From start up to £10 billion; building the ultimate challenger brand - Rebecca Dibb-Simkin

0:06Welcome back everybody to the Uncensored CMO. Now, it won't have passed you by that one of the biggest challenges we face in our generation is the climate crisis. And one of the companies really doing something about it is Octopus Energy. Energy contributes so much to the challenges in the environment today. And they are doing astonishing things with renewable energy. And as a business, have absolutely transformed themselves from a startup to a really significant challenger, turning over over£10 billion. pounds. Now I'm joined in this episode by Rebecca Dib-Simkin, who is the Chief Product and Marketing Officer of Octopus, to find out about the journey from startup to major challenger and disruptor in the industry.

0:49What can we do to save the planet and change how we are using energy? And what are the marketing secrets of a company that have enjoyed such good success over the last few years? And ladies and gentlemen, if you're listening to this on audio right here, right now, don't forget I also have a YouTube channel where you can not only listen, you can see the guests in glorious Technicolor, see their reactions to my questions and enjoy the full 3D experience. So do check it out over at Uncensored CMO over on YouTube. Rebecca, welcome to the show. Hello, nice to be here. Why don't we go back to the beginning?

1:23Because I think you and I share a few things in common, don't we? Apparently. Apparently so. We're going to discover this. But we both made a move from accountancy into marketing, didn't we? So tell me about your kind of move into marketing and how it came about. Well, I always thought I was going to be an accountant. So I did business at university in Nottingham. I was quite good. Top of my year in financial accounting. I won the financial accountancy prize. Had a job to go to with one of the big four. Quite happy. And then I saw a brilliant long copy ad on the back of the student uni magazine for the Ogilvy graduate scheme written by the brilliant Rory Sutherland.

1:59He does know this story. I've told it enough. enough off that he doesn't think I'm weird anymore and was so inspired about how somebody could do such amazing things with words um that I applied and ended up getting a job in in advertising moved to move to London um and then from then into into marketing was kind of the natural natural progression that's brilliant it's funny because I think I think you and I may have run parallel you see because I I did a finance degree and uh ended up working for Cooper's and Lybrand so all very grown up and I was in the um I was actually in the tax department I mean it doesn't get more more sensible.

2:30I know. And I was in the personal tax department. So I had all these like, you know, wealthy executives that flew around the world. And I had to work out how much tax I had to pay. And there's this one guy. And I remember he worked for a company called Dun & Brad Street, which I think was like a data company or something at the time. And I worked out, I was doing a tax return, and I worked out that if he spent two more days out of the country, I could save him£10 ,000. But he refused to return my calls. And it's getting near and near and nearer to the deadline. I'm going, I've got to get him into a meeting to tell him that he needs to leave the country for a couple of days and I'll save him money.

3:06Eventually I got him into the office and we sat down. I said, I've got some great news for you. I can save you£10 ,000. He goes, oh, how? I said, just get out of the country next weekend. Anyway. And then as I was chatting to him, I said, so what do you do for a job then? And he was the marketing director for this global data company. And I'm like, damn, your job sounds a lot more interesting than mine. So I thought, I'd rather kind of make the money than count the money sort of thing. And that was like the moment I thought, yeah, I'm going to get into marketing. The problem I had was, and this is what you reminded me about the Ogilvy thing, is I was just finishing my degree at Brunel and I'd done finance and economics.

3:42And I'd done a couple of placements, one at a bank, one at an accountancy firm. And then I thought, I'm going to apply for the marketing schemes at companies. And I thought, I know what, I love cars, right? So this is my plan. I'm going to go, I'm going to be a marketing director in a car company and i'm going to pick my favorite brand was mercedes so the only thing i applied for my final year was the mercedes graduate scheme and i i actually um i took their ad at the time for the new e-class right and i read as a rewrote the copy to describe me wow literally rewrote it so that knows about you know performance and beauty and all this kind of thing didn't hear back oh i got the stat well i did i got the standard letter that said my application was received and would be on file right but it shows how life is funny because 20 years later i think i sound old now i was lecturing at ashford business school to the mercedes-benz senior directors program globally and we did this thing where we go around the room and everyone introduced themselves i was doing a talk on um challenger brands and being innovative in big companies anyway i met the hr director from that time i was like can i have a word did he say i remember you no he denied your knowledge she said i would get thousands of applications a year i'm sorry you know it's really funny two years ago i actually hired someone so i was i was recruiting for a senior role the first cv i read was someone who was obviously incredibly keen didn't quite think she was right said said no i had hundreds of applications and she then linked in me and she sent me a poem written about why she should work at octopus it was so fucking brilliant i hired her she's now doing the role that i was recruiting for two years ago because the other person didn't work out.

