271: "This Is and Will Always Be the Best Place I've Ever Worked", with Gemma & Xav from Studio XAG

0:00Gemma Ruse:This week we're doing something a little bit different. We've got two guests. They're a married couple who also happen to run a business together. That sounds terrible, Jan. It sounds familiar, that's for sure. Although I have to say Gemma and Xavier have been at it a lot longer than us. They've been building Studio Zag together since 2009. And here's what you're going to love about their story. They didn't set out to work together. They were just two art students living in a house share, taking on freelance projects. and then one day they realised the work they did together was way more interesting than what they could have done separately.

0:34Gemma Ruse:Which is exactly how it happens, isn't it? It's never this grand plan of let's start a business together. It is a lot more like, well, this project's too big for one person. Fancy helping? And then suddenly 15 years have passed and you've got 60 people working for you. Just in case you haven't heard of Studio Zag, they're a brand experience agency. They're the people who design and build those incredible pop-ups or the installations or the experiences you see and you think, how did they do that? If you might have seen the 35-metre boombox they clad on Diesel's Carnaby Street store, that was all them.

1:07Gemma Ruse:And what's brilliant about this conversation in particular is they're brutally honest about what it's really like, the good bits, the hard bits, and why sometimes the best decision is to cry it out with your co-founder over a large box of chocolates. They just happen to be your spouse as well. Yep, I think we've done that. Plus, they've got this phrase that there's been rattling around in my head since we spoke to them. This is and will always be the best place I've ever worked. That's what people say when they leave Studio Zag, which tells you everything you need to know about how they've built their culture.

1:41Gemma Ruse:Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne, I'm a Chartered Occupational psychologist. My name is Al, I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work and create amazing workplace cultures. So let's join Gemma and Xavier after this very short word from our sponsors. HubSpot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers. And here's a perfect example. Lee, your turn.

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2:46Xavier Shariff:I'm Gemma. I'm the co-founder and creative director at Studio Zag. so my role is to at a top level oversee the creative output of the studio working very closely with my associate creative director and our brilliant design team and also to work with my co-founder and husband Xavier to shape the vision and future direction of the business

3:08Gemma Ruse:I'm Xavier I'm the other co-founder also Gemma's husband so she's my creative director in business and in life um and yeah i i set studios i got with jemma back way back in 2009 uh we started from this place where we designed and built everything ourselves and installed it and project managed it and the whole lot really um and we've still kind of stayed really close to that with our business model we've just added 60 odd people into the mix underneath so So, but we're still all under one roof. For someone who hasn't heard of StudioZag, just give us like the overview of what they, what it does.

3:49Gemma Ruse:Maybe start with you, Gemma.

3:50Xavier Shariff:So we're a brand experience agency. We design and build spaces that tell stories for our clients. So we work with brands all over the world to create environments that draw people in, get them excited about interacting with a brand. That could be a pop-up, an event, a window, any sort of physical experiential installation that gets people talking and wanting to learn more about the brands that we worked with.

4:22Gemma Ruse:Did you always want to do it together? we get asked that a fair bit and it's it's an interesting one because it's a little bit like asking uh it's not a bad question but it's a little bit like asking someone did you know when you first uh for us it's a bit like asking did you know when you first got together that you'd be together forever right and um so we got we Gemma and I met as you know young students 20 years old uh in a house chair and yeah we were both at art school and we were both uh designing and building every day in our in our kind of studies and also kind of connected into the worlds of fashion and design and product and and all that sort of stuff um and pretty handy i'd say you know could could turn our our kind of creative hand to all sorts of projects and that was very useful for people that we knew that were already working in the industry uh what happened was we were both commissioned to work in the industry as freelancers.

5:27Gemma Ruse:And then eventually the projects got so big and unwieldy that we needed each other on everything that we were working on. And the rest is history. That's how we formed Studio Zag. We saw this gap in the market for both creativity and high-quality kind of execution to come together. They were happening separately, but it was very, very disjointed in lots of places. and we're still doing that today so did we always want to do it together was that the plan there was kind of no other uh option in a lot of ways um but it definitely like um made a lot of sense and it's because our skills are complementary you know so we are aligned on taste creativity attention to detail um even the kind of more soft stuff like values and and and and how we operate and how we want to be seen and how we want to behave.

