Uncensored Renegades: Why we need to embrace failure with Kory Marchisotto

0:06Welcome ladies and gentlemen to Uncensored Renegades. This is a new show that I'm launching with Corey Marchessoto, and we're going to be focusing in on leadership. And we're going to be doing that in a new format, which is the two of us tackling one topic for 20 minutes. So shorter than normal show, but super focused and with the absolute rock star that is Corey. I know you're going to love this. Now, if you want to make sure you get this every single week, please do go and subscribe to Uncensored Renegades in your feed, and then you'll never, ever miss an episode again. But without further ado, let's get into it.

0:38Here it is. Welcome to the show. I'm Johnny Boy. And I'm Kay Boss. Okay, let's get into it. One feedback I get on my podcast from so many people is the fact that I talk about getting fired. Because apparently we don't like to talk about things that go wrong. And actually when I do, or I have guests like you that are very open about, you know, the journey they've been on, it gets such a positive response. I thought, why don't we, for our first episode, talk about failure? And it kind of reminds me of this. I met this incredible venture capitalist guy called Shlomo. And he'd invested in loads and loads of companies.

1:11And I was captivated by his view on business and the talent he hires in the role. But the first thing he does is he asks someone to tell them about a big failure that they faced. And if they can't think of one, the meeting is over. Because he said, if you've not confronted failure and cope with it and gone on, you are not in a position to be a startup founder and get backing. and I thought, wow, man, that's pretty cool. So I thought we should talk about failure. Can we just start with the word? I actually love the word failure. What, what, why is, failure has a branding problem. It does. It's a great word.

1:47We should celebrate failure. Yeah. Do you know the comedian, UK comedian, Jimmy Carr? I don't. He is like, he's one of the most successful comedians. He is hilarious, right? He sells out massive stadiums. He's on like TV Saturday night. He is one of the most famous comedians ever. I heard him being interviewed on a podcast and he said, I have failed in a thousand pubs before I made someone laugh. And basically what he just said, I worked harder at figuring out which jokes did not work. And he said, I told a thousand jokes in a thousand pubs and I found the one and I just repeated that one. And I just said, no one knows.

2:26Like no one talks about the thousand jokes you told that didn't work, you see. So I thought maybe we could talk about a thousand jokes that we've done that haven't worked. And why do you think that is, though? Where did we have this turning point that the thing that actually creates the success, the conditions that have to be true for success to happen, which is the failure, somehow became something we're afraid to talk about? I think there's some social stigma around it, isn't it? Like everyone wants to be seen to succeed and no one wants to be seen to have failed. And therefore we kind of disassociate ourselves.

2:57I mean, there's a phrase, actually, my boss, Clark from Britvick, from way back, one of the most inspirational people I've ever worked for. He said to me, Johnny boy, success has many fathers, failure is an orphan. And I thought that, damn it, man, you're completely right. Everyone like swarms around a success and claims it as their own, don't they? But the moment something goes wrong, it's like a bomb has been dropped and the scene's been cleared and like, oh, that wasn't me. That wasn't me. You know, and everyone's dusting it, dusting it off. You know what I just took away from that story? That they called you Johnny Boy.

3:33There's your nickname. There we go, K-boss. Do you know what? Funnily enough, actually, right? I started a new job a few years ago. The last proper CMO job I had, right? I was working for a British company in drinks, Lucas A. Rabina Suntory. And they had this brilliant idea that in our kind of customer satisfaction, sorry, employee satisfaction survey, there was one negative thing that said the c-suite are too distant from you know the employees and so tracy our hr director had this amazing idea she goes we're going to do this learning festival and this learning festival was going to be delivered by the c-suite for everybody on it on a different topic right so the cfo is going to do you know how to do a pnl and the sales director how to sell right i just started that week right so they didn't have a title for me so in the in the kind of post that went out it just said meet john i'm like come on like i'm not that interesting i'm not going to hold a room for an hour to go hey i used to love skateboarding you know i mean like you know when i like heavy metal i mean like you know that's gonna be weird but i was on holiday and i just read this incredible book called black box thinking by matthew syed and basically the insight in it is when a plane crashes they they remove the black box but they don't just learn from it in terms of the airline that by law they have to make that publicly available for everyone in airline in the airline industry and you look at the um fatalities in it with air crashes over time and there's a really close correlation between the more information about failure they give away and the reduction in airline crashes which i thought was brilliant so anyway i was so inspired i phoned i phoned i hr director said tracy i've got it my title is going to be my most epic failures anyway it sounded good while i sat there you know sat there on the beach when i arrived that the my particular kind of event had been oversold four times you oversold an internal company event about failure i know about they were thinking who's this new cmo that's turned up this is going to be wild he's going to talk about his failures but do you know what it was really revealing because i remember there was one guy that worked in sales this tough kind of six foot four guy he was in tears and what i absolutely did not realize was that at the time he you know there was a there was a there's an investigation into something quite serious that had been going on and different departments were blaming each other a bit like you know my friend clark's you know failure is an orphan type thing everyone was disavowing any responsibility yeah yeah and i'd walked in and said yeah let's talk about our biggest failures and this guy's like i don't believe i have permission to do that and he just got really and everyone got really emotional but I remember the little twist in my story at the end which you'll probably guess is that I went through my five biggest failures and then of course the end of the meeting I said my five biggest successes immediately followed those failures because what I learned you know in in kind of really desperate times set me up for the success that followed 100 % that's the thing we forget isn't it and those are the greatest things we can teach people it's funny you just said that because in our company, we have a new employee onboarding every six months and all of the C-suite independently has one hour with all the new employees.