5:24Amazing. It just shows a bit of creativity. Yep. Can go a long way. It doesn't always work. People do try it in marketing. I mean, you need creativity and brilliance underneath it. You know, it was nice that she did a poem. It was also a fucking good poem. You know, she was clearly super bright. It was just completely spot on what we do. You know, it was all of those things. But yeah. I love stories like that. Maybe your copy wasn't my good. Well, to be fair, no. It wasn't my strong point. We'll come back to marketing skills in a minute. but tell me things you don't like about marketing. We were having quite a conversation earlier about things that we don't like in marketing.

5:59What annoys you? I mean, any kind of marketing jargon at all, really. I spent years trying to understand, you know, what a brand hierarchy was and what a message track was and how segmentation and personas work. And I just, you know, it's almost like a kind of language that you have to learn. And if you don't learn it, you don't know how to sell stuff to humans. but I actually seem to do that quite effectively. So I just, you know, it's actually a bit of a joke at work now that you can't, I don't even like the word proposition at work. New people come in and they go, let's talk about the value proposition.

6:30I'm like, what the fuck does value proposition mean? I just, I still don't understand it. It's like that moment you explain what you do to friends and then you realise, you go, well, our proposition is this. And you're going, who talks like that? But people don't do it. You say, what do you do? Well, you know, I've grown an energy company from nothing to one of the most well-known in the UK. And we were about green energy and fairness and brilliant customer service. and we've got a pink octopus and, you know, people really like us. You know, nowhere there was there a value proposition. You know, it's just...

6:57I love that. I love that. The one that used to really annoy me early in my career was people used to talk about being classically trained marketers. And it was like, I remember my first ever marketing job that I didn't get was on Pepsi Max. I was gutted. It was my dream job came up at Brittany where I was at the time. And I got the feedback. I wasn't... Well, I got two bits of feedback. One, I wasn't classically trained. I hadn't obviously done the right things and talked the right way and I wasn't creative enough which I I really got very upset by that because you know um because I was being judged based on my past not based on my potential and that used to that used to really annoy me but yeah the phrase classically trained is is I don't even know what that means like yeah there is there a secret course that some people have done that everyone else hasn't done no I mean I you know in my marketism you have to know how to do certain it's helpful to have people who can know how to do certain things like get a direct mail campaign out and how to get a tv ad signed off and all that kind of stuff but in terms of you know the insight that sits behind the people who are brilliant i look for people who are brilliant and understand human behavior and what drives humans to do things and react in a particular way and i think you have to be a student of the brain and the student of of humans and psychologists work really well in this kind of role it's actually understanding that and it's yeah it's i don't think my my my theory on this is the closer you are to your actual customer, the less you need the theory.

