Social media masterclass in community and influencer marketing with Elfried Samba (ex Gymshark)

0:06welcome back to uncensored cma what it's really good to have you on the show welcome thank Thank you. Thank you. Like I was saying, I was like, it's great to be in this like really fancy studio. I never thought I'd be in a studio quite as like stylish as this talking about the thing that I like the most with someone like yourself. It's an honour. And I should say, actually, for everyone listening and watching this, this is thanks to the very lovely people at Uncommon Creative Studios. So Natalie, Lucy and Nils, big thank you and all the crew who very kindly offered when they just moved, just moved in.

0:39And they very kindly said, we'll create some space for you to do some podcasting in the studio. So this is episode number one from Uncommon. So great to have you, man. And excited to get into this. I must start by complimenting you on the hat and the outfit. Right. We were having some good man kind of chat before in terms of like bags, hats and outfits and the love of black. like you say. So you're definitely my kind of guy. What's the hat about? Like, because I only see you in the hat. Is it like part of your kind of, you know, your thing? So there's two stories, right? There's a cool one. And there's like a subtle reality slash embarrassing one.

1:17So two things happen. So I was approaching my 30th birthday, I think I was like 28, 29. And I knew that 30 was coming. And I was like, I'm about to have a quarter life crisis, right like who am I have I done enough who do I want to be what's my legacy all that stuff and at the time I also realized that usually family members in my family go bald by the time they get to 30 right so I was like oh my god I'm gonna get bald as well so I was like I need to figure something out for that but then I was watching this Netflix series about creativity and there was an episode it's called abstract there was an episode on Tinker Hatfield so creative director at Nike.

1:58He designed the Jordans, et cetera, et cetera. And not only is his name Hatfield, he wears hats and fedoras, right? And I watched a scene of him just like walking because he used to be a pole vaulter and was just walking on the track with a blue t-shirt and his hat on. And I was like, God, he's cool. Like if I was like 50 or 60 and I just like looked like subtly cool, that would be really dope. But I can't do it then because then I look like I have a midlife crisis. i have to do it now and uh and i went through a few and the first ones made me look like the undertaker in the wrestling and he just wasn't quite right and then eventually i found this company called gurren bros and they just did it just right it was like i don't know that pharrell williams was doing his thing with the vivian westward hat i was like that's a bit too much for me so i found one no one sells it anymore and it just became like uh my hat but then the good thing about that it solved the balding problem because if i have hair or no hair no one will ever know it gave me a signature which means that people can identify it with me but then also it's almost like my my trigger that when i wear it that it's time for the show it's time to go out there and give your best from a creative standpoint and it's almost like you create a character for yourself which is super dope so what happens when you take it off right do people not recognize you anymore that hang on who's this imposter that's just come in i've been to events where people have literally spoken to me for a couple of minutes and said oh let's connect on LinkedIn and they're like, I know you, but where's the hat?

3:24And literally, if I hop on a call, and I don't wear my hat, everyone feels like disappointed. I can see it in their faces. Yeah. So now it's almost like I need to give the people what they want. So keep the hat, man. It's great. You're doing a great job. Makes me look cooler than I actually am. I'm just a nerdy kid from the Congo, really. No, he's definitely cool. No, definitely. We have a good chat on luggage and outfits to wear went on planes already so it's it's good it's very cool now you um we were comparing dissertations which is quite amusing because we we took some very different routes although we found some commonality in our dissertations but you you were thinking about kind of social media and impact on business that social media can have even when you're doing a dissertation so what did you learn doing that uh so i thought i was going to be a doctor like my dad until i realized that i was like terrible at science right but then i i never liked to back down for a challenge i was committed to make that happen because my whole thing was all about making my parents proud.

4:18I just moved to the UK with my family. They pretty much like sacrificed their relationship for us because they did, they've done 18 years long distance. It's only now that they're actually starting to like actually see each other every single day, but they did it all for us. Right. So armed with this almost like fuel to like pay them back for like the sacrifice they've done for us. And this golden ticket that I had, I was like, I have to do something that I could be great at. Right. Because in our family, going to university, working hard, really aspiring to be the best. That's just the norm. That's what we do, right?

4:52But then also I realized that I also had the responsibility to show my younger siblings the example, right? We're very close. And I'm not a dictatorial person. I don't tell people what to do. I just lead through my actions. I said, I have to do something that resets the tone for what we need to do. And when I was figuring what that thing is, I stumbled onto a iPhone keynote and Steve Jobs was presenting the iPhone. And honestly, at the time, I just started using computers and it was really technical to me. And he was able to just explain it in a way that made sense to my simple brain. And I was like, whatever he's doing, I want to do that.

