218. The F-ckup Files: Our biggest work (and life!) failures. Summer Sessions, Episode 1

0:02Leanne:Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work Summer Sessions, Episode 1. My name is Leanne. I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, but I'm also just a girl sat next to a pool asking her listeners to stick with her and listen to a business podcast while they're on holiday. It's a tough ask. It's difficult to follow that one. My name is Al. I'm a business owner and also sitting by our pool on our terrace. You probably hear a little bit of wind, maybe some dogs barking in the background. Perhaps the occasional stalk because we're in Bulgaria for a couple of months over summer. And fun fact for Bulgaria, a couple of things.

0:36First of all, stalks, lots of stalks. They nest on top of lampposts. They do. Two, stalks are massive. They're like the size of a cat. Probably bigger. And three, Bulgarians, when they say no, they nod their head. So we went in and asked for something in a supermarket. He said, do you have this? And they said, no, but nodded their head. Very confusing. Anyway, this is Truth, Lies and Work where we simplify the science of work and basically relax over summer I believe.

1:01Leanne:Yeah I'm not sure we'll be doing much simplifying the science of work over the next few weeks but what we will be doing is bring you into our summer holiday. The idea is it's August or pretty much I think this episode will go out a couple of days before August starts and we fancy a little break too but equally we want to bring you with us on our summer holidays. So we're going to talk to you about things that On typical Truth Lies and Work, but on very Al and Leanne. So particularly if you listen to our This Week in Work episodes, the vibe and conversation, it will feel familiar, but just slightly different topic, as well as keeping it loosely work-related, but fun work-related.

1:43The dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across three teams and four systems, and in our case, it's about 216 ,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it.

1:57Leanne:What you should be doing is using HubSpot because why? HubSpot connects it all. Every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already knows the full story and when you know more, you grow more. Nice. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

2:24If you've listened to our previous podcast, you might know me from podcasts such as The Sideways Life. We have a podcast called A Sideways Life, which is all about our travels. We have a whole backstory about that. And you probably recognise this is a lot more like that because we're sitting with a gin and tonic.

2:41Leanne:Yes, we are. The sun is out. Unfortunately, I left my sunglasses inside and I didn't go in because I might lose connection. But see, and Leanne's all ready. She's one sip of gin and she's just getting leery. But yeah, so if you're expecting professional broadcasting and expecting something incredible from these episodes, it's probably not the episode for you. Come back in September. Now's the time to lower your expectations, friends. We're back in September. We'll be back with all the normal stuff, which is... We'll also be back in our studio in Mostar. So we'll have all the equipment there. Yes.

3:11Leanne:And we should also say as well, our Thursday episodes will remain largely the same guest interviews, but topics are a bit more relevant. um so for example on thursday we have dr elaine coming up who's talking all about the best ways to switch off during your holiday and actually enjoy it um but today we are talking about i think the official episode title is the fuck up files um we had some ideas with the assistance of of an ai platform um to help us generate some ideas to watch talk about and we put it to our our lovely follow us on LinkedIn. And this is by far the most voted episode. People want to learn how we've completely messed up our lives and we are here to deliver.

3:55Absolutely. So what we've decided to do is split into three sort of like major fuck-ups. I'm not sure whether we can say that. Might need to beep it. Might need to beep it. It's the disaster files, we'll call it. You know what we mean. So the The first one is business disasters. Second one is career disasters. And the third one is just general disasters. Life disasters. Life disasters, just roughly speaking. So prepare to cringe. So, Lee, do you want to kick off with your first? Now, in yours, it's actually, I believe, you've got two career and one personal, and I've got one business.

4:33Leanne:That much of a mess up. I've got one business. One career disaster, I've got two. To be fair, I've got two business and one personal. because my career is nothing really, I've no job since 2002, so I can't really talk about that. So, Leigh, do you want to start off with your first career disaster? Oh, yes, the time I got demoted. How could I forget? That was a tough day. So, set the scene. So, before you tell us what happened, set the scene. What was your job? What was your position? How well was it going? So, I'm going to take you back to early 2012, January, in fact, right at the start of 2012, Well, the year that Al and I were due to get married, which was a stressful...

5:13You say due to get married. We did actually get married.

