Turning A Hobby Into A £350M Brand | George Sullivan, The Sole Supplier

0:00Only you know the thing that you lay there at night and think I want to do more of that thing tomorrow. And sometimes the sad thing is that's not where the money is.

0:16It's been a tough four years for companies. I know two good founder friends who have shut down their companies. It came out in the woodwork, day one. You've been a bit authoritarian recently. I will give people everything in terms of flexibility. If they're trustworthy and they work hard, I'm like, that's not true. I've run a business for 12 years. It can't be harder than that. That broke them at points, effectively. They spent all of their money trying to put me through a good secondary school as well. If you can do that, then you will be way less regretful if something goes wrong.

0:57George welcome to what it takes how are you all good yeah apart from the hour and 40 minute journey to get here I shouldn't have got a car should I yeah driving in London isn't the best

1:09Olly Fawcett:idea on a Friday well look thanks for coming on the show I'm very excited to talk a lot about sole supplier business you've been building for a very long time now what's it coming on to 13 years 13 years wow does it feel like 13 years I never thought I'd be in a job for longer than a year I couldn't keep a job for six months. So, yeah, it's wild to me that it's been this long. Some of it's felt very long where I've been like stuck in a rut and I haven't known my place. And some of it's flown by. It seems to say, I mean, I'm in a similar time period to you with my business. And it does feel like a little bit when you start thinking about to the years, like they kind of merge into an area.

1:50Olly Fawcett:Some of that feels like, oh, that was a tough time. But it's part of the journey, right? part of the journey well look we're going to talk a lot a lot today about building such a i guess a legacy business and your journey in doing that but before we do i love kind of giving a bit of context behind childhood because i think that's always an interesting place to start for a lot of people what was childhood like for you i know uh school was an interesting time um but give me a give me an overview of what it was like growing up in your world yeah i always find this question interesting because it's like people trying to figure out like what was it that happened to you in childhood that made you who you are today um the truth is man like my dad was out of south london depford my mom out of gravesend they're from like humble beginnings yeah they could only have me right right my mom couldn't they struggled to have me basically and they got the news like lucky so i'm their only child their only son they don't have only child syndrome and they tried to give me everything they could so i could do well and that broke them at points effectively you know they spent all of their money trying to put me through a good secondary school as well some of that was supported with a charity place as well and i was the kid that just didn't want to listen or do the school thing so they they was working hard to try and give me a good education and i just i just pissed it up the wall i threw it away and my parents were pissed about that disappointed all of their friends were like you know you spend that money their friends were sending their kids to normal schools my mom and dad were like we're going to send him to a private secondary school so we can give him the good chance you know oh wow and yeah it didn't go well i i got thrown out of that school and for a long time i was like i fucked it what am i going to do with my life effectively and if you asked any of the friends around me at the time they would have said he is going to mess his life up he will be a drug addict or a criminal that's the truth why was that though what was the behavior you were it's known today as adhd it's known today which is just a barrage of different symptoms isn't it like no one's adhd is the same no your adhd can cause this problem mine could cause this problem so it's a bit of a wild west when it comes to adhd yeah i believe yeah kind of like ai optimization right now it's like the wild west yeah but that for me meant i was very impulsive all of my friends would encourage me to do crazy things in school right you know they'd encourage me to shout the stupid things out call the teacher you know what and i would listen because my impulse was like that so that led to to a lot of problems it led to me you know smoking weed really early and getting really into that it led to me drinking way too much at parties um and being very hung over missing school all of this stuff that comes along with that impulsive attitude yeah yeah for you at the time was it very much like a not even realizing that you're doing this stuff because i'm kind of similar to you in a slight way both adhd but my adhd as you say showed up very differently mine was a lot more you know i guess i was very impulsive i was jumping around things but i also was quite like focused on certain aspects and and probably arrogant and dismissive to others but for you was there an idea of like that lost feeling as a kid or were you very much just like you're flying by the years it wasn't it wasn't lost there was just zero self-reflection i feel for a long period of time i was not looking at my own behavior and thinking that that i shouldn't do that was good yeah it was just like a bull in a china shop just moving forward and just trying all this stuff yeah and i got to i had some really bad experiences after getting thrown out of school you know got into different bits of trouble fights dangerous situations how dangerous we're talking oh just like you know problems with people right where i'm getting like getting hurt ultimately right right and problems that probably i'd cause or situations i put myself in and you start to learn from these experiences even down to like going out to clubs right yeah and being a that arrogant loud rowdy character um when i'm drinking that was the kind of character i was being like bullish carefree impulsive yeah and you know that's something that bouncers don't like funny enough so you're the target in in clubs and pubs when you're that loud character so and then you're also the target for other loud characters who don't like that type of character right they're like i'm the man here not you so being that loud impulsive adhd teenager into adulthood taught me a lot of lessons pretty quickly it taught me like if you don't fix up you're gonna get yourself hurt you're not gonna be able to keep a job you're gonna just end up in shit so that made me self-reflect but for a long time there was no self-reflection but I'm glad I got to self-reflection because it was that self-reflection that led to me like reading more books about the internet which my dad always told me to do it led to me learning more about sales it led to me actually listening to some of my bosses in the jobs I had in the later jobs which eventually led me to understanding that i could start a website through my love of shoes yeah called the sole supplier and i knew enough about it to be able to start the website so it was it was that it was those painful experiences and that self-reflection of like this isn't working i need to try this that got me to eventually start the business you know um and i stand by today that self-reflection is the i hate it when people like gurus go on a podcast right and they're like this is the way to do things because everyone's story is different yeah if you listen to me what i am going to say is my story down to my timing my journey my pain my life that might not work for you it probably won't but what will work for everybody is self reflection understanding the things that you should stop doing that are bad for you and the things that you're not doing that could be good for you there's those two things and understanding that on a daily or weekly basis is the way to like change your life there's no amount of guru or anything that can tell you tell you anyone that can tell you anything apart from what's your story and what do you