Ep.40 When Do You Know It's Time To Walk Away? Taking Career Risks With Iconic TV Presenter Jake Humphrey

0:00The person that I met with said, BBC Sport doesn't employ people like you. The 2012 Formula One season has come and gone. I did feel underappreciated and underloved and I felt like the only way to do that was to walk away and show someone else what I could do and deliver my talents. Welcome to our new home. Welcome to BT Sport. And it would have been the easiest thing in the world to stay at the Beeb for another four years but I thought, you know what, I'm not going to sit in the comfort chair. I'm going to take a risk. You're going to be on the earth for 70 years, right? You don't need to achieve everything in the first 21.

0:32The phone rang and it was a guy from the BBC and he said, I saw some of your TV show that you were working on this weekend. You're a shining star in a sea of shit. Everywhere you look, you're shown perfection. What I want people to understand is that that perfection didn't come for free.

0:56What is up, guys? And welcome back to Working Hard Hardly Working. today's episode is inspiring so I hope you're ready to be inspired I was just sitting there like nodding like a little um nodding dog thing you know those yeah sure anyway honestly I just felt like it was one of those episodes that I'm going to go back and listen to when I just really need like a kick up the ass or like but also to like a nice kick up the ass that sounds horrible and also quite dodgy but like motivation in a nice friendly way I don't know I just thought this was some of the best advice I'd kind of listened to and was just such a good conversation on the idea of success versus failure and our paths and careers and the speed we should be going at sprints versus you know a nice little jog so I hope you really enjoyed this episode I think it's a really good one personally I would say that you know it's my podcast as always please rate the podcast if you do enjoy it please share it with your friends if you do enjoy it and if not just don't let me know because it will hurt me I hope you really enjoy this episode and as always have a lovely day

2:00thanks so much for joining me to set the scene would you be able to give a little whistle stop tour on the background of like who you are and kind of how you got to where you are now but we can we can drag that bit out a little bit longer yeah okay um it's always hard to know how you got there right that's one of the challenging things i think a lot of people will see the amazing stuff that you put out on Instagram and the incredible story of your businesses and what they will I think maybe come to this podcast for or other podcasts like it is to connect the dots in advance one of the hardest things I think is that you're not able to do that yeah sure and it's only now when I think of oh that was a really key moment in my career or that was a moment that really had a long-lasting impact the truth is at the time I had no idea so the learning from that is just be you and give 100 % to everything because you you don't know when that moment's going to come so what were the sort of moments for me again they were totally disguised like I always try and say this in a way that it comes across right but I sometimes think that it feels a bit stupid to say I was the most normal person you could ever imagine because it sounds a bit too self deprecating although I'm trying to make a point but what I'm trying to say is I grew up thinking you had successful people I you know 30 years ago I'd see your Instagram and go wow she's naturally successful I'm naturally not I just thought there was a secret to high performance that I wasn't exposed to or I wasn't born into wealth or anything so came from a small village in Norfolk dad was a charity worker mum was a teacher house absolutely full of love probably not a house full of like die-hard ambition you know they was like go to school get a degree if you can go to university and get a job that was the kind of plan really heavy work ethic I had a paper round really early I carried on doing it till I was about 16 my mum and dad were always palming me off to neighbours houses to mow their lawn do their gardening for like two pounds an hour or whatever the big moment really was I was like super normal didn't do any acting didn't do any stuff at school wasn't any sports teams failed my a-levels that was like a really big key moment for me and that was around a time of like deep and intense failure or struggle or negative things happening so I worked at McDonald's and I got fired and I know now like we can laugh and think fired from McDonald's how ridiculous yeah but when you're 17 and all your mates work there and they come in because you can like chat to them while they're buying their food and then you have to tell them you've been sacked like that is deeply embarrassing even to go home to your parents at that age and go I've been fired from a fast food restaurant particularly when none of us thought like that jake had any sort of special talents or it wasn't like don't worry because you're great at this i didn't really have anything so i got fired from that i lost my grandma around that time she committed suicide which again is a really difficult thing to cope with mentally when you're when you're doing your a-levels and you're a teenager because your grandparents you feel like they've got it sorted like i mean i've never experienced that so i can't i can't imagine how tough that would have been but i can also imagine conceptually you have this such like naive approach to life when you're a teenager like it's it's so sweet and naive in the way that you're like kind of of course you'd want to live and like that kind of whole approach to thinking about something so I can imagine that just being turned on its head in that moment like that's a lot alongside grief conceptually for a teenager to be able to deal with the difference between someone wanting to live and someone deciding that that wasn't what they wanted to do I can imagine that just rocking your entire world grief aside you're totally right because i think like i'd already lost grandparents before then there's something very different though to your mum sitting down and i remember her telling me when like my when my grandma when my grandpa died for example he was ill and he was in his 80s i remember them just sitting down and going listen we've got some news grandpas died in the night and you kind of go amazing guy amazing life sad but this is you you're told that that's the circle of life right when you've got a healthy fun amazing dynamic brilliant grandma who seems okay then it is very difficult thing to deal with and actually i remember it specifically difficult because about three or four days before i was doing my a-level um revision and she came around and i remember her walking past my bedroom where i was doing my revision and she just she did look really sad i said you okay she goes oh i don't know i don't think I can carry on I'm just really sad and I remember going oh you'll be fine grandma carry on with my and with my revision and I'm not saying it would have made the difference if I'd have stopped and gone whoa hold on a minute but you kind of wish you had and you do carry that um so that was a moment for sure where I learned a lot about the world and then it wasn't long after that I failed my a levels so again I had to learn not through any desire or design i had to learn to dust myself off so