6:24Gemma Ruse:But the skills actually are different in the sense that we balance blue sky thinking with practicality and both actually take that role at different times in different environments. That's why it's worked, essentially. And I guess on the side of that, running a business with someone is really tough. and it's been amazing to have someone who implicitly trusts you, you implicitly trust them, but also has got your back when you screw things up and things are not perfect because that is a thing that happens a lot in the beginning and all the way through your career. Any thoughts, Gemma?

7:05Xavier Shariff:It wasn't really a plan. Originally, it was two young lovers fresh out of university trying to establish what life could be and sort of working one job to the next. And it really snowballed from there. As I've said, our skill sets are very complementary. And we found that the work that we could take on together was far bigger and more interesting than the work that we could do individually. So it was a bit of a no-brainer, really. We worked really well together. So it was very, very organic in the early days. we've freelanced individually and then we were like well we should probably officialize this and we did and the first time we ever used the name Studio Zag publicly was actually when we clad a 35 meter boom box onto the facade of Diesel on Carnaby Street and we sprayed a little Studio Zag tag on the bottom of it and I was so proud of that project because we used to do those facade treatments on Carnaby Street for diesel quite regularly and this one was by far and away the most ambitious but often they would get like graffitied or torn down or people would respond to them in a way that wasn't ideal and nobody touched the boombox and for me that was a sign that people respected the boombox yeah that's always stayed with me like if you make something great that people love it will hold its own in the world i love that project because it's over 16

8:48Gemma Ruse:years ago that project now and i've still if that brief came in today we'd still be like the whole business would be absolutely buzzing for it so it stands up i think the other thing that's quite interesting about what the question is uh we graduated in 2007 uh my whole time at university we both went to central martins we were i was personally told don't don't set up on your own don't make a studio like it's it's you know not a good game to get into basically it's hard you never do it just get a job essentially i don't think it's quite the same in fashion because it's quite normal to sell but potentially a bit of encouragement discouragement from going out on your own but then 2008 happened you know within minutes of us graduating financial crash there were no jobs and actually there were a lot of people are contemporaries who accidentally or deliberately started studios businesses at that time um and it was because you were the young weapon snappers yeah probably we were cheaper we were faster we had less red tape but we were able to be competitive and a bit of a blessing in disguise really in lots of ways for us that that horrendous financial crash um because yeah we were able to jump in and be kind of reactive and responsive to the market can you tell us a bit more about how you've set up your agency for to make it a great place to work well it's interesting actually because we again jemma and I've never worked anywhere else right so a lot of our values and the way we operate in the culture and the behaviors of our business have just come from the gut so you know Gemma and I both come from a very honest kind friendly human centric place because we don't have a hugely corporate background and as we've grown and become more corporate in inverted commas we've had to kind of figure out how that how that evolves i guess what i mean by that is at the beginning you're a small studio you've maybe got two employees four including yourself you know i literally cook lunch for everybody every day for the first what two three years maybe you know occasionally someone else would would have a go and it was a really nice very kind of holistic way of building an an artistically based studio and and the culture of kind of like equality and everybody being on the same mission is is a given and kind of uh and kind of baked in in a way that just feels very natural and organic but as you grow it's it's difficult to hold on to that because different things happen you have more people you are structured in a different way your your clients grow and i think you start talking about numbers all this sort of stuff you know you don't do at the beginning i don't know maybe some creative studios do but we didn't like you know it was all kind of like do the work work a lot see what happens see what comes out in the wash and we were very lucky we had a very very steady organic growth through those first few years but the culture shouldn't change because your values should remain the same and i think that is what happened but there was definitely a point in our growth where you kind of react to uh to that you get worried that everyone's starting to you're losing your grip a little bit on the culture and the behavior and all that's starting to change and you kind of react with the things that you're told to react with which is you know uh have more conversations more one-to-ones more performance reviews more uh i think throw more parties and and all that stuff is really important and we bring all that we still do all that but actually what we've realized more recently certainly the last few years is that you can't do that and that doesn't work unless you still have a really really clearly defined mission purpose that you are on together that is well communicated that everybody understands and above that or not above that alongside that that the work is good for us uh that you you attract ambitious um creative clients that you that you sell to them which is like a really can be a really dirty word in a creative business but it's absolutely essential and that you deliver it together because in the end really like your creative employees who are brilliant they want to deliver great work that don't waste their time is kind of how i think about it you know and if they do deliver that great work um they will have a portfolio and a legacy of their own within the business and externally that they will be proud of and and that is essential to have alongside all of the nice stuff which is you know being nice listening to people making sure it's a comfortable healthy um you know inclusive place to work absolutely but it doesn't create culture what creates culture is doing that while delivering brilliant work um that's what a creative business is in my opinion what are your thoughts