need to to fix and that's the journey i've been on i'm 35 now i'm still trying to fix stuff you know uh it's a non-stop thing yeah do you think there's something someone could have said as a vice or a realization statement or something to you when you were younger going through what you went through because i know you're a new dad and i know there's there's all this to come with your with your little ones yeah but like it's one of those things where i often think that no one could have really said anything to me seeing me as a kid going through that slightly chaotic destructive failing maths failing science getting into fight whatever the fuck it is there's kind of not a lot you can really say and sometimes it's quite painful to realize that as i think you're kind of getting at a lot of us have just got to go through making the mistakes ourselves do you agree yeah that's a realization i've had in the last six months i've seen good friends have problems whether that's money problems drug problems and there's no amount of advice that me or other people have been able to give them that has helped them change apart from their own realizations yeah you know i've seen i've seen i've seen bad stuff happen for people and and and and there's nothing that's helped them apart from them being able to wake up on their own and and that's like the most painful thing to realize that yeah you just kind of have to let people roll with their own issues but what i do believe is it starts early right so me and you 30 35 that's gonna i could tell you something you'll you'll say i won't do that you'll go and make that mistake yourself right and then you'll learn but maybe when you're 10 years old if i was there or your father or mother or friends and we're modeling the right behavior from early then you're going to become more of the person that makes the right decisions more influential when you're younger right yeah so that's why it's like with my kids it's about modeling the right behavior trying to break the cycle how do i and my partner taz how do we and the people that how do we be the people that they look up to and admire and respect yeah and are like that's obviously what i'm gonna do look at george look at taz like not that we're gods no effectively we're gods i want to be a god in my child's eyes yeah i want them to look at me with like admiration and love and be like he's the fucking man you know like that that's the truth people might think i'm mad for saying that i guess it all like yeah i guess i haven't had kids yet yeah we'd love to have some someday but it's like you do want to be the hero of your kid i think every parent wants that like completely and you kind of are in the first couple of years and then they get into teenage years and you're seen as a bit of dickhead and then they kind of come back around it's a but how do you keep being the hero is what i'm trying to work out yeah that's what i'm like thinking through this lens now of like when i'm 50 when my daughter's 15 and i'm 50 what is going to make me the hero in her eyes yeah and i'm trying to like think about my life through that that lens more yeah than ever so that's why i believe that having children is a powerful experience for most because it either makes you or breaks you you either start to go i'm gonna be the man or woman that i need to be and no i can be or this is too much and it all falls apart and that's when people break up and they leave their kids and it all falls apart sure it's like a were you worried about being in peril no because i was optimistic like i always am but then when we had the baby i was like this is crazy how much i underestimated how powerful and life-changing this is in a really difficult way that I wasn't prepared for everyone said it would be the hardest thing I'm like that's not true I've run a business for 12 years it can't be harder than that you know I've had to I've had to manage people and shit like that you know I've managed people I can manage a baby yeah that was wrong honestly like what was that what was the kind of like the build-up for you in it like being being an entrepreneur being a guy as you said it's been burning for the baby yeah yeah it's like it's like denial that it's going to be a danger or it's going to be hard right denial leading up to it like it's going to be fine yeah then like fear as it's a okay it's here now and then bang like the realization baby's born and the baby's there so you go through like these stages of grief they say when someone passes like it's like the five stages of grief but for putting in an opposite way and yeah that that the first two months is like the really i had to realize i can't be as selfish as i was before like taz my partner would say to me you need to give me more time i'm like this new concept of giving you time you know like that you could just do what you wanted before and she could just do what she wanted but now i have to think about balancing our time and accommodating baby you know like that how do you deal with that with adhd that was the thing that nearly broke me man right is the truth because i don't function well with low sleep right uh what would you define as low sleep like inconsistent sleep fine like four or five hours or something like that let me put that a different way i don't function well with low sleep at the level i want to function at right is the way to put it okay so if i want to work like 10 to 12 hours every day five days a week i want to do my training and i want to be a good family person yeah that i have to function here i have to get good seven hours sleep like eight hours i have to i have to sleep understood otherwise it's like i'm failing at one of those three things i'm even weaker in the gym i'm i'm not as a good decision maker at work or i'm mind numbed when i come home and see my family they're like strong with you you know so yeah it's just sleep's really important and that wasn't happening and then the adhd fires up with low sleep so i'm more impulsive do you find that yeah interesting i'm more impulsive i'm eating more shit as a result right which then fuels poor sleep and it's like a cycle so i got medicated for adhd about six months after baby was born is that your first time first time because i ignored it i've done it yet i did it once when i was 16 and i had a terrible time but i haven't got back i'm interested to hear how you how you found it it's game changer really but again this is not prescriptive this is not me saying you should get medicated for adhd because i know three people who are close to me who have tried and it didn't work for them really they couldn't find the medication that worked for them yeah so this is another thing i dismiss people are like oh everyone should take adhd meds it's like no they don't work for people yeah that is the truth so but that changed my life genuinely it worked for me and it's allowed me to be calmer it's allowed me to be more consistent have more balanced energy just it's unlocked so much for me it's allowed me to be a better dad amazing what made you wait so long to get medicated i just ignored it like it uh it was stigmatized when we were younger like you were dying there's like seven right yeah yeah early like in some place in surrey like yeah yeah maybe in the 90s right in the 90s yeah so barely knew what it meant about that yeah exactly i mean i was dying i was like diagnosed and then like i did like six tests in the in the noughties yeah so god knows how they figured out what was going on with you about 10 years earlier well that's the thing i think it was when ritalin was first announced or invented and so ritalin had just hit the scene like it's some dude that's what i did when i was 16 on the ritalin yeah yeah i did rizzo in 16 for a week so awful right or it was unbelievable but it was like i i have a slight thing where like i think a 16 year old's brain because brain medication i think you've got to be really fucking careful like obviously i just think that's nuts and that's why i have got like a weird association with adhd medication because of it but um yeah People should think very carefully about giving a developing brain any drugs.