then really quickly went back to school the day i went back to school there was a letter from a local tv channel looking for politics students to go and work on a tv show just to offer their opinions at the weekend i went there explained that i'd failed my a-levels that i was around and i was available worked basically for free ended up doing bits of presenting ended up being offered a job was that something that had you previously been interested because that's ambition and i didn't have any of that and i think it's just because i was a really late developer like i was physically a late developer mentally a late developer i was just like the kind of class clown the kind of average kid at school that just made people laugh yeah very popular and you know nothing special so i certainly wouldn't have said i'm gonna be a tv presenter also like grace i'm from a small village in norfolk like people like me just don't be tv presenters or that's how it felt at the time but then I got off of a job£6 ,472 a year if I remember correctly was my starting salary and then one day I was at work and the phone rang and it was a guy from the BBC and he said is that Jake Humphrey I said yeah and he said I saw some of your TV show that you were working on this weekend you're a shining star in a sea of shit which I kind of took I kind of took as a review yeah yeah go on as long as I was the shining star not the sea of shit right then I'm happy and he invited me down to London and I had a few meetings they then launched the CBBC channel I started on that as a CBBC presenter like couldn't believe it had this actually happened I was a kids tv presenter amazing time there the BBC then won the rights to Formula One paid millions of pounds for them and there was this feeling that they had to try and make their sports coverage a bit younger a bit fresher yeah I took that job I got offered that job accepted it incredible how sorry how old were you at this stage by now so i was like the a-level failure two or three years in telly so i was then in my early 20s and then it was eight years at cbbc so now i'm like 29 probably okay so it was quite young to get that formula yeah no that's incredible did that for four years and then we can talk about this in more detail but walked away from the beef joined bt sport um and then i'm now sitting here with you in the meantime i started I had a production company called The Whisper Group, which has now got about 300 staff.

9:10It's pretty successful, based in West London. I've got a podcast called High Performance, a couple of kids, an amazing wife. I live back in Norfolk where it all started. Sometimes it's really nice just to stop and look back on all that because you just don't do that, you know? I think one of the, as you were kind of saying earlier, one of the reasons we listen to podcasts is because we try and learn from people's mistakes or failures before we've made them ourselves. And obviously there's only an element of that that you can do like you're gonna make the mistakes you're gonna make but it feels like your story is so one of those that like of course there's serendipity in there but it's also like it feels feels like it had to happen that way like it almost feels like you and I would like in terms of like the you know being fired from McDonald's or like the a levels or any of those things it's like in order to grow your sense of self to be at the point that you would be you know just applying for that presenter role rather than from a point of ambition actually from a point of kind of well what else am I going to do this has just come through my door I think is so important to look at because we kind of lots of the time see things always having to have risen from ambition at that stage and actually like trusting the process and trusting the like direction of your life in terms of like what way you're going to go I do think it's incredibly important and I think it's hard at the moment to trust the direction because like I'm a lot older than you I'm in my 40s right so when I was growing up thankfully there was no social media there was no showing off there was no way of knowing what everyone else was doing because all it would have done is make me feel even worse and even more inferior and that's the real challenge I think for people now is that everywhere you look you're shown perfection now what I want people to understand is that that perfection didn't come for free right you and your businesses haven't come for free what I've done hasn't come for free and I think now we live in a world where people I get people not saying to me how should I start out in television they say how can I get a job presenting the Champions League or how can I be a Formula One presenter or how can I present match of the day and it's like well you have to do the work and actually the truth is a lot of the work is in just the being in the doing the failing the trying again and I know that there's a slight element of well you've been through it and you've failed and you've learned all these things why don't you just tell me yeah that's kind of not enough yeah no but also you like the actual experience in order to make you the person you were when you took that formula one job if that opportunity had been there nine years earlier or eight years earlier or whenever it is that you kind of got your first proper presenting job you wouldn't have been in the right place to take it like you wouldn't have been experienced enough all my mistakes came on this tiny channel it's called rapture television all my mistakes came there and then they came on children's bbc so i i talk about it as being like a pilot getting your wings yeah what people need to do is realize you need to get your like wings for life like you need to do all of that stuff which can be sometimes frustrating when i remember right when i really wanted to be a sports presenter i've been maybe five years on children's bbc i wanted to be a sports presenter went for a meeting and explained this to them and i thought it'd be a lot of funny to say I failed my A-levels and I got fired from McDonald's and the person that I met with they were responsible for finding new presenters for BBC Sport and they said BBC Sport doesn't employ people like you in other words you haven't got a degree you haven't you're not a trained journalist you haven't played football or rugby or cricket to an elite level you're not what we're looking for and I think that that was actually a really brilliant message for me because it meant I had to find another way now if that had happened to me and I hadn't done the years on children's bbc and I hadn't had the a-level failure and I hadn't had those setbacks from mcdonald's and having to deal with grief in the way that I had I think that that would have just derailed me but instead it just energized me and I thought fine I will absolutely show you what I should be doing and I actually ended up getting an ISDN kit which is the old way of sort of broadcasting from matches and I used to earn like 100 pounds on a Saturday to go and report for the radio for BBC radio and I was on CBBC at the time where I thought my career had taken me to a certain point and it was going right back to the beginning and saying fine let me show you yeah so I think that's the other important takeaway is that like the work doesn't stop yeah you know you have had an amazing career right the truth is if you wanted to go and totally pivot in another direction you'd have to be humble enough