Pizza Empire Founder: What It Really Takes to Build a Successful Restaurant Brand - Thom Elliot

0:00We need a vehicle that's cheaper to buy in Italy. We need to learn about pizza. So buy the vehicle in Italy and then drive it back. We did everything. We said yes to everything. Tuesday to Friday on the market. We'd pack up on Friday and go to an event. We traded in car park spaces outside clubs in Camden and got arrested by the police. New story. It has everything. It has passion. It has food. It has travel. It has purpose. It has growth. Tom Elliott is the co-founder of Pizza Pilgrims, the award-winning restaurant group he launched with his brother James after a six-week trip across Italy researching authentic Neapolitan pizza.

0:36What began as a market stall and a three-wheeled van in London has grown into a nationwide brand, and Tom is now a recognized hospitality entrepreneur, speaker, and author. A lot of the kind of Dragon's Den and Apprentice view of business is be ruthless. We don't want to drop our supplier of 10 years to save 5%, because it's not respectful. When the shit is the fan, which it will, all those people desert you because you've got no respect for them. So during your entire journey as an entrepreneur, you were fueled by enjoying what you do, never by money. Most things have been done before. It's about how you do it, how you execute it.

1:13Is that your secret to success? Execution.

1:20Tom, for anyone who doesn't know you, who are you and what is it that you do for a living? who am i uh well my name is tom elliot i am the co-founder of a pizza business called pizza pilgrims uh and yeah i guess you know truth is that that is like that has been my identity for the last 15 years i guess i'm really keen to to you know start to move away from like just being the pizza guy and also be like hopefully a good husband maybe goodish husband good father football fan rugby fan bruce springsteen fan like i want to be other things not just pizza before you became the pizza guy before pizza pilgrims which by the way i i love your pizzerias thank you how was your life what did you do for a living what did you study uh so i um i did at university I did experimental psychology which was not your classic route to pizza but um yeah I really enjoyed it it was very kind of it was very sciency as a degree and so it was a lot of statistics and a lot of like psychology is is quite often based on a kind of theory which you know is empirically tested but quite often can be quite like loose I would say and some of those theories will last for like 30 40 50 60 years until another theory comes along and like can completely just prove a whole generation of thinking just with a kind of one but i really enjoyed my degree particularly because it was very empirical and very like anything you were trying to claim had to be proved through experimentation statistics all that stuff so i really enjoyed that um uh and then i came out of that and yeah so many of my friends were going into I mean the sort of collective group that I call is like some jobs with suits which to me are all the same no offense to anyone who does the jobs they're really important and you're super important people but not for me and so I but but you're under a lot of pressure particularly 20 years ago you know the whole kind of start your own business founder thing was very much more frowned upon I think not frowned upon that's not quite right but I certainly not like as kind of bountiful and encouraged and respected as it is today I would say um so yeah there was a lot of pressure to go into a job with a suit uh because it was the obvious choice and so I I guess sort of like rebelled in the smallest possible way by going into advertising which was like a job with a suit but you didn't have to wear a suit apart from when you were like very occasionally meeting a client so yeah it was kind of it was kind of very much a corporate job but in the kind of creative end I guess of that um creative for creative see lowest paid uh and so yeah so I went into advertising um I how did I I mean I didn't do it the usual kind of route I ended up getting work experience at a at an agency and then like I went for a week and then they asked me to for another month and then they put me on the grad scheme so I kind of weaseled my way in for lack of a better word and um yeah and it was well do you know what my first client in advertising was McDonald's and I still think they are the most incredible business and I still it was by far the most interesting client I had in seven eight years in advertising but I'm still obsessed with mcdonald's the way they behave the way they conduct themselves obviously there are lots of issues about around their scale but broadly compared to other businesses at scale they are doing so much good stuff and they were doing it 20 years ago so you know even in 2006 when i started working with mcdonald's that you know all of their milk was organic all of their beef was from uk and irish farms and you could literally like take a hamburger and you could go right back to like where that cow had lived what field what are they'd eaten what you know what day were they born what day did they die like the level of connectivity through that chain was amazing um they were you know all their eggs were free range they were genuinely pushing that industry forward but the issue they had was because they're mcdonald's and because everyone loves to hate you know success scale i mean candidly probably their practices of 30 years before that which were probably pretty awful they did all this stuff and they kind of did it under the radar because they couldn't if they stood up and said oh by the way we use all this amazing stuff everyone would just come back with like no you don't and we hate you and so they just kind of got on and did it which i think you know if the definition of like a good culture is like doing the right thing when no one's looking they were doing that and they were doing it 20 years ago and so you know and just the the level of respect i have for like what they've built the number of people whose first job is mcdonald's i mean the stats are nuts and you know what they teach those people the number of people who are in c-suite jobs who started on the tills i mean that that is all the stuff that we aspire to in pizza pilgrims like provide a real route you know i'm sure i'm being hugely naive and it's well spun but you know if if a senior mcdonald's person does something perceived not right not you know in line with their family values they're gone even if they're the best ceo they've ever had and i'm sure there's a lot of politicking going on behind the scenes but from where i stand it's like they actually have a belief in something and you know the fact that what they sell is questionable and has implications for the human race in a big way i don't really know how you square that away because that is what they sell it's what they've sold for 50 years 60 years before they well 70 years before they even arguably knew the bad they were doing and like they're just doing the best they can in that field and if they put loads of salads on the menu that's great but no one's going to buy him so what do you want them to do so i'm not like i don't want to sit here and be like too much of a mcdonald's fanboy and i definitely understand there's a flip side to the coin but as a business that is well run has a strong culture has its issues of course but statistically employs so many people of course of course it's going to have big issues but you know it really does do from my observations of it and we got very close to it and my job was to take mums through we set up a website which is before even twitter come out called make up your own mind you can write us any question you wanted about mcdonald's and you get stupid questions like you know do they put semen in the milkshakes and are all the you know burgers made out of cow assholes and stuff and you you legitimately answer all those questions so it was like one of the first like corporate transparency projects and then we would select certain people who ask questions to take them around the factories and show them so we you know i'd take a mum and see everything from a chicken to a chicken nugget in a day and film the whole thing and put it on our website and it was so enlightening and so so many places where you had a factory that was making things for three or four businesses and mcdonald's were like over here doing a super you know in the in the concept what they're doing a pretty premium version of it and then all the stuff that they didn't want was going to the other businesses and it was like happening there in front of your eyes and you're like, it's pretty powerful stuff.

8:39But the scale of it is so intimidating. Like, you know, you see the scale that they're making nuggets at and you're like, this doesn't feel right. Anyway, I don't want to get into a whole McDonald's session, but it was so inspiring as a business. The most inspiring business I've ever had the privilege to kind of get under the hood of. I completely agree with you. I think we should use McDonald's as a business reference, as a good business reference much more often because another guest that came to the show, his name is Ronan Dune. He's now the current serving chairman of Six Nations Rugby. But before that, he was the CEO of O2.

9:17And then after becoming the CEO of O2, he was the CEO of Verizon Wireless. So a hugely successful C-suite. And his first job was at McDonald's. And what he told me is exactly what you just said. He said, I still use today in my current job things that I've learned at McDonald's because it's a great school for entrepreneurs and for businesses. Yeah. Which is ironic because it is such a tight ship. Like, it's like, this is how you put burger sauce on. Never change it. Just do it identical. This is how you do a burger. It's identical. And so, like, you know, that wouldn't sound like a place where creativity and entrepreneurialism could thrive.

9:57But, yeah, I don't know. I don't know what it is. But I just think there's so much responsibility. and hospitality broadly you know i'm obsessed with that first job thing our role in hospitality is to be a great pathway into work and you know we employ so many young people and we we get as a company so much energy from those young people and all we hope to give back to them is you know is a path in life and if that you know if if hospitality is not for them then fine but what they will learn from being in hospitality even for six months is just like how to interact with humans at every level whether that's team members whether that's people above you people below you whether that's difficult customers happy customers it's just it's an education in humanity and you don't get it at you know a 42nd floor of a building in a corporate i so strongly maintain that if every kind of first candidate or 2-1 candidate every great graduate from university went and did a year of hospitality and then went and got their job in insert amazing firm here they would go further and do better and it you know but you've got to take that year out which is counterintuitive i guess and after your advertisement job did you found pizza pilgrims or what did you do uh so i so i did advertising for seven years um which is longer than i like to i was really really bad at it um i i found the whole structure of advertising i won't go into it but essentially you have this like creatives who are treated like kind of like you know have you seen minority report you know there's like three kind of people who can see into the future and they're treated like absolute gods that's how the creators are treated and to be fair they come up with the ideas but truth is a good idea can come from anywhere and they talk advertising agencies talk a good game but ultimately the the creatives are very very protected and the account guys have to run around and like look after them i found that really really hard um and i wasn't good at it and I wasn't good at kind of playing my role in it so I did it for for about seven years and then um was looking for a way out and I'd grown up with my brother um above pubs our parents had run pubs in the countryside we'd always lived in a hospitality environment from the age of like six or seven and so kind of had that bug of like you know hospitality and it's magic and you know we can talk about that at length I'm sure and um so yeah had just this kind of slightly burning desire we also come from a family of people who'd always run their own business like only one person in my family had worked for another company for their whole life and ironically it was my grandfather working in advertising so I'm sure there's a lot a lot to be said about just following our predecessors but um yeah all my other all my other family members had run their own business many in hospitality but also wine businesses antiques businesses my grandfather on my mother's side was some serial like entrepreneur i think you know never quite got something huge off the ground but just was always looking for the next thing and so there was a bit of that a bit of having grown up in pubs both me and my brother were sat there in 2011 going god we both hate our jobs he was a tv producer or like a runner more like and uh we yeah we sort of decided that we wanted to try and do something in hospitality why pizzas why pizzas we initially wanted to do a pub because that's what we knew but we didn't have any money and we didn't have anyone we didn't have really any expertise to find money um so a pub you know just didn't have a capital to do it um and had no concept of like raising the capital or anything it was just was not something that was on our agenda at all we did not have that like you know i didn't even know what a pnl was i didn't know really anything about investing or i mean i still don't know huge amounts but know a bit more um so yeah the idea of raising the money was just just not on the agenda so we were a bit of a loss to be honest for a little while and then during the course of 2011 the street food thing really happened in london and uh you know remember going down to a car park in peckham and seeing the meat wagon which subsequently became meat liquor which very sadly i think has gone into admin this week or last week um but yeah and just seeing you know there was a car park in the middle of nowhere with a van serving super premium burgers with queues of people that had turned up specifically to eat this burger and you're like and you know it's the same time that twitter was just really getting traction and you're like hang on a minute this is a this is a movement this is the thing these people are creating a legitimate brand with a fantastic product driven by social media you know i don't want to pretend it was kind of this insane light bulb moment but it was just this feeling of like this this is the way to do this like you could it was the first time you could see a way to build something of quality that didn't require four walls um that didn't require a huge amount of cash and so so then we we got quite obsessed with the idea of street food um and we were you know for a less sort of poetic version of it we were looking at the street food landscape and at the time no one was doing pizza and it was like well seems like a pretty huge food stuff to not be covered for this and i guess the what we quickly discovered is the reason for that is you know to to do a burger van you need like a grill and that's it and you can carry that under your arm to do pizza you need like one ton oven which requires quite a lot more logistics so that was the reason no one was doing it but yeah at that point we were just like well hang on a minute this is the opportunity um and how did you bring the idea to life we it was kind of like i mean we've always just been kind of like have a go particularly my brother just like have a go see what happens so we went and did an event in a field for a 21st birthday that we still have a picture of that i just love the picture because it just it just sums up in so many ways how little we knew but we had you know it's me in my work shirt from from work having driven down from London that day.