17:09Olly Fawcett:Yeah. I was smoking weed from 14, 15. Do you find that helped ADHD? There's a few people I've seen a bit online around weed versus ADHD. Not versus, but supporting. I never really thought of it like did it help the ADHD. It just helped me escape because I was in a lot of pain with why am I messing up this whole school thing? Truly. Like I was quite, I got on with a lot of people. I was quite popular in my teenage years, especially I've mixed between groups. And I was the kind of loud person at the party. I got on with people. So do you want to fly? Yeah. But it was, but the pain inside was like, I just am so like, just quite mad and manic.

17:55And I can't hold down this schooling thing. And my parents have given everything to this, but I know that I'm going to mess this up. so there was a lot of pain going on so weed just helped me escape but that really messed my brain up as a kid you know like for years i was paranoid after stopping i smoked it for five years consistently probably from what ages about 15 years old fucking hell until i was about 20 you know a lot of people i knew did probably the only exception that i drew was i wouldn't roll a spliff when i woke up i'd wait until midday until i smoked like literally good job people would but like it made me so paranoid so socially inept for a while that it took me like years to unravel that and that's still there's strands of that now so that's why this thing about giving ritalin or weed or drink developing brain it's gonna be really dangerous man yeah i feel like there's

18:50Olly Fawcett:so much more work and to be fair there's probably a lot of studies there we've never heard about but there's a lot of work to be done on just like how bad some of that shit is yeah and just like it's almost hard to communicate with kids like if i came to you at 15 and i was my age now 30 and said mate don't go near the drugs or the booze or the ritalin yeah because you're gonna mash it like you know have a bad time in future life you just don't listen when you're a kid this is this that's the hard part about being young is that you just cannot listen to some of it and you've got to make those mistakes because the classic saying of like oh we all did that yeah we all went through those journeys it's just there's so much more damaging to others it's normalized though as well in this in the uk especially like the drink the drugs and the drink right more so like we had programs growing up like brits abroad and you know like shows about benedorm and like what is it like sun sun and suspicious parents sun c-sex suspicious parents oh my god what was going along with british culture for ages like and so because i've i've reflected on all this having a child i'm like i don't that was so damaging because it normalized it all yeah and that's just you go to somewhere like the uae and none of that stuff exists those programs none of that normalization yeah it's not like that it's even the slight this is one i always talk to i've not actually spoken about this on the podcast because it's slightly fucking boring so let's see how it goes but like i think soaps are really bad yeah like when i said i don't mean what you clean yourself with you're a coronation street fan is what you're saying i've never really fucking watched them until i was a kid but when i was a kid they're on the tv but like that fucking those narratives no wonder the country's a bit miserable sometimes because there's a culture of watching that content you know everyone's talking about not watching the news right and like the influences on that or not looking on socials because it's negative and you know trying to live a little bit more in the present and a bit more positive thinking yeah and you're fucking coronation street with like deaths and car crashes and yeah people cheating on each other and it's just this like chaotic kind of world it's the same with shit like love island like there are kids watching that kind of going back to this topic around influential brains yeah all this stuff's getting poured in i just don't see how there's any any upside to that like and if you one of the guests we just had on the show is from america i'm just talking around the culture in america around yeah there's still negative press there's negative media that's probably even more heightened than the uk but like the culture around particularly like positive enthusiasm colleges in the states entrepreneurship in the states it's a different level yeah it's a completely different level and like i think that's what the uk is missing particularly in kind of this chat around becoming more productive as a workforce like it's just a bit fucking depressing but we're influenced so much by everything i think they have to they have to control the population to some extent and if there was constant prosperous optimistic educational helpful content going out to the population more people would probably rise up they would realize that they no longer want to work that really difficult job that doesn't pay them too much so effectively not to get down go down this route but is this by design you know yeah you can't empower people too much as the state and the government because they'll they won't be good workers that pay their taxes and not everyone can be a business owner and not everyone can i don't know there's a whole deeper conversation that goes on there but what were you like when you entered the workforce so what when did you get your first kind of proper job if you will awful this is why i have sympathy for people that join our company at 21 right 22 23 yeah let's say they're young they've just come out of uni and they might have issues with their own like reliability and how they conduct themselves in a workplace because i look back on my early job life and i would not have wanted me to work for me i would have sacked me quickly what were you like i thought i knew it all right i always thought that i could answer back to bosses and managers when i knew nothing really like i'd got into the job one month in and i think i know how to do it more than the lady that's been there three years like and i thought i could just do what i wanted in my way and i would yeah it was just any part about that was kind of entrepreneurial was it all pretty destructive deep down i always thought that there was better for me i don't know where that come from okay but that has maybe been instilled by my dad he was like me and your mom have busted our balls my mom doesn't have balls me and your mom have busted our balls all our lives working a nine to five you don't want to do that you can do something for yourself and he would say stuff like that to me yeah and probably that got into my head so i've gone in with his best intentions which are good i've gone into the world of work like i can do better my dad said so fuck you so that was probably it's so funny isn't it you think as a parent you're giving like good but actually that's then given an attitude of like son thinks he's better for the work better than the workplace yeah um so yeah i wasn't easy to manage but at the same time i wasn't inspired by the people that i was working with either right until i got my job in recruitment i was also really inspired by someone that i worked with at the yellow pages called james bugner he was the son of the boxer something bugner pretty famous boxer brilliant leader he would sit me down talk to me and be like look really respected the way that he spoke and address people and then ben jim larry in my recruitment job they were brilliant and these people aside from my dad they were like the role models of like look we can have a laugh we can have a drink but these are our values of how we conduct ourselves in the workplace and outside and this is who you need to be if you want to get further and and if it wasn't for those people i probably wouldn't have learned the right way to interact in a workplace and then lead people now in the company yeah do you think you kind of well i guess do you remember being told for the sort of first couple of times that you're doing a good job because i imagine from what you're saying childhood i think you had eight or nine jobs in about three years or something like that yeah there must have been a lot of like you're just rubbish you're just bad was that the kind of environment you're around because it there wasn't feedback in a lot of the jobs there just wasn't that you did a great job there yeah then when i worked with like james bugner it was a culture of you that was great george well done maybe you should try and adjust this very clear with ben and jim it was like do this do that try that stop doing that with larry it'd be like we need to do things like this that was really good but but in a lot of them there was nothing so you didn't know where you stood um which is a very