6:44And our CEO always tells us we have to tell the long story. And people actually really love coming to these integration moments with the C-suite because we get personal. We talk about our journey. How did we get here? What are the things we learned along the path? Why did we choose this place? And it's actually really special to have those moments where you completely shed your title and you just talk human to human. And then you start to get a sense of what do people really care about through the questions they ask. And they always inevitably go to tell me about a time that you failed. Because there's something about the C-suite where people just think you can only be a bunch of success stories.

7:24So I think it's pretty amazing that we see the same thing. And actually, I spend a lot of time with Billie Jean King. And for those of you in the audience who don't know who she is, she is the goat, not only of tennis, but of equality. She's really an equality champion. And she has a line that I absolutely love. And she says, failure is feedback. And when you think about that, especially as a tennis champion, every time you fail, you think about what happened and how do I make those tiny little adjustments? And when I think about a sport that I love, which is skiing, the beauty of skiing is the pause and reflect on the lift that takes you back up to the top.

8:04You can't get back on another run. And it's like your black box story. Unless you get on the lift and you ask yourself, what did I do right that run? What did I do wrong that run? What are the little adjustments that I need to make? And if you do that all day, at the end of the day, you're a much better skier and you can see it. The progress is tangible. so taking the time to pause and reflect like you did to say what are my five biggest failures is actually how you get to the success is through those learnings 100 percent talking tennis i think i heard this statistic about roger federer i mean one of the most insane can i just tell you that i'm in love with roger federer can we just talk about i mean come on the guy's a dude he's just so smooth isn't he just looks unbothered like i'm like nothing's gonna bother him and and yet he just turns up and looks so graceful and it's the grace in which he plays oh he's made it just beautiful to watch it's like the craft of tennis on display and you know people talk about natural talent but i bet you anything he works hard it's like david beckham you know kind of england captain back in the day that could score these incredible goals free kicks from long distance and when you actually dig into it when he when they trained on the pitch he would spend another three hours after everyone had gone home, just doing the same kick over and over and over again.

9:21So for the one moment under pressure, when everyone's watching and it's on you, he's done the work so that when he takes the shot, it's in the back of the net. And that I think is something that people don't realize about this is you have to repeat the failures again and again and again until he gets the success. Okay, between Roger Federer and David Beckham, which one are you choosing to have dinner with? Oh, I think I'd go Beckham. I think I'm probably Team Beckham here. I am so Team Federer. Okay. Okay. This is good. All right. But you are getting to a stat. Tell me the stat because now I'm intrigued.

9:53Yeah. The stat is wild, right? So like if you think of Roger Federer, he's won 80 % of the matches in his career. So you then ask yourself, how many of the shots has he won? And you might go, oh, well, I assume he's probably won 80 % of the shots. I would maybe like 75. Yeah. It's going to be close, right? 54. What? 54. So they're like, probably the greatest male tennis player of all time, right? Has only won 54 % of the shots he's taken. And you're just like, but that marginal difference, that marginal like being 54%, not 46%, that's the difference between being the greatest of all time and being a kind of circuit player that's in the top 1 ,000, but not in the top one.

10:35That's incredible. And again, here we are. We talk about the 54 % of shots that he won and not the ones that he didn't. So let's talk about failure. What's your biggest failure? And most importantly, so I do this actually with my team. We're called the MLT and for princess bride lovers, that's a mutton, lettuce, and tomato. And for those that have never seen the princess bride, it's the marketing leadership team. And we do a wins and fails lightning round. And what I love about that is we don't get to spend too much time on what was the actual thing. That's the quick part. The thing we spend time on is what did you learn from it?

11:11Because your failure might be somebody else's win because you caught them before they were going to make the same fail. And we celebrate it among our team and we celebrate it in our company. And I think one of the reasons that Elf is so successful is we actually embrace failure. It's not a dirty word. It's not ugly language. It's not even something that we put a border or a boundary. We just openly blurt it out like, man, you raise your hand instantly. I totally screwed this up immediately. And those moments create the conditions by which we can all collectively learn from each other's failure.