5:15Leanne:No, we did. But I mean, in January, we were due to get married in the September. So a fairly high stress year all in all. I got promoted into a management role, my first management role in the company I was with, but also probably my proper management role. I'd been in a management role before. I've only had one member of staff. and it was to set up a brand new welfare to work contract called the family support program which was co-funded by the dwp and the esf support fund um very exciting um there was me there was one coach on board basically the program was to help people who were from multi-generation worklessness families so worklessness worklessness yeah so they were unemployed their parents were unemployed and likely their grandparents had been unemployed for a significant part of their working life.

6:08Leanne:I should have known it wasn't going well when on my first day we sat down in a meeting with the MD, the director of the contract, fun fact, the MD and the director of the contract were married, no pressure there, and the one coach who was also starting to work one-to-one with the customers who had been a peer of mine for a number of years and had also applied for the management job that I had subsequently got. So you got this person's job? We applied for the same job I got it. They didn't? They didn't. Oof, that's not a great start. No, it's not a great start. So we were sat in this meeting talking about what the program looked like, all the things we need to do to set it up, which is basically everything.

6:51Leanne:And after that first morning session the MD came up to me and said Leanne can I have a word she sat me down on the stairs and said you don't have to do this oh that's harsh I was like what do you mean she's like well you know if this is a bit of a stretch for you I understand your maybe your main motivation was to move back to Manchester I've been put on a contract over in Yorkshire previous and had a very long commute she said I understand there's no pressure you're more than welcome to be a coach on this contract we'll find somebody else to manage it I don't want you to feel that there's any pressure we're not a job for you here and being the naive 27 year old that I was I was like I'll be fine I've got this I'll be absolutely fine so we went through the initial setup of the contract in the northwest which is Manchester and Cheshire East it went okay started to get some people onto program it was voluntary which made it difficult so typically welfare to work contracts are mandated by job centres.

7:50Leanne:This was voluntary and delivered also in partnership with the local authority. So it was slow getting people into programme, but we were starting to get there. They also had this contract over in Yorkshire and hadn't filled that position for a manager in Yorkshire. So maybe about a month in, we're starting to make some waves in the Northwest. And I was asked to pick up the contract in Yorkshire as well. So things are going well. Things are getting better. And I got the call from the same MD that told me I didn't need to do this. So I thought that's a nice phone call, a bit of faith, a bit of trust here.

8:25Leanne:So I also then took on Yorkshire. And it was probably over the next three months that the wheels really started to fall off. If you're not from the UK, Manchester and Yorkshire aren't that close. And we had all of Yorkshire. So we're talking Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, East Yorkshire. Largest county, I think, in England. So based pretty much coast to coast of the north of England, a big area, just me, no fixed premises, all community based, had to bring in all the coaches, built a team from ground up. And that's probably the only thing that I can still say confidently that I did right because of all the members of staff that I hired in those initial four to five months.

9:07Leanne:Every single one of them, except one, remained on the contract for its entirety, which is three and a half years. Nice. So that I did well. um but understandably massive area complete startup two contracts very complex brand new I was out of my depth if I'm being honest I wasn't provided the support I probably should have been by the organization at this point um to the point where we were meant to deliver courses they weren't being developed in head office as I was promised they would then I had to pick up that as well and develop the courses myself equally did them well because those courses also stayed place for the entirety of the contract so where my strengths were recruitment pathway development training and development all that type of thing smashed it but in terms of building a contract from startup or the logistics office structure we needed systems processes I struggled and it was just it was just me so we get to about July August I know it's not going well I'm starting to feel that I'm losing control of where things are up to but I feel like it's ticking by we then go on holiday to get married we got married in Gibraltar so we had three weeks annual leave our wedding and then our honeymoon and I came back after three weeks and the entire contract was broken because I hadn't set up enough systems and processes that it could function without me being there and a new rule had come in anyway blah blah from the prime contractor which meant we didn't have the right paperwork in place anyway don't want to make any excuses I was out of my depth and I went into a meeting maybe on my third day back with said MD and my director and was told that I wasn't doing a good enough job I was being demoted and I had three options I could either become a coach on the contract in Manchester.

10:58Leanne:So basically become a peer of the people I had been, I'd recruited into the business and had been managing up to that point. That's rough. I could go back to the contract I used to work on in Yorkshire as a coach. Long commute. Long commute, demotion, back to the role I was in previously. Or a third option was I could be a tutor. So I could actually deliver the courses that I developed to the customers. So I went home. I spoke to Al, obviously, um and a couple of trusted colleagues and decided that i'd be a tutor because the other two options seemed like stepping back this at least felt like a bit of a sidestep and something new can i ask you at this point then how much of this was ego led as in you didn't want to look like you've been taking a step back it was a bit of ego but to be honest it was more from a view of career development because at this point you and i started talking about moving to spain and i kind of thought well I'm not going to find a job coach role in Gibraltar because unemployment doesn't exist in Gibraltar.