15:59It's, you know, an oven that we borrowed off a friend who subsequently became boy, he's called Tom Gosney. And he now runs Gosney, which is like one of the biggest global pizza oven makers in the world. But at the time, he ran something called the stone baked pizza oven company, and we borrowed an oven off him. I got my wife's Toyota's Corolla in the shot when that was the vehicle that we used to get around. There's like my wife had made a logo for us, which was actually called pizza pilgrims even then. uh but you know the number one no-no with neapolitan pizza is a rolling pin it's all like your hands but our logo was a rolling pin and i'm even holding a rolling pin in the shot and i just love like the wood you can see the wood under the oven it's literally come off a building site it's got like nails and stuff in it and it was just like it was such it was it's just such a great shot of how little we knew how much we just dived in and thought let's have a go we've got another shot of the dough we'd made the night before in literally a bin that we bought from B &Q and the dough just completely bubbled over overnight.

16:59So we came down in the morning and the dough was like falling out of the bin. It's just an amazing reminder of like, yeah, there was no kind of expertise here. It was very much a like, have a go. And so yeah, we did that event. You were cooking the pizzas yourself? Me and James and one other guy were there cooking the pizzas and, you know, just generally getting stuck in. And then, yeah, we did that event. And I think it made us realize like, holy shit, we have absolutely no clue about anything. You know, serving pizza to drunk 21-year-olds, you know, they're all like, yeah, this pizza is delicious.

17:37And we're like, great, they love the pizza. And so, but we did quickly realize that we had no idea what we were doing. And I think that, you know, we brought the oven in, we heated it up to 500 degrees. we made the pizza and then at the end of the night we're like oh shit how do we get this oven away like it's 500 degrees you can't put it back in the car uh so we had to like leave it and go the next day and i think at that point we're like right we know nothing about making pizza what we do know is we need a vehicle that can transport this oven around and that's permanent and that was when james came up with the idea of like the ape which is a three-wheeled piaggio vehicle that you see in italy um uh and he was like wouldn't it be fun to do it in that you saw a lot of them doing coffee that started at the time and so we were like that'd be really fun um so yeah then then the idea started to be born of like right well we need to buy this vehicle and we looked into it and it's cheaper to buy in italy we need to learn about pizza so why don't we go and start go go and buy the vehicle in the tip of the toe of italy and then drive it back um and so yeah that's where that's where that idea was born and i think now i'm thinking about it like we had the name pizza pilgrims so i think that idea that event whilst we were it did really highlight how little we knew i think we already knew at that time that we needed the vehicle and we needed to learn about pizza so we did the event under the name pizza pilgrims but the idea that the origin story of the company is that trip through italy talk to me more about the name so we we knew we wanted to do pizza and you know we obviously booked this one event which showed us a lot about what we didn't know but yeah we we did we were conscious that well we were just conscious we didn't know anything about pizza and if we're going to go and do this we need to learn about pizza and where do you learn about pizza in italy so we had the idea to do a trip to italy to go and understand about pizza but genuinely at the time we didn't even know that like naples was a famous you know particularly famous pizza place it was it was very very naive the whole thing but we we essentially had that idea i told my employer about leaving advertising to go and start a pizza van and they were like what are you talking about it's just a huge suite of raised eyebrows um but then we met one guy who um is still actually the food so essentially i emailed my boss at work uh i hadn't even met her she was like the strategy director of the firm but i'd heard that she was leaving to go and start a bakery in cambridge so i was like okay well i'll send her an email and so i'm leaving to start something in bakery let's you know let's go for a beer so i emailed her and said hey you don't know who i am but i'm here you're leaving to start a bakery i'm leaving to start a pizza thing be cool to go for a beer so she's like absolutely let's come for a beer went to their house in camden to have a beer and what i didn't genuinely didn't know at the time was that her husband is a guy called tim hayward who is still the the food critic for the financial times and it was just the first person who genuinely was like head over heels enthusiastic for our idea he was just like oh my god this is such a great idea absolutely love it like you know the idea of the trip is so fantastic you can learn so much he was just just so effusive with his enthusiasm for the idea and so and he was like you know you should make something out of this trip like you should turn it into something so yeah that moment was both galvanizing and that you're like holy crap somebody who knows food actually believes in this and it was so serendipitous because i genuinely we did not know that tim was even going to be there let alone that he was married to this lady and secondly um yeah it kind of it so it galvanized us on that the idea was was legit but but also kind of slightly spurred us into action so the next week we kind of went out and wrote like a pitch for turning this pilgrimage into a tv show um and you know we you know actually got traction with like some pretty big names and we went and met with pat luellen who was the lady who discovered jamie oliver and she was like we love the idea it's so fresh and interesting and it's got like you know serendipity it's got jeopardy in it and all that jazz um but they all wanted to like you know wait for 18 months we're going to get a plan together we're going to pitch it to channels we're going to we were like we don't want to wait for 18 months we're not here to make a tv show we want to get on with it um again it was really gratifying to get that kind of response of like this is a good idea but we didn't want to be on tv or anything anyway then one of the production companies i think we contacted like three or four production companies one of them were like look we're tiny we're just starting out but we will film this with you uh on the basis that you know we just we'll film it on the hope that we'll sell it and so we we were like well it's going to help you know having camera crews that's going to get us into places we wouldn't have done so we did actually end up going with those guys and we went on the trip in october 2011 so about five months after that first pizza event um and i don't forget we literally set off on the day that steve jobs died and i was quite like steve jobs geek at the time so that was kind of a weird just a weird moment i will remember that anyway and then um yeah and this this crew small crew about three came with us and we went and did this pizza pilgrimage we bought our little van in the tip of the toe in red jody calabria right down in the south and we'd mapped out a route to go through all these places set off you know bought set off in our little van and you know having never driven one before i pulled out the garage and realized quite quickly that it does 15 miles an hour top speed like it is the slowest vehicle we've got footage of us being overtaken up a hill by a jogger that is how slow the vehicle is uh and so there was a bit of a like wow this is going to take a long time um but yeah we set off on this kind of crazy trip through italy uh and you know the idea was to go and learn as much about pizza as you can and we had a whole lot of stops planned out you know mozzarella and tomatoes and but then we got to napoli probably after about a week of of driving at 15 miles an hour and um we got to Napoli and we went to Damachale which is still like one of the kind of temples of pizza I would say uh if you've had the sort of misfortune to see Eat Pray Love it's where Julia Roberts has her Neapolitan pizza moment and um we did that and had a pizza there and just had this like genuine like sort of Proustian Madeleine moment of like holy crap that is just the most delicious thing I think I've ever eaten how have I how have I gone at that time 27 years and never had something like that in a pizza form um and that was it that was the moment it was like we just want to we want to make as close to that as we can in the uk there are over 1 500 pizzerias in london yeah so was that the thing that made you think i can do better than these other 1 500 businesses and hence why my business my business can thrive again like we weren't thinking that far ahead we were literally like candidly i was like this is an idea that's going to be look great on paper that will get me out of advertising that will give me like a reason to go and do another job i really genuinely thought that i was like this is going to get me out it's going to be like a super proactive thing there's no way i've done the numbers um and i'll come back to that in a minute but like there's no way this can support me and james as a market stall no way like um but what it will do is like you know get me out of advertising it'll get him on the road it was his idea really and i was like you know we can do it together and then realistically after like a year when he's off and running i will go and find another job and it'll be a great story to tell and a great kind of like you know evidence that i'm not someone who like sits on my ass all day that thing that was genuinely my like the extent of my feeling on this particular project i still wanted to do something hospitality probably but i didn't feel like a pizza van was going to be like the answer to all of our problems but but yeah we we um we so we you have to remember that the pizza scene in london was so different then um it really has like exploded over the last 15 years and And I think there were a couple.