11:51So I'd love to start by hearing yours. I've got so many that I could do this all day long. Well, I was going to say, it's quite a long list I have to narrow down. The one that I think sticks in my memory and kind of gets a visceral response is I'd spent about 15 years in soft drinks, working in big corporate companies in relative safety, right? I'd done lots of innovation. I'd achieved lots of things. I'd done lots of failures as well. But I took a really big bet and I decided to go into private equity backed and not a startup, but a small company that was scaling up, right? And when I joined, they gave me 18, no, was it?

12:26No, 16 weeks to completely relaunch everything in terms of new packaging, new design, new flavor ranges, move us from we're in the food service sector into the grocery sector. Right. Now, that isn't possible. Right. Because if I go back to my previous experience, that would have happened over 18 months. Right. Because there's annual listing cycles, that kind of thing. So I fast tracked everything, like everything. thing i was parallel doing taste testing stability tests pack designs everything everything you know trade presentations all of it i was just and by the way it's just me as well right because it's a tiny company i was everything i was a fun project i was the twitter handle i was the designer i designed our logo i did the staff you know briefings i did everything right it's literally it was wildly fun actually i loved it and i had no meetings i had no meetings at all so I could just get on and do.

13:15It was brilliant, right? But we relaunched and within about a week of relaunching, we started getting loads of complaints. And it was a juice brand. And it was the hottest summer we'd had in the UK for a very long time. And mold was growing inside the bottle. And we started getting five complaints, then 10, then 100, then 1 ,000. And literally the complaint tracker was just like going off with alarms and everyone was sending the stock back. and I had my heart in my, you know, like what's happened? And me and the CEO went down to the warehouse and we started opening bottles and there was mold growing under the caps that we were using.

13:54And you can imagine how horrible that looked when you go for a juice in the morning and there's like mold floating in it. So we had to recall everything. And by the way, we just got ourselves into loads of new customers. And the first thing I had to do with all our new customers is going, you know, I've just sold you on this amazing dream of this new juice brand that does all this and does all that. I'm going to have to withdraw the stock. We had to shut the line down in the hottest summer when soft drink demand is at its highest. And we had to turn everything off for about six months. How do you recover from something like that?

14:24We lost a third of our entire business. Now, bear in mind, this isn't just someone else's money. This was my life savings. And it was also private investment. And I was a shareholder of the company and one of the board of directors. Right. So it was, and I remember the moment I sat there on the pallet of soft drinks with Gary, the CEO, and we looked at each other and said, have we just destroyed it? And we just had this emotion. It was just kind of felt like him and I going, have we actually destroyed this thing? Now, go forward a year. And what I learned in that, what I, I went through, I uncovered 96 learnings because I did a forensic analysis from beginning to end.

15:03I broke everything down water supply ingredients supplies everything right for the next two years we were the fastest growing soft drink in the whole of the UK of any drink in any category and we won awards and we smashed it I don't know if that would have happened had I not been forced to really understand how you make a juice brand how you distribute it how you you know manage the shelf life it was very technical what had gone wrong in terms of the compatibility compatibility issue it was basically the source of our caps they were everything was everything was aseptic so it was very carefully uh controlled and it was a brand new production line we also launched a new production line as we launched the new brands right but the one thing that was externally supplied that wasn't made in-house was the cap and they were stored outside and it was picking up um kind of picking up an infection floating in the air sort of thing and anyway it was the we we eventually isolated the problem you could correct for it but it's one of those things I wasn't an expert on aseptic production lines.

16:03I didn't know this stuff because I'd come from corporate life where all the production is someone else's problem. I don't know. I don't think about, you know, is production okay? And suddenly now I'm in charge of the quality control and customer complaints. And then, so the lesson for me there was I was used to being responsible for about 10 % of what happens on a brand, the marketing bit, right? This job was the other 90%. Yeah. And I was completely, you know, incapable of learning anything. So I became an expert on how you make a juice in the UK. But actually that set us up for world success.

16:36Yeah, I think most people don't recognize the complexity of a supply chain. And we have a, you were talking earlier about your C-suite teaching classes, if you will. We did for our 20th anniversary of Elf, we took our entire employee base offsite for a big company-wide celebration. And one of the things we did was have each person teach a class. So our CFO taught a class called What the Elf is EBITDA. Our chief people officer did Getting Cozy with Equity because every elf is a shareholder. And the lines were out the door to get into these classes. And our head of supply chain did a class called The Life of a$2 Eyebrow Pencil.