14:02Xavier Shariff:Gemma I'm a very nice person Al that's a really silly answer but um as I've said neither of us have worked meaningfully anywhere else. We've had bar jobs and the rest of it, hustled to make some cash, but we've never been employed in a meaningful way within any sort of corporation. So it was done on following our guts of how would I like to exist in the workplace and how would I like to treat people and how would I like other people to treat me. equality, fairness, you know, listening to other people, just generally getting along together. What we do is fun, playful, frivolous. Like it shouldn't be a horrible environment.

14:57Xavier Shariff:It shouldn't be, of course, there are pressures of budgets and timelines and demanding clients, but I always believe that we should be able to be swan-like and rise above that and enjoy ourselves like it's fun stuff that we make and like my personal taste in terms of the creative output of the studio is very bold it's very playful it's can we be a bit daring here and I'd like to embody that in the work that we do in the environment that we create like our studio itself embodies those principles the workplace that we've created is colorful that's all based around sky and sun and the earth and yeah i just think the way that why wouldn't we want to make a good work i'm curious

15:48Gemma Ruse:where did this inspiration for this come from is there another agency perhaps that you look up to

15:53Xavier Shariff:and go we'd like to be like them or another business uh no truthfully not from my side i I mean, creatively from an ambition and a type of work perspective, yeah, absolutely. There are loads of people out there killing it that are inspiring. But in terms of culture and workplace environment, I think that's quite innate.

16:13Gemma Ruse:I agree. I think there is like a lot less noise about it when we started SAG. You think like 2009 is like Twitter just coming onto the market. So it wasn't like we're all on LinkedIn and like reading about how amazing all of these business leaders are. in these highly polished kind of personal brands. But actually, I think ignorance in a good way, whatever the positive ignorance is, what is the positive of ignorance, can be quite a beautiful thing. And I think that not knowing how everybody else is doing it is actually quite healthy sometimes because there's this thing, isn't there, about gut feeling, and you know Gemma and I are both I would say both well maybe I shouldn't talk for Gemma I'm a very emotional person and I'm an empath for sure um and that is hard as a business leader because sometimes you need to be a bit tougher but what it means is that your gut feeling is generally pretty good and that when I say my gut feeling I mean they're feeling in your stomach when you're making a decision about the business who to hire who not to hire uh you know whatever the difficult decision is you're making that day what to work with who not to that gut feeling is good and it's normally pretty right and actually that's what your team are looking to you for they're looking for your decision your intuition privately owned we're husband and wife team ultimately if we say we want to do it we're going to do it we say we don't want to do it we're not going to do it but it's always with the best interest of the business at its heart and that's because it is our baby it's one of our babies the third baby um i think that if you hold that like what do i actually feel is the right thing to do here that's normally okay of course you're gonna check make sure you're legally right that hr's right and all that stuff but in the end how do i feel about this decision is an important part of how we run the business jemma when we were talking there about inspiration you your face sort of like went oh as if you had

18:22Xavier Shariff:idea was there was yes i remembered um something from the early days the dutch studios specifically piet heynique i remember seeing in a book this um furniture maker that i admired piet heynique and uh seeing into his studio and they had this beautiful long table and they all have lunch together and that is as i've said how we used to do it in the very early days we don't do it anymore sadly but there's something about that culture and that's that was me remembering a civic um studio that i could point to and say yes i found that inspiring and that is totally true