26:03So there was, in terms of like the pizza scene then, obviously there were Ubiquitous, Ask ZZ, Pizza Express, Pizza Hut, all those guys. And, you know, they had their place. And I absolutely particularly love Pizza Express still. I think it's just a phenomenal brand. And, you know, so much nostalgia for me and, you know, just everywhere. But it's so ubiquitous. i think there's a thing about pizza that is very rarely like truly bad and so actually like so much pizza on that landscape in that style you know no one was really missing a better pizza whereas if you have a bad burger you really know it's a bad burger whereas like a bad pizza is quite a rare thing to come across i think you know cheese it's it's you know the standard to make it like enjoyable it's not that that hard but then we went to you know frankomenka at the time it just started out had one store in Brixton when I had a pizza there was sensational pizza at the time there was a pizzeria in Hampstead which is embedded called Lantica pizzeria which is phenomenal there was also Santa Maria still a phenomenal little Neapolitan pizza business but you know run by two super passionate Neapolitan guys they just won best pizza in London in time out so we could see that there were places that were starting to move it forward but yeah it just wasn't like now where there's you know there's a lot of neapolitan pizza now and a lot more pizza in general and i think you know we're now seeing a next wave of different you know neapolitan had a really strong 10 years and we still believe it's it's you know the the best form but um yeah there's now sort of more new york style coming in and then there's new haven style and there's Detroit style and the, you know, the level of understanding of pizza has grown so much since 2012, I would say.

27:52I'm loving, loving, loving your story so far. You didn't like the nine to five thing. You didn't want to wear a suit. You started in advertising, but you still probably didn't want to be in advertising. You go off with your brother to travel Italy, which sounds fantastic, mozzarella pizza. It wasn't too bad. Exactly. And then you come back to London and what happens? How do you get your business started? So we come back to London in the van. In the context of what I just said, I went straight back to work. I was working in another advertising agency. I'd taken time off to go and do the trip. I went straight back to work.

28:25But we set about me and my brother working out how we turned this into a business. And I think the original business idea was to go and do events, basically. To put an oven in the van, which we hadn't done. We did that when we got back from the trip. uh and then the idea was to do private events so like weddings you know bar mitzvahs funerals or any kind of event where people needed catering we would do that and then probably try and go and do some festivals so like you know i guess glastonbury is the kind of the absolute top of the tree but um but yeah so so that was the original business plan and then we got back and you know as with all these things the food landscape in terms of street food was moving pretty quick and suddenly you had curb market which which was then called eat street at the time uh in king's cross and there was starting to be destinational places where people went just to enjoy street food and i think we quite quickly realized that we had to have like a presence like a place where we were even it was like one day a week we are here so if you don't have that like you're never going to really be able to build a following because people are just not they're not going to try your product they're not going to you know they'll come across you serendipitously but not not in a kind of you know more regular way so we then quickly realized we wanted to do um our own location we also realized that we didn't actually want to be bundled in with east street interestingly we they that was what where it was happening and all the best street food brands at the time were with them and we did join them but we were like we don't actually want to be lumped in with 10 other people we want to kind of find our own our own place so then we started writing to the council all the councils in london say hey can we have a space on one of your markets to sell pizza uh and they all wrote back uh saying absolutely not like there's a waiting list for the waiting list like don't even bother um so yeah kind of like shawshank you know when he's writing the letters for the for the library and like the more rejections you get the more letters he writes we kind of it kind of made us double down and we're like so we started going to sites to markets at you know on a thursday at lunchtime and taking a picture of all the empty spots and then emailing them to the council and being like hey i know you said there's loads of waiting lists but there are no yeah like your market is half full so it's either full or it's not which is it and eventually like one of them was like if you leave us alone we'll give you a spot basically and we got a spot in berwick street market which is like you couldn't have picked a better location it's like slap bang in the middle of soho we you know at the time like hot food was a bit of a novelty people were like there were one or two other people doing hot food but that was it everyone else in the market was selling like textiles a lot of people selling fruit and veg there still are um there was a guy selling bread uh i think there was a fish store at one point that was just a lot but very few people selling like a hot lunch um and so we sat out we were paying 10 pound a day in rent to trade in the center of Soho.

31:23And we just couldn't really believe our luck. And we, we, so yeah, that opportunity came up. I reckon that probably came up January, 2012. And we were on that market trading by March, 2012. What do you think would have happened if you didn't get that opportunity? I don't know. We're pretty persistent. So I think we'd have kind of chipped away and chipped away at it, but there's no doubt it accelerated it. because it was just such a fantastic spot. We were in Soho, in the heart of like everything that's cool about London, surrounded by people who run PR companies and events companies. And so, you know, we did that.

31:58I mean, it was total chaos. The market had no infrastructure whatsoever. So, you know, there was no way to, you know, basically how it works, you have to bring a van in, dump all your stuff off, and bring the little van with the oven in separately. We were one of the few people that had like a dedicated vehicle. uh then take the van away find a place to park it in soho which obviously is impossible good luck and then you know trade for the day and then get the van bring it back load all the stuff in go away and do it again the next day and we were like well that's that's not going to work that's a disaster so then then we were like how do we fix this so we went about sort of like over the first three months just building some infrastructure so i convinced my old agency who had an underground car park on dean street could we park our little van there and they let us i think they let us without telling anyone senior i think that i was quite friendly with the the lady who ran the office and she was like yeah you do it but just don't tell anyone so we parked there and part of the little van there we then went into the pub on on berwick street it's called the endurance and we said look can we rent like a corner of your basement and so we paid him 50 pound a week to literally take a basement in what is now duck and rice on um berwick street and yeah we made all our dough down there uh and then yeah the other market traders were initially like super suspicious of us they called us the apprentice because we were like running around like on the phones like this like trying to figure out what the hell we're doing but you know slowly but surely i think basically when we traded through a winter they were like okay these guys are not just like complete idiots and then they you know they had a they had a lock up around the corner with refrigeration space like proper walk-in so they then let us use that and so yeah over six months we built like so starting in March over six months we built like a proper infrastructure around that little business and we ended up you know trading probably four days a week I think on a good day we were selling pizza for a fiver on a really good day we'd take like five six hundred quid did you quit your job at that point I so I um had a job so I quit my job in advertising in like December after we got back from the trip so I got back on the trip in November did about another six weeks of that and was like, I'm going to give this a crack, then quit.

34:10Then very quickly realized that we had nothing, that I had no income at all. We hadn't even put the oven in the van yet. Um, yeah, bearing in mind, we did this whole thing on a credit card. Like we had no money to invest in this. The whole thing cost us 10 grand and it all went on a Barclay card. Um, uh, and so, yeah, so I quit my job in December and then was like, shit, not ready for this at all. Like the business isn't even going to take money for months. So then I went and got another job, a magazine called the week magazine, which does like a weekly summation of the news. I was, I loved it because I was obsessed with the products and I still am.

34:44I think it's the best way to keep yourself informed. We, I still read it every week. Um, anyway, I went and got, I went and got a job with a week in January and I, and I was working, we started in March. And for the first three months I was literally working in the office in, um, Fitzrovia. And then I would leave the office at 12. I'd go down to the market stall. I would trade the lunch with my brother who'd done all the setting up and made the dough and things. And we had one other guy called Louis. And yeah, I'd come down. I'd do like 12 till 1.30 and then like sneak back to the office and hope no one noticed I'd take an hour and a half.

35:18Was your brother full time? My brother was full time. He was like fully in. And there's one other guy, Louis, who was sort of full-time um and how did you go from having a street market presence to opening a first site well we did so we did it uh i reckon so yeah if we started in march i reckon i quit in like may june and was like okay this is a thing and i'm going back to the kind of like fast tracking we um being in soho you know and having twitter and just being in that place where there's so many like opinion formers we just very quickly got traction on on twitter and stuff and then we very quickly got people being like hey i run this festival do you want to come and have a picture this festival and so we quite quickly like start to build up a summer of like big events so we were doing we tended to do sort of tuesday to friday on the market uh and then we would go and we'd pack up on friday and go to an event you know whether it's a music festival or you know we did we did everything we said yes to everything we traded in car park spaces outside clubs in camden and got arrested by the police we you know for trading without a license we went to like the world vertical dance championships which is pole dancing in like the york hall we you know we went to the cheltenham jazz festival and it rained solidly um we just we literally i mean we we did trade we did everything we any opportunity that we could we did and what was so fascinating about that was like you know there were so many that were just a car crash and you lost loads of money and you're like god why do we do that but so often like within the next 12 months someone will come by and present a genuine opportunity and say like oh i saw you outside that nightclub in camden or i saw you at children jazz festival and it was just amazing how like out of all the bad stuff there was always something positive that came from it just like doing things being out there being present was such a big part of like moving it forward and so yeah so i quit my job in about in May, June and was like, look, I'll let's get through this summer because it's obviously getting some traction.

37:23We already had like a calendar of events booked in. So I'll come and help do that. You know, we're starting to bring in some real cash and then like at the end of the summer, let's sit down and work out what actually we're doing here. Uh, got to the end of the summer and I think it'd been a good summer in terms of like, you know, we'd got way further than we could have imagined in terms of getting into events and we were making, we were taking money, but probably not, you know, didn't really understand the concept of P &L, didn't really, candidly, really know if we were making money at the bottom line.