to go well let me start at the beginning a hundred show you where it works yeah and I think one of the important messages there as well is like I do think social media has positioned us in a way where we like we want so much instant gratification and I'll be the first person to say that because I think you can see by the speed of my career like I'm very much a like I want something and I want it now not I don't say that in like a derogatory sense I kind of like I'm very determined and I'll make something happen and I'm very like spur like I'm quite impulsive in the way that like I'll decide to do something and then spend three days making it happen or you know like back to back and through the night and all of this but I also think that like what's really important when you look at that is it's like sure you can do that but like remember careers are long and you're also by wanting something like the chapter 20 now rather than chapter one you're probably not giving yourself like a great backing to be able to get there like if I went back and did it again I would a hundred percent get more formal experience in what I then wanted to do but at the time I wanted to make a lot of money I wanted to do well I wanted to grow on social media and so like what I did was do anything to make that happen but actually realistically I think if I'd been able to be a little more a little slower a little less impulsive and a little more about building the foundations I would have felt a lot more confident to be able to grow in the direction I needed to grow in like I think I could have learned so much from working in private equity or from working in a startup or from you know going to the production side of fashion or whatever it might be and I do think that there's this like because we want this instant gratification it's also often against our best interests and of course I can say that now because I'm sitting in the position yeah of course it has but I also think that like there are also times now where I'm kind of very much like I rushed into the like you know not everything at all like I love the position I'm in I think I'm in a very powerful position with like Tala for example in the way that I'm their target customer so yeah sure I am probably the best person to be sitting that room and being like no we want that on the leggings but ultimately when it comes to some of the other things I think I rushed it a lot because I wanted it to look like the finished product before it was there this kind of fake it till you make it thing and only now I'm able to kind of like sit here and say those things because it worked out whereas like I could have been sitting here and saying those things were like something had gone bankrupt or like the idea hadn't worked or I didn't what I was terrible at running a company and terrible at managing people or whatever it might have been but I think that kind of like the mistakes the failures but also just the experience as a whole is like so important to have in your like toolbox of like things that you could use to then confront the issues that you come and you know and I would say mine in particular having had like a I'd say eight year career now would be like the grand total of it is like almost every problem I come across is like a very new problem that I haven't had lower risk experience of if that makes sense but you're also um a great advocate for the fact there's more than one way to do something i mean i like i i would say that i've had a great career but quite a slow career so i got into telly at 18 i'm still in telly at 44 and i've still got loads of things i want to do the production company whisper that i've got is has grown organically we've never taken any funding we've never had any debt I'm really proud with where it is I love the fact that it just grew slowly and it kind of grew organically there was no grand plan and I love that um even my podcast you know for the first year it was just a kind of almost like a side hobby and high performance has sort of slowly become more of that and then I see like amazing new podcasts now that are doing now what we've spent three years building up to do but I'm kind of okay with that because I think that it's really brilliant for people to see people like me that actually maybe need to take it slow but also see people like you your calling card what your USP is what your unique ability is is like your conviction of your decision making and your energy and actually that's brilliant because we can all be really sure in our decision making even if we've got loads of doubts under the surface we can still go i'm going to decide this right that's the first thing the second thing is as long as we get enough sleep we should all have the energy yeah so i think you are massively inspirational for people in that yeah i could do with the way that jake's done it and kind of try and find my path and try and work it out as i go or i could just literally be grace and go this is what i'm going to do because actually i know it's easy to go yeah it might not work out well both way of operating may well not work out there is no answer here it's just kind of don't overthink it if you're an energy bunny yeah be super energetic if you're a cautious careful slow i need all the answers before i make a potentially dangerous decision then be that yeah yeah sure no i think that's incredibly important yeah like a really really important differentiation there and i think realistically i never would have not done it the way i did it because that's who i am and i bet you still do it today right you still go hell for leather all the time right oh my god like as in like i know what's good for me and i know what's bad for me and yet you will see me like like i'll have an idea at you know 3 a.m and i'll make it happen by the next day and like all wheels will be in motion and all of this and like but that's not for everyone no of course and i think the danger is these days everyone wants to tell everyone that their way of doing it is the right way that's very true i think what i don't want to happen is by me having the platform that I have that being the only acceptable way to make that happen which I think is what I'm trying to say by that differentiation I also think that like being careful when you are the type of person that I am being careful in the way that time's not going to change based on the fact that you've got to success quicker you're still then going to have that if you burn yourself out you're going to burn yourself out and you're going to take a long time to be able to get out of that if ever and I feel like knowing where your downfalls in that way are very very important because personally I would say that I go far too fast and I do burn myself out to like you know and it's not it's not good for me and I think that like that's all well and good me saying that sitting here and being like you know whatever position I'm in and then being able to be like but don't burn yourself out like you know of course I can say that but I do think it is also important to you know that's it's not it's definitely not always a strength and i think just seeing the fruits of that success on social media on my platforms or whatever without caveating it with that and being like you know i don't really have balance there's like a lot of you know all of those things i think is important what what the world doesn't need is another dynamic entrepreneurial successful wealthy awesome young man or young woman making