12:00Leanne:But I might find a training and development role in Gibraltar. So it was more that aspect of it. And to be fair, when I had been a coach, running the training sessions had been my favorite part of it. So I went back in the next day, said, I want to be a tutor. That's what I'll do. And the MD was not expecting that. She didn't like that. She thought I was going to go back to being a coach. So we took a break. And my director called John, who was also the MD's husband, said to me, I think you can do this. I just think it was too much for you to take on the entire North region. I think if you just have Manchester and Cheshire, with the team you've got in place, the premises you've put in place, I think in three months you'll smash it.

12:48Leanne:So he really campaigned for me to the MD to give me this opportunity. She was not keen and it was made very clear to me that if I didn't completely turn around the contract by Christmas and this would have been late September, then I was basically out of a job. So again, challenge accepted. At this point, Alan and I had already made the decision that we were going to move to Spain in the spring. So it's kind of like, well, make the most of it. Deal with what happens. and at that point as well John became much more of a hands-on mentor and over time coach and I got myself together in terms of being more organized understanding exactly where all of our customers were at where our coaches were at much more hands-on to the point of probably micromanagement within that first six weeks to understand exactly what was going on and just found our groove found the joy in what we were doing um we had a lovely wave of of inflow of customers coming on which also made everything easy to hit our targets and by christmas we were smashing it and the md came to manchester to visit me and asked me to stay on as manager fabulous is that the same contract that you ended up running from spain yes yes so this would have been at christmas and i'd already made the decision and I planned to move to Spain in May so I handed in my notice in April um contract still doing really well explained John we were moving abroad um he was very sweet gave me a hug wished me well and then the next morning I got a phone call he said to me when we left that initial meeting he's like don't talk to anyone yet obviously I want to talk it through Katrina and understand how we handle this transition um the next morning I got a phone call from John and he was like just so i understand are you leaving your job because you have another job to go to in gibraltar or you're leaving your job because you think you can't do it from while being abroad i was like the second one and he was like well i'm not so sure about that he said i think you can probably do the majority of this job remotely so go and have a think about how much of a job you think you could do what system structure potentially other members of staff you need to put in place on the ground in Manchester and talk to Al about it and see if it's even something he'd want you to consider because we would expect you to come back a week a month to the UK.

15:12We had those conversations and it worked out really well.

15:15Leanne:We flew to Spain in May and for the next two years I worked as a remote manager going back to the UK a week a month. In fact it went kind of better than that because after a year I got promoted into the national manager role where I had Manchester, I regained Yorkshire, which is the one I got demoted from and also picked up Cornwall. So let's just say that someone's listening to this and they go, oh God, yeah, I feel like that's happened to me. Or I'm at the situation where things aren't great at work, maybe not being demoted, but they just haven't got the promotion that they wanted. Is there any advice you'd give them?

15:52Leanne:I made the mistake that every first manager, the vast majority of first managers make. I felt I needed to do it all on my own. I felt I needed to have all the answers and I felt that asking for help would be a sign of weakness and signal to my incompetence. And the exact opposite is true. The minute I asked for help, went to my team, asked for their help, went to my manager, asked for his help, different colleagues across the business, is when it all turned around. I was stuck in this complete frozen threat state of overwhelm that I didn't do anything effectively. So I think if you're feeling that or if you've just been demoted or you can feel it coming, think about who around you can ask for support and ask for help.

16:40Leanne:and if it's possible to reduce your focus areas down to the absolute must be done, have to be done. So, Lee, when you look back on this, what, 13 years ago, 14 years ago, do you still see it as a career disaster?