37:52We were taking, I think, £100 a week each as a salary, me and my brother. So it was like, it was, you know, we were on our knees a bit that way. Yeah, and we got to the end of that summer and I don't know, there was just enough in it for me that I was like, you know, maybe there is something in this. Maybe we could have like a second van and a third van and suddenly you could be taking real money then we traded through so i so i didn't go back to work in that september i was like yeah let's see what we can make of this uh we then traded through a winter which was horrendous like like all of your sales just halved or even like went down to a quarter you know all your costs remain the same obviously yeah and it was it was just not the kind of fun of doing it in the sunshine and being out and having a beer after work and all that stuff just evaporated into like you know january february miserable snow rain and so we got through that and i think that winter was like look if we're realistically you know we've now done a year got to march or whatever when we'd started started in march 2012 got to march 2013 and we're like look if we're going to do this we have to have some kind of pizzeria like brick walls uh and roofs crucially roofs uh and that was genuinely i would say genuinely early 2013 was the first time that we legitimately were like we're going to do a pizzeria we're going to actually like get the money to do something with four walls in those early days were you doubting yourself were you doubting the business and how did you keep going the truth is everyone always says to me how did you risk it all and like such a big risk we didn't risk anything I had no kids I wasn't married at the time like hated my job like it was just great fun like I mean look back at those times and it was such great fun you were like out there at festivals in the kind of like VIP areas just you know just having a great time and you know know if you're making a bit of money fine but you know it's probably quite selfish looking back on it definitely is i guess but yeah a big part of it was just it wasn't like oh okay i'm gonna build this huge business it just wasn't that at all i mean it's so genuinely it was just like this is really fun we're having a good time and you know my my my now wife then well she was girlfriend when we started the business fiance probably about two months after that and wife probably about a year after that um yeah she was there coming along like you know she was working in front of house when we were doing festivals and stuff and it was just it was just great fun there was no like big plan so this whole idea that we kind of risked everything we put 10 grand on a credit card that was it like it just wasn't a big risk i feel like the risk is bigger now than it was then because you know hospitality is a tough it's a very tough industry did you have a plan b yeah it would have been go back to work basically i think you know it wasn't it wasn't that clever but i think this is you know something i really want to communicate is that like that's the time to take a risk you gotta do it before you have all this responsibility because it is a risk if you've got two kids and a big mortgage and you're used to a big salary you know which you you know if you're doing well you know let's say by your early 30s you're probably on a pretty good salary if you're doing good at your corporate job you know all those things it becomes too much of a risk you can't throw in a massive salary and risk the roof over your head and your children's future on a pizza van you just can't but you can do it before all that stuff happens and i think there's so much it's a balance obviously but i just think kind of youthful exuberance makes up for so much like lack of kind of skills i agree with you 100 % in this show i've had the privilege of interviewing some incredibly smart and successful young founders and they've all founded their businesses under 30 and they all said exactly the same thing and i'm a firm believer of that thing is starting a business in your 20s has so many advantages there are three advantages in my opinion the first one is your risk appetite because it's it's quite higher because you're not risking anything you're risking far less right because risking far less yeah um if you're failing you're failing just yourself you're not failing with your wife or your husband or your kids and then um the second one your opportunity cost your opportunity cost is almost negligent because it's not like you're giving away a huge career because you didn't build that yet and then the third one is again going back it's interconnected but it's you know the feeling of failure when you're failing when you're in your 20s it's almost like in society um it is much more accepted than if you're failing in your late 30s or in your 40s because also you know time is life is finite it's all about time and you just have less time to you know get back up so i think there's just not a better time for you to really try yourself out and and become an entrepreneur than in your 20s yeah absolutely that said i don't think you know i don't think if you're listening to this in your late 30s or 40 you can't do it i agree there's so much you know so many in many ways advantages that you do have of like you know you've actually seen the world you you know you know a bit more how it all works you know there's a million reasons why that you know don't shy away from it but it is riskier for sure the risk is higher and i think that that is a factor and I think um I think that those are like obvious advantages and I think when if you go to university or if you have friends and family members that are also entrepreneurs they all can easily tell you the advantages of building a business when you're older because you're more senior you're more experienced you know who you are and you know what you like and so on and so forth but nobody tells you the unseen unknown advantages of building a business when you are young and these are the ones that i actually also want to show in in in this podcast yeah and i think you know there's so it's so interesting to me i don't know obviously my kids are at school now and societally and like as parents frankly like we all just kind of want them to conform and fit in we literally you know we want our kids to be like safe toe in the line you know not being different in their amongst their peers you're constantly asking like does so and so do it this way and why is my son not doing it that way or my daughter doing it that way i don't know i feel like there's a real sense of but then you get to 18 and suddenly you're told like the best thing you could do is go on your own i think sometimes it's like well which is it but ultimately i think most people as parents want that kind of you know they want their child to have a safe secure job there's a bit of a feeling of like right i've got them through here this is just my take on it and you know got them to this point and then they've got a job with you know a safe corporate and that's good that's it my work here is done i don't have to worry about it anymore so the idea of like your 21 year old going off and starting a business is not as much as it hopefully would fill you with joy that they're going to get a lot out of it it probably is also filling you with like oh god well if it what fails what does that leave them financially blah blah so i think parents do quite like the like ribbon at the end of a corporate job thank you very much my work here it's done but yeah i agree like that you know the time is the truth is it's like classic i love all this apocryphal stuff like i love all these sort of you know you know the best times plant a tree was 20 years ago the second best time is now and i absolutely love that that's like a chinese proverb or something but it's just like if you're 40 and listening to this and want to do it don't wait 10 years if you're going to do it you got to do it now like that's the thing because the longer you wait the worse off you'll be what was the best decision that you've made in those early days the best decision i mean you know so many little decisions i think i think the best decision was staying very close to it you know we really were you know we were in the thick of running pizza vans then pizzerias for four years and we were not in a rush like at all partly because it was fun uh but you know i speak to so many people now in the hospitality particularly who've done like and you know i don't want to be you know everyone's got their own journey and many of them have gone on or will go on to be hugely successful speak to so many entrepreneurs in hospitality particularly and who have done a great restaurant and it's like oh it's making a bit of money and you know it's got a good name for itself and so now we've got backing and we're going to do three more next year and then five the year after that.

46:18And I'm like, well, you might, but you also might mess it all up. I think so many people are in a rush to get it done, to get to that perceived higher ground, which is higher in some ways. And I would argue, whether we get into it or not, lower in many others. Less fun, for one, I would say. Why do you think this is? Because I've heard that from many other people. People want to do everything, particularly today. Everything's got to happen fast. there is no time to you know enjoy a moment or like slow down or take things at your pace i think this is what social media is teaching us how success is defined that it needs to happen overnight yeah and like you know if you're not doing this in a year then you've kind of not done it as well as the next person and i i just i just don't buy it i just don't think it's enjoyable i don't think it's the the answer to you know success i think it's so rare that you've stumbled across something that is so like insanely brilliantly different that you know like unless you move immediately quickly someone's going to beat you to it you know particularly in hospitality i mean it's you know obviously there are great concepts coming all the time and really good ideas but you know most things have been done before it's about how you do it how you execute it and that you know that is that doesn't need to happen overnight is that your secret to success in hospitality execution i think i think i think it's a huge part of it i think you know if you said well we had it even back then it was like hey we want to so when we had the idea when we finally settled on you know we've done a winter the only way to do another winter is inside four walls at that point we realized we needed money because we didn't have any so we had to go and raise all of the money to do that pizzeria um and even then in 2000 and early 2013 the answers that came back were basically like it's completely saturated like why you know there's so much pizza why would you do another pizzeria so i think it's so easy to say this is what i'm going to do actually doing it particularly in hospitality is a different thing and i think that execution the warmth the humanity the obviously the quality of the product all of that stuff is really about execution you can say i'm going to make the best pizza in the world but you've got to actually go and do it and i think if you do it then people will come to you and but they won't come to you like overnight necessarily but you'll build it over time um but i think also it's in the execute it's in the you know humanity so many so much of hospitality is in the service and not the food i think you know the food's you know ideally the food is great and we certainly in pizza pilgrims are obsessed about the product and that is kind of your ticket to play but it's about the warmth of the hospitality and the experience and the overall kind of ambience of the room and the vibe that is why people come back i think

49:10what are your non-negotiables i think if i was kind of we have lots of values and and missions and purposes which we can get into or not depending on whether you're in i think if i'm going to sum it up in a word it's it's respect i think we genuinely as a business i believe are built on respect is respect for every single person who works in it their role to play in that business respect for the traditions of neapolitan pizza respect for the customer and their opinion you know balancing that i think we want you know we want to be a company that builds respect we don't want to we want to be a company that builds relationships we don't want to drop our supplier of 10 years to save 5 % because it's not respectful.

49:52It doesn't need, you don't need to behave like that to be, I fear that quite a lot of the kind of, you know, dragon's den and apprentice view of business is like be ruthless, be a, you know, be aggressive and alpha male and step on people to get that slightly bit higher. I just, every time I've ever seen that kind of thing come near our business, I just see all the pitfalls, which are, you know, building anything with like genuine foundations you're just building something that's great now but when the shit is the fan which you will all those people will this will desert you because they've got you've got no respect for them you want to be human 100 i want to look i i don't want to ever ever walk down the street and see someone and think fuck i did really wrong that person i never want that in my life and i really don't understand and i see a lot of people who do people who can build businesses where they have done that you know you know you see it in today's politics like the lack of respect and i know it's super naive but it's super important to me and i think you know i'm obsessed with this concept of like you know again hugely apocryphal i'm sure but you know that lyndon johnson going to the kennedy space center in like 1968 and chatting to a janitor and saying what do you do here and he's like i'm putting a man on the moon and this like this concept that every single person in any business is hugely valuable, should be hugely respected and is doing their bit in the best possible way.