everyone else feel like they're not doing enough sure that's like the worst conversation that we can have yeah on my podcast on your podcast on any platform what there isn't enough of is people in other people's lives saying just take your time just enjoy it you know you're going to be on the earth for 70 years right you don't need to achieve everything in the first 21 yeah that's the risk that's the danger and you know you're great at being honest and saying well it leaves me feeling burnt out it leaves me feeling anxious and stressed I sometimes don't feel I've got the toolkit because I haven't lived those experiences it's a very interesting conversation because I do think we laud the young early successful entrepreneur oh my god 100 % and also like I think that we it it's the same with like the kind of girl boss kind of rhetoric and like all of the you know we love to see success stories that are against the norm because to us it makes us you know we're able to celebrate it more so you know young successful woman so like whatever it might be it's easier to celebrate that and almost not glorify it too much because I don't think the concept can be glorified too much but in terms of like giving that qualities that it doesn't actually have in terms or like taking away the fact that there would be any negatives there just to celebrate that kind of specific thing which is why I think it's important to kind of be able to talk about the not so great parts not from a kind of like self-flagellating like being like oh but you know life is really hard it's not like it's not that it's just actually being like you know there's always going to be the flip side i want to talk about your starting up with the production company because to get a company to a point where it's got 300 team members is absolutely unbelievable when did you start that and what was the kind of idea for that i love talking about this because i do believe that entrepreneurial people just they the one thing i will be really clear about is i think that they are risk takers they are gamblers they are you know they're constantly buying a lottery ticket they're constantly making a bet now there's a chance and you would have been through many bets and chances in your life that haven't paid off right it's the one that does pay off that is that is the one yes that everyone lords and is excited about but you mustn't stop taking these risks just because you've had a few that don't pay off so i was working in formula one uh between 2009 and 2012 and the bbz moved the sports department to manchester and i was working with this amazing guy called sanil patel who is still the ceo of whisper today and he's one of those rare people where i'd work with great creatives and i'd work with people who are brilliant organizers i've never worked with someone who was hugely creative massive ideas but then got it done just believed they could get it done and sonal was that guy so he said he didn't really fancy going to Manchester because BBC Sport was moving from London to Manchester at the time and with this idea of buying a lottery ticket or being a bit of a gambler I said well let's just set up a production company now I didn't really have a grand plan for that and again don't think you need to put all the dots in place before you make that first decision just make the first decision for what it is we didn't know we were going to be going 10 years later turning over you know probably close to 100 million dollars this year that wasn't the plan the plan was just let's just set up a production company so the two of us got together without even the name of a business and we were lucky enough that we knew obviously loads of the teams in formula one so we went to meet with the williams formula one team and we said to them look you love the coverage on the bbc it was winning lots of awards at the time the viewing figures were really high we said sonal is one of the brains behind the coverage we would love to produce your content and we will basically produce bbc level quality we'll do it cheaper than you've already been paying people anyway um because there was a lot of people in that space at the time that were just overcharging they weren't you know we didn't think giving fair quotes for the work so we said we will just be totally honest we'll charge you what it costs plus 10 to cover our overheads and that's what we'll do and williams took a chance on us they said okay why don't you produce our content for the season the two of us couldn't believe it yeah remember leaving their factory we pulled up in a lay by next to their factory and got out and started dancing and then we were like this looks really bad if one of them comes out of the office and sees a dark center labor so then we started driving back and we were like we don't even have a name for the company we don't have an office we literally had nothing and he'd just been on a lads holiday to and been drinking in a bar called whisper and he had the business card in his pocket and he said well let's just call it whisper and that was it that was the beginning and just for clarification for people who might not have background on like production companies for example was the aim to create their content for their organic platforms or was it to be able to create the content to then sell to say like a channel or something so let's remember we're talking about 2010 2011 so online social media content was nothing like it is now okay like twitter was kind of getting going but it was pretty much just updates like even photos were a tricky thing to put up so what it was really it was to produce content for them on behalf of their sponsors which could then be given to tv channels used in their marketing material used in their motor home just assets basically okay um and that's how it all started my wife worked on strictly come dancing she was a production manager so she left her job to work on the business she worked out of our back office sonal worked out of his study in his house and it's a big you know it's a risk for her she left her job was she your wife at the time she was my wife at the time yeah seems like less of a risk when there's the uh definitely less definitely less of a risk for her.

26:16Oh, my boyfriend's starting this production company and I'm going to quit my job. It's definitely less of a risk for her. But the thing... No, no, no, that wasn't to belittle the fact that it was obviously still a significant risk. It was the fact she was walking away from her dream job which was working on Strictly Come Dancing. 100%, I mean, it's a huge vote of confidence. And I'm like, can you walk away from Strictly just to work on some slightly random Formula One content? Yeah, also for both of your risk as a family or a unit at that time to be completely undiversified. Totally, totally. We were all in at that point into this plan.

26:46And what we actually found, because I think one of the great things about, you know, we've talked about doing things when you're young. One of the great things about naivety, and that would have been one of your superpowers for sure when you first started out, was you just thought every meeting was going to be amazing. Every opportunity was going to work. It was all going to be fantastic. Yeah. Because that's how wonderful being naive is. Be naive. It's okay. I want it back. Don't fully educate yourself. And we were naive, totally naive, to think that we would meet one person, get some work, and then others and others.