dangerous place to be right yeah you're just like ticking along it feels like nobody really cares yeah and which is dangerous like you say because then nobody's really performing high there's no real energies there's no real great ideas and inspiration so everything's a little bit flat and it just feels like a classic nine to five yeah which there's nothing wrong with that but i think our eyes have been opened now as young people and because of the internet and so you walk into an environment like that as a young person and you're like oh man this isn't for me i can completely get why gen z are lazy because they walk into a place like that where there's no inspiration and leaders don't give any feedback they don't care and they're like what for the next 30 years this is me i'm gonna be lazy in that environment would you not seeing what you see on the internet you'd be like yeah i'm not destined for this this is scary yeah yeah i mean i i've got a few opinions on it like yeah i think the younger i think ageism is going to come back really aggressively i think it already exists i've sat in rooms with founders big business owners investors and the way they look at under 25s is bad and i think that the that is that that's one issue i think the second issue is that people who've been in their career for 10 15 20 years so they're maybe in their 30s their 40s they're also very much got an opinion on the younger gens who come in and want all these employee perks this remote working setup etc where they've worked for 20 years and had none of it and i think that's natural i think it's natural naturally almost fair to say well we didn't have that so why should you type thing you know so i think there's two problems in the workforce around that and i think that i know that the figures on unemployment for kind of 18 to 25 is a really bad at the moment sadly i think it's gonna get worse because you can't really call out ageism because you just call it inexperience you can't really say oh you know i went for this job and it's because of my age there's no easy way to put that in they just go you don't have the experience we're looking for you don't have the qualification we're looking for because you haven't been to uni which means you're not a certain age and i think that that is going to be a problem particularly in the uk quite a lot and i think that there's nothing pre-covid the scales of like employer employee everything was on the employer like employees were treated so badly before covid like it was rough like i had a business then i knew that we didn't have the best like care for our team at that start of time like i can admit that what happened in covid in my eyes that it all went over to the employee which means employers also include include founders and rich individuals and you know people who are struggling whatever is you know founders employers is a big area and i think in the moment what we need to find is the perfect middle where like for the founders of the world and the employers of the world they get what they need and they have that right environment but i think you're completely right you get the most amount of people when you're inspiring them when you're motivating them when you're driving them forward but i do think it's a very tough time coming for that age demographic why are gen z not motivated that's the question why are they lazy and i keep doing this because i just think it's a generalization i've worked with just as many bad people that are millennials oh yeah or older yeah if i look at the data in my head right now and i'm like good people in different demographics across our last decade in the company i can think of brilliant people that we've had under 25 yeah and i can think of rubbish people that we've had over 35 yeah both have existed i don't really see a that's why i just but for me it's about of course someone that's 40 is going to look at someone at 22 that's a bit more entitled and think why aren't you the same as me yeah that's just normal i guess isn't it yeah um but the 22 year old should be a little bit more entitled is the wrong word but they should be a little bit more like there's so many opportunities in this world because they've grown up with social media that they're looking for one of those that those 40 year olds could not see at the time they just accepted what was in front of them the high street the job in the city they didn't understand all this great stuff existed because it wasn't as on offer yeah but at the same time i believe that we've got a mental health crisis with younger people more than ever i think that they are more hopeless than ever because the cost of living is higher than ever they're not income is not stretching as far as it once was companies are not as profitable right now as they are so they're struggling to pay salaries to accommodate right so everything's being squeezed that's actually such a good point i don't think a lot of people realize is i think they all think that because everyone's like a company so you're like amazon or nvidia or apple you're making fat stacks of profit if you actually look i mean we me and you must know a lot of founders between the two of us i reckon 80 percent of the founders we know that we would get their profit levels wrong yeah i i've had in 22 and 23 we lost money you know in 23 and 24 sorry we lost money yeah and 25 we just about came back into profit yeah and 26 we'll be back in profit so it's been a tough four years for companies i know two good founder friends who shut down their companies really one of them was absolutely flying and their company got wrecked which was horrible so but the point is this there's a mental health crisis for young people because of this lack of hope and that comes from not believing there's a better future for them tomorrow and i wouldn't i don't believe there's a great future ahead for us so why would young people world war three cyber security ai crises the aliens coming back down back down yeah yeah um and and so if a young person in our company has a reason like they don't feel mentally well enough to work today someone says i don't feel mentally well enough to work today that's a valid reason to have a day off yeah we have these things called duvet days you have this you have three a year and you don't have to you just say i'm having a duvet day you don't have to tell your manager what the reason why your manager shouldn't ask questions it's just to know questions asked day off for whatever reason because you might be feeling like shit and some people be like that's a soft reason to to give a day off i'm like if young people and people generally are struggling what is an extra three days off a year is that really going to affect things and i'm not the one who's creating their mental health crisis they're having that on their own i should be the company that's trying to support is my is my theory yeah i guess my question is your team you guys have a pretty high standard in the business right so you aren't necessarily hiring absolutely anyone and everyone and you're also probably not hiring people that are inexperienced as such or have that level so i guess my question is because you know the standard of your team and you have that trust level yeah that must make it a lot easier right yeah but i also think we misattribute like the highest performers in the world yeah probably have just as many mental health days as the lowest performers yeah i would say sure and i think it's just like this common misconception that you shouldn't have a duvet day type system because it encourages the wrong behavior but i'm like the amount of days especially before adhd meds i had to have off because i was burnt out really or like mentally couldn't do it today i had a lot of them is the truth and i know some of my best performers in the company who have them as well now there's one or two in like the top two percent who don't have these mental health days right they're just resilient they're like the david goggins of the business world you know they're just fucking going every day and they don't seem to have them yeah they are rare i would say most people in today's world there's a lot going on in people's minds whether that's social media the lack of hope i just think we are at a time now where there's more problems than ever and for us to just sit here not us but people to just go mental health days that's a soft real it's like it's just the world we're living in right now it's a bit of a shit time in the west yeah with no hope so we're either going to be the company that accommodates and helps these people or they're going to try and come into the office and then be like they're going to do shit work that day they're going to piss someone else off yeah and then they're going They're going to resent us and them and we're going to have a word with them.