51:18And if you can get that person to really buy into what they're doing and why they're doing it and why it's important they're doing it, then that person, you know, that person is more fulfilled. They'll do better for your business. It's just a win-win for everyone. And I just, I really want to nail that down. And I think, you know, we have our purpose of pizza pilgrims is making people happier, one pizza at a time that's our like headline goal and you know we do our sixth monthly um happiness survey where we ask everyone in the company are you happy amongst other questions and you know we just did one i think 79 response which is pretty good for you know almost 800 employees and uh 84 were happy or very happy at peace pilgrims which is great obviously 16 percent to find but great um but the one that kind of blows my mind is 92 percent of people said that they understood and bought into the mission of pizza pilgrims and knew their role in it and that to me is the that's the bit that i i'm just like bowled over by because if you can get every single person going i know what my parts play in this is and i believe in where we're trying to go that's all you need that that's that that's more than like any kind of process, you know, procedure, operations manual, all of that stuff is hugely important still.

52:37And, you know, you want the breadcrumb trail to show people where to go. But if they don't want to go down the trail in the first place, you're fighting a losing battle from the start. So my role in Pizza Pilgrims now is to like really hammer home that point, make sure people do understand, make sure the difference they're making is clear to them and show them respect for that. And I think if we can't do that as a company, then I don't really want to be part of it. And how do you define happiness at Pizza Pilgrim? It's a tricky concept. Happiness is a thorny one. Particularly in the workplace.

53:10Well, at its worst, it's kind of maniacal Disney happiness, which is not what it is.

53:18We've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and there aren't that many straight answers. But I think the point is it's long-term, not short-term, So it's not like I'm so happy I skip into work every day. Obviously, all human experience is a sine curve of happiness. But I think, yeah, long term, you want that to be more positive than negative. I think it's a view to progression. So, you know, what does... I'm talking here about team happiness specifically, not customer happiness. They are quite distinct because customer happiness is probably, at its purest form, quite short term. It's a 45-minute experience and we want them to leave happier than when they came in.

53:57obviously that could form a long-term relationship with the brand or the business but yeah a lot of the kind of interaction we have is short-term whereas with team members it's very much about long-term thinking it's how are we providing you with progression are you respected at work and looked after are you given the opportunity to be you one of our core values is be yourself our four values are be yourself push yourself enjoy yourself and respect others and i think making sure that everyone has the opportunity to do that is really really crucial interesting we have similar values at my company is that right yes and the truth is that so many of these values when you boil them down not to you know they can be quite similar but it's how again it's how you execute them in reality like do you make decisions that actually if you're honest with yourself do you actually make decisions that reflect your values do the people above you you know our board members stuff do they know the values do they reflect the values um you've got to you've got to you know you've got to just bang on about the same stuff until you're blue in the face yeah because you kind of assume that you've said it enough but you never have you just keep saying it and i think you know that those those things making sure that you're sticking by them it provides a consistent platform that is a place to build happiness and you know the other big one is is listening giving people the opportunity to actually say what they think and listening and so we have a program called hospitality heroes every pizzeria has a dedicated hospitality hero which is come not a part of the management team they're just a usually a waiter or a line chef we get together once a quarter with me and the heads of and they tell us the stuff that frustrates them about pizza pilgrims and the stuff they love about pizza pilgrims and they all get to win a room together and you know someone from leeds might say this and then this person from brighton will go yeah i totally agree that's so annoying and then we are committed to every single thing that they raise we need to go away in the next meeting in three months down the line we come back and report back on each of those things and some of them was like yeah we fixed it the next day because it was the till button that was in the wrong place and we've moved it and some of it is bigger stuff sometimes we have to go look we've tried it it didn't work sometimes it's like we're on the process to fixing it but it's a six months journey but that listening is so valuable because you know they're the people on the front front line and i think they're the ones that seeing the the issues for them and their teams and also the issues for customers you know we're all sat there going on we've made this great pizza if every customer's going in going i hate this element of it we don't necessarily see that um so yeah that listening part is a huge part of happiness i would say so from your first site all the way until now you have 26 sites so how did fundraising change so i mean if i was gonna say i have a weakness it probably is fundraising uh just not very kind of I'm not very good at selling myself, I don't think, in terms of like, you know, why you should invest in me or whatever.

56:45I think, but on the flip side, I'm always like, anyone, particularly in hospitality, I'm like, if you're going to start something in hospitality, do it with someone else's money. Like, for sure. It's high risk. And, you know, I speak to some people and I'm going to put my house on the line or whatever. And I'm just like, not only is that just so, so risky, but I also think it makes you less good at your job because that risk profile is so high that actually like the intensity of like getting it right is so much that you'll make bad decisions because. You're more emotional. Too much emotion. Like, you know, any sense of failure will just send you into a flat spin.

57:23Like you need to be able to kind of go, you know, yes, I'm enjoying this and my life does not depend on it. And it's only a job. We literally, since day one, have been saying to everyone, like, you know, here's what a good job looks like, but please remember you're not saving lives. Like, you are serving pizza. There's not life or death situations here. Obviously, you know, food safety, very, very important. You know, the CEO and the ops team obsess about it. So in some ways, you know, there's real responsibility there. But broadly, we're not in a hospital. There's no one on the slab in front of us, like, do a great job, but don't stress too much.

57:55It's pizza. And I think that's good. you know we want a relaxed atmosphere we don't want a whole lot of people that are like oh my god stress of like have i hit my xyz target um so yeah so fundraising yeah i think crucial hospitality i mean it's a very kind of capital first industry you've got to kind of you've got to build the thing before you can actually sell anything so capital intensive yeah exactly um and it's hugely high risk i mean you know yeah it blows my mind people that people still start restaurants it kind of almost it's almost anti-capitalistic it's like so you've looked at all the numbers you've seen all the statistics of business failures and you've decided this is what you're going to do and it gives me faith in humanity honestly because it's like it's like wow there's just no kind of spreadsheet in the world that would tell you to do that like and and so fantastic it means you've made a decision for a genuine human emotional warm thing and i think it's the same with so many areas it's the same with like you know i guess music or being an actor or it's just like the the odds are so stacked against you it is mad yet everyone wants to be an actor a footballer a musician i think restaurants are probably up there you know what i mean like everyone's i would love to just run my own little cafe restaurant pub airbnb whatever it is um and i find that so fascinating it's like you know i'm not gonna sit here and say in any way adjacent to a rock star but i think hospitality is adjacent to that kind of it's it's kind of cool and fun and and and yeah but it's incredibly hard and makes no sense on a spreadsheet um uh so yeah so you know um i think raising money is crucial you need to obviously build the thing we raised initially 250 000 pounds uh which to open a restaurant in soho which is where we did on dean street our first pizzeria uh great street it's a great street it's it's got even better honestly in terms of like it's now crosswell has opened at the end and but it's proper soho dean street yeah opposite the two can um obviously we're opposite a flagship pizza express which you know on reflection was a slightly bold choice but um but you know it's been a fantastic corner for us and we just actually i mean we've just actually completely refurbed it so it opened in august 13 and we've just opened on the 8th of december completely redone it i think retained that kind of vibe of it but also just made something that actually works for the team we actually expanded into the hairdresser next door lacus is a long-term sort of mate he's cut my hair ever since we moved into that thing sadly i now have to find somewhere else to get my hair cut because lacus has uh um stepped out of his unit but yeah all done you know with his agreement and excitement and he's you know he's got a young family and so we we took his unit on he's moved to another unit and um we expanded into thing and we remain good friends but um yeah so it's exciting to have expanded that original store it still has an amazing amazing emotional resonance for me that first one um uh but yeah we raised 250 grand which is not a lot of money to open a pizzeria from scratch uh and that came with a lot you know we did everything on the cheap me and james that's from angel investors yes it was so yes i didn't get into that detail so it was from essentially from angel investors yeah who remained invested so we got two or three of them initially after sort of a lot of back and forth and they had hospitality experience and they then brought a whole host of kind of adjacent investors so we had you know a pr guy who you know they all put in about 10 grand some people put a little more we like i said we raised 250 out of i think it was 16 people in the end so some people put in more but the majority of people put in 10 grand we had a pr guy we had like a building guy uh we had a couple of people in property we had two or three corporate finances two or three people who'd run hospitality businesses so we had this incredible long tail of people i would recommend it to anyone actually there was almost no one who was like oh my god that's so much money breathing down on net being like where's the return where's the return none of that but so many people who were like interested and interesting and we could pick up the phone and go hey we've got a problem and they would give you an hour of their time or half a day of their time and we really learned into that we learned a huge a huge amount and um i think we you know we in our for our part of the bargain we kind of showed them stuff that maybe they didn't get to see normally so like you know come and have drinks in a building site before the site's finished and see kind of you know they go to a million swanky dinners in posh restaurants let's offer them something that's a bit more kind of real and just so many so many great bits of advice that we just got that you know over a beer or whatever and one of the guys sean he was the ex head of uh hospitality and leisure for pwc in terms of mna and i remember thinking god this guy's going to be so aggressive and he's going to want like you know he's going to be like how quickly you're growing and when you get into this ebitda number and that's going to be his whole mo and i remember meeting for the first time he's very softly spoken guy obviously super super bright and his number one bit of advice was like never go too fast that you haven't fixed the problems of the previous stuff so he was like as soon as you're going faster then you're fixing the problems you're gonna you're gonna run out of road and his advice was basically the opposite of what i thought which was like he was like slow the fuck down don't do this faster than you need to and it just resonates so strongly coming from someone that that um you know that who knew the sector so well and and also again like just the juxtaposition of like i really expected it to be this kind of advice and it was the exact opposite it was so valuable so i that that root of like get a lot of people who really know what they're talking about but aren't staking a lot on you it works so well for us everyone's root is different it comes obviously with a lot of you know stakeholder management and that kind of thing but but yeah broadly it was it was great for us because we just were like sponges for all this information we just wanted to learn and i think you know hopefully if you're at that stage of your journey, that's how you should be.