17:21And that class was so popular because it detract from inception to a consumer hands, how many touch points does this thing have to go through? And we sell it for$2. It's almost like an impossible mission, if you will. And I think that's actually something really interesting for, you know, marketers have a tendency to be pigeonholed. I don't even know what marketing means to be totally frank. And when you ask a thousand people, what does marketing mean to you? You're going to get a thousand different answers. The most important thing is to have a holistic view of things because it's the interconnectedness of it all that makes it work.

17:58And I run innovation, so I have to be very close to the supply chain. And when you think about the stability testing, the compatibility testing, and you always want to move faster and cut down your timeline so that you can move a trend to market as quickly as possible, but there are steps you just cannot miss. So one of the things that we learned how to do is concurrence. Instead of waiting for one step to be complete before you get to another step, move things concurrently. And that's how we're able to pick up speed. But one thing goes wrong in stability testing. And, you know, for the audience, if you don't know, I mean, you've got to put things in extreme conditions, like a lip gloss has to be tested at minus 40 and, you know, blazing inferno to see if it's going to change the juice.

18:44And, you know, as you're talking about with the mold and the thing. And it goes through torture testing. And in those moments, you've got timelines, you've got shelves you've got to get on, you've got commitments you've made. And there are so many places this thing could break down and fall apart. All right. So I've done my failure, Corey. Come on. I am dying to hear about yours. So I did get fired from Chili's, but that's not the failure I'm going to talk about today. Write that down and you can ask me that next time. Okay. We're going to come back to that. The one I want to talk about is a couple of months into Elf.

19:17One of the reasons I took the job was because there was so much about it that was new for me. And one of the biggest things I had never done before was work with the investors. So I had always worked with publicly traded companies, but they were publicly traded in different countries. So this was my first U.S. publicly traded company. And part of a C-suite job is to talk to investors. So that's a big, scary move for me. and I'm always excited about big, scary moves and leaning into the discomfort. So about an hour before my first investor meeting, I got brought into the training room. And for one hour, you basically get trained on all the things you can't say.

19:55This is very serious. You're an officer of the company, the whole corporate stuff. I'm like, great, got it. I could follow a rule. I got this, I got this, I got this. And then we go into, immediately after that, I go into my first investor meeting. it's our cfo our ceo and one of our biggest investors she right out the door hits me with the first question and the first question i make a forward-looking statement oh no so if anybody which is price sensitive isn't it anything about a publicly traded company rule number one is you cannot make a forward-looking trying to get you to make that they're desperate to try and find out And it was so bad that the CEO had to put his hand on her hand with the pen and the notepad and cross out what she wrote and said, I need you to strike that from the record.

20:44My heart sunk into the bottom of the well. I went sheet white and I did not speak for the rest of the time. I was petrified. And you know me. I'm gregarious. I'm talkative. I love telling stories. I love telling stories about what I love to do, which is my job. So the next, you know, we walked out of that meeting. I was so apologetic. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I got a big F on my report card. The CEO didn't even care. He didn't give me an F. He's like, let's go. We're going to come back at this again. You've got another meeting later this week. Fast forward through a series of investor meetings.

21:20He calls me into his office and he goes, where are you? And I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, where is the person I hired? Every single one of these meetings, I'm bringing in my rockstar CMO and you're a robot. And I got so emotional because I knew it. I was hiding behind my fear. I let fear get in the driver's seat. So I was creating my own string of failures. Every single one of these meetings was another failure on top of failure on top of failure. He was like, time out. What is going on? And I'm so grateful for that. And I think leaders can really learn a lesson from that. When you see somebody spiraling like that, just hit the timeout button.

22:00Hey, what's going on? This is not like you. And he gave me one piece of advice that literally changed the game for me. He said, I'm going to make this very easy. When somebody asks you a question about the future, you just tell them a story about the past. And I was like, that's it. From that moment on. Now I love being in front of investors. I could talk about this all day, every day. And it's like my favorite thing to do. But I had to go through that string of failures to really learn those little tricks. And I also had to learn for myself. Nothing good happens when fear is in the driver's seat.

22:37Do you know what I love about that is your CEO's response to you. That is so powerful. I met the England rugby coach after England had just won 15 consecutive games, a record ever. And I got to interview him. And I said, what's the secret of success? And he said, we are tough in victory and we are gentle in defeat. Because he said, when you've faced a big setback, you know exactly what you've done wrong. You don't need to be reminded in that. You need to be reminded of how great you are. When you've just won a game and smashed the opposition, you are probably overconfident and vulnerable to failure.

23:16and I just thought and he's dealing with these you know hardcore big burly guys ultra competitive but then the biggest stage in the world and I just thought that framing was absolute genius brilliant right I think that's us done on failure isn't it can we talk about some successes next time I'll tell you about how I got fired from Chili's