35:18Just have your day off. It's fine. Just have a few days off. I don't know. I'm very like, I will give people everything in terms of flexibility. If they're trustworthy and they work hard.

35:31Olly Fawcett:I was going to say, I find this interesting. I think you're going to explain it really well for what you're doing. But how do you look at how much you give to the team and how do they become trustworthy in your eyes trust is quite it's it's quite binary right it's like do you trust that person yes or no and then that's going to be formed from all the small little things like they said they would do something and they did it or they said they would do something and they didn't do it but they clearly explained why a few days before yeah and they give expectations as to why and it's a believable reason you know and it makes sense it's just and it's all those micro little things that build up and are they trusted by their peers and trust is like when we're out the office are those people looking after the rest of the team are they there supporting the team then when we go to a social do the team say good things about those people are they brought into the company are they part of that energy trust is like a multifaceted thing it's not just like do i trust them it's are they trusted by the peers as well and you can see that a lot of the time by how people show up who they make connections with we're a team of 34 so we've got to protect the environment for people as much as possible and and it self-pleases like if someone is not pulling their weight or they're untrustworthy they're taking the piss or they're rubbing people up the wrong way and being disrespectful and not helpful the team will pick this stuff out really stuff will be said our culture is like we're not here to make people's lives hard i didn't want to go and work in a place where it was like a hard place to work so it's not me going it's like the team yeah because they have grown in this environment of like a place they can feel safe in so if someone's being rude and disrespectful for that kind of comes out pretty quickly yeah i mean we're talking about the business already so let's let's dive straight in where did the original idea come from just give everyone some context so i love trainers because they were a symbol of my success simple as that i grew up watching eminem and dr dre and 50 cent they wore air force ones yeah and i thought i need to get some air force ones parents wouldn't get me them so when i got my money in my yellow pages and recruitment job i started buying air force ones got obsessed because they made me feel good i had 40 50 pairs two years in i thought i can start a website that helps other people 50 pairs yeah 40 to 50 pairs and my dad was like please stop wasting your money he was how much air force ones at this time 60 pounds maybe yeah yeah this is like 10 50 pounds probably 50 60 today 110 120 sometimes yeah so a big difference um they've gone up by the more than the price of houses in the uk probably so that would have been a better investment um so i just it's weird because i'm a multi-faceted person with a lot of interests and a lot of i'd consider myself reasonably smart and on the surface people say well look at you and they will judge you for being a sneakerhead they will be sneakerhead classic american term they will look at me and be like a sneakerhead this guy's stupid he thinks collecting shoes is the way forward and for a long time people were like i'd say to them this is like for six seven years probably with the business with the with the business with it existing i'd my dad's friends or whatever he's like well connected he's got a lot of funny friends and what i like you know proper like geezers like some of them be like oh yeah george does that make money that business that training you make money from trainers do you i'm like yeah at like after like five years we're making like millions of pounds from trainers and content online and i got to a point where i'd laugh at that that reaction but it used to piss me off i'd be like i'd be like i was the kid that no one believed in at school i've started a business you should fucking respect me and when they'd be like oh does that are you making money from it like have you got is that just you is it or you do you do that full time you know all those questions that one just is that a full-time thing is it is that do you just do that i'm like when did it stop hurting i don't like once we had we had this office in woolwich right that was like a two-story 2 000 square foot industrial unit we converted it big grass wall like the size of this ceiling pool table all of it studios downstairs maybe 15 people in there way too big for the amount of people that we had so ridiculous financial management at that time and we were making a few million a year at that point and i'm like i don't give a fuck anymore i know this is real they know this is real in the business and the millions of people were reaching online with the content and that we're helping to find great shoes and streetwear they know it's real dave from welling does not need to know or care if it's real but why was and i don't care about his opinion anymore but what yeah i guess why did it hurt why was it itching you for so long because for a long time i was holding on to that i need to prove to people that i'm no longer the kid that was going to be the fuck up yeah yeah and so it was like that was everything to me i'd bump into old people from school and i just want them to know that i was doing well now but at the same time i had a bit of humility to not be that prick that would just be like oh you're seeing this i'm doing this now and i'd try and communicate it subtly um because yeah i had moments when i had those 10 jobs after leaving school where i was driving a really bashed up car i looked fucked you know like i just i just wasn't the man i i wanted to be and i remember bumping into people years after leaving school and just thinking they've seen me like this like i'm just bumming around driving my fiat probably smoking a joint out the window of the fiat of the traffic lights did all of that lead up to actually starting the thing yeah because how did you go from like and this i think is something that a lot of people are trying to work out at the moment because i think there's a lot of content online about like you know i know gary vanichuk always talks about this i've talked about it for years where like there are people that can make six figure salaries by just doing their passion whether it be magic gathering whether it be pokemon whether it be you know sneakers etc what was the what was the journey from you from like hobby and passion yeah to like actually trying to start to make something that meant something i tried to start businesses before the soul supplier right you said you were you were 17 you're 17 right so at 17 i started a business called filthy vibes which was a good what filthy vibes which was it was so good the vibes were filthy and it was a music event we love music we always have loved music right and we started it i sold the tickets created the flyers on paint and got them printed and we sold one event yeah and then we sold another event the second event though the bar owner decided to id everybody meaning everyone got turned away actually said to my dad who was there on the second one because my dad was like george is about to kill the event game and my dad was there and he said to my dad pete if you can verify that all these people are above 18 they can come in and my dad's like that's a lot of pressure because i was checking people in the bars at that point like the police would turn up and check there's a lot of good old days so the filthy vibes fell apart i tried to start a shoe repair delivery business danny the guy that's uh he helped me fix my shoes at school i used to give my shoes to danny i was like danny i'm gonna drive a van and pick people's shoes up deliver them to you and i'm gonna take a cut he's like that's good where's your van i was like i don't have my license yet that's the truth i mean i had all these ideas man and and the last one was explore my property which was luxury property videos that was a good idea because not a lot of people were doing it at when when i was 20 years old so 15 years ago oh yeah luxury property videos is a good one right yeah i think i made a few quid off doing that yeah yeah yeah a bit of content back in the other day we used to work with everyone yeah and now it's and now it's everywhere right you look at a property video that's great yeah yeah but i didn't have the money to buy the equipment i knew a little bit about video editing at the time right but i didn't have the money to buy the equipment and i think i made one or two like sales calls to say to the estate agent would you be interested in this got a no gave up done that was the resilience level i had at that age two sales calls finished so I had ideas but so so I was used to like having ideas and trying things but not used to them really working and definitely had no resilience I would give up pretty quickly as you've as you've seen so sole supplier was the first one where I actually knew a lot about this thing it didn't cost that much money to start because it was just building a website and creating content and my passion was still fueling at that time so i was still buying more shoes and the trainer market was just starting to really pick up yeah i mean when did that really happen the sneaker market in the uk literally 2015 16 it was when it started to pop up and we started in end of 2013 14 so it was a timing thing i would like to say that we were a big reason why the uk market also picked up more really because we were reaching a lot of people millions of people so the The original idea for the business was content, which wasn't really being done at the time.