27:14the reality was you win that first contract you put all your effort into making that content so you haven't got time to find the next bit of work so eventually we were like we need more help with pitching pitching meeting people commercial contacts all this sort of stuff and we worked with david calthard who's a formula one driver he just retired he was working on the bbc coverage and we said to him would you like to be part of our company and he actually said what would it cost me we hadn't even considered we were so naive to this whole thing we hadn't even considered that he would pay to have some of our business we thought we'd have to come yeah he's asking all the questions i'd be like what are you paying me we were like we'd have to convince him to have some of our business yeah so then we were like well how the hell do we decide what it costs so son of a said well i needed a new bathroom which was 15 grand so big fan of the priority yeah so i said well why don't if i can get 15 grand that'd be brilliant so i said okay well i'll have 15 grand as well and we'll get what should we give him someone was like i don't know 20 of the business like it's literally the best investment david coolthard has ever made yeah christ alive that's a that's a return so he got 20 of whisper for his 30 grand and he was brilliant at are you still selling them i've got something else you might want to invest in but we can talk about that separately um so we started and and then we got loads of commercial work and the business built up to seven or eight people but there was still an element of being unfulfilled because we were tv people and we were still not making television so we then thought well let's go and meet all these tv channels and say come on let's let's make your content and this was a really really interesting time and a lot of takeaways you may well have experienced this as well certainly people listening to this might take something from it we would meet the people that we used to work for and they were they wouldn't commission us to produce their content even though we'd worked with them and they were our former colleagues because they were saying well you haven't got a track record of making anything and we're like well whisper hasn't but we have so how do we solve this dilemma part of it i think was was we were the people that had taken the risk and we were the people that by then were probably a staff of as i say about 10 people and maybe turning over two million pounds a year which to a lot of people like seems hugely successful right so there was probably an element of jealousy and um and also kind of if if we if you were colleagues then why wouldn't it be them if it was like if it was you yeah if you can do that like i've done the same thing as you so why aren't they especially like senior colleagues who would look at us and go hold on you were the kid from cbbc that was presenting formula one you were just an assistant producer sure i'm an exec producer and now you're telling me that you can produce my content so we to find a way around this and i've always been actually it's a nonsense to say that i now think this i can't say i've always been because as i've told you i hadn't known no experience i now realize every business is a recruitment business right it literally is the people so we thought let's just go and hire the best people that we can so then we come back to this whole risk-taking thing and i think that i had been armed against this risk by those things that happened when i was younger i sort of had this mindset of well what can possibly go wrong i've had some stuff happen and it was kind of it was kind of all right my hell of all failure led to me working in television the death of my grandma led to an understanding that life is really precious and you need to enjoy every moment my sacking from mcdonald's led to me working in television because i had the spare time rather than frying fries i was saying i've got loads of time man's can i come work for you so i ended up at rapture tv all all of the negatives literally all of them had been turned into positives.

30:51So it kind of meant, well, what can go wrong? So we went to the best people that we worked with and we said, why don't you come and work for us? And again, we were like totally shocked that these people would leave ITV, BBC, Channel 4, massive production companies. They'd leave those companies and come and work with us. But we knew that if we could get those people, then we could get the job, we could win the work. Now, again, this is a slightly risky way of doing it. most businesses go well if we win the work then we'll hire the people we had to do it the other way we had to find another way to do it and i think one of the things i'm most proud of is that we've always found a way of doing something that nobody else has thought of or isn't a very popular way of operating okay which i think is really vital yeah i think no i think that is um like a great origin story in the way of like we've obviously i've had lots of different people on the podcast in terms of like the story of things starting up but i think that a lot of the entrepreneurship always seems like a big idea made happen rather than like a series of small ideas that kind of forms into what it ends up being which is this huge production company but actually it started from this one decision to like maybe try and get this one contract or yeah absolutely and by the way it's still this didn't solve the problem hiring these people was still a real challenge because what we found was instead of being told we'll never hire you we'd go in to try and win some work and they'd say well you've got some good people so we'll give you this work and it was like the the little bit of the contract you didn't really want to win it there was no value in it it wasn't the elite stuff and we wanted to still to get the best stuff and the other thing that was a bit of a challenge around this time was I was still working as a presenter and it was important for me to make sure that my presenting was totally separate from the production company because what I didn't want was this just to become a vehicle that was successful or unsuccessful depending on my presenting career being successful or unsuccessful and I remember I got a phone call from the head of Channel 4 when they won the rights to Formula One so just to put a timeline on this I had we'd set Whisper up in about 2011 I joined BT Sport at the end of 2012 and I think at the end towards the end of 2013 the BBC lost the rights to Formula and they went to Channel 4 so that we'd been going at Whisper maybe a couple of years right right and the head of Channel 4 rang and said to me I want you to come and be the host of the Channel 4 coverage on Channel 4 and I said well I've just signed a contract with BT Sport I'm really loyal to them I don't I don't feel comfortable walking away from that contract and then they said well if you accept the presenting job then oh we could give whisper the production work now this is a multi-million pound contract we're talking about here that is a that is a juicy juice piece of work so then i'm having to go to sunal to tell him what happened and he said well of course you'll quit bt present formula one and and this will be you know us made so i had to say no like i'm really firm in the fact that what i do is totally separate we have to win this on merit and I still think there are people in the industry that don't think we won this on merit but we absolutely did and do you know what we did we went to all of our amazing contacts in formula one who were working for the b but who were going to be available and we said to all of them agree to only work with us only work with whisper channel four were explicit they said we won't give you this contract the only way we'd get it it was if I came with it and so we're up against a few other really big production companies to win the work and so we actually went to all of these people and said sign this bit of paper that says you'll work with us or you'd love to work with whisper and you'll be we'll make you part of our big package the truth is they could have worked for anyone yeah you can't right you can't control who who and when people work but the fact we'd gone and got all of these names presented them to channel four and i remember we put on the we made we created like a beautiful color like booklet and it said on there like 500 hours of 500 years combined experience of working in formula one like we were the most experienced people yeah we had to win it properly, properly win it on merit.