5:35That's not the tech bit, it's the storytelling bit, right? And I was like, it's marketing. And there's a whole, and it's not in what you say, it's in everything you do. It's almost like, you know, when you watch Karate Kid, and they say that Kung Fu is not just like what you do, it's in the way you live. It's like from the clothing all being like simple. It's a way of life, if you will. And I said that I want to be everything. That's why I still wear black till this day. It started from then, right? and and I said okay I want to be a storyteller and marketing I want to be able to simplify very complicated things in a way that gets people to act or get bought into something so that was the that side and then I watched this documentary well not documentary a film called The Social Networker and it was about Mark Zuckerberg and and I was using Facebook to reconnect with my friends back home during that period but I didn't know that it came from a 23 year old and the thing that striked me was the fact that I saw the headline of a 23 year old saying no to yahoo after they offered him a billion dollars and I was like what the hell is he on right because if I went to my mom and told her I'm not taking a billion dollars she would send me right back home right so I was like okay so that's pretty cool I love the rebellious nature there were two entrepreneurs that just didn't fit the mold that aligned with what I stood for so there's the creativity simplicity that side young rebellious disruption element almost like a f you to the system side and then uh the missing piece was the whole element of like uh meeting me where i'm at when it came to like my business knowledge and understanding and jay-z did that for me so jay-z is famous for uh uh seeding scriptures around business in a very poetic and rap like nature like him saying women lie men lie numbers don't made me really obsessed about data analytics and not just opinion right so he would say something in a way that i would understand and then i would be able to like therefore articulate that to other people and i think that enthusiasm um got me thinking about this thing called social media marketing because i was like i learned about the marketing about the social well the four p says product price price promotion but place doesn't have to be a physical space it can be where your attention and your mind is so that's where the world's going to go and uh really so i put my dissertation together and the title was how small to medium-sized businesses can use social to compete against the large competitors right and it was marked down because of lack of harvard references no yeah because she marked up it should be marked up but but but there's a funny story with that is that i believed it so much that i I was like, well, they're wrong.

8:20But they were really right because I had to have references and evidence to prove it. But then there was nobody that was actually thinking about it the way that I was at the time. So I said, well, I'm going to be the reference. And that's why every time when there's like a uni student or I have the opportunity to do things like this, this is just creating more references for people that were thinking about or that think the way that I did at the time to like draw to, as an example that this is actually like, you're not crazy. This is actually happening. That's such good advice. I remember, weirdly, I came into marketing through finance and through kind of investment banking, which is a really odd thing to do.

8:58And I remember I just sat down with one of our customers and I realized that what a customer was doing, who's a marketing director, sounded fascinating. And I realized that in marketing, you're inventing the future that doesn't exist today. And what I was doing in my accountancy role was accounting for the past. A bit like your Harvard, I was the Harvard reference of like, that's how it has been done. I'm not interested in that. I want to do, how could it be done differently in the future? That's much more exciting, isn't it? But what you realize with the world, we put a lot of titles on things, right?

9:30Like a lot of people think that I have to be a marketeer. Let's peel that back a little bit, right? That the best marketeers understand people and they can get people to believe or act in a particular way, right? and and that's all it is right and whether you are a data analyst and you use the storytelling from that and you can say actually this is what's happening i need to get you to act this way right if you can bridge that gap between like a people and an action or a feeling then you're a marketeer if you will right which is why whenever people ask me like what is it that i do i never use titles that are like defined by time right i always say what are things that will always be around and tastemaking is is one of them creative tastemaking uh storytelling and community building so whatever that is today that's what i am yeah and i like to use like timeless titles like that yeah i love that we were saying before we like 20 years ago everyone was rushing to learn chinese weren't they and then 10 years ago everyone was learning to code you know what i mean and then ai is like taking care of everything for us and and actually what is left is community leadership Well, in fact, we were chatting as well, weren't we, that I heard the global economist at LinkedIn, which is like, I just think one kick-ass title, about titles, right?

10:46Global economist at LinkedIn. But she was fascinating because she was saying, look, there's a massive increase in search in LinkedIn for AI skills or more correctly prompting skills and development skills, right? But she said there are five skills more in demand than even those skills. I'm like, wow, it must be like technical stuff, right? And it wasn't at all. It was all creativity, problem solving, leadership, building teams, all the human things, the EQ. That's what's in demand now. So sometimes I guess we in kind of creative industries think of it as a threat that all the computers taking our jobs.