19:05Gemma Ruse:actually we were inspired by i think so i did an internship at a company called frederickson stallard with patrick frederickson and ian stallard are amazing artists product designers and kind of creatives and it was the same you know i interned there we had lunch together every day someone would take turns to cook every day definitely the dutch stuff jemma uh jemma also did a lot of those internships in those small studios fashion studios um so you do take a lot of inspiration from those places of oh that felt really good and how it feels and actually yeah to say we don't do anymore like we kind of do we built a whole studio that i'm in now that has our workshop and our design studio and our production studio all integrated under one roof um and we have a huge probably 10 meter something like that table in the middle in what we call the base which is where everyone eats lunch so so we bring we've brought that right from the very beginning from the kind of you know spark of that idea all the way through to the end when we were finally able to after 12 years of being in our previous space which which we were busting in the seams um we're finally able to bring that vision back to life uh and and we stay true to it we still we still we don't live here anymore which is great but we used to live in our studio a long time ago but we still design and build in the same space everybody's treated with the same respect everybody eats together um and i love that i think that's really good because it isn't it isn't totally universal that um one of our clients in fact to take inspiration mont blanc uh if you go to their headquarters in hamburg the engineers from the factory who make the writing instruments and the and any of the other goods that they make in Hamburg, they are in the same building and they eat together in the same canteen.

21:04Gemma Ruse:So you have these very, very like, you know, well-dressed execs in their suits, you know, with the guys in their overalls. They are very clean overalls, I must say, but I love that. I feel like that is, they're respecting the craft, whether it's you're a CEO or a fabricator, we respect that we are both experts in our deals.

21:55Gemma Ruse:Listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts.

22:02Gemma Ruse:I need to ask what might be a bit of a dull question, but the division of the leadership tasks between the two of you, is it fluid? Do you have specific tasks? How does it work?

22:12Xavier Shariff:We have very distinct roles for the most part. So I'm the creative director and Xavier's the managing director. We also have other senior leadership within the business who do lots of other wonderful things. So for the most part, it's very clear and has been for a very long time. Where we're pushing into new areas, sometimes we have to figure that out a little bit or what part of that are you going to take? What am I going to take? but um people generally know what they'd come to me for and what they'd come go to south for

22:46Gemma Ruse:and was there any kind of jostling for that creative director title seeing as you're both artists no never Gemma is a better creative than I am um my creativity comes through in different ways let's say like I'd studied product design I'm a maker I was brought up by a carpenter uh like you know i was really good at like making all of the stuff happen and not being too afraid of the scale of it um and jemma is never afraid of the scale of creativity so like we can and do create design build anything um and yeah we very quickly fell into that and then from a really boring administrative side, I took more easily to the business side of it.

23:38Gemma Ruse:So the numbers and the, let's say, paperwork, that is not paper anymore, but Gemma didn't like it and therefore it didn't happen. And so I just understood it really. I found it easier to understand and I knew that it was essential. And so I was a very early... like FD, let's say. And I've continued on that train. And yeah, the salesy side of things fell just more naturally into my remit. And then, you know, people also like working with us because we are a couple in a lot of ways. So we, you know, I wouldn't say we play on it, but we use that to our advantage. It's great to have a founder in the room, but it's also great to, they like, there's a trust there that they genuinely get from knowing that we've got both sides of those things covered that it's going to be highly creative but also it's going to work it's going to be on time it's going to it's going to be safe it's going to be whatever it is that we need to make happen in whatever country in the world that we're doing is going to happen we have a weird

24:49Xavier Shariff:dynamic i think where we're both good at supporting each other and we both take turns in a way of being the visionary and the more pragmatic practical one so on any kind of creative project client work or something that we're trying to achieve creatively I will be the visionary and I will know what I want to achieve and Zav will be the one who can help make that reality so whether that is you know hanging a massive floating house in the middle of a store or whatever it is I won't know how to make that happen but I will be confident that we can figure it out and Zav will figure it out or not anymore because we have a wonderful team who do all of this for us with us but that's very much how it was in the early days and it's almost the other way around in business Zav has a visionary business idea and I can help him make that happen because I'm a little bit more practical okay well if that's what you want to achieve these are the steps that we need to take these are the people that we need to bring on the journey and this is how we might be able to make that happen an interesting duality there yeah and i guess as the business has grown

26:04Gemma Ruse:you you do staff a little bit by employing people in your image and you're like oh cool i'll have another one of those please another one of those and that but actually to talk to the team a bit because nothing happens without them now uh you do that and then you find different people who are sort of similar or whatever and you kind of you multiply like that for quite a long time but now we're definitely in a stage where we it's really important to find people who have skills that we don't have and that our team don't have because that's the that's the now where we are is that's the real growth is that actually we don't actually know how to do this thing or create that process or go into that market or whatever it is let's find someone who does and and of course so much of growth is about finding people who are genuinely brilliant and can take queue there you know you just need to build the ship as it were and and get and let them get on what about the ego like both of you are excellent at what you do both of you like you say that you sort of like change a little bit and you excel at one part of the business and then you excel at creativity i sense that a lot of people who have creative agencies someone wants to be the person who came up with the idea but there's two of you do you share it how does that work or do you not even think about it i wouldn't say it's something that we've thought about in any sort of pained way