8:16Because when I've met people that have been really, really into, here's my persona, meet Jane, she does yoga, sort of thing, you know, that kind of thing. It's because they don't know their customers, right? If you were spending every day on the phone to your customers, or you were out there in the shops, you know, when they're buying, you just know, because you're like, you see how they behave, you see other decisions they make, you talk to them, you experience it yourself. Is that something for you at Oxbus Energy? Are you, how close are you to your customer is that something that's very important yeah i agree i you just have to be there with them so for example when we send a new email campaign we're doing one this morning actually which i'm keeping an eye of you know something new and we will send say 2 000 emails initially and all the responses come back into the marketing inbox and all of the team will be stood around the table including me going what are customers saying right and they go okay well that's interesting they've asked that question clearly that wasn't clear enough let's tweet the copy let's send another 2 000 and we will do that over and over again until we know we can start sending 100 000 200 000 because we've optimized that copy because we've understood exactly that's not clear and that's not clear and actually we can direct people that way and that's and that's you know and i'd never get that from a focus group i've never done a focus group of octopus if i want to test something i talk to customers we all have access to the same system we you know we have a system called cracking octopus which is our um full end to end tech stack and actually everyone gets it so if i want to go and send something to a customer i can go and find customer details and talk to them I can go into the emails and I read every day the emails that customers send us like you just you're just there with it and and that that's how you kind of I mean I was saying earlier I think you have to be aware a little bit of um you know if your own bias is coming to to to something so you know that actually I think about the world in a particular way because you know of where I'm from where I've brought up where I live and all that kind of thing so sometimes you have to particularly be you know look into other groups that you might not be so aware of but i think generally just being really really close to the humans who you know who kindly pay your salary is the only way to do it but without doubt my best work has always been done when i'm closest to my customer and often in crisis situations actually where you have to get close and understand how it goes on um it seems to be i i probably lay claim to being the shortest lived cmo in history because i worked at brew dog for three months and got fired but i did learn quite a lot while i was there and one of the things that impressed me i mean again james who runs brew dog has never done a focus group.

10:34But he spends a lot of time in the bars, obviously. So there's that. But what he also has is he has this group of 2 ,000 equity for punks, they call them, people who have invested in the business. And they're really, really big fans of the brand. And they've got an opinion. And I noticed what he used to do was if he couldn't decide on a pack to sign or the name of a beer, he'd just literally just go option A, option B, send it to this group of 2 ,000. They were so keen. They would literally give loads of feedback straight away. and it almost ran the entire business like that with this effectively well i suppose it's a 2 000 people focus group but it's just instant response and you know it's very impressive yeah and i mean i often think of myself as a little bit of a spider on a web you know and a fly hits a web and they kind of know where it know where it is and it's like there's lots and lots of inputs which tells me how customers are feeling you know so it's like you know we use um slack at work to communicate so we've got 3 000 people all talking through slack so i'm in different slack channels with different operations teams, our customer service teams.

11:30So I can kind of spot, oh, there's a lot of chat going on around that particular thing. And then I might look at Twitter and go, oh, there's a lot of chat around that particular thing. And then let's send something out and see what responses we get. So you're using all your senses all the time in the middle of the web to kind of work out what's going on and what you can improve. You can piece all those things together to help you be better informed. Yes, yes. So social media is quite a good early warning system. Something goes there. We have particular kinds of people use social media and use Twitter.

11:56so a lot of our smart tariff you know early adopting customers will go there first of all but it's a good you know i'm like okay that's interesting that's come up on twitter we wouldn't usually come up on twitter that may mean there's a problem elsewhere because if it's a problem it's it's bubbled up to a channel it wouldn't usually come out of so it's that kind of technique i want to go back to when you started at octopus right so you if i get this right you were british gas for a number of years before that so tell me the moment you decided to leave british gas and take the jump to what was then a pretty small startup yeah it was it was because i because i said i started off you know in in advertising then ended up british gas was a client and i quite like british gas actually because i was oh god i want to go watch british gas from advertising they've got a bar in the office now i have to go to british gas where they all are quite smart and everything but i liked it because they moved me around every couple of years and they they're doing they were doing cool stuff um and then i at the end of my time now i worked in their hive business which was their internet of things business building new tech so i was building thermostat so that was really cool but it got quite big and when I joined Hive it was again it was kind of startup within a within a bigger business 30 people and then over a few years it got quite successful got to 200 people you know lots of HR people started joining and strategy people and I was like I just feel like I quite like to build something again so I was you know casting my CV out and my CV got passed to Greg Jackson who's the the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy as it was funny the reason it got passed to him was I was actually trying to apply for a job at Mumsnet that a friend of his worked at and he was supposed to pass it on and then he forgot.