1:04:12Did you give them equity of that single unit or of the overall brand? The whole thing. We still only have one business. Oh, wow. Again, it's about sort of, so naive, about integrity. I was like, I don't want an SBV for every unit. We need to be convicted in our choices. If we're going to do a site, we need to believe in it. And if it doesn't work, we need to be held accountable and we need to have the incentive to fix it. So you had 16 shareholders from day one? Day one. Wow. Yeah. How many do you have now? Well, we had, it got sort of a bit silly. I think we probably ended up with, including kind of employees on option schemes and stuff.

1:04:56And we probably ended up with, and there's lots of, obviously inevitably it gets more complicated, but it was still one limited company. I think we probably ended up with like 30 individuals. individuals, some institutions, um, and some, uh, individuals and some like individuals, family members and that kind of thing. But, um, do you think that was a good idea? Got quite unwieldy towards the end. Uh, and just to finish that thought, we obviously had our, um, investment last, last year. So now, now we have five, two of which are me and James, two of which are our CFO and CEO, and then one major investor.

1:05:38So that's slightly different. So from unit one to unit 26, you grew through angel investments, and then you had a major player come acquire all of your minority shareholders' shares and preserve the two founders and one other shareholder, right? Not quite similar to that. So along that route, there were two institutions. We had a family office come in about five years into the journey, yeah who probably had about 20 at one point um all the while me and james retained 51 of the kind of voting rights yeah essentially uh and then uh in covid you know we can get onto that because it's obviously a big old part of the chapter of the story but essentially in covid um we kind of had two options one option is like completely go to ground take as much sea bills as you can button down all the hatches and just like wait for this to blow over and i was like i just don't want to that just sounds miserable it was generally from a pretty sort of selfish point of view i was like we just got to keep keep going and so we we we did a deal with a uh hospitality focused private equity firm called imbiba who came in and took a sort of a big stake at that point um you know candidly probably not for like the greatest valuation imaginable but i was like i'd much prefer to be moving forward with less less equity stake than sitting on my hands with more um so that was that so yeah we ended up with two kind of institutions a lot of private individuals and a lot of employees as shareholders by the end um but yeah what's the greatest lesson you've learned in that regard when it comes to fundraising in fundraising someone described it to me as like when you're raising funds like that basically it's like it's like playing poker with professional poker players and they have your cards and and that's so true like you can try and outsmart them but you can be pretty damn sure if you're getting money from a private equity firm they've thought of something that you haven't and like you could you maybe you're the brightest person in the room maybe you're the most obstinate maybe you do win but ultimately they're investing you because they see a win for them like the house always wins is kind of my take on it and therefore like you know i think i'm probably quite unique in that i just you know the money bit just doesn't interest me i want to be having a nice time i want to be respectful to people if you can make some money along the way great but it's a kind of means to an end for me a little bit and i think that's what's so exciting about our new investors is they're not actually that they are operators of the purest sense the people who have invested in us know more about running restaurants than we do and we're back into like sponge for information again super exciting you know i've always said the second I'm not learning is when I'll be out.

1:08:22That's the only real driver I have. So during your entire journey as an entrepreneur, you were fueled by enjoying what you do, never by money. No. You never wanted to become an entrepreneur to make more money. Well, it goes back to my original thought. Like if I wanted to make money, the last thing I've done is start a restaurant. It's madness. What is money to you now? What is money to me now? I think it's... You have a multi-million pound business. What is money to you now? It's, you know, it's security, basically. You know, candidly. That's kind of it. It's like, it's nice knowing that, you know, you have a roof over your head and it's probably still going to be over your head in 10 years time.

1:09:04It's nice to, you know, if the kids decide they want to go and be whatever they want to be, you know, you can kind of help them with that. Not like by paying their way, but, you know, by getting them the best access to education or whatever. That's kind of it. I mean, I've literally, I bought, we did this big investment round and I hate talking about money. Like I actually kind of curl up into a ball. The only thing I've bought since then is I bought a new pair of sketches for 90 quid.

1:09:34Is that the nicest thing you bought for yourself? I bought, I bought tickets, quite expensive tickets to go and watch England play France in the Six Nations. Okay. So yeah, if you can introduce me to your mate who's the chairman of the Six Nations, I'll take that. uh yeah like yeah i mean honestly i sound so trite i know but i just what what am i gonna do like i don't want a new car i have no interest my car works it gets me made a beat done next um well i bought a vespa because my vespa got stolen so i bought another vespa only because it got stolen yeah it got stolen yeah it got stolen so i bought a new vespa that's it i just i'm not interested i I love it.

1:10:16Thank you. Thank you for the honesty. Yeah, no worries. Sorry. I'm sure you want me to say like, no, it's more, it's all about more. No, not really. What was interesting about the investors and I think, you know, I did use this to my advantages. They were all driven by that. And so you had to kind of slightly go, okay, so I'm going to let them kind of. Yeah, they were more capitalistic than I was. And so, you know, you can kind of let them drive that in certain ways. But, you know, you've got to know when you're kind of compromising your principles to just get more. and I hope, I hope that we haven't done that.

1:10:50I hope that we are, you know, we're true to what we are and we're, you know, me and James are still 100 % in. We work five days a week in pilgrims. We've not gone and disappeared into the sunset in any way. Like if anything, we're more engaged than we've ever been. But yeah, my number one driver now is to get the next bit to work so that the numerous people on a kind of management incentive plan in the company get a great outcome. That is my number one driver if you're talking about money drivers.

1:11:22I want to talk about your brother because he's your co-founder. What are the advantages and disadvantages of working with a family member? I mean, my brother is a very unique person.

1:11:38You know, the cartoon version of James, he's a bit disorganized, this is a bit all over the shop, but he's like a creative genius and he comes up with amazing ideas. And I think, you know, he has suffered a bit with that because it's not actually true. He's, you know, I think if we're really getting into it, you know, academically, I was always kind of quite good at school and like, you know, always kind of got all the kind of requisite letters and numbers that you're supposed to get at the end of school. And I think James struggled a bit more with that because it's very structured learning and all the stuff that we still don't seem to have learned from 20, 30 years later in education of like just being able to do exams well is not the ultimate measure of your ability.

1:12:14Yeah. And, you know, there's so many stories. You know, it's basically you can't be a rock star without saying you're a shit at school. It's like part of the law of being a rock star or an entrepreneur. Like you've got to be, you know, on the edge of that kind of particular societal construct. But yeah, James is, he is unbelievably creative. I mean, the whole of Pete's programs is his idea. I always say anything great that we do is usually his idea. um you know he's not a sort of let's make a spreadsheet and see if it works that frustrates him he's like let's just do it i think you know i think probably i would still be analyzing whether pizza pools would be a good idea if it was just me and he's like why don't we just do it and if it's not a good idea we'll stop doing it it's like that's that's really good advice uh he's just a super engaging person he can walk into a room of like a hundred italians and doesn't speak the language and he will have the meeting out of his hand.

1:13:07I don't know what it is. It's like a sort of, it's a real kind of charisma at another level that I don't have. Uh, so, you know, he's always been able to kind of get people to follow him, I guess, in that way. Um, and yeah, we are, you know, we're a great, we're a great foil for each other because, you know, I'm probably more analytical. He's more like, let's just do it. He has great creative ideas, which I like to kind of try and dissect but quite often the best stuff we do doesn't have a logical answer uh and you know the great thing about i think family members you know the amount of people that talk to me i could never do that with my brother or sister and it surprises me but we're very very different which really helps so like we don't tread on each other's toes um but i just think you know you can trust him implicitly there's not been one day in our journey where it's like oh i wonder if that person has you know got the same you know is looking out for me as much as i'm looking out for them and i suspect that's quite hard when you start with another founder that you don't have you maybe have known for a little time or a longer time but there's always that feeling of like are we 100 aligned and i think there's never been a day in the whole of pizza programs where we've not been aligned on the long-term goal how did you distribute your responsibilities from day one like you're responsible for a b and c and then he's responsible for other things not formally i think we were just all involved in everything but you know quite quickly you know he he's like i have he's much more a have a go person than i am and he's just like we'll get stuck in and i'm a bit more like okay i don't know what i'm doing here so i'm slightly more like nervous you know he'll go into an event and be like i don't know how we're going to make this number of pizzas but we'll figure it out and i'll be there being like how the hell are we going to do this and so you know i think we probably spur each other on it's probably me worrying i'm definitely the worrier me worrying about whether we're going to do stuff maybe nudges him a little more to like plan more but him not worrying makes me think well let's just go and do it what's the worst that could happen and in the early days that's just how it was it was like sort of you know we were just a sort of double act that like careered into things and i think you know we've got to quickly realize that we can't we want to keep bringing that energy of like why not i guess to pizza programs but the why not is getting harder because it's like well if we're going to do this great thing and it looks great here in front of us now we've got to roll that out to you know almost 30 pizzerias across the country it's got to be great in all of them that's why not and so you know you've got to fight with that really a bit because it's so easy to just let no become the answer to everything but yeah um i'm not sure that's really answered your question but yeah he's an amazing foil to to me and he's so different i want to get shit done and like get you know this is a problem let's get it fixed let's move on to the next problem he's like he's like we need we need to pause and like actually let this problem percolate and come up with the best solution not just a solution and he's brilliant at that and you know that again is a battle because everyone wants to get shit done but you know there's so many examples a great example is in brighton in our peteria in brighton we have a basement that's big and And we also had a first floor and a ground floor.