11:19But if anything, there's a rush to emphasize the kind of skill set that we have. So I remember when we went to school, right? And there was always like, you know, remember B-Tech, right? And everybody used to say, well, the B-Tech courses. but then those are the jobs that are going to be in demand in the next couple of years because those are the jobs that keep us human right we thought that reciting or learning about something and then recalling it in an exam is going to be the thing that's going to almost like protect us for the rest of our lives but it doesn't help us anymore because the computer can do that so what's the thing that's going to differentiate us from the computer it's going to be our human nature in a world where IQ is being democratized, the only separation between brands, people will be those that double down on the human, right?

12:06And at the end of the day, if everybody has access to the same tools, people will always look for a point of differentiation and trust, right? And it's just, I think it's just a matter of time. So if anybody's in the marketing world and the storytelling world, I will say that this is a good time to be there because that's what the race is going to be about. It's not going to be about, because product quality, I think, is the most important thing. I think it's the most important P. But then when product quality goes up for everybody, then what else is going to differentiate you, right? Yeah, it makes complete sense.

12:37Now, you cut your teeth early on, didn't you, at Gymshark? And what an amazing ride to be on. And I'd love to know just that experience, like building a, well, a unicorn. I mean, I think Ben is the youngest, isn't he, the youngest UK billionaire or something crazy like that. But what was the secret to building? Because you were very famously community first, weren't you? And actually from chatting to the guys as well, you didn't try to be Nike and Adidas and everybody else. You tried to create a community and be different and be about the gym and that kind of thing. So what was the secret to building that community?

13:13Well, there's three things. If I can try to articulate what it feels like being in a machine, like being in a in a in a rocket ship like this right because i think a lot of the time we we talked about the fact that i was there for seven years right and what everybody has seen is the nice like powerpoint slides about how the company has grown during that time or the headlines right they almost see like the montage video but when you're in it it feels completely different and i guess the best way to describe it in this three ways one it's a you're building a rocket ship whilst you're flying, right?

13:48So it's like you're building as you go. The other is you feel like a lot of young, old souls and young bodies, right? So you go through like in seven years, you probably go through like 30 years worth of experience, right? Because you look left and you look right and no one has an answer for you. So you have to figure it out. And there was no chat GPT at the time, right? So it's funny when people say, well, we had books at the time. Now we say, well, we had Google at the time, right? So there was no, there's no, actually you had to figure it out, right? And the other is it almost felt like inflation, right?

14:21You always had to become 8%, 10 % better the next year. Otherwise, you were not growing at the speed of the business needed you. So my job role never really changed from the start. So I came in as a social media executive, but then I still had the same responsibility seven years later. The title got bigger, the team got bigger, but the responsibility of looking after the community and social media side stayed the same, right? and but then the difference is it went from oh i'm gonna be the social media executive of this great fitness brand that sells gym clothes to eventually you're almost like with great power comes responsibility you're looking after this massive community and everything that you say is a political statement right so you have to grow with that and and i guess when i joined the business um i found out so first and foremost i used to love these guys called the hodge twins right so i was into fitness at the time and i used to watch their youtube channel that they're the guys that invented the term gains right so everyone started talking about gains after the hodge twins and i realized that they were going to birmingham body power right and i was like and they're going to be with this company called gymshark and i was like who the hell is that i'm here to see the hodge twins so i went to the nec um in birmingham to go see them but i couldn't because there was like a four-hour queue and not only were people like wrapped around the other stalls to go see them but there was also like an army of influencers and I was like and then I met my brother said well there's no way in hell we're gonna queue up for four hours but we'll look at the stand from afar and then see if we can catch a glimpse but then whilst I was there I realized that everybody that was working there was like my age and I was like this is really interesting and then what they were doing was they were giving out free gymshark clothing if you gave uh there's a story about that and we'll talk about it later maybe but they're giving out free t-shirts right if you gave them your data so i went there i did it and i wore some gymshark stuff and then i was like hooked on the brand ever since and my big thing was what if i could ever work at gymshark so i'm not one of those people that uh just goes to people and ask them for stuff i like to almost like get people to come to me right i'm an inbound guy and the only way that I could do that was through LinkedIn.

16:34So what I did was I said, you know what, maybe I can get the attention of the guys at Gymshark. And I realized that they were hiring for a social person, but there was like 300 or 400 applicants already. And I was like, I'm not going to stand out. So I hired, not only hired, I followed everybody that worked there. And then I just started posting like stuff for free, like that demonstrated my marketing knowledge. And then they just kept engaging with it and then eventually I got called in uh for an interview and um the rest was history and I got interviewed by Ben and Dan Knight at the time and and it was great they asked me one question they said like tell us about yourself I took over the interview and I just I think they thought he's crazy enough to just like let him do his thing and and when I went in there I didn't understand the thing that made Gymshark special because I was not the person that started the Gymshark community it already started and a lot of people think the Gymshark community was digital all no it was physical so they started at the expos and the whole thing was we'll put on the best show at the expos and we'll make sure that we're going to go there and everyone's going to they're going to come for the expo but they're going to leave being Gymshark fans and that's where it started right and uh and so it's not a content thing it's like using IRL to disrupt URL is what we usually tend to say now when I went to the brand and we talked about the aspiration now the aspiration was to become the leading sports brand globally so ben is not a small time dreamer he's a big time dreamer but then i took it literally just like when everybody says want to be like apple and they just become like apple and they think differently but that's the ironic bit about it right and i started to elevate the content i started to uh professionalize the systems but the community we created a bridge between us and them right and then i and actually I say that I only had three like actual meetings with Ben in terms of like official meetings.