45:35Olly Fawcett:And that's blog content, I guess, back then. Yes. And some Twitter and some little bit of socials somewhere. Exactly. Yeah. It was website content, Twitter content and Facebook content. Right. Yeah. But no product. No product. We were simply the aggregator finding the best pairs from across the internet and showing you where you could buy them with a bit of an opinion on what's good, what's not. Right. And that was all being driven by your interest. Yeah. So for how long, sorry, was it just you and a computer? For around 15 months, it was me and three or four freelancers. And then when I left my job after 15 months, then I hired the first full-time person.

46:15Then we got an office after 18 months. And then it went from there. And I realized that hiring people full-time is better than just having freelancers that might be working on three other things.

46:27Olly Fawcett:Yeah. Yeah. Was there a point in those very early days where for you, the idea became a bit more like this could actually work? Because how's the business making money? Yeah, it wasn't making money. The business made nearly no money for nine months. And I was still working in recruitment. I was ready to give up. The recruitment or the sole supplier? Ready to give up the sole supplier. Oh, right. Because I was working in recruitment, having to hit my targets, whilst also building the website a little bit in lunch and in the evening. and that's where the freelancers came in because they would help me whilst i was working put the content out on the website so i was ready to give up the same week or within that two week period we finally got a number one ranking in google for the triple black harachi it was a shoe that i was non-stop talking about right you remember it and that's 20 that's 2015 yeah yeah about 20 yeah around that yeah exactly yeah and everything went mad on that release day we made two thousand pounds in affiliate commissions in around uh an hour so that was the model is that you would make at the time yeah if the article did well on organic search you guys would make cash yeah the thing that exists today that we've always stood by is we help people find out what's next in sneakers and streetwear we tell you what's good and what's not it was always me saying what's good and what's not and it was always a taste and judgment thing and that's what it is today not me but 18 people across the marketing team that have taste personality their own individual style giving you what they think is good so it's human beings helping other human beings to get inspired yeah and find out what the cool brands and products are that are coming and that is that is why the sole supplier is important for the audience and also for the brands that is why probably this year we've had more income in briefs from brands than ever because we've scaled our content we've doubled our reach monthly from 23 million to 50 million fuck right in a year in in since the start of this year shit what without hiring more people or without spending any more money and we've done that for improving the content strategy how the content lands and who engages with it like it's been a powerful year for our content strategy but it works because real human beings with real perspectives real opinions and that's what the audience like and that's what the brands like and the brands can't do themselves yeah because obviously they're the brand they're going to say they're good they need a third party like an influencer or a sole supplier to certify so that's where it started ollie like so how do you real brands now what's the interaction with brand you said the partnerships piece mostly partnerships yeah mostly brands that we know we can tell a great story with we look at what they've got coming up we say that would be great that would be great they tell us what they're trying to do yeah and we put together a plan for them that will help elevate their brand create new demand and help them land in culture for real not just a one-off campaign not just can you pump this shoe it's like how are we going to work with you to help your brand with gen z actually land yeah so it gets adopted not so it's forced into their minds and the only way we can do that is we say to the team what do you think of this brand we could work with them they're like no no their products aren't good enough there's nothing to tell about this story it's our job to find the story right so we've turned down brands we still turn down brands but when we work with a brand it's always like a partnership they're coming to us to understand how do we land in this market correctly yeah and that's always like us going we think these products could be good and them saying but we want to talk about these and a partnership of like how we do it together nice but 12 years doing this it has to work for the audience and us and them if we just play for the brands the audience get pissed off the triangle it's the triangle yeah one of the four yeah you're full fucked so that's why people will be like oh you you're just saying you turn down brands because you're trying to sound like a humble no no no i would have said that before probably but the reason we do it is because it will it will ruin the audience and we've done that before right we've hush stuff that we know we've just been paid for we've done that before everyone has right again it's these things where you've got to just experience the fucking mistake right yeah and the pain and the and the the cringe feeling of why did we do that yeah you know we shouldn't have done it no you said it actually before we started which was that's why you like working in luxury and with those brands because they understand the power of like great content connecting up with human beings on an emotional level like that sort of thing we're just in this game where like a lot of content you know it's all social driven every single brand is trying to go for it there's i think the phrase ai slops come into trend at the moment but i think there's just general slop as well yeah there's just general like nonsense influencer campaigns are the same for years as well so 2013 2014 2015 you start the business starts to grow you start to find success when do things start to become more difficult as you enter 2015 2016 well that was a golden era 2016 17 was the golden era for shoes we grew from 2014 all the way through to 2022 for eight years solidly we grew i thought this is never gonna end we was on a non-stop crypto meme coin ball run when you say grow are you talking about revenue team the whole lot revenue traffic content reach the team the team grew too fast and then did how were you sorry to interrupt you but how were you doing in your mind in those years i was you getting a bit ahead of yourself oh was i i was like i went through periods over that eight years of not drinking all right and to dial in and because because drinking was never helpful for me it never has been okay and then i'd go through periods of like party and celebrate it was like oh we've got this big win this week dan let's go out you know or someone from the team that we got on well with let's go out and celebrate and then we'd be back on and it'd be like rocky of like because drinking ruins your decision making um it also clouds your judgment to problems that might exist right it's very easy to go out and have a drink and ignore the problems and then for that to carry over into next week so drinking's a great mask to help you ruin your business is what i'd say and i've been there yeah yeah where you just want to go we'll do that next week that problem and then you just go out again because it's thursday the other problem is like for a lot of businesses if you're a service base or even for you i imagine a lot of deals are done in a pub like it is one of the industry like we're not the industries it is still one of the worlds where like business still elevates itself a little bit around a lot of events events yeah dinners like i was up for breakfast this morning with a business contact it's like you know you could easily do this five days a week and probably have mimosas for breakfast definitely yeah media is like that yeah yeah i think we were lucky but when when the crypto rug pull happened if we was to call it that was in 20 at the end of 2022 when we started to see on social media comments like soul suppliers pushing another shoe again soul suppliers here selling us another nike i'm like nah these are just a few random people this is on social on socials right which is not a good thing to see that's poor sentiment that's people criticizing your brand for being greedy effectively yeah and they were doing that because during 2021 and 2022 we went all in on pushing products because that's what we thought people wanted they were sitting at home furloughed fashion was booming right for a while selling you got e-com on the site at this point no it was just it was just pumping products from different brands and retailers that we worked with got it and we had a phenomenal year in 2021 and coming into 2022 we stopped doing all of the content that was helpful that was with human beings in it that had personality we stopped doing our youtube channel that was getting millions of views every month that had that had david beckham on six months before we stopped on the podcast i sat with him and interviewed him and we stopped doing it crazy to even think that we would stop it just for that reason alone but why did you stop we stopped doing it because youtube wasn't making money directly you couldn't like the monetization wasn't worth the production youtube didn't seem like it was making money so we stopped doing the activity and the things that were soft the content that seemingly didn't make money and we focused on the channels and the activities that made us money right here and now the sales of today and that is the biggest mistake ever because we went 95 into the sales focused content the performance and we stopped doing the brand investment and YouTube was the biggest brand investment and what we saw looking back in 2024-25 was when we stopped doing YouTube branded searches dropped that year after Google rankings had dropped everything lined up when we got better at understanding data so we understood that YouTube was creating a halo effect on all the other marketing channels it was making us a lot of money but just not directly and so this is why the biggest mistake for us was pulling out that brand spend and going all in on performance and i know now this is because most people are not ready to buy today they're ready to buy tomorrow so if you're there as the company with the helpful content that makes people laugh that helps them learn you know you're there with the billboard or the radio ad with the jingle and the mascot not that we were doing that but the same principle then when that person's ready to buy tomorrow you're there in the back of their mind yeah but when we were there in 2022 with the cost of living crisis here all we were there doing was knocking saying buy this and they're like fuck you sole supplier we don't have the money trainer prices have gone up my income's gone down i haven't gone on holiday for two years we don't want you anymore they were actively disregarding us so it was how did you realize all this what happened years later in true reflection of like but was there like a crash in 2022 23 did something happen where you like how bad did the revenue get did you notice it in the numbers yeah yeah so the crack started appearing end of 2022 2023 that cost of living crisis was everywhere people were talking about it non-stop yeah revenue dropped off for us that year around 15 i'd say right it continued we dropped around 25 to 30 revenue across the 18 months we had to let go of uh 10 to 12 people across 2023 and the start of 2024 and we had grew for eight years solidly and that was the first time ever that we had had revenue drop and to let go of people at once and man it was horrible for everybody you know i thought the business was going to go under at that point did you because we had to let go of people in 2023 and at the start of 2024 like two rounds and when you do two rounds of redundancies you start to think we're probably going to have to do another one at some point because this is where the business is going so it's really scary going from being on top of the world eight years of growth to now we're letting people go and it looks like the company might fall apart so how were you in that time yeah there were moments of like you know like yeah dark moments of like not being able to cope with initially not being able to cope with the having to let people go part and how i was going to handle that because not only did it signal failure it was like people's jobs that we that had worked at the company some of them for a good few years a tight team yeah so it was learning to deal with like the emotional bit of having to do that was hard as well as the thought of the old fears came back within me of the kid that didn't do well at school he's now not going to be doing well again if this all goes wrong and what my family going to do as well and what if this company goes down further and what the rest of the people so it's like you're in doom for a bit and learning to deal with the doom and the terror and the fear and the future projection is the hard thing you have to stay try and stay present when the mind is so powerful and it wants you to lay there at night thinking about what it could look like in the worst case you know when when you're bullish you're laying there at night thinking all the great stuff and that is uncontrollable as well but you don't realize it as much when it's positive right but when it's negative and you realize you can't stop these thoughts they're keeping you awake constantly is there something you did alone in a room or like speaking whatever it was is there something you did as a clear action to try and get through that time speak to my key people in my team you know share the pain be the vulnerable leader if that's what you want to call it like not that i haven't been but telling them how i'm feeling like a few of my close people maya christian dan saying look i'm struggling here maybe like you need to have a few days off you need to do this they said that yeah like you need to a couple of them come to my house at one point when i was like really struggling and i was ending up drinking too much and all that and they was like look we need to we need to have a word with you because you're really struggling here but it made me it's made me an all-round better person and character truly not that i would want to go through that in that way again but it's a classic thing look back on that experience and has it made me way more thoughtful about this business absolutely yeah and does that mean that everyone in the business is going to benefit from my experience there because i am way more thoughtful around how i'm conducting our finances how i work with the cfo how we validate opportunities our cash flow like that doesn't mean i'm not taking risks and bets but it means that i have a responsibility to look after the company the people my family in that way yeah i've got to be more mindful i can't just be all high on success and hiring because i think it feels right you know I've got to be more diligent with things I'm doing.