13:25So about three months later, I got this email from him saying, I'm terribly sorry. I think I'm supposed to do you a favor and pass your CV on, but actually I've had a look at it and it's actually really good. And do you fancy coming and having a chat? And he said, I've got time today or next Tuesday. Now I'm a very like now or never person. I'm incredibly impatient. And I literally looked down, sitting at my desk, looked down, thought, oh, I'm quite smart today. It was like had a job what an amazing story that's brilliant he's a similar type so we were like yeah you hit it off straight away yeah yeah it's like a slight detail you just remind me internet of things i think the most random meeting i've ever done in my life was um i was asked to um i was asked to speak to speak at a dinner sort of private dinner on marketing and the organization sent me the wrong date so it said it was about a month early to when i was supposed to do it so i turned up at this dinner and I sat down and they introduced me as the speaker but the topic was the internet of things and I'm the least technical person possible and I didn't know whether to kind of admit that I was in the wrong place but I actually went through with it and they sat down and said John we're really looking forward to hearing your talk on the internet of things because no one knows what it is anyway but you know what it was the funniest thing because they they said it was the best talk ever and the reason it's best talk ever is i what i basically did is said don't think about what the technology can do think about the problem it can solve for people real people in real situations who are real consumers so i'm going to throw the question back on you right stop thinking about it from a technological what you can you know sort of thing and then oh yes good point never thought about that you know basic marketing question you know i mean we had this big brainstorm about you know how we could how we could i said that's so useful and i will i said never never kind of had to think on my feet as much as that anyway sorry you can give me a flashback to that anyway back to energy back to energy um look climate right so um talk to me about the mission of octopus energy what is it that inspired you personally to get behind this you know this business and do what you're doing so i when i first met greg said to him that really i was done with energy marketing worked you know British Gas for a long time wanted to get I like tech actually I like what I do wanted to build stuff and he said well I'm going to build a company which is you know it won't be like unlike any other energy company and it'd be tech driven and I was quite captivated by both his vision and the ability that they had to deliver on their promises to build this technology and Octopus was set up not just with a green slant climate slant but actually to be a fairer business so so um greg had a real passion for he thought that energy was broken and people being ripped off and he could build a better kind of company a fairer company so the sense of social justice is very strong with him um but also climate change is the biggest challenge of our of our age right you know we need to stop pumping crap out there um into our atmosphere it's really interesting actually one of our jumping slightly but one of our big investors is Generation, which was co-founded by Al Gore, the former vice president.

16:34And if you're in the climate space, he's a bit of a hero. And I've been lucky enough to meet him a couple of times. He tells the story that he says that the shell of atmosphere around the earth is so small that if you turn a car on end and drive it full tilt up to the ozone layer, it will only take you about five to seven minutes. So that's the shell around the earth that we are pumping full of crap. That is not very big. It's not a lot, is it? Five minutes drive? Five minutes drive is where you hit, there's different layers of atmosphere above the earth and it's where you hit the layer that keeps everything in, basically.

17:07So, you know, I realised, I joined Octopus because it felt like, not necessarily just because Greenbit felt like a company that could do things better. And I wanted to join a startup and it was an exciting team. But more and more over the years, discovered that actually, you know, unlocking the power of renewable energy and moving to a renewable energy system is, you know, going to be one of the fundamental ways that will save us from climate change. And that Octopus has the technology to do that. And actually some things happen that were kind of hidden. So, for example, right now it is cheaper to produce a green electron from a wind turbine or a solar farm than it is to produce a brown electron from coal or oil.

17:49It's actually cheaper to produce. But because of all the complexities of how the market is set up and all the taxes that go on, you know, actually that green electron is actually inflated in price. There's a load of stuff broken around it. But, you know, we have the other thing that Al said, I mean, Al, he said that tech will save us as as a species, you know, that we are a bit fucked up and we are breaking a lot of stuff. But we are smart, you know, and curious and brilliant and tech will save us as it did, you know, during the pandemic with a vaccine rollout in six months. And we have the technology to save us from climate change.