18:26And within my first month, I thought I was going to be out the job because they got a friend of mine now whose name is Jody. She actually did an analysis of why Gymshark Social sucks. Oh, no. Yeah. It was basically an analysis about like, well, we're not doing very well right now. And I was like, oh, that's not good, is it? And then Ben was like, oh, we think you're the guy, but something's got to change. But then what I realized then is that the thing that made Gymshark special was the fact that the community felt that it represented them. And the most important thing about the brand is making sure that that distance between the community and the brand never becomes wider.

19:07So I could piss people off internally, even sometimes piss people off externally. But as long as that gap doesn't change, I'm unsackable. right because then i'm switzerland right right and and that means that actually everything is like just keep as long as this happens that's when the alarm bells go as long as this stays the same especially as we go which is why as the brand was getting bigger the more it leaned into transparency and accessibility to the point that sometimes ben did like um a company updates before the company knew about it it went straight to the community right so really leaned in on that and the guys already had a million followers at the time.

19:48So I went to learn from them, right? I knew the theory, I knew what it could be, but I didn't know Gymshark. And I didn't know the Gymshark community. I didn't even know the bodybuilding world. I trained. But then I think the thing is, whenever you go into an industry or a job, be a student, be the enthusiast before you try to be the expert, right? And I think it was a piece of humble pie that I had to learn from the team. And then I had to win their trust, right? And that's what happened, right? And to the point where we go from nearly losing my job and about 24 months later, we're getting an honorable mention from Mark Zuckerberg.

20:24And that's a little company in Birmingham. And once you teach, once somebody like me who comes from the Congo and grew up in Africa thought I was going to be a failure and you get that level of validation from one of your reference points, the sky's the limit from there. Wow, that's incredible. Isn't it interesting, Laura, like from the outside, you look at Gymshark, incredible success. You think it's really highly polished, but of course inside a rocket ship is chaos, carnage, like having to learn on the job, isn't it? I mean, it's funny actually, I'm experiencing this to a much more degree, but in my kind of job at System One and also in the podcast, both are expanding really rapidly and it becomes more chaotic, doesn't it?

21:08you know success brings with it huge challenges as you scale i mean scaling is not easy and what are the challenges that you you were in obviously a formative period of takeoff for the business what are the challenges you face in that kind of scaling up where you might have been the one guy to begin with and then suddenly you're like leading others to you know to do it as well so so there's a lot right first and foremost there's no blueprint there's a blueprint for how you grow a business but there was not a blueprint for how you grow a business in the way that we wanted to do it right so you almost have to just have a very comfortable relationship with failure right otherwise if you and there's actually like a there's a quote that's been going viral recently from arson wenger i'm an arsenal fan for those that uh uh haven't noticed and he basically they asked him so how do you tell the difference between players that are gonna make it versus those that don't.

22:01And he said something like the stamina of the motivation is way more powerful than the intensity of it, right? So it's almost like people think that I have to just be more motivated. No, you have to create systems that trump your motivation that just gets you to just show up every day, whether it's a good day or a bad day, there's not a good day, there's not a bad day, there just is, right? And you almost have to go through this mental barrier of just getting really used to losing a lot. And think about it, think about my role, right? So I like to say that my role is almost like the FIFA president role, which is more like, not more trickier than even like the president of a country, right?