34:56And that was really the first big thing that we won, which transformed the business. And that was winning the rights to host and produce Channel 4's coverage of Formula 1. And now we do, we still do it. We recently produced the Lionesses for the BBC, the whole of the Women's Euros. We're producing the Paris Paralympics for Channel 4, having just done the Paralympics previously. We work for UEFA, we work for FIFA. we we just commissioned a daytime quiz show with Stephen Fry we've got a chat show in America that we've done we've got another daytime show for ITV we like the business is just picking up big wins everywhere yeah and it all came from naivety it all came from taking that leap of faith and it all came from trying to find another way to solve the puzzle that no one else is solving in that way yeah and it kind of sounds like a continuous like one foot in front of the other and like a rerouting like someone saying someone creating a dead end and then you being like right okay well that's not the right way to do it yeah let's go around this way and you having that gut feeling that like no i'm we're not going to get this purely through me presenting it we're going to do this differently is like the conviction of that decision is i mean it's like really really powerful and definitely um i don't think should be understated in terms of you being really clear what you wanted from the business and what you wanted from that kind of contract if you were going to get it what do you think the biggest mistakes you made when building that company were you see this is a really hard one because I can I can talk about me making mistakes personally one of the real challenges for whisper is because we did it slowly I don't I can't think of any really big mistakes that we made because i think you could argue that doing it really slowly not taking on any investment would be a mistake i mean we also became part of something called the channel for growth fund right which was where channel four were looking for production companies who were small but had more potential than they were realizing to grow um and they invested in us now you could say that was a mistake because they paid a really small amount for their stake and they sold it for a profit um which was great for them but actually i believe that channel 4 totally transformed our business so you can't always put the financial value of something at the at the center of what you do i and i know this sounds like ridiculous grace but sunnel is such a brilliant ceo the business has been so fascinating to watch it grow and i don't i can't think of any big mistakes that we've made the the biggest thing we've done is to bring someone on board with a formula one mindset in david coolzard because the exacting standards that he brings with him we run ourselves like a motor racing team like an elite sports outfit that belief that they can do anything and they just make it happen you know make it happen is one of the mottos of the business and we do everything we can to just make it happen you know we produced an amazing opening vt last year with tom cruise because we were just like well let's just make it happen let's just call tom cruise's office and see if it can happen and lo and behold the next thing we know tom cruise is personally calling the producer who's making the film at whisper going right i've got some great ideas let's do this he flies in in his own helicopter films with us for a day and then shoots off again like classic tom classic as i would if i was tom cruise like thinking big investing in people keeping culture at the heart of what you do yeah and trying to do the right thing is all is also really important I think I just want to call out trying to do the right thing as well because we are really really passionate about equality so we have an almost 50 % female workforce we have women in a really high position within the business the CEO of the business is the Asian son of a news agents in Twickenham those people are totally underrepresented in our industry when we produced the Paralympics it was important for us to make sure that the workforce behind the camera were disabled traditionally it's just been the people in front of the camera which to us felt kind of disingenuous we run lots of scholarships with local universities and local colleges and the local area where we're based in west london to bring people into the business who don't normally get a chance in television we run open days where anyone can apply to come and meet us and we can try and get them into the business and i think that what that then brings us is that real cognitive diversity that diversity of thought that different opinion rather than us trying to produce content for a certain group of people that we think they want let's get those people in and get them to produce the content that they know they would want to watch and i think if you can do what's right then i think that can be transformational for a business because actually it kind of means that whether you hit your numbers financially or you don't to know that you're doing things in the right way actually carries a real a real value and i think other people see it and yeah i actually think it's hard to put value on it but i think that's been a real game changer for us as a business that people from the outside look at it go oh my goodness yeah they really do put their money where their mouth is yeah i mean i think that's incredibly valuable as you say i think you can tell companies that do that versus companies that don't do that and actually a lot of them say they do right yeah sure and like everyone has a sustainability statement and an inclusivity statement and like and all of the like this is what we're trying to do to you know whatever it might be but actually something like a tv in particular that is incredibly hard to get into especially without any sort of kind of nepotism which we know is kind of rife in that type of industry the actual like positive moves in that way of actually like going out of your way to ensure that that's the case i mean when you're saying that from the perspective of someone who was told we don't hire people like you and from the point where actually actually it's a good point yeah like as in you understand how important that is because you were once put in the box of actually and i'm not saying that's not to say that other people don't understand it but it's in a way of like in the same way as i want young women in the room to be able to create clothes for young women because I'm like sure it could be you know we could have an all-male board and it could be whatever it might be but actually like I know it's possible because I'm the one doing it and I know why I feel so strongly about this sports bra or whatever it might be who am I to say that I'm the only person who can flip that trend in terms of being the person who's making the decisions whether it's financial whether it's a product whatever it might be i want to talk about high performance you are high performance i mean what is there to say i want to talk about the podcast the decision to start that where did that come into the whole kind of production company journey yeah so high performance is totally separate from whisper right and i think that's the other thing that i really enjoy is a bit of diversification um i said i'd come on to it later now's probably a good time to talk about it like when i had been at the BBC for CBBC for eight years.