17:00Leanne:Yes, I probably do. I probably do because I can't sugarcoat it too much. it was it was such a hard hard experience and that was also the year that I started to have really bad panic attacks so my mental health took a real toll as well and it took me a long time to rebuild my credibility with the rest of the organization my team not so much my direct managers not so much my MD not so much but gossip in organizations happens so it took me a good probably 12 months to rebuild any form of credibility if I'm being honest there are some leaders and managers in that organization that never truly saw me as a competent no matter how successful ESF was and it was by far one of the most successful contracts the organization had ever seen I think we finished with from startup we finished with maybe more than 3 ,000 customers who'd gone through the program 40 plus members of staff and we yeah we were always one of the top performing but but that um but that one that one slip stayed with me and with my reputation with certain people throughout the business it was one of the hardest things I've ever been through in my career it was really really hard because there's an element of

18:17Leanne:you have to internalize that failure to an extent that you can learn from it and grow from it and that's a process we have to go through but that little sting of failure is still there and always will be I also think that's where maybe I I've since developed a lot of empathy for people who find themselves as accidental managers or new managers without the training where I can connect with them in ways that perhaps other practitioners and trainers and coaches can't so it's definitely given me a unique perspective but if i was being honest and i could go back and have it not happen i don't know that'd be a hard choice okay we're going to take a very short break after this i believe leanne's got a question for me did you know that the uk's number one management podcast that's us by the way and the uk's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network we actually have a lot in common we both use behavioral science to help people do better at work.

19:17Leanne:And we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode. And two out of three of us are devilishly good looking. And you're not going to say which. Phil, host of Nudge, UK's number one marketing podcast. It's brought to you, we need to do this in threes. The HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination. Or business professional. Seamless, seamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil. We've just done an episode on fake fandom and how New York indie bands are paying agencies to create fake TikTok videos about how much they like their work. And we talk about the behavioral science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics, business and brands as well.

20:00It is.

20:00Leanne:It's such a good show. Of course, you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioral science in your marketing. But there's also just some really interesting episodes that will be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better? It can. And Are We All Just Status Seeking Monkeys? I am. Go and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. But come back. Yeah, come back. Definitely come back, because Nudge isn't as good as this, so come back. I'll cut that out. Keep that in.

20:32Leanne:But enough about me and my career disasters. There's another one coming, don't worry. Al which one of your mess ups do you want to start with first? Let's start with a big one so it was 2002 I'd been working for about well basically I've started work in a pub then I moved up to manager then I had my own pub then I got fired from my own pub because someone was stealing and I couldn't tell them who so they were like okay well you're stealing so and I wasn't by the way but they so I got fired from that so I had a couple of really weird job sales jobs for tele sales jobs that kind of thing and then had enough of working in the office and said right i'm gonna start my start my own business 2002 it was basically if you've heard of uber eats or anything similar it was basically that in 2002 so you'd ring me up at two o 'clock in the morning and um i would bring you some beer and that was it and it was aimed at students a couple of issues with starting that business first of all the peak times as in like just when the pubs shut back then you couldn't buy alcohol 24 hours um i know for all those kids who are, oh my God, if you're born in 2002, how old would you be now?

21:40You'd be 23, wouldn't you? So yeah, those kids, so anyone who's over the age of 40 will know in the UK will know you never used to be able to buy alcohol. So this solved the problem. Basically, I'd sell it over the phone. So people would ring up and I'd get the drivers out. But there was lots of peak demand around about 11 till one and then around about sort of 2.30 till four in the morning. But I paid the drivers rather than paying per delivery. I paid them an hourly rate, which meant that I didn't make a lot of money. And the second issue was I didn't really look forward. I wasn't really careful about what was going to happen in future.

22:16I heard that the licensing law was going to change, didn't think it was going to affect me, and of course it did, it decimated it. At a high, I think we had 20 staff and we were doing 20, 30 grand a week, which back in 2002, 2003 was decent. but no that didn't work at all so essentially what happened was I was every week I was trying to make payroll and I'd ring up the bank and they'd have to give me a temporary overdraft for three days and then I'd pull I'd withdraw the money to pay all the staff and then the revenue from those three days or at least I think it was actually when the credit cards went through and when that money hit the account, it allowed me then to get back into the black, is it?

23:02See, this is why I went bankrupt because I don't know the difference between red and black. Get back into the black and it was a really tough time. I ended up moving out the house I lived in. I lived in the warehouse. I built a little room in the back and I did everything to try and keep that business alive but it was not to be. So when the licensing law came in, went from 20 grand a week to about two grand a week. Had to fire 99 % of my staff. And to be fair, two grand a week were kind of almost profitable. But by that stage, I got 103 grand's worth of debt, mainly to HSBC banks. Sorry if you worked there and you were around in 2003, 2004.