22:40Because you're always going to make somebody unhappy, especially when you have a social-led brand where the Instagram pages and TikToks are the shop front window of the company right so so so essentially from the moment and by the way i was posting first and then i had a team and i will talk a little bit about the challenges in leadership and within a second ben's liked it leadership have liked it the rest of the team have liked it so you can make a mistake in private in an organization you can't do that in public totally and by the way we're posting 50 times a day across different platforms so you have to be a hundred percent and and in an industry where and i always talk about the fact that perfection is like like like fuck perfection right like perfection is is is the enemy of progress and growth right and and and so you have to be able to give your team the ability to flex up and create but then also you have to not mess up and that's the thing that was dealing with uh when i was uh making that transition from being i just got to a point where i could trust myself to run the page because i had my own systems i had team members i had all that stuff but now i had to work through a team and it just wasn't working and that was my second meeting with ben where he said elf we think you're great this leadership thing ain't working right and uh and he said uh well we've got two options either we're gonna figure it out and and we'll slug it out and we'll make it work or you can be a independent uh contractor independent contributor or something like that you can still do what you do you have no direct reports just think about the ideas and the guys will execute which one is it going to be and i said i'll do the the second one i want to be the independent is like think about it i was like no i thought about it i'll do it was like sleep on it right because he knows me really well and that i'm challenge orientated and every single time he presents a challenge to me i will probably like accept defeat and then i'll go back and i'll something will happen in my brain that will just like bring me back out for war i'm a david versus goliath kind of guy right like i don't back down.

25:01So after I slept on it, I thought, of course, I'm not going to back down. But then if I'm going to be a leader, I have to do it my way. And I have to study the best people to do it, because I don't do things half hearted. It's pretty much toxic. I'm an all or nothing kind of guy, right? So so when I said I was going to commit to it, I committed to being the best at it. So I had to go completely different and say, I can make sure that even if I don't touch anything, I'm going to go from being Michael Jackson to Quincy Jones right I have to conduct the orchestra so I have to work through my team and then I studied it and it was a long a long process it was painful and that was probably the thing that I had to learn the most because then I was given the easy route and I took it but then the power in that is that you have to have leaders that see you before you see yourself and they give you the room to be able to grow right and and I think that that's the i always say that my undenying like loyalty to gymshark is because uh we were perfect for each other right i gave gymshark everything and gymshark gave me everything so it's almost like it was the best time of my life i would from a career standpoint and so i couldn't work anywhere else i love i love the phrase you used about them seeing what you hadn't seen yet yeah that's really powerful the ability to spot kind of potential a bit and also the i love the thing he talks about the stamina point as well that's huge isn't it because like you know you see so many people like just get start and then fail sort of thing and they just haven't got that stamina to keep going pick themselves up keep going because most most of it you know you know we probably most people see the highlight reel right they don't see exactly they don't see the two-hour film that went before which is all the stuff that was hard and difficult and and they had to learn from.

26:50And also in film, everything ends at happily ever after. Yeah. But what is the ever after, right? Yeah. No, I actually think that if somebody was to create a film that starts at the end and then says what happens next, you start to see what life is actually about, right? And that's the thing. And going back to the fact that that was a Ben moment, but I think Noel was on here as well. He was, yeah. And Noel probably gave me the best feedback that had probably one of the biggest impacts on my life, right? And so Noel is also from Birmingham. We're into the same stuff. He's almost like my brother, right?

27:28We're into hip hop music. We love like sports culture. We love socials, et cetera, et cetera. So we speak the same language. So he was always able to like, almost like champion me in things because he understood where I was coming from. But as the company became bigger and bigger, and started to get a lot of like professionals coming in from other spaces, there was a gap or a bridge between me and the people in the boardroom. And I would always present stuff and people just wouldn't get it. And a lot of the times with very intelligent people, they won't tell you that they don't understand, right?

28:03They won't say, I don't get it because I don't know what you're talking about. They'll just say that what you're doing is wrong, right? so so i almost just went into this like very like limited mindset of they don't know they don't get me it's us against the world etc etc which sounds great but then actually if your goal is to grow you have to do it as a team and and i did a thing called nlp training which talked about the cause and effect theory which is like the the most successful people believe that everything that happens to them good or bad is down to themselves whether it's true or not at least you're not disempowering yourself to to anything else right you're like somebody slapped me in the face i shouldn't have been standing there right so that's just my mindset because you can do something about it so i said okay if people are not understand and noel said this he said elf what you're doing here on this side is brilliant but then everybody has to be able to understand it right if you can work on how you communicate and storytell and you can think about where you're going to speak before you do it and then you can communicate it clearly you'll be the most dangerous person on the planet right and that's what he said to me he said he said if you can learn how to communicate what's happening in your brain you'll be one of the most dangerous people on the planet and for me don't position growth as a as a tell-off position it as an opportunity to unlock a superpower i will jump through hoops to get that power right so i was like okay i'm gonna study the best speakers right like who are the people that speak the most who are the people that articulate themselves and i really honed in on the storytelling bit and now the thing that people always talk about i told people that i the idea that i'm even speaking on a podcast right now if you ask the gymshark faithful of old and they hear me on a podcast they always message me like i can't believe you can do it because ben was in the same spot and i think he did a podcast with true geordie and as soon as he got off i was like how did you do that and then and then i spoke to him about it And he said, I was working with a coach and he told me about like the rule of three and all those different things.