1:01:30Olly Fawcett:I don't think there is a successful entrepreneur that hasn't gone through hell and back at some point in any business or any time in their career. It's such a painful thing when you go through it. I've been through versions of what you've just explained in different ways and in different instances. And I feel like I've done quite well at fucking a lot of stuff up along the way. And I think it's like what I always try and think about now as I sit here today, you know we're our main business is doing a lot of exciting things and it's an exciting time for us but like i do remember those dark times and i remember those sleepless nights and everyone writes about them on linkedin and goes through them i'm always just trying to think of like what can i remember now the feeling i have now when things are okay so because it's going to happen again yeah like the probability is is you're going to go through shit again in in self-splotter i'm gonna go through some shit with my thing and it's just like how do you what can stop the mind from going especially with the adhd sprinkled in there because i do think that's actually one of the hardest times for someone who's got symptoms of adhd or a version of it or where the fuck's going on or anyone really like in that moment it's really mind over matter like that's that's the change i think that's going to happen do you know what i mean yeah what can you do to keep yourself grounded when you're successful and what can you do to remind yourself that it's not always going to be painful when you're having a bad time it's kind of what you're getting at really it's like that balance thing don't ride way too high on success that you forget what pain looks like yeah and don't wallow too much in pity and forget what success looks like it's like how do you keep trying to bring yourself back to to baseline is what i'm better at now yeah it's a really philosophical way to say it but i just have a lot more faith now i have a lot more faith that whatever's going to happen is going to happen i have less fear around a lot of things whatever's going to happen is going to happen and i have less fear and more faith because i do the right things by myself first that means i don't drink anymore i'd conduct myself in a way that i am a good family man and i'm a good business man and i try my best there's nothing in my way of my own success or own stability anymore and i was trying to get to that point for years and that's what i said at the start about like self-reflection how do you get reflect enough so you can figure out what you need to stop doing or what you need to do more of and just do more of those things consistently so you can wake up every day and be that person that you want to be in your head without going to sleep at night regretting that you didn't be that person today which i was doing for a lot of years yeah and so if you can do that then you will be way less regretful if something goes wrong but if you if you and and don't get me wrong the mind is powerful we trick ourselves all the time into believing that the stories right yeah i'm not saying i've got full control of the mind and everything but i do believe that if you are that person yeah when tough times come you go did i give it my best was i the person i knew i should have been most of the time yeah okay well give yourself a break and try and get through this yeah but the reason the redundancies were painful for me was because i wasn't being the best version of myself for a long time in that success period as great moments of being that good version but there was a lot of time i i spent way too much money on things that i shouldn't have in the business and outside the business there was a lot of times where i just turned a blind eye to problems and said i'll get to them tomorrow that's laziness you know so there was a lot of values and traits that i was holding that let me down uh laziness still the old ego coming in lack of motivation drinking too much all of these things piles up piles up compounds yeah big time yeah you mentioned before i mean it sounds like you've got a fantastic inner circle in the business but we've spoken a little bit about team over the last 13 years has your perception on team changed from when you first started the business to now when i first started hiring people i did not know what i was looking for i didn't know how to interview people and i didn't know what good looked like once they started right which meant that someone could join the business they do a little bit of everything it wouldn't be clear how they'd be successful and if they weren't proactive they'd kind of just struggle because if a proactive person joined they'd figure it out right you know someone that was motivated and proactive they'd get stuck in and christian is one of those people christian's our head of partnerships he started as a freelance writer really he started as a freelance writer he had come back from traveling he was i'm going to do some writing just work for the soul supplier great and now he's our head of partnerships we've had a record-breaking year for our partnerships this year christian and dan have been a big reason as to why that's been christian's phenomenal but he was one of the people that just got stuck into the chaos and kind of found problems to solve in the business um but yeah it was a big problem with me and how i was hiring it was just reckless i wanted to hire people because i thought the number looked good it was a classic when we got to 48 people yeah when when it's when the number was like i used to say i've got 50 people in the company it wasn't it was 48 but it's like how many people yeah 50 i swear when you fill out a form on a website it says zero to i'm like no 50 to 100 motherfucker like so it was ego again it's like check it learning to check your own ego is like it was for me it's everything because this fucking ego gets in the way of good decision making it does things like that where it's hiring people and obviously there was a lot of good hires in that bunch but yeah do you think there's a way to find i wonder how you do it now because i imagine you're still involved a lot in team changes and growth yeah how do you find the a-star players how do you find the killers man even google have like a what a 50 50 did they get their hit rates like 70 yeah i think or not but i think it's like 50 50 when they roll out the like research they're like hiring's like a 50 50 game yeah so what can you do to improve it really maybe we've just got to come to accept that we need to assess based on the values that we want to bring in we need to assess for me now if you're joining the marketing team you better care a lot about trainers and streetwear that's number one and then you've got to be a nice person who is helpful to others okay number two it's as simple as that like because that's going to breed trust that's going to breed like knowledge sharing that's going to breed like person learning more because they're a nice approachable person it's like being a nice person Gary Vee says this if it's true I always used to laugh when Gary Vee used to say just be fucking nice man that's it and it's like what he means is because that breeds trust it breeds everything i think so yeah it's like do they care in marketing about shoes are they a nice person great then do they have the job skills because in my 12 years we can always teach them the stuff if they're a nice approachable person and if they if they want to do well for themselves they'll learn in the business now you positioned as the ceo the founder like what's your position it's the ceo founder yeah and do you have a direct team kind of reporting into you yeah we have the senior team we make decisions together we have a strategic team every two weeks we do like a sprint planning where we look at what do we want to look at for the next two weeks they might be things that are going to help us make more money in the future and a little bit of how we make more money today they're strategic things and the senior team we keep each other accountable we share stories with each other around how we handle things in the team what we could have done better what people are saying on the ground as well how we can fix those problems to make it a better place for people to work and yeah we check each other like i was told around three months ago when we started leadership training it came out in the woodwork day one you've been a bit authoritarian recently i'm like i thought i was just bringing more solutions to problems they're like yeah but number one we can't work at that speed you're bringing a lot of solutions and number two they're solutions when we should discuss the opportunity and what the solution is together because some of these things you're bringing are big solutions and they might be right because don't get me wrong you have had lots of good ideas George not all of them but we need to discuss as a team and I was doing that because I'm scarred still from that redundancy thing when i see a problem i want to fix it as soon as possible because i'm scared that if i if we do not fix it quick enough we'll get back to a point where we might have to let people go again and i don't want that i just want to grow are you a bit teetery at the moment teetery meaning is in you a bit on the edge with everything at the moment no after it no not right now but that is how it's changed my behavior you see that's interesting and i don't even realize it until the team say it's just taking ruthless action is what it's turned me into those traits of like being lazy or letting a problem slip i've gone the complete other way where i work more where i'll really just keep track of things more it's just like the pendulum swung the other way a bit too much yeah yeah it's often the way in the reaction to i guess crises yeah you kind of do the opposite thing way too much and you're in the other other way because you are like you say panicking you're scared of the rest of it yeah i think it's super common like redundancies are fucking horrible letting go of anyone's horrible i hate firing like i hate it even though you know it's the right thing at the right time and all those sorts of things there's no part of the negatives that seem to be that enjoyable to be honest and you do then react and go right next time i'll make sure i'm even more diligent on the hire or we lost a great member of the team we're going to fix all those problems tomorrow and you know i think immediate reactions and that intensity a very uh very to the adhd trait to be honest yeah but the medication solved all that for me yeah my my emotional stability is chill now really yeah yeah like having that meet that leadership training where the team said you're a bit too authoritarian now number one they felt comfortable to say it around that table and we discussed how that's come out in the in the woodwork like how it come come up in meetings yeah and number two um i wasn't as reactive when they said that not that i would shout or get angry before but i was a bit more like it was a painful meeting that to learn that and it really hurt me but i was able to sit there and take it in and listen and the dramatic bond change that calls between the team with us after from having like more openness in that first so it's all stuff like this it's like rather than dismiss it and be like quite angry and like i was able to like take it in because i've got a bit more space in my mind now i don't know whether that's because of the meds or whatever else but something's changed that shit's important yeah is there a part of your job that you hate and i do quite literally mean hate um