42:13So 12 years I was at the BBC, Kids Telly and Formula One. Like when I decided to leave the BBC, my contract was four more years of Formula One, World Cups, Olympics, Commonwealth Games, Match of the Day, Match of the Day 2. I was hosting the One Show at the time. I was working on all the big royal events for the BBC events team. Like if you were to create the dream TV presenter contract that was probably the contract but when I left Rapture TV I had a cool boss there and I said to him I'm gonna go to London and try and get a job with you know this guy who's called me from Children's BBC see if it works out and he said I love that you're taking that risk he said just never sit in the comfy chair and I remember those words ringing in my ears when I had this amazing job offer from the BBC but then at the same time an offer from BT sport to go there and present their football coverage and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to stay at the beep for another four years but I thought you know what I'm not going to sit in the comfy chair I'm going to take a risk and it was like I was full of fear I remember walking into an office about two or three weeks after I joined BT sport and I'd walked away from the oldest the most famous broadcaster on the planet and I walked into a room and there were six people sitting around the desk and that was the entirety of BT sport we were talking about opening titles music where the studio should be what the studio should look like what content we were going to put on like it was like going from the world's greatest university back to like a nursery or something you know what I mean you went from the biggest and the best and the most famous to something right in its infancy it was the single most exciting thing that I've ever been involved in yeah but it's about taking the risk it's about taking that leap doing something a little bit different it was important for me what pulled you towards that was it the fact that it was different was it purely that or was it kind of the potential that you saw from it it was the chance to well the chance to present Premier League football comes around very infrequently and as a sports presenter Premier League and Champions League football is like to me it's the elite yeah if you can present that then you're in a very select band of people I also had this impression that I felt I needed to leave the BBC because I'd come through the ranks there.

44:28I'd come through Children's BBC to Formula One. I did feel underappreciated and underloved. And I felt like almost the only way to do that was to walk away and show someone else what I could do and deliver my talents elsewhere. I also, we were having a baby, Florence, our first child, and it was around that time as well. And so there was that playing on my mind about if I sign this deal with the BBC I'm going to be away an awful lot it was a whole combination risk to change when you're about to have a yeah it was a combination of things but the biggest pull was let's just take a chance on this yeah let's just see how this goes I think I've always been like that I've always been someone that wants to take a risk you know the reason why I tell you that story was because I had this belief that growing up like I said right at the start of this conversation you get normal people and I was one of those normal people I would never ever have made a decision like walking away from the BBC to join BT Sport at the start of my career it was only the time that I spent in Formula One and with all of these amazing elite people but I got the chance to speak to them all so I remember the first time I was in the pit lane I was like wow that person's a billionaire team owner that person's a Formula One driver that person's a team principal that person's a globally famous actress like i often used to watch the races with louis hamilton's girlfriend at the time nicole scherzinger you know so i was around it was just weird for me this kid from norfolk watching a grand prix in bahrain sitting next to nicole scherzinger and then louis hamilton coming in and having a chat with you it was a strange time kind of weird but what i did was i used it to say to all these people like what's the secret how did you get to where you got to thinking that they would go well i was born into wealth or oh my parents were billionaires oh this was always destined for me they'd never said that they told they talked about consistency they talked about taking a chance and taking a risk and taking a leap of faith and they talked about hard work and i took all of those things and i always wanted to have the kinds of conversations that we're now having on high performance but it felt churlish to have these conversations without actually living it myself so the inspiration to walk away from formula one ironically came from formula one that those people are inherent risk takers they will take a chance they'll do something that most people won't do and that's really what led to us creating high performance i wanted to have these kinds of conversations and it felt like a podcast was the right platform to do it on and so that started am i right in thinking it mainly started with a lot of sports people it did so I also had this fear like this imposter syndrome thing where I was like no one's going to care what a former kids tv presenter that's done a bit of presenting on football and formula one thinks about high performance um so I'm I was a talk at Norwich City Football Club and I met Damian Hughes who's my co-host as you know you've met him and then I thought maybe this guy could be the guy that brings the credibility to the conversation so I just called him and I said look I really want to have a conversation with people about high achievement and success and failure and all these things would you be happy to be part of that conversation again imposter syndrome told me that he would say no but he didn't he said yes and we started at the back end of 2019 where the whole thing that was taking a huge shift is that in all honesty like when we first started high performance it was mainly sports people because those were my contacts and they were his contacts and you know it's like when you first start you you don't have any evidence that this thing's going to be successful you have to rely on your exactly you know you rely on your black book right but i wanted the conversation back then to be life's about failing faltering slipping getting punched in the guts getting back up taking a risk getting knocked down going again and the reason for that is because that was my story that's all the things that i've spoken about yeah it's only now three years down the line of having these conversations on high performance that i realize that none of that is what success is none of that creates more success getting punched in the guts and talking badly to yourself and failing and faltering just creates more of the same so the biggest revelation for me is that my idea of what high performance is has fundamentally changed from doing this podcast you know like is there a higher high performance than happiness probably not no when i first started was it even in the top 50 things that i thought were going to be important probably not so it's really good for me in that respect who would you say you've learned most from as a guest obviously other than me obviously you were incredible yes but it wouldn't feel right to sit here and regale you with tales of your own stories i mean johnny wilkinson if people have not heard of high performance and they want to have their brains put through a washing machine listen to our conversation with johnny wilkinson it is a it's an it's the conversation that changed the game for the high performance podcast and so johnny wilkinson kicked the drop goal that won the rugby world cup for him in 2003 he told us that doing the washing up is as important as winning the rugby world cup and so we're like well you need to explain that yes i am lost and he said well let me just break it down for you what is playing rugby or winning the