27:30Xavier Shariff:it depends what the idea is in terms of setting the direction and the vision for the business and where we want to go and who we want to be and who we want to be working with that is something that we do together and we discuss it we go around in circles sometimes and we align on it and then And we share that with the team. And it depends what the other idea is. But I don't think there's a, I mean, we're all humans and we all have egos, right? But I think we're so aligned and we're so like in each other's lives. We've been together for over 20 years and we've been running a business together for 16 of those.

28:07Xavier Shariff:It almost doesn't really matter who had the idea so long as we're both on the same page and we both stand behind it and we both keep saying it.

28:16Gemma Ruse:when does it matter that you had the idea? I think what is hard about, one of the things that's hard about running a business is not a new concept, is the feeling of being an imposter and not being good enough. And man, do you reach that level all the time? I do anyway, you know, because it's really stretchy, like growing from two to four, four to six, six to 10 million. It's really, really stretchy. Every single step of the way is just like new problems every day. and not only that you're bringing in these people on board who are fresh to it and they are going to make the same mistakes that the people did five years ago they just you know with all the systems and processes in the world it happens and it's part of life you just have to accept it so sometimes it's important i think in contrast to what jemma was saying to document maybe unofficially document what did i do that was good today what decision did i make that was good that was a winning decision because so many of them are not and you have to be okay with that um just to know just to back yourself in terms of ego the reason i'm saying it is because you say that you say the word ego and i'm like your ego is important because if you don't have one you don't think you're good it's not it's not a good situation being a founder of a business being a managing director being at the very top of anything being top of creative or the top of business or whatever it is you need to have a bit of ego you need to back yourself so and i think sometimes you can lack that a bit and actually it can be quite hard as you bring experts into the business because they're inherently better than you at lots of things which is like you know great also then you're like oh what am i good at now and you know and you've got to go back to it what am i good at i built this i'm good i'm smart i make good decisions people you know all those sorts of things so it's important to feed that sometimes so that you don't end up not taking any risks defaulting to the easy answer.

30:13Gemma Ruse:Or ultimately, and I've seen this in a lot of my contemporaries who run businesses, shutting the business down, you know, or slowly winding it down through a lack of growth mentality, which is not healthy. And the other thing, and I'm not sure whether this is connected or not, is one of the amazing things about the business that we work in, and when I say the business, I mean the industry, is it's always new. And newness is a big factor for it. People want something different. You're very, very rarely doing the exact same thing that you've done before. Certainly in our slice of the market, it's pretty challenging.

30:50Gemma Ruse:And it's not easy money, let's say. It's just not. We can scale, but we can't really scale what we do because it's so bespoke. You need to have a certain amount of ego to do that because you've got to believe that you can do something that you've never done before. you know by following process by bringing amazing people on board by collaborating with with people you know that's another thing to mention our team is incredible but also a lot of over the years we've collaborated with people who specialist engineers lighting but all these people who didn't who can make all this magic happen the show happen um they but you need to have the the moment of like we can do this and that that does come a bit from ego i think so as you're either entering or approaching sort of seven figure turnover what what might you have said to the two kids back in 2010 when they were just approaching their first their first mill what what advice would you give man take more holidays yeah take more holidays that's exactly what just came to me at the exact same time yeah i don't even know if it was really necessary but we didn't take enough time off um you know we worked hard and we had a good our 20s and 30s were good like you know we partied we had fun but we didn't take enough time off and now we've got kids and and we're taking more time off and it's great but obviously it's really fun taking time off before you have kids as well let's be honest um take more holidays uh i guess like um you know what we do is as Gemma said it's not very serious it's it's playful and fun but but to the people that we work for the clients and their their jobs and their brands it's incredibly serious and uh you know it feels like a little bit like life and death sometimes doesn't it like people are like oh my gosh it's not going to happen and you know you don't miss a deadline all that sort of stuff It's very, very theatrical in that sense.