1:16:10And the commercial reality was we did not need any more seats. We had more seats than we needed. So my solution to that is like, cool, well, what were those? We'll just brick up the basement. We don't actually need it. We use it for storage and incidental stuff. And that's a problem solved. And we don't need to spend money in the basement. And James was like, okay, that seems like quite a boring solution. Went away. In my head, that was fixed. We're on to the next thing. Comes back two weeks later. I've had a think about Brighton. I've spoken to a few people. for five grand we can turn it into a football pitch and you're like what do you mean he's like you know we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna put in astro and then we're gonna like build like basic walls i've spoken to a local graffiti college they're gonna come and graffiti it for no money and yeah for five grand we can make it into a football pitch and that's just like so much a more brilliant solution and we now have brighton pizzeria has a legit football pitch in the basement and we take 10 kids parties a weekend to come and play football for an hour and then have pizza after and it's a great example of James just bringing that extra level to the business and yeah you know it's it's the reason you know it's the reason why you know we really want the founders to to still be leading in in many ways because no CEO is going to make that decision you don't think so no because it's not like it's a formulaic decision and i'm not saying our ceo is formulaic i mean he's he's just been such a huge part of the story him and the cfo um we can get onto that later if you want but like yeah i don't think he would ever go let's do something completely left field here um because he hasn't got the time to kind of make those stupid decisions and he hasn't got the backup and ultimately everyone's looking for a kind of you know vindication that their ideas are good and i guess the beauty of being a founder is you don't need that vindication you just go and do it and no one's kind of looking at you going was that a good idea you know no one's holding you to your account really because you're a crazy founder so you can do what you want you know what i mean it played well it's a hugely valuable card at what point in your journey did you appoint an external ceo so we opened again slowly so we opened the first pizzeria august 13 and then over the course of the next four years we opened four more um uh yeah so we opened basically one a year um mostly out of cash flow initially um that's great yeah it was really good it was really good we took on a loan i think for the fourth one maybe um but a small one uh so yeah we grew it grew it grew it and then so it was all going pretty well like we we were kind of like, okay, this is, you know, this seems quite easy.

1:18:50I don't know why it was just timing back to the track and things. And then, uh, then we opened in Oxford, a pizzeria in Oxford, which, uh, it just was, you know, from day one, it was a disaster. We, we, we bought it off plan. It was much too big. It was, so we bought it from a scheme that hadn't been built yet. So we had assumed it was the right location, but it was very quickly apparent that it was like absolutely the wrong location. too big for us cavernous space but more on it than any other pizzeria had ever done uh there was a huge amount of hubris in it um and essentially we opened it and it didn't work it didn't like i mean i think the first week the center was insanely busy and it made money and then after that i just started to go like that until it was like losing money pretty fundamentally um did you close in so we ultimately closed it but what what it immediately kind of brought to light we basically me and james were like holy crap we're so far out of our depth we went to star pizza van suddenly we've got six pizzerias and we've got one outside of london and it's not working and we have no clue how to fix it there's two options here either we just like that's it you know we've got as far as we've got like get me the hell out of here let's like sell it and move away or we need to go and hire the best person we can afford to run this and like you know not run it so that we can step away but run it so that like problems like this that we don't how to fix they at least have an idea of how to fix and so that was yeah 2017 18 um that that happened and um yeah went away and yeah got got agreement from the board that's what we needed to do so then i went away and i personally interviewed i think like 42 people in bills on broadwick street uh or beak street even uh is that one yeah anyway one of those the bills in soho essentially had 42 coffees with 42 people and um yeah just met everyone who talked to recruiters we talked to like other friends of the industry if they knew anyone and yeah gavin who is our now ceo he's been with us sort of eight years almost um was the 42nd person we met what were you looking for because it sounds like you were trying to find a another parent to co-parent with you your child yeah we were looking for someone that absolutely had the experience we didn't have like really knew how to like run something at scale bought into what we were about which is not kind of like how fast can we grow and how much is in it for me and like really bought into the philosophy of like people first product first um and you know candidly what we encountered was just a lot of people who's kind of leading reason for being in an interview with us was they didn't like their current job which is like i mean literally that was an instant feel like oh i hate my job because my boss is an idiot it was literally like this interview is over next question uh and so it was just finding you know as always the people who are loving what they do and are really good at it don't want to go anywhere like you've got to you've got to kind of really encourage them to make that leap because there's no need to make it they're doing great in their current job they're on a great path they're doing they love it why would they leave what's the point and so you really have to find that person and tempt them out and that's what happened with gab he'd actually he he was at the time he was ops manager ops director sorry of oaxaca um the mexican business and he was actually leaving there um and he'd taken a job to go and work for a business in ireland to be md of a business in ireland so he had like a job done um and so i'm i met him i was introduced to him by another person in hospitality he was like we should go and meet gav he's like you know he's he's going on this journey and he might know some people that was literally the point of the meeting um we met i'll never forget it we met in the american bar underneath rasseries adele and had an america had a negroni and yeah it was just like i mean it's you know like it was kind of love at first sight i guess we just we got on so well we had this we had this philosophy at the time we still have of like you know what's your one question we always ask is like what's your favorite film and why because we wanted people who were engaging and had like a passion for something so that was sort of thing we both had the same film that we loved which was shawshank at the time mine's changed since but yeah we talked about Shawshank we talked about hospitality and you know I just I just was like this is the guy he was more than we could afford he already had a job but I went to the board the next day I was like this is the guy and they were like well we can't afford him I was like well he's either the guy or I'm leaving really uh pretty much like I don't think I was ever like that you know that bullshit but I was very much like this is the guy I'm not going to go employ someone for 60 % of this guy's salary who's going to be not good enough this is the guy i'm telling you for free it's the guy and um then yeah arranged for him to meet every board member within the next three days he's very can do i'm very can do and you know made that happen and then made him an offer and he was like look my wife's actually not that well um you know having second thoughts about the island thing and let's do this and he joined as ops director initially um uh and then after about two three years was promoted to md and then subsequently promoted to CEO and is just an absolute tour de force in the company.

1:24:00He, you know, he's full of energy. He brings all the structure and all the kind of like, you know, long-term planning and thinking that me and James aren't so good at. Hugely respects what, you know, what we've built and the people first culture and the values and all that jazz. And yeah, we're a great team. And alongside Sophie, who's our CFO, who literally reopened Dean Street, our first pizzeria. and put out tweet after about six months being like we need someone to come and do one day a week bookkeeping for us and sophie replied on twitter uh and she came in and did one day a week just helping us like do accounts and yeah she'd been with us 11 years she's now a cfo and she's absolutely amazing brilliant stories and so those two people i trust more than anyone this is why i feel so lucky about this next phase trusting more than anyone to deliver you know what what i guess was in our heads and you know we know them so so well like you know i know gav i know his whole family and his kid where he's about to have a second kid and sophie as well you know she she you know my son and her son were playing fortnight the weekend together like we're very close and they they bring all the stuff that we don't have sophie brings a calm and a real analytical energy and sees things that maybe others miss.

1:25:21And Gav just brings this insane energy and the structure. And he's just a great leader of people. In all the ways that we're not, we're kind of slightly British and a bit apologetic. And he's quite like, no, we are the best. Let's bloody do this. And so between the four of us, we're a good team. I want to talk about failure because this is one of my favorite topics when I interview founders and entrepreneurs. I think we've learned very little from successes and we learn almost everything from failures. What has been your greatest failure? Greatest failure. I mean, you know, in the purest sense, our greatest failure is we started a business in COVID called Slice, which was like a Slice, New York Slice type concept.

1:26:06And yeah, I mean, it worked in COVID. actually we had a great site on the south bank and that worked and it was that we were there for a pop-up for a 12-month pop-up was the original idea and i think covid was such a like destructure of momentum that we would you know me and james particularly were just like we need to be doing something let's just do things so we did two things we did slice which was a slice joint on the south bank and then we did pizza in the post which was a through the mail sending ingredients so people could make pizza at home and we can get onto that because it was a pretty crazy story but slice just never worked it you know we put a lot of money and time and energy into it and we did the south bank thing which sort of worked then we um moved it to finsbury park tried to open a slice joint in finsbury park and it just spectacularly didn't work um yeah and you know we did learn a hell of a lot of it and you know i guess you do you know i think so many founders think and again like good on them and maybe they're right but like think that you know they are the reason why their business is thing and whatever they put their hands to, they're going to do it again.

1:27:11You know, Oh, well I've done that. And now I'm just going to do it again. And I just think there are so many more like factors why success happens. And, you know, it was great to have a little insight into like, yeah, no, we're not just, you know, we go and do something and it's not, the conditions aren't right. We can't just make a success of another business. It's like lightning doesn't necessarily strike twice. Is that what you've learned from that failure? Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, it's, it's just not, it's, there are so many things that i guess we sort of take for granted that work for pizza pilgrims and the way we operate and serving you know the pizza we serve and all that stuff and when you move that into a sort of five six pounder slice model it's very different you've got to operate in a completely different way you've got so many more people through the door the whole thing changes and i think you know in many ways i just feel like we luckily our kind of particular outlook has just happens to align beautifully with pizza pilgrims and i think you know it's not wholly true it's not quite as solid as that but the idea that if we just kind of stop this tomorrow and went and did something else it would be as successful as peace program as you know we've been lucky enough to be i just don't think it's the case thank you for the honesty no worries what's the best advice you were ever given it's a big big question you know i i think i think it is you know it's so kind of so trite but it's so important to us it's just like it's all about the people hospitality is all about the people and like if you know not looking after people not giving people opportunity not you know giving them their first share of whatever is the fastest way for it not to work and i think you know we really do try and put that at the heart of everything we do and you know I think, you know, my sort of business mentor, if that's the thing, is a guy called John Timpson.

1:29:03I don't know if you know Timpson's, but it's a truly phenomenal business. They have about, well, it's a family business. They originally did like mending shoes, like cobblers essentially. You can see one on every high street. There'll be one within 100 meters of here for sure. And he's built it to like something like 2 ,000 shops or something across the country. It's huge. and they are 100 % owners, no private equity. But the way they treat their people, there's just so many philosophies in there that are so, so powerful to me. They have this whole concept of upside down management. So they're like, the most important person in our business is the person serving the customer.