23:46And so eventually I was like, right, well, I'm going to have to declare bankruptcy. um so i did so i'm bankrupt in 2005 for 103 000 pounds

23:59Leanne:oof oof indeed before we dwell on the um bankruptcy i i want to ask you because about the because this is so like we say al is a business owner al is is i know you hate this word you are an entrepreneur in ways that there aren't many entrepreneurs because not only did you have this idea that you saw yes it's the early noughties every student wants to keep drinking after 11 o 'clock and they don't necessarily want to go out clubbing but then you also had to find very creative ways of working around the existing laws around selling alcohol so tell us a little bit about that okay so without boring you about the legal regulations back then but essentially it was something called off sales and on sales on sales were on-premises sales so it was in bars in clubs, off-premises sales was you sold alcohol to basically drink at home or drink off the premises.

24:54So that's basically what it was. So we definitely came under the off-licence rules, which meant that you were only allowed to sell alcohol during what they call permitted hours, which is 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. It sounds archaic now, and the kids these days, you know, be like, what do you mean you can't go in at three o 'clock in the morning and buy a bottle of white claw or whatever it's called? But no, you couldn't. After 10 p.m., you weren't allowed to buy any alcohol unless you went to a pub and then even then at 11 o 'clock it would shut so this was the this was the hole that i thought we could fill now the now just just to be fair there was a company out there called i can't remember they're called now um first emergency or something and they were trading but they were doing it wholesale um because weirdly in the uk and this sound boring but weirdly in the uk you are able to sell a wholesale without a without a license, which basically wholesale is 24 cans of lager.

25:47So what they were doing was students were going, can I have four cans of lager? And they're going, no, you have to buy 24. And they're like, I don't want to buy 24. Well, that's the only way we can sell it to you. So there was that. We found a slightly weird way around this. I found a law that basically said that if you're allowed to set aside orders for customers during permitted hours, and you're allowed to give it to them after permitted hours, as long as you then take the money during permitted hours. Now, bear with me. What that basically means, if Leanne said to me, I want four cans of lager tonight at 2 a.m., then I'm allowed to, in permitted hours, go into my shop, take four cans of lager, put a sticky note on, they're saying for Leanne, and then at 2 a.m., go and take that lager.

26:37I'm not allowed to take any money from her at that point. But then if I went and knocked on her door at 10.01 the next morning and said, can you pay me for those lagers? That's perfectly okay. So I was like, well, obviously that's not a good, great business plan. But you know, when you go into a hotel and they take a swipe of your card, well, I did that about the same time, which hotel took a swipe of card and was like, tell me how this works. Oh, it's called a pre, you know, I've forgotten the term, but it's called like a reserve kind of thing. Pre something it's called. and what they would do is essentially reserve the money on your card and then they would complete that purchase that transaction when you left i was like oh so that means i can go and basically take a swipe of leanne's card when i deliver the alcohol at 2 a.m and then at 10 a.m i could then complete that sale knowing the money's reserved for me for 24 hours and i could do it and i did that for like two years one of my best friends and a business partner in a current business um he was his job was to come in and essentially we had one of those old-fashioned machines where you with numbers on it where you type the credit card number in then you type the expiry date in then you type the amount you press enter and he just he just basically went through and did completions for all of the transactions the night before there'd be hundreds it'd take him four or five hours to do that but that's the way we got around it so like wow we found a way this is cool but then we got a visit from the um licensing officer first one and the licensing officer said can you just show me where this person ordered this alcohol?

28:07So go back to Leanne's example. What I was doing was taking Leanne four cans of lager at 2am, taking a swipe of her card to reserve the£10, whatever I was taking off her. And then the next morning at 10.01, I was typing her card in again and completing that transaction. The problem was the licensing officer was clever, and he was basically the police, the person who's in charge with licensing, and said, when did you when did leanne actually order that that stumped me a little bit i'll be honest because leanne hadn't ordered that she rung me up at 2am and says can you bring it to me so i was like hmm so then i wrote a bit of software back in if you remember lotus notes no i can't remember the database one was in lotus but i wrote a bit of software that essentially generated every possible combination of order for every possible customer we had a record of and we had like maybe a hundred like files and each one of those had an order like they had basically everything anyone could order from every customer so if liana ordered four cans of lager and a bottle of acardi she would have an independent order for four cans of lager and an independent order for a bottle of acardi that had been auto-generated during permitted hours that i could then prove she's pre-ordered it of course we'd never show them the files, but that's where we could do it.

29:22That satisfied the licensee officer for a little while, but then about six months later, it all went wrong.