rugby world cup using your body to achieve a goal what is doing the washing up using your body to achieve a goal why is winning the rubber world cup here and washing up to a brilliant level here it's because society tells us that winning the rubber world cup is more important we were joined by hector beyer on the podcast who told us you need to live like a candle which is exactly the same message he said you need to be a candle you need your flame needs to burn the same so let's say you have some really bad results with with your business right financially you're struggling or the sales dip or something and then equally the next month you have an amazing month and you break all your records you are no less of a person for your difficult month and you're no more of a person for your brilliant month which was a great revelation for us susie ma came on the podcast and she spoke about making sure that all of your plans are infinite so she spoke about infinite purpose so purpose could be i'm going to get a six pack the problem with that is you either get a six pack and then you lose motivation because you got it or you don't get it and you lose motivation because you never got it so she came on spoke about infinite purpose finding your purpose that never ends so originally with high performance we were like let's reach 10 million people with the message of high performance we've now had about 40 million downloads yeah so that's a nonsense number to have picked out so the purpose of high performance is reach more people every single day to get them closer to their own version of high performance we were joined by rungan shatterjee who spoke about ikigai which is your reason for being so what are you good at what do you love doing what does the world need and what can generate income if you can find something that you're good at and you love and that the world needs and that you can use it to pay your bills so you can actually do it that is the reason for being that is your ikigai and the final one that i would call out is this idea of fault versus responsibility that's a big learning for us on the podcast that we all walk around with all kinds of things that are not our fault trauma from childhood an illness that you're not expecting like a global pandemic it's probably the biggest the most obvious example of something that's none of our fault that's happened in the last few years you know a breakdown in a relationship with a partner someone cheating on you or walking out the door whatever those things are not your fault the difficult conversation we need to have with people is they're still your responsibility it's your responsibility and that finding that mindset of 100 responsibility is a really like fascinating tenant of the high performance podcast so my mind has just been totally opened up exploded changed altered and it is no longer and i almost like regret the title high performance it makes it sound like high wealth high earnings high status it's none of those things it's high happiness it's high self-worth it's talking well to yourself because everyone now is delaying their happiness mainly because of social media the pressures from society the kind of messaging that not on this podcast but lots of podcasts put out there lots of social media channels put out there they're like get this house and you'll be happy and that you could chart life right do well at my gcse's i'll be happy did that to do well at my a levels then i'll definitely be happy well if i can get my place at uni i'll really be happy but if i get it first i'll be delighted now I want my dream job but I definitely want a promotion then I'll be really happy and now I can buy my first house well it's a two bed once I get a four bed I'll be delighted then I'll try and meet my life partner if we get married I'll be happy but then I won't be really happy till we have kids but that's kind of great but I won't be happy till they're happy and then I'll finally retire then I'll definitely really relax and be happy and then I'll go abroad and we'll live abroad then I'll finally relax and be really happy you're dead and you realize that it was in all of those moments that you had to find the happiness the happiness is in the struggle the happiness is in the scrap it's in the battle it's in the fight it's in the good days it's in the bad days it's in the way your coffee smells it's in the conversation you have with your partner first thing in the morning even if they've got morning breath you have to embrace that and love it because that is the happiness it's there all the time and we all have to stop delaying our happiness if i could condense all of those messages for people then i think we've done a good job on high performance but it's not about making money and being successful and building your wealth yeah i think such important messages and i think they're the types of things that we hear almost not i don't say over and over in a way to kind of do down how important they are but i think they're the messages that we need to hear probably like once or twice a week to actually even ever start internalizing like we all know we're delaying happiness we all know we're you know and then we always think that we're the exception that needs to get success first because we're harder than the others and therefore we're resilient enough to delay happiness for now but actually you kind of need to be constantly internalizing those messages in order to be able to actually get to a point where you're understanding that you're enjoying the journey not just the destination and understanding that the goalposts are always going to move so you've got to make the goalpost different you've got to make the thing about the actual you know even getting there in the first place and by the way like i still get a thrill from things being successful like of course i still get a buzz from that yeah i'm not saying don't be thrilled as you go along i'm just saying don't not be thrilled as you go along like it's about those little wins those little things every day part of the issue i think is we can talk like this for hours the way the human brain obviously works is it only takes one much more toxic negative message to dominate people's thoughts so you know one of the big things that we talk about when we go and sort of meet groups of people and do workshops and talk about high performances they're like i know all this but then i just see my neighbor with a new car and i can't help but think ah i wish that was me my answer to that always is if you want what someone else has got right whether it's their house their car their kids their holiday whatever like my wife's currently got fomo because all our friends are going to go on a skiing holiday in a few weeks and we're not right if you want the things that they've got you have to have everything they've got yeah that involves getting rid of your kids and having their kids that involves having the little traumas that they have that you don't even see it can often involve having the big traumas that you even know about you can't cherry pick the best bits of everyone's lives and want that for your life if you want what they've got you need to be all in and have the lot and by the way give up everything you've got i think once you say that to someone you want to give up your house your kids your job your life your family your parents for that definitely very few would say yes so just stop that toxic comparison of your life with other people's don't play the game don't get sucked in it's not real you are enough what a good place to end thank you so much for coming in that's been a real i mean i feel like thanks for letting me talk to you which was really actually very helpful you're incredible your career has been incredible and it's been yeah amazing to watch for the amount of time i've kind of watched it and um yeah thank you so much you're so kind i bet you feel like me though that you feel like you're actually five percent of the way there yeah yeah that's exciting though right it's all to come maybe i want some sleep we all want more sleep