30:06And I was just like noting things down. And what happened was the pandemic helped me because we're all on Zoom calls. So what I would do is first and foremost, I found out about that thing from Nelson Mandela that said the best leaders speak last. Right. Why? Because one gives you the time to hear everybody else's opinions. Right. And also you don't sway the room so that people don't tell you the truth. so what happened was first I used to speak first and then I'll just like put my foot in it and then I'll just say something and everyone will be like what the hell is this person talking about so then I just said you know what I'm just going to speak last and then once people are speaking I'll write down notes about what I'm going to say and so everyone would wait first to see is Alfred going to speak and then I would wait and then somebody else would speak and then I would just just give one point and everyone would be like that's really good but then what I would do is I'd put the notes right by the zoom camera so people think i'm speaking to the camera but i'm just reading my notes so i'd write down one note max three and i would just speak in those terms oh that's because i got feedback from we did an off site and then they were asking everybody what are the things that people need to improve on right and everybody wrote down for everyone and mine everyone wrote waffle did they yeah because i just they're like you just talked a lot right yeah because i didn't know how to simplify things and uh arrive at the point so i said you know what i'm just gonna create restrictions for myself keep it at three points max and keep it really really brief and then make sure that you arrive back at what you were saying at the start right and then i just practiced that first it was literal notes and with words on it then it was just bullet points and now i have mental notes so before even now when you're about to ask me a question i've got three points i want to hear three stories let me get to it right so good and that just helped me become so much better at organizing my thoughts and communicating i love that so much that's really really good i'm probably a bit similar to how you were i tend to talk and think at the same time sort of thing and then i saw about three points later i get to what i should have said i i got i got properly schooled in this actually in my sort of corporate job i had a few years ago i remember we'd always like in the exec we'd always debate some big stuff right like the ceo would ask a question right and and me being a good school boy would always like put my hand up first I was going, ah, I've got some ideas on this.

32:25And I'd just get the ideas out there thinking, I'm going to win the room. I was thinking it's like a presidential campaign. I'm going to win everyone over first by going first. Anyway, the sales director was way smarter than me because he would do what you do. He would just sit back and look at all the reactions of the room. And he'd look at the face of the CEO and look at what the CEO was paying attention to and what the CEO was writing down. And then he'd always wait to hear what the CEO was thinking. and then and then suddenly he would just go yeah and he'd work out what which way the room's going yeah and he'd go yeah me and the team have been thinking about this for a good few weeks now we've already come up with a plan to address exactly that thing and i'd have gone first and said the opposite kind of thing i'd say man you that is genius do you know what i mean you just get the benefit of everyone else's wisdom you consolidate it and you you come i mean he went one step further which i think is a bit naughty of like pretending he'd got it all worked out oh yeah the team already on this they've been they've had it done for days whatever which wasn't the case you know but that that is an art isn't it you know listening is three times more powerful than talking and also just having the the the confidence the self-assurance and confidence just like restrain yourself right because i was realizing that and i watched a master class from lewis hamilton right so like i said i love to have references from places all over the place right and and i like to admire i always think that success leaves clues right and you can all because i i studied kobe bryant and he said that to get an edge you look at like tap dancers and film artists the reason why uh he calls himself the black mamba was because he realized that actors method act and they create an identity which goes back to this whole thing right yeah i am not who i am at home i am a new character when i go to the space so you learn reference points from everywhere and and uh going back to this point i like to just like learn what different people have done and lewis hamilton uh there was a point where i think he won one championship with mclaren right but he was finding it really difficult to win another but that's because he said that f1 was his everything right and because this is everything is emotionally compromised right so there was a period when he started to do things like do fashion do all this everyone's like why are you distracting yourself just think about racing but it was like no i'm i'm all these things but i boil it into one which therefore means that i'm like it becomes my everything whereas now if i can like express myself emotionally in all these different areas i just have rational brain left for f1 right yeah and then he went on winning eight championships i said you know what and then going back to the leadership point i realized that because gymshark was the only place for me to express myself creatively, it became more to me than just the job at hand.

35:12So I started to overstep what was required for the company to go from wherever it needs to go. So what happened was I started posting on LinkedIn again, right? And then I was like, you know what? That gives me the feeling or that like edge of like posting something out and waiting to see what people get, come back with. but then I could then just allow my team to create and take the shine for once right and that was so good it was therapeutic it's therapeutic because it still allowed me to keep my finger on the pulse it still allowed me to be creating at the same uh at the same pace as what the team was and because I was so used to building big communities that I just built my own right yeah and then now that's the thing that people know me for more so some people now say I know you from LinkedIn whereas First, it used to be, I know you because of Gymshark, which is super interesting.