18:22And sometimes it's just about forcing the message through that it's here. And it's not, you know, green energy isn't more expensive for someone who's vegan and, you know, kind of lives off the land. It's actually cheaper and better and more positive for everyone. So that's what I'm trying to help deliver. I mean, it's insane what you're saying in terms of green energy actually being cheaper, right? I mean, that is, well, it's encouraging, right? Because it means it's like there's a business case for it. What are the greenest forms of energy? And what is Octopus? You talk about the technology that Octopus has.

18:53What is that technology that's enabling green energy to basically provide the energy needs of our nation? So, I mean, we talk about renewable energy, anything created from renewable sources. So solar, wind, big over here, tidal. There's various other ways of doing it, biogas. The technology that we have, we have Kraken, which is our own software platform. Basically, one of the challenges with renewables is that they are intermittent. So you might have a really sunny day and you get shitloads of it. And then it's not a sunny day and you don't get so much. I've got solar panels in my house and I get home in the evening.

19:28My husband's like, oh, we've got 20 kilowatts today, you know, darling. And whereas, you know, the traditional energy system, when you're using coal fire power stations, like if you needed more, they just turn it on and they'd start burning and they produce more electricity. Right. And the national grid and most grid systems whose job is to balance the energy that we need. So it's very finely balanced. They will work out. It's incredibly complex. how much electricity is needed for people to heat their homes and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And they'll make sure they've got enough power and they have to keep it within a certain balance.

19:59Otherwise, things start going pop. Right. And historically, they've gone, OK, well, we're going to need it's going to be really busy on Saturday because the football's on. I mean, they literally look at that kind of stuff. So we're going to need another coal fired power station ready to switch on. Right. Now, actually, what we need to do is move to renewables. But because you can't always switch renewables on and off, what Kraken does is kind of unlock optimisation. So, for example, if it was a really sunny day and you've got lots of power, can you say to people, consumers, would you like to use more today?

20:26It's cheaper. Or if you haven't got very much, which is something we've done recently, you go, do you know what? We're a bit sparser on the grid at five o 'clock till six o 'clock today. We'd rather not turn another cold station on. So actually, could you use a bit less? And it's something we've real world trials. So over the last few months, hundreds of thousands of customers have taken part in these kind of sessions. They're called saving sessions, which is where we say to people, use a bit less or use a bit more at these times to help balance the grid. And that's the technology that we enable.

20:55So theoretically, could I then decide when to record this podcast based on when the cheaper time of day would be? Yes, not theoretically, actually. You can do that now. I actually can do that right now. Okay, right. We're going to do it at 2.30, not at 11 o 'clock in the morning. So you use power, which is greener. Use power that's cheaper. and is that also why electric vehicles often decide themselves when to recharge because they can absolutely spot on yes wow yes amazing so it is a really clever system but imagine you know and i don't even imagine it's getting here right now that you know you plug in your car and we decide when to charge it based on when it's cheaper or green so we have a tariff called intelligent octopus and we say you know we will always guarantee you this very cheap rate but you plug it in you tell us you want it 100 by eight o 'clock in the morning you've plugged it in at six you know and we just work it out so it's it's here right now and and it works for ordinary consumers as well if you don't have an electric car actually you know this kind of balancing brings down costs for everyone because it means you don't have to have like coal stations on on standby which is quite expensive and it moves us towards a world of renewables anyway which are cheaper it's just it's a win-win for everyone and one of the challenges of course is cost of living isn't it because i noticed the demand for evs unfortunately is going down isn't it because it's a high ticket item and very expensive out of a lot of people's reach.

22:08But what you're doing is saving people money at the same time, presumably in a cost of living crisis is quite helpful. Oh, gosh, yeah. Cost of living, I mean, the energy crisis is very real. So wholesale prices, the wholesale price of gas, which still generally drives electricity, a lot of electricity still made from gas as well as renewables, is still kind of three to five times what it was a year ago, massively, massively spiked. There's nothing in the short term that we can do about that from renewables because the system is kind of already there. We're hooked in. What we're trying to do is show people that the technology is there.