32:55Gemma Ruse:But we learned, didn't we, quite early on with a few like critical moments where things weren't going to happen, you know, like we weren't going to hit a prototype deadline or something, a window got pulled out a day or a week before it was supposed to be pulled out or something that like ultimately just have a conversation with the client make it you know be honest and try and fix it as quickly as you can and it's generally all right

33:29Xavier Shariff:definitely agree with you on take more holidays that's the number one but the second one would be taking a more proactive approach to growth sooner because we have have had amazing growth over the last 16 years. And it has been very organic. And that's no bad thing. But in terms of the clients that we work with in the pandemic, we lost a few clients, a lot of shops closed, budgets were tightened, a common story. And that was the first point in our career, so we'd been 10 years old at that point, that we actually started actively going out and asking our dream clients for opportunities. And we hadn't done that for the first 10 years.

34:23Xavier Shariff:We still worked with fantastic clients. But had we had that more proactive approach earlier on in our career, we might have bagged those dream clients even sooner and been working at a different scale, more visible earlier on.

34:44Gemma Ruse:Great one, Gemma. Thank you for bringing a great one.

34:47Xavier Shariff:Yeah, well, it was just a mindset shift for us because we were very busy working for great clients, you know, no regrets at all. But when I understood the power of asking the clients that I'd always wanted to work with for opportunities and they said yes I was like oh we should have been doing this before but other than that like I don't really have regrets and I don't really want to change things massively so I wouldn't want to meddle too much who knows what would happen with the butterfly effect I think there are probably some practical things I could share

35:23Gemma Ruse:that might be useful for your listeners. Like, we had always had an accountant. Someone recently asked me, like, when would you recommend getting an accountant? I was like, immediately, no matter what you're doing, don't be crazy and doing that stuff yourself. But good financial advice, very late on. It lasts a few years for me, really. And, you know, we're talking about big numbers. Like, we've been a seven-figure business for, you know, most of that time, I'd say. um big numbers you need to think about the money that is in your business as an investment opportunity and i'm still on that journey to be honest and that's partly because it's such a big amount of operating capital you need to do what we do because we work with all these blue chip clients that demand a lot for quite a big credit line as it were like you know we we it's changed a bit now but it is difficult when you're small and competing against big companies um so you need to have this big load of cash to be able to actually work and pay everyone all that sort of stuff but the rest of it can be treated like an investment opportunity and use it to to drive growth and revenue and different revenue streams and all that sort of stuff but yeah and then also of course and then so from that side good professional business financial advice good personal business financial advice to look after yourself make sure that you are going to be okay because ultimately it's on your shoulders and for us that's that's it's a family affair so it's not like we can lose our income and then you know the other one could pick up the slack it doesn't it doesn't work like that so i've had that on my mind at least for the last eight years where we've had children that it's like this you know we're not playing around anymore we need to be careful and that's not like planning to be um but you know being being smart with how you how you work and get the right advice it's hard to find but you've got to pay for it and that is something that is hard to swallow at the beginning because you're like why would i pay this guy to tell me to do what something with my business finances or whatever but i think it is worth it so let's talk about home life so do you talk about work at home yes we do talk about work at home the rule is we shouldn't and you have to check each other but it's really hard not to that's the honest truth of it it's the main topic in your head all the time isn't it it's going around and around and i think that's the bit that probably the bit the bit that no one warns you about is not that you'll talk about it all the time i think that's pretty obvious but it's that you'll think about it all the time um and i was once having a coaching conversation with someone i was being coached and they said how you know how how many hours a week do you work and i came up with some number of whatever it was 40 50 60 hours whatever it was at the time and they were like i think that's not true think about all the time that you're thinking about it and it is sometimes you are thinking about it funny you know all of your waking hours and some and that is that's the hard bit right we have to check ourselves um the kids really do not like it and it's not like that's a really toxic thing but they just behave badly when we're talking about work to be honest they they don't like it when you're not talking about anything that isn't something that's entirely focused on them so that's been really good for us i think kids have been really good for us because you are forced we are forced to leave work on time we're forced to go home we're forced to be a family we're forced to take more holidays many many many positives from having dependents because it changes your whole way you operate jemma and i just used to work late all the time and you sort of realize it was just work expanding to full time available do you know what i mean it was like you can work till 9 10 11 every night it doesn't matter um and then you don't employ the people that you need to employ to do the work this happens between 6 and 10 or whatever they can just do it in the devil when you're paying them to do it so do you literally ask the question are you okay to talk about work or is it a bit more