36:04Oh, it is. We're going to come on to one more verse because it's, I've been on a similar journey to you, not quite as far ahead as you are. You've done amazingly well. But the, so many points in that, but I found doing podcasting and doing LinkedIn as almost my kind of therapy and energy session. Because I get so much kind of motivation out of doing it. And it's almost like, because you use a different part of your brain and suddenly you can kind of, in the other job, you can start thinking more clearly and you get perspective and you get ideas and this sort of thing so although it can feel like this this tension oh i've got to give me in my case i try and do an hour a day on linkedin something and that can feel that can feel like a burden so sometimes i'll get up earlier i'll get up at six o 'clock not seven o 'clock because i want to spend an hour on linkedin so i think it feels like oh man that's really hard but by the end of it i'm really energized and motivated i'm learning all the time i think people forget so i say going back to the whole conversation around the EQ generation, right?

37:00I'm convinced that the future CEOs and leaders, they have to understand how to do social. I think it's going to come from people from the social generation. The reason why is because people don't know what is actually happening in your brain at the time, right? And how I evaluate. So there's two different ways that we evaluate great talent, right? And one is more about like education side and the other one is more about how their brain works. So my co-founder and I see that there's almost like four categories of people, right, from an educational standpoint. So, and it's not just like our opinion, it's just what we've noticed, right?

37:33At the very top, the best talent are those that have some form of like high level education, but they actually get shit done. They do things. They're actually where the, what they do trumps what they think. And you'll see that with people like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, they all went to like this really great universities and they just dropped out, right? And the next level is those that haven't got any education at all and they just execute very well, right? Those are the only two challenges you should worry about. And then you've got people that are really educated, but they don't do anything.

38:02They're dangerous. They are so dangerous. That's very dangerous. That's probably like the one you should look out for the most. And then you have people that are not educated that don't do anything, right? But in fact, what I mean by that is that, and why does it work that way? It's because executing is the minimum requirement and doing stuff is what gets things done, right? But some people know how to storytell to others how to do it well and they can articulate what is it they're doing as it's happening right so it's not necessarily formal education it's more can you create or what you're doing in a box and systemize so other people can do it too can you story tell what you're doing as you're doing it or are you just doing it and it's just a feeling right and the thing about it being a feeling is you can do it but then you'll never trust anybody else to do it because you don't know how to teach other people how you did it right which is why in football i say that the best football manager in the world is going to be Sergio Busquets because he sat in a team with stars for like 15 20 years and just he was like you guys are the stars but then his position was never questioned I was like what would he have learned yeah what would he have seen right which is why I'm like that that's why Pep Guardiola and all those guys play in that position uh but I was gonna say so that's from a talent standpoint but on the other side what's happening in the brain of somebody in social is I think there's four different levels.

39:24I think that creativity is the minimum requirement, right? People think that social is about being creative. No, it's not, right? That's like, that's great and all and you have to think creatively, but I think that that's a junior level of thinking in terms of like, because you're thinking about the output, right? And it's not about like age or anything. It's just about like, that's just like what you see. The next level down is all about psychology. Those that understand people. And I think that social is behavioral psychology. at scale you have an understanding of the pulse of the world right now right and the the genius thing about Elon Musk buying Twitter I think a lot of people right now are almost like using the valuation of the platform to justify that it was a bad move I'm like no he's got a pulse of the world and he can what can you do with that right 100 % and especially if he makes everybody unfiltered then he has the real pulse yeah yeah right so and he's got the data behind that as well that we don't even see Jay-Z said women lie men lie numbers don't right that's all I'm saying right And then the level below that is platform mechanics.