22:43We need to unlock and unwrap some of the centuries of complexity and regulatory red tape around why it's more expensive and look at how we might change the grid to enable that kind of flexibility of wires and give people a bit of hope that actually there's there's change coming right now because you know it's hope is what we need really so for example some of one of the things we work quite a lot on is that um it doesn't take very long to build a wind turbine right so you build a wind turbine in a year but it might take five or even ten years to go through the red tape to actually connect to the grid so you can get that power from it right that seems bonkers you know like if we want to kind of move away from dependence on the oil coming from other countries who may constrain it for their own purposes to send prices up the you know homegrown british power from renewables needs to be unlocked much so theoretically then let's imagine there was no red tape right so red tape ends tomorrow how long does it take for the uk to become fully renewed powered by renewables oh gosh i mean not long uh you know i think it would be a few years yeah if you could literally just kind of because it's cheaper gross stuff it's cheaper it can be done in a few years yes yeah just need the red tape removed that's insane isn't it yeah um and there's a lot of you know the wind turbines but turbines are a little bit controversial right because there's a bit of kind of like i don't really know if i want a wind turbine in my landscape but there's a lot of research that we've done we've done research it's been independent research as well saying well if you go if you had a wind turbine near you but your power was cheaper when it was spinning you know would you be happy and everyone's like oh yeah that that'll be all right that'll be all right so we've got two wind turbines where we're trying this we call them fan club there's one in wales and one in Yorkshire where actually if you live within, I think it's five kilometres, when it's spinning, we send you a text message saying your power's half price, put your washing on.

24:26That's amazing. Isn't that cool, right? And that's what we all do more and more because actually you go. But these trade-offs are real. I mean, if you think about commercial TV, it's like, well, we're going to show you some adverts and you get the content for free. Same kind of model, isn't it? Totally, peaking off peaked trains. People are very happy. People get it. You know there's a trade-off and you're happy to take it. Yeah, totally. So it's like with the Saving Sessions programme that's recently run And with National Grid, where National Grid actually trialled for the first time ever, not having coal stations on standby when they thought they needed some more power, but actually relying on consumers to use a bit less.

24:58So we would message all our consumers and say, well, if you use less between five and six tonight, then we will pay you for every bit you use less. So if you do use five kilowatt hours and use three, we'll pay you for those too. And you don't have to. Like if you have to cook your tea at five, then cook your tea at five. There's power for all. But enough people are like, well, I'm not that bothered, so I won't cook my tea at five. I'll do it at six. Made the difference. Literally off peak and on peak trains. You choose when you travel. Now, sticking on cost of living crisis, because it's been a challenge for energy companies.

25:26Obviously, there's been a number of go out of business, but it's been really hard on the consumer, hasn't it? So what are you doing to help those people that can't afford energy? Oh, it's incredibly difficult. So we talked about 40 ,000 customers every day at Oxbus. And just, you know, it's so the wholesale rates are so high. It's so, so it's, it's so hard for people. I mean, everything we can, I think, you know, we always try to be, you know, the best thing you can do if you're worried about your business, talk to your energy company, because there's lots of ways that they can help, you know, with payment plans or, you know, or support or signposting you to the right organisations.

25:59We have a 15 million pound fund called the Octopus Sys Fund, where we can credit people's bills and offer people help. We've given out 40 ,000 free electric blankets this year to vulnerable customers. Electric blanket is an incredibly effective way of staying warm. so it actually costs about 3p an hour to heat yourself so it's literally one where you sit on the sofa and you kind of have it as a lovely warm throw as opposed to if you're heating the whole house it might cost you£2 or something That's a genius idea because you're heating just where the heating is needed, right? You're not heating the whole house and you're sat in the lounge watching TV I've got one literally if you haven't got an electric blanket you are missing out and actually we found that the customers with our electric blankets spent 20 % less on their energy than customers without an electric blanket this winter So we've given thousands of them out, particularly to those who will benefit the most.