1:13:25yeah the part of the job that i hate is that there's 34 people in the company and most of the time i really enjoy leading supporting problem solving but i'm not doing a lot of the work the work for me is not the creative focused work that it once was yeah don't get me wrong there's working on strategies there's planning there's research there's thinking about problems there's analyzing there's a lot of conversations to do that there's a lot of valuable stuff that i'm doing but is it me creating something writing a great piece of content filming the video putting it out to the world and having pride like our brilliant content team do and i see them buzzing that they've created like a wicked piece of content for nike or something that's popped off a new series like it's not the same and that is it something i hate no but is it something that i really crave and miss about the early days for me of being that person that was just building and creating yeah man that's like everything so for me now my personal brand is a little outlet writing posts for linkedin i've just started my personal youtube channel again to share

1:14:47Olly Fawcett:stories and lessons appreciate it's great yeah and we're going to have more behind the scenes stuff coming out on there that's i'll upload talks that i've done on there i mean there's a lot of stuff i want to share just to just as a creative outlet that's what that is for me yeah because i'm a creative person i i started this business for that reason to create and build and sometimes if you're just stuck in team management and problem solving i come home sometimes and i'm like that was just an absolute conundrum of a day whereas if you're just sitting at your computer creating it's like flow you're in creative mode it's a whole different thing of interpersonal relationships team dynamics are the most complex thing and having to deal with those every week because whether things are good or whether they're always there you know would you ever think about someone else being a ceo of source player yeah and we've seen it work at companies right absolutely but i don't know right now is the truth it's a hard one isn't it yeah i arrogantly think no one could do it as well as me right now yeah yeah and i say that because the bond that we have as a team and the senior team i think if i have to be one of the current team do i have to be do you think it would have to be one of the current team we've spoken about this as well and it would only be a combination of a couple of them yeah because both of the people said they're missing this thing if it was just them when i went on paternity leave we do 10 weeks paternity leave at the sole supplier by the way no you're not hiring right now because two weeks is not enough for new dads join the soul supplier the snore's funny isn't it but but when i was off that that's when that come about i was like how would you feel if this was like more of a full-time thing the business can run without me yeah that that's for sure and it can run without most people because we've built the right systems that's why we can cope with a duvet day when someone goes because if someone doesn't come in doesn't crash then what's your what you're not building a business you've built a something where it's not an engine is it then again actually like an f1 car if a bit of the engine breaks the whole car's pretty fucked so also i guess you're in a you're in a world where like you've got reserved drivers and you've got spare parts like that's kind of the world you're living right which is a scalable profitable business it has to be it has to be we have to be building as if we were going to sell in the future yeah what would that what would someone that's going to buy your business one they would want you as the founder in the senior team to not be the points of failure they'd want you to hand them a guidebook that says this is how you can run it so therefore you need key strategies in each place yeah you need good people yeah and you need a growth like it needs to be systemized anyway when i was off on paternity leave we discussed this and it was that same thing of like there was just a few things that they said we really needed you here in this and we need you here for this it made me feel wanted more because as a boss or founder or ceo no matter how the senior team's brilliant we're open i don't get as much feedback upwards positive or negative and it does come no doubt you hear it but it doesn't flow up as naturally as it flows down i don't think any business it does yeah yeah right like and that's okay but sometimes no matter how resilient you are you sometimes question these things sometimes you go how valuable am i here like do like do they really do they value me and the way that i'm doing things so doing this leadership training you get to hear more of that as well and that's nice and creating like a culture of like positive and constructive feedback yeah it's really important it's what we spoke about before yes isn't it yeah definitely if that's not going on regularly it creates a kind of people are doubtful about weird environment yeah no one knows what the fuck's going on yeah you included yeah exactly yeah so how big is the sole supplier now i mean a couple of numbers i think you have four and a half million users monthly i think you've driven 350 million in um gmv 350 million in tracked revenue for partners yeah so so that's tracked revenue right our content has reached billions of people over the last decade online i can't think what the number must be that has been driven across all of their marketing channels.

1:19:11Olly Fawcett:Do you reckon it's a billion? As a result of our content. Billion good? Probably because there's this thing called the Halo Index which is from a company called Partnerise and they did this big study on how influential content partners are and creators in terms of driving sales to the brands that they work with. and they saw that in clothing it's around two and a half times more sales that are driven than are actually tracked so two and a half times more sales would be driven on Nike's actual channels than we tracked on a last click basis so it could be in terms of value close to a billion but I'm not going to sit here and say that's the case I will but what I really want now for this industry last click is a dead way to measure especially the stuff we're talking about right brand investment yeah top of funnel middle of funnel if we're reaching millions with content if this year 50 million people reached a month i don't know how that number because you'd have to de-dupe that number yeah right on social so but last week our reach was the highest reach week ever it was 23 million in a week last week so so and there was serious engagement behind that multiple different content franchises our own and for brands you're like none of that can be measured on a last click basis it's only having an effect in the market like in people's minds i mean i do i generally a lot of the conversations i'm a part of is exactly what it was with what you're saying and i think a lot of people are starting to think a lot more about brand i think a lot more people will think about the middle of the funnel more than anything that we all know a lot of brands like i knew the sole supplier i didn't know what you did until about a year ago because i'd seen it and i'd seen linkedin and i'd seen insta and etc and i'd seen articles and i was like oh then you go on the site it takes a while to just understand do you know what i mean even if we all know the biggest brands in the world but there are a lot of brands where you're like oh i've heard of them i've seen them so they do what do they actually do what they stand for that's really interesting what you're saying about this so what brought you to speak to me then if you had to pin it down what was it um how long you've had a business for yeah but how did how did you come across linkedin linkedin i've followed your linkedin journey for the last two years probably i appreciate um do you know what i did on linkedin the other a couple of days ago i was using a claude project and some different tools that i use yeah and i i looked at all of the reactions from all of my posts over the last year this year this year who was liking my posts who was commenting i looked at all of our target brands and all of the contacts yeah and i saw that nearly every target brand that we wanted to go after had liked to post whether that was sorkinney merrill nike a load of adidas's marketing team the maddest thing on this is the people that don't like your content that see it right so like i've had conversations in at 303 and a good friend of mine runs a um seo and ae agency in premium luxury similar to us similar size business is us like you know that we're well connected and we always talk about this because we got jump on you know new opportunity to call news business calls and how you heard of us i found you on linkedin yeah oh you're on look and you can't see they've liked a single thing they just follow you yeah they don't even engage with the content they just see it and consume it yes and because of the scroll scroll stoppers and all that kind of stuff that no one ever thinks about just being in the world is being in the world yeah it's so important that because 90 of people on social media they do not like or comment or engage with anything they're lurkers it's the it's the it's the stat that happens every year yeah so if 10 like you say and out of that 10 most of our target brands someone from them have liked a post of mine then that is absolute justification that linkedin's working but linkedin is a linkedin personal posting is a brand activity yeah isn't it it's a brand investment yeah i was questioning the value of it for a while there's a few people yeah right people in the office will take the piss yeah you know like dan who my best friend i work with he's like oh linkedin again he's like oh here he goes what's that i post for linkedin and it's like i've got the data now right yeah yeah i've got the data okay look yeah and is this me saying that it's my linkedin that's brought in those brands obviously not because it's part a small part of it but we would have had to have done all the good content and work yeah in the world anyway of course for me to be able to say something on linkedin so like you've got to do the work first i think every business anyone building anything you know the linkedin game is is very worthwhile yeah i think the content game is even more worthwhile um george my last question we just went through how big the soul supplier has got your journey to get there 13 years of blood sweat tears and sometimes wanting to give up like what does it take to build a business like the soul supplier self-reflection figure out the thing that you want to do that you just like a little bit more than the other things do more of that thing figure out the stuff that's stopping you doing more of that thing and figure out how you get better at that thing and do it for long enough so that you can do that thing better than others around and then you'll eventually figure out an idea that makes you a business like the sole supplier hopefully by the way i don't like to give advice like that but the point here is is that isn't it it's it's figuring out what you like leaning more into it that's all we have in this world isn't it yeah just trying to test things out and figure out what's the thing for me it's going to be different for everyone this isn't me saying woo woo like follow your passion and all of that it's just like if if there was anything that lasted for me it was because i liked it people try and make money online or with a business because they hear someone's made money doing something and they try and copy it yeah and i've done it as well i do this still i until recently i did this to this day i'd go on linkedin i'd see someone doing something crazy with ai two years ago i tried to build a linkedin uh bot for content and now there's loads of them but i spent about five grand trying to do that whilst i was running the soul supplier nice i should have been turning the soul supplier around so it's very easy to get tainted by what other people are doing in the world but only you know your thing that makes you tick only you know the thing that you lay there at night and think i want to do more of that thing tomorrow yeah and sometimes the sad thing is that's not where the money is so that's the problem that we have when people say follow your passion well it doesn't always work like that the thing that you love the most might not be something that can make money certainly not but i still think there's great advice there um for sure but look thank you i I really appreciate coming on the show.

1:26:14Olly Fawcett:It's been almost a whirlwind of different stories, which I love. And congratulations, man, because thanks. What a business you've gone through it for sure. And I'm excited to see where you go next. There's a different world on the horizon with AI and content and, and so many challenges you're about to face, which I look forward to seeing you overcome. Yeah. But yeah, I really appreciate the time and as always, and I'm sure we'll see you soon. Thanks. Cheers, dude. Nice one.