40:24So you understand how these different platforms work, right? And you understand the way that the reason why they, what they do is they create these incubators that keep people on the platform for as long as possible. And if you contribute to that, like by you giving people something of value to keep people on the platform, they reward you, right? That's effectively what it is. And now they all reward different things. And once you understand those different things, you can reverse engineer that, right? but that's like a like a coding like level of thinking right so you're not just saying it's almost like um when they say that a chef that only cooks their favorite dish will have an empty restaurant right you almost have to cater like a dj for what the platform and the audience wants and you're almost like you have to work outside yourself like method acting yeah so it's like it's a great exercise for your brain and then at the bottom those that really get to the top they also understand social dynamics they they cannot just understand the creativity the psychology and the almost like platform mechanics and that's just tillage it to one brand if you want to be able to be the same but for multiple brands you have to understand who that brand or that person is to society that's the reason why Ryanair can get away with things that British Airways can't right same industry trying to go for the same audience people that want to go escape somewhere but then they mean different things to society and once you get clocked that bit you can do that for any brand yeah and that's what we look out for so it's like one are you a doer and then two at what level uh are you thinking about things right which i think is super super interesting that's amazing frank i love how you've broken that down i mean you apply that to brands exactly in the way you apply it to usually actually but and you talked about your kind a LinkedIn journey as well how you used it early to attract Gymshark you used it um as you're exiting of course or on the kind of way because you wrote you didn't you write like a breakup letter to effectively to Gymshark when you left no well well I wrote it on LinkedIn or a love letter to you know but honestly whenever I go back there and this is just like the honest honest truth I always say like I don't regret the decision because I think it was great for my growth and i think that we always have to evolve but then whenever you go there especially if you if you chase comfort and if you chase like um a safety whenever i go back there it just feels like oh my god i love this place right i love the people uh we have great relationships with everybody there it just feels like how we did and there's like this whole new group of talent that are there but probably don't know who the hell you are but they're just like it once you're a part of that it never leaves you right you always feel a part of the journey but as people naturally we always have to evolve and want more and do more right and i was like well i want to uh if my parents are going to sacrifice everything for us i have i have to be able to show them that was the best thing they've ever done right and now it's no longer to the point where it's like doing it in service of them i just want to do it right because i'm just like you know you know how right now the world is in a very pluralized place where people are talking about immigrants this and immigrants that i was like well i want to show you what an immigrant can do yeah right and and not just for myself yeah but what car can we demonstrate what a positive impact uh immigration can have a society when people are selfless instead of selfish right and and i was like then i have to do something that's much bigger than myself and i feel like the best brands the best people create wise and visions that are in service and i always say that i can tell if somebody wants to be able can have the capacity to be a billionaire or not i can tell it in a sitting and when you ask them what is it they want to do if they say i want to be the best or i want to create the greatest thing at this i'm like you're not going to do it if you say i want to help people do this or i want to unite people or if you do something in service of people the world becomes smaller right because then people are like oh we all want that that's when you get yeah talent that are not on the table you get opportunities that are on the table because people buy into that united course right and then i said you know what that's a skill and that's a system and and we want to be able to do that with more brands right so so we did um and and the the reason why i left was because I almost like describe it as I felt like um Hermione and the prisoner of Azkaban right when she had that clock where she could see the future etc I think I just got to a point when I got really really comfortable right I bought a house uh on Gymshark campus I was about to get married all these things were happening and I was like I'm gonna be here forever right I was like I was settled in etc etc and then um i'm not going to mention the brand but my favorite company and i probably hinted it before and people from my favorite company started like reaching out to me and saying would you want to come uh with us and and that was probably the biggest almost like validation that you might be all right at this and by the way a lot of things happened before that point that would have probably given me the signals that i'm okay at this thing but it was only when that happened it has to be really extreme for me to say holy crap like this is beyond uh it's you're not just good because you're a gymshark you're just good right and i was like i can't unlearn that what do i do with that right and and um and first i said yes i want to do it but then i said well i said the gymshark's the last place i was ever going to work right and i said that um if I'm going to do this I'm going to do something that I'm fearful of doing and one of the things that I had to tick off was starting my own business but I was like what am I going to start a business in right I was like what skills do I have right like starting a social media agency doesn't make any sense that would have worked five years ago right but now everybody has one right so I was like it has to be something better and I uh and then so I did the ikigai exercise uh which is like a four is a Japanese uh proverb that talks about like your one true calling and it asks you four questions which is what are you passionate about uh what are you good at uh what have you been paid to do and what does the world need right and uh and i was like well the world doesn't need any more gym leggings it already has it well we have the ben francis story we have that we know we can do that there's a billionaire in the social generation uh my dissertation has been ticked off right so so so we don't need that anymore but then what the world needs is to a demonstration that diversity especially in the creative world makes business sense right so that was one world need and i was like but then actually one example is okay but multiple examples defines the point right so could we create a unicorn factory okay that makes sense now let's go one step back we wanted to create a company where the mission was to unite diverse creatives so people that think differently and challenge each other because that's the world and we need people that have a safe space to challenge each other?

47:38And then can we help make brave brands famous? Because what we mean by that is that I recognized the first moment I stepped out of Gymshark, I thought that everybody wanted to win. But I realized that 95 % of people just don't want to fail. 100%. So I said, well, that's not who I want to work with. I changed. it was first unite diverse creatives make brands famous i moved and i added the word brave it's like and bravery doesn't mean disruptive and crazy it means you just want to take a first step forward yeah right you just like if you just don't want to lose yeah we're just not gonna align right that's not the gear that we're in together but if you want to win then or you want to grow or you want to be better i can do something with that then it just becomes a dial meaning you where you're at and then taking you where you need to go so we said okay we're not going to be a social media agency, we're going to be a community marketing agency, because that's what we do.