26:47So if you're slightly mobile, if you're elderly, if there's a reason that you can't move around a lot and keep yourself warm, then we give them out. But that's been a wonderful thing to do. We've diverted other funds into that internally. So we dialed back on our advertising over the winter. I didn't feel the right thing to spend on. We dialed back on sending out our cuddly octopus to customers. It was all like, actually, how can we put as much money as possible into helping customers as practically as possible? I'd love to go back to the beginning and just because, you know, you're in big company now, I think 10 billion or something you turn over now.

27:21But when you joined, we had 50 ,000 customers, a team of 30, I think I might say. That's a massive transformation. Like, tell me what, well, the first question I'd love to know is like, what have you done as a business to grow at that kind of rate? I mean, that's an insane amount of growth, isn't it? So what as a brand has led to that level of success in a short period of time? Gosh, hunger, I think, to make a difference and keeping that startup mentality that you just want to grow and grow and grow. And I think there's a good, there's a Jeff Bezos quote, which is something about the only competitive advantage you've got is speed that everyone else will copy you at some point.

28:06But just, you know, go quicker than ever. And I think the model that we've built within the business, which is, you know, trying to hire empowered, smart people and let them get on with it. You know, we don't let functions creep up who argue with each other. We don't let processes creep up that are ineffective. It's all about being close to the customer and building stuff that they want and dealing with customers as we would like to be dealt with. And I think a lot of companies say that, but then they're, you know, they're tempted by going back to marketing jargon. well, I don't really want to talk to a customer, so I could just have a focus group and then I could hire someone to run the focus group.

28:41And then I can hire an agency to analyse the output from the focus group. And then I could go to the agency's offices to have coffee and posh biscuits and look at the result and all that kind of thing. Whereas we will just email some customers and see what they say back. It's harder, that's pressure on the team. But it just makes you that much more effective and easy to scale. You remind me actually, going back to BrewDog, in my three months, the the fame my favorite quote from james and he said this all the time he had this phrase that goes this will only work if and his most common answer to his own question he'd pose a question answer he goes this will only work if we are 10 times quicker than anybody else he exactly bought into the bezos thing like you know how can you do in six weeks what would take six months or in fact actually now i say that he never gave me six the longest deadline i had was two weeks but you know it was how do we do this by tomorrow how do we do this by the end of the week how do we do this 10 times bigger how do we do this 10 times faster and just that constant ambition to kind of challenge yourself to go be bigger and go faster and and take the barriers down and find a way through um because i think in big corporate organizations they've almost created infrastructure to keep them at the speed they're at you know annual planning cycles and you know support departments and processes and ways of working and all these things are designed actually to hold the status quo isn't it in what you're doing but i'm fascinated by given that you've grown so big how do you keep that kind of focus on the customer the hunger that you had at the beginning how do you make that sustain that because that's not easy yeah no is it i mean it's it it's not we we had um so yeah with 3 000 people now we had 82 000 job applications last year 82 000 i mean it's just it's just insane isn't it and i can't believe it and i still think in my head of like you know that we're like about 100 people in our first little ramshackle offices where there were two dodgy toilets that always got blocked you know i'm like i can't quite understand that we're that we're so big now i think the the key thing is i mean it's still very much so i was one of the last people into the very senior management team reporting into the ceo and founder that very small core team still run the business they're still the most senior smt it's very tightly run people who just know how it works and then what's happened underneath is that the people when i joint there were 10 people who were our energy specialist operations people they're now pretty much all with the business but they've grown with the business right so one of them's in japan you know running our japanese business one of the usa one of those come back from australia so actually those people who were graduates or second jobbers are now head head of operations with hundreds of people working for them so they've been brought up in our culture and they're now bringing people underneath them as well so that's that's what it is it's actually organically we don't tend to bring in senior people really um we tend to you know we we grow junior people into into that into that mold that's very very interesting yeah another thing i think stands out about your organization is how lean it is from a marketing point of view because not only do you do a lot of the marketing product development yourself but your team is actually quite small relative to the size of the organization isn't it so what's the advantage of having an in-house product you know product team and marketing team yeah so we have about there's probably about 20 do do marketing for the whole the whole of the uk and actually we support a lot of our countries as well so we do all our design in-house videography in-house media buying in-house everything i think it's just i mean it's just speed and getting stuff out there so if i wanted to do new ad new ad i literally turned to the designer who sits next to me and said could you have a little go i've been thinking about this concept you know can you put something together and then you know 45 minutes later she'll go okay what do you think of this and i'll feed it back and then you go back again and again it's not like you know i have to phone the account manager at an agency and then she goes and briefs creators via traffic um and then the creators go to the creative director and they go back to you know all that kind of thing and then four weeks later you sit down with the client and they have coffee and nice biscuits and all that kind of thing right now i love agencies i agree was fabulous and there's fabulous agencies out there and i do i do often look around at competitors and i'm like you know with great campaigns there's what there's one at the moment i'm like gosh that's that feels agency but it's bloody good but i think for absolute speed and agility and getting stuff out the door and closest to customers having it in-house works incredibly well for us i mean how i'm ex-agency i have a creative director who's ex-agency as well but that's that's really what it is i mean talking to customers i i had a little play on the website just to kind of get the experience myself and i thought always good isn't it yeah i i one thing that struck me i love the simplicity of it right because the first thing is give us your postcode and we'll tell you how much your energy is right and it's just just really really quick which is brilliant and it gives you the carbon offset at the end as well um but the The thing that caught my eye was this statement where you said outrageously good customer service with a friendly human.