1:29:36And everyone else is there to just make their life easier. And if anyone is not making their life easier, they're not helping and they're gone. And the stuff they do for their people is so powerful. I mean, obviously it's a family business and very successful so they can afford to do it. But they spend like over a million a year at fulfilling team member wishes. So you can just email anyone like, hey, I've always wanted to take my family to Disneyland and I can't do it because I haven't got the money. And they'll go, here's the money. Go, take them to Disneyland. No commitment. You don't have to like then sign up for 10 years or, you know, you don't have to have been there.

1:30:09I think you have to, the only thing that they look for to fulfill that wish is that your colleagues think you're good. That's it. That's all that matters. And like, you know, there's so many interesting things that they do and I won't get into them all here, but that kind of stuff you know they have 18 holiday homes that all of their team can use for free just you just all you have to do is book it in and then that is yours um they have this you know they don't have a marketing team their whole marketing is built on customer experience so it's like you know every team member is allowed i think it's up to like 200 quid or something is allowed to spend 200 quid without asking anyone you have to ask your line manager or anything just to make a customer happy and if it's like you know i'm going to a wedding next weekend thing and know they'll send the shoes to the wedding like if that if that's going to help and but they don't have to kind of ask for that permission it's just like do stuff that delights the customer um the stories are just endless i mean it's just such a but one one thing he did say that i really always did take to heart is like never punish the kind of 98 brilliant people in your company for the two percent so when someone steals from you or someone does something incredibly stupid or you know finds a loophole that don't immediately like change the policy of the company and like put cameras around the tills and you know punish the 98 % of people who are doing a great job you will hold yourself back more punishing those 98 % yeah to to catch the 2 % you're better off not letting it happen but you know you want to find the 2 % before that problem happens and you know ideally move them on if that's the right thing to do but don't just narrow narrow narrow your horizons every time something bad happens you just make it tougher make it tougher make it tougher until you end up with something completely robotic and all the good people will leave because why would they want to operate in that environment like give you know you've got to accept that giving people responsibility will result in some people not doing the right thing and hopefully you can help that person not do that in future but what you certainly shouldn't do is punish people who've only done the right thing and are doing great things that you hadn't even thought of don't punish them for the person who's done a stupid thing it does 100 % seem that you have embedded your mentor's advice because pizza pilgrims is a people's first business i really hope so and i you know i've never worked in another business so i don't know but i genuinely believe that is case you know i think we really work hard to look after people and and you know give them give them a bit of freedom to make some decisions about their business their pizzeria you know a great manager in a pizzeria should be able to make calls about what that pizzeria does i want to make you the mentor of my audience for this next question oh my god so for anyone that is looking to start a hospitality business from scratch these days what would you advise them i mean look i think do it there's so much joy in it and so much fun to be had and so much to learn and like even if it doesn't work out at a kind of spreadsheet level like you will learn so much about yourself about you know working with other people you know it is i think as close to a kind of business school that you can get hospitality it's so um it's you know it's such a great place for testing ideas you can literally have an idea on monday morning have it on the menu monday evening and know if it's worked by the following monday like there aren't many businesses like that where you know try a recipe or try a particular kind of deal or whatever it is you want to try like it's just the most incredible testing bed for like people who have lots of ideas it's great fun it's incredibly hard work but you know that can also be fun too um don't overthink it if you overthink hospitality you'll lose the kernel of joy at the beginning of your idea anyway and ultimately all the thinking will lead to like statistically this doesn't make sense so you have to you have to kind of just go with it and and kind of bring yourself to it i mean i so again so kind of trite but i just finished reading this book called the blood sweat and asparagus spears it's about like it's about how like basically the uk started the 90s as like comfortably the worst food scene in the world and like any good chefs we had were from france basically and that was you know it was kind of accepted that the uk is kind of fish and chips and maybe a pie and that everything else is rubbish and like through that decade amazing people turned up and like just brought insane energy and positivity and moved the uk dining environment on so much and they all did it you know candidly i would say 80 of them are now out of business or have had some kind of like you know it didn't they didn't make squazillions of pounds out of it you know there's the jamie olivers and whatever that did but um most people didn't but you know but they're they're rock stars they're legends of their time and they genuinely like changed things.

1:34:55And, you know, I don't think any of them, if you ask them, you know, looking back on what you did, even if it wasn't hugely financially successful, would you do it again? I'm sure they'd all say yes. I think that's the thing. And I think, so yeah, go for it. Don't stress that someone's done your idea because everyone's done it. I think it's all in the execution. Whatever idea you've had, someone's done it somewhere. Like, you know, and so you've got to get out and do it, have a crack and like, you know, learn on the go. We we spent so much time too much time thinking about pilgrims and not enough time just getting on and doing it and i remember when we started we had this stupid idea about like we were going to revolutionize queuing so we're like right what we're going to do is we have three things on the menu and then what you do is you just queue for the thing that you want so like if you want a margarita pizza you queue in this queue and then do your pizza you know garlic and mushroom pizza and then it was like brilliant and then we'll know exactly and then when you get the thing you'll take a specific marble and then we'll be able to gauge the interest we'll know that there's eight people in the margarita queue and three people and like this is going to be amazing and like literally on paper it was like oh my god we've totally changed this and like in reality it was a total car crash we abandoned it after 10 minutes it was like that's just never going to work make a queue tell us what you want we'll do it the normal way and so you know just like you've got you know all those sharp edges will come off you know it's like what that mike tyson quote like everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face it's just so it's so true of hospitality like you will get punched in the face and you know you'll learn a hell of a lot from it and you know i think adapting is is almost the most important part of succeeding in the early days but you know that said all of those rock stars in the 90s food scene they didn't really adapt that was kind of why they were rock stars they were like no no this is it take it or leave it and they move stuff forward.

1:36:42And so, you know, it's a tough balance of like, you know, adapting when stuff is obviously not working, but also sticking to your conviction on the stuff that you really believe. We could have easily gone, do you know what? It would be easier to do hot dogs. Let's just do hot dogs. Yeah. But we didn't. We stuck to pizza and we could go, do you know what? It'd be easier to like, you know, not look after people because we'll not pay them right or whatever. We didn't. And I think, you know, so know what you do stand for, but absolutely know what you don't. we've spoken about failure but my last two questions are about the opposite success ah how do you define success i mean there's only one definition isn't it it's a trite answer but it's happiness right you could be the richest person in the world you could be you know you could have a thousand billion pizzerias you doesn't mean you're happy and i think you know i'm not saying i'm you know necessarily like happy i've not certainly not found the answer but if that's not success then i don't know what it is if you could literally go right i'm gonna make a deal with the devil and i'm gonna be happy with the rest of my life that's it isn't it that's that's success done and then how do you define happiness well that's harder and like that that you know that's that's a very different question that's why we haven't done it um you know we can't you can't redefine it because everyone's sense of happiness is different and it might be that your happiness is driven by like you know charts that go up that might be happiness for you what's your definition of happiness?

1:38:07I think it is security. It's like knowing that, you know, I'm in a place that, that, you know, that I feel happy in that, you know, the people I love around me and that they want to be with me, I guess, and that we're kind of able to maintain that. I guess it's pretty, it's pretty, you know, it's pretty unexciting, I would say. I want to be able to do the things I love doing, like going to watch gigs and going to watch football and sport live sport and you know all that kind of thing but also yeah just you know feel like you're doing doing right by people and and keeping yourself engaged and learning i think i think happiness for me actually it's a lot about like am i learning stuff am i kind of getting getting new information in pushing myself in the right way you know i'm certainly not good at sitting still or being bored or like happiness is not like cool i've got a cottage in the country and I'm just going to sit here and read books.

1:38:57That's not it. So yeah, it's definitely keeping my brain engaged and kind of hopefully looking after people on the way, I think. Are you happy now? I feel like last year was tough. Like the process thing of getting a big investor on board, whilst I understand its necessity, I found it incredibly hard. I found that it sort of attempted to contractify, spreadsheetify generally just like bottle something that is not actually bottleable I know that sounds a bit OTT but like I found that very hard all the stuff that I want to believe in as Shamil from Dushun would put it, a sort of poetic element to it you can't put it into a contract, you can't put it into a spreadsheet but everyone's trying to because no one wants to be made to look like they missed something or whatever and yeah a lot of you know ultimately it's all driven by money which i think we've established is not necessarily what drives me and james so yeah i found it very very hard and i think last year is probably the most stressful year of my whole life but actually you know as with anything like that it's a very first world problem i appreciate that but like yeah it takes a long you know you think you know on the day that we completed the deal you'd be like oh all the weight's gone and I feel great.

1:40:16Actually, it takes you a hell of a long time to like move on from that. But yeah, do you know what? I woke up in 2026 and I feel very happy. I'm excited for the business and the people in it. And I really believe in our new partners and the opportunity we have. I believe we're going to do it, maintaining our integrity. And, you know, I'm excited for my role in that, which is, you know, hopefully playing to my strengths and not my week this is um and yeah you know i think we're really happy at home you know we have two great kids and you know we they go to the local school and we all seem to get on obviously we don't get on all the time we're starting to see the beginnings of teenage-ness i would say but you know very very lucky you know live 100 meters from the coast get to kind of you know I get to go and watch Brighton in an incredibly average 1-1 draw with Bournemouth, but with my son alongside me, which is great.

1:41:17And yeah, you know, I am very lucky, very, very lucky. And I hope, yeah, I hope, you know, that continues. And I hope I can use that position to help others find whatever their happiness is. Thank you, Tom. I really, really enjoyed your story because it has everything. It has passion, it has food, it has travel, it has purpose, it has growth. So yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. I actually really want to have also a pizza right now. But thank you so much for coming to the show. Mate, thanks for having me.