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Patrick brings real-life faith into focus, discussing the responsibilities of godparents, the differences between Catholic and Protestant Bibles, and how the Church responds even after the Pope passes. He addresses questions about indulgences, confession, and spiritual practices, while commenting on the growing impact of driverless trucks and technology on everyday life. Patrick also highlights moments of kindness and authentic conversation, encouraging listeners to live their faith boldly in today’s world. Patrick gives a few more thoughts on Joseph’s question from the end of the last hour. Joseph asked, “I just got a bible from a Protestant and I was wondering if it is something I should keep?” (00:26) Jesse - My son has been asked by a Lutheran couple to be godparents of their child. (06:25) Steve - Was Pope Francis embalmed? (09:08) Anna - How do you pray for the intentions of the pope when the pope is dead? Are your sins only forgiven when you do your penance? (10:35) Driverless trucks are rolling in Texas, ushering in new era (18:39) Pirso - Can you talk about the Church of Christ in the Philippines. They say the Catholic Church is not true because the pope died and they created a bible which they are spreading over the world. How can I debate them? (29:51) Steve - I am a truck driver and I would like to comment on the automated trucks. They definitely have limitations. They mainly can only do long stretches of highway. (40:07) Judy - Have you ever read a book called 'A Canticle of Leibowitz'? (45:46)

Want to apply to be coached by us? Follow us on Instagram nor @fitfemaleproject or head to the website www.fitfemaleproject.com Questions in order: Client Questions - **Sophie** – How can I focus on belly fat after having two kids and a C-section? - **Emily** – Does it matter when I eat breakfast after the gym? - **Francesca** – Should I eat before an early morning workout? If so, what should I eat? - **Michelle** – Is it okay to work out fasted, or should I have a snack to avoid high cortisol? - **Jessica** – How can I balance half marathon training with strength workouts without overtraining? - **Vicki** – How many ab workouts should I do per week? - **Bailey** – What are some simple ways to increase protein intake on busy days? - **Emily** – Could my underactive thyroid be affecting my weight loss, and what foods should I eat or avoid? - **Anna** – How do I do a barbell shoulder press without hitting my chin or pulling my head back? - **Sam** – What alternative handle can I use for cable exercises if the rope attachment isn't available? - **Eadaoin** – What's the correct knee angle and form for the leg press? - **Gemma** – Do I have to do cardio? I love strength training and don't want to risk anything in my first trimester. - **Niamh** – I'm on a mini cut, but my protein intake is higher than usual. Is that okay? - **Amy** – How can I handle sugar cravings? Also, is it normal to wake up thirsty at night? - **Emma** – Can you help me with carb loading? What should I eat and how many carbs do I need? - **Aisling** – I took a break from weighing myself. Should I start tracking my weight again? - **Jess** – What time will the London meet & greet be? - **Ann-Marie** – Should I focus on getting deeper in my squats before adding more weight?

Cara – Why the one-leg leg press? Also, when I get DOMS, I feel more tired, hungry, and cranky. Is this normal? What can I do to ease it?  Saffi – How can I track food and plan workouts when I'm moving around a lot and staying in different places?  Dierdre – I started on the 17th. Does that mean my check-in week is Monday to Sunday, even though the questionnaire runs Wednesday to Thursday?  Eimer – What's the difference between dumbbell RDLs and barbell RDLs?  Emily – I hit 100kg on the leg press but can only do it if I don't start right at the bottom. Is that okay, or is it ‘cheating'?  Emma – I've been extremely tired despite getting 8 hours of sleep and eating well. I've ordered magnesium but not sure if it will help. Any suggestions besides getting bloodwork done?  Bethan – My weight has stayed the same for the past week, but I feel better in my clothes. Can weight stay the same while building muscle and losing fat?  Sugitha – When and how should I return to exercise after illness?  Lucy – Is it really possible to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time?  Kelly – I feel hangry in a calorie deficit. Is this normal, or could it be menopause symptoms?  Valeria – I'm fasting for Ramadan. What's the best way to break my fast and structure meals around workouts?  Sam C – What are your thoughts on using wrist weights while walking?  Niamh – For Phase 11 cable step-ups, I've been adding 20kg resistance. Is this okay?  Julia – I do home workouts with one PT session using heavier weights. Would I get better results at a gym?  Samantha – Should I log the total weight or just one dumbbell when tracking workouts? And for unilateral exercises, do I log total reps or per side?  Stacey – I'm not hitting my protein target and struggling with low-carb/low-fat options. Should I add a protein powder?  Anna – How should I position myself for the barbell bench press? I keep hitting the hooks when pressing up. Also, the cable biceps curl hurts my wrist—what attachment should I use?  Elaine – For dumbbell hip thrusts, I'm using 15kg and don't feel challenged. Should I get a dumbbell strap to hold two weights?  Annabel – What's the best dark chocolate to buy? What's your take on Medjool dates?  Emily – My wrists feel weak when doing push-ups and holding dumbbells. Are there exercises to strengthen them?  Christine – I struggle with getting enough protein due to a busy lifestyle. Any quick, portable solutions? Also, how do I log meals when eating from a work cafeteria with unknown calories?  Francesca – I've hit a weight loss plateau despite mostly sticking to my plan, aside from five off-track days in the last month. Any advice?