33:18Because we're obsessed with technology and automating and the bots popping up and, you know, do you want a conversation with a robot sort of thing. How important is that positioning to the success of the business? So we see our CTO, it says that our operations team are the gods who technology serves, right? So our technology serves our humans, it enables, makes their lives easier. So we have an incredible platform, which means our super people are enabled to do their job as much as possible. You know, a platform that means a load of our customers self-serve. If you want to self-serve, that's absolutely fine.

33:51Lots of people don't want to engage with their energy company. But actually, if you want to call us, then, you know, we don't have limits on SLAs on how long someone can spend on the phone, for example. Because it's like, actually, you know, you should be able to spend as long as you want if you've chosen to call us. and actually that agent will have all the technology in place to be able to support you, if that makes sense. So it's kind of, you know, humans are fabulous and we should enable their fabulousness to interact with consumers, but then the technology backs it up. That's such the right round.

34:20I've always believed that as soon as we see technology as replacing humans, we've lost. Technology should enable us to be more human and free us up to have the conversations on the phone because, I mean, I find this in my day job so often is one phone call gets you so much further than than endless you know automated conversations could ever get you well when you phone us we don't have um you know we didn't want to have a system where you know you press one for meter readings and two for payments and three for you know all that kind of stuff so you phone us you'll get out we aim to answer the phone in two minutes maximum you get through to a human who i and our our people are fully trained in every aspect of the energy account right so they're all graduates you know they know they can sort anything so we we aim for like a 90 % first time fix that the person you talk to on the phone will deal with your problem, whether it's give us a meeting or whether it's a really complex industry situation where we've mixed up your house with the one next door or something.

35:16And actually what we also do is that you're always, customers are always looked after by the same team of like eight to 10 people. So when you join us, you're kind of assigned to a team and that those 10 people will always look after you. So whenever you phone, you'll be routed to that group of people. If you email, you'll be rooted to the right group of people. So there's no like, you know, other companies, you know, you just feel like someone goes, oh, yes, that'll definitely happen, sir, and hangs up and then there's no no. Because it's the same team, under the same team leader. So you can literally phone up and go, can I speak to Ben again?

35:43Because I spoke to him last week. And if he's not in, then someone who's next to him is like, oh, Ben's off today, but can I help you? You have five million customers, but you can speak to the same person you spoke to last week. I love that so much. Because like we've all experienced it, haven't we, where you kind of go, you go through the bot process and you end up like, well, they haven't. My question doesn't fit in the list of standard answers that come up. Or you go through the menu option and realise that, you know, 15 minutes into your menu, you haven't got any, you got to the wrong kind of answer sort of thing.