In this episode I go on a style journey with the longest standing former editor of British Vogue …  Alexandra Shulman CBE.  As a young designer at the time I will never forget being invited by Alex to a one on one lunch at San Lorenzo not long after she became Editor in Chief.  I didn't quite know what to expect, but I came away thinking how kind and approachable she was…in fact the polar opposite to the intimidating image of most editors at the time…There was never anything Devil Wears Prada about Alex. In this episode she talks openly about her relationship with fashion …proclaiming she knew nothing about fashion when she took the job and maybe “ignorance was bliss”. But when she took the helm of Vogue it was a unique moment in fashion…there was an incredible pool of British design talent and at the same time the High Street was breaking through and democratising fashion. Of course I ask her what she wore on her first day in the ever-imposing Vogue House…  We talk about the pressure of dressing to attend all the shows around the world and she is wonderfully pragmatic about how she knew she was never going to be a “Carine or an Anna”… How the editors grand hotel rooms would always be laden with flowers on arrival from all the big houses, often with handwritten notes from the designers…and a time that Karl (as in Lagerfeld) wrote several pages to her as to how he was feeling about a particular situation… During her editorship she was asked by the then Kate Middleton to recommend British designers for her wedding dress…Alex submitted her ideas, bearing in mind the possible dynamic between the designer and Kate, the obvious need for incredible security not to mention, could the designer/house create a dress worthy of making history for all the right reasons. She had no idea until the wedding day who had actually got the job. She talks lovingly of spending time in her mother's dressing room as a child (the only time she and her siblings got to see her during the week), watching her get dressed for work as the editor of Conde Nast Brides magazine. How glamourous and stylish she was and indeed still is in her 90's…   Alex's book Clothes and Other Things that Matter… is not only about clothes but about the way we live our lives. “From childhood onwards, the way we dress is a result of our personal history”.  Not dissimilar to this podcast, our clothes have stories … I hope you enjoy this episode…it was a rich conversation peppered with stories of the crazy world of fashion. Thank you @alexandrashulman for being so wonderfully open and brilliantly eloquent x

EP 295 – Our Christmas Special   POWERED BY RED ENERGY - Red Energy for 100% Australian electricity and gas. Powered by Snowy Hydro, a leader in renewable energy. Switch to Aussie owned Red Energy today.   Anna Barry from the Op Shop joins us with some amazing Christmas tips and recommendations. Also with Anna: How is your Christmas shopping going, what does Christmas Day look like, your big wins so far this year, the mistake you always make Anna's summer tips: 1 – Surrealist Lee Miller exhibition at the Heide Museum  2 – Outing to the Abbotsford Convent, Julie's Dining Room, Collingwood's children's farm, walk along the Yarra 3 – Newly renovated Prahran Pool 4 – Get back into the city! 5 – Plan an evening at Memo Hall, Acland Street, St Kilda Don't Shoot The Messenger's 300th Birthday details! Thursday, 29 February – 5:30 for 6pm start Bell's Hotel in South Melbourne With us – Caro & Corrie – and Brad Scott as special guest A drink on arrival and nibbles Book now – $50 a ticket - there's a link in the show notes And the first 50 people to book will receive an Ello Botanicals gift All thanks to our friends at Red Energy BOOK TICKETS: https://ballparkentertainment.com.au/tickets/dstm-300-event   COCKTAIL CABINET – PrinceWineStore.com.au • Bringing Melburnians, the greatest wine in the world. PrinceWineStore.com.au This week:  Christmas Wines: Petilia Flanghina - $30 Murdoch Hill Chardonnay - $32 Roche de Bellen Bourgogne Rouge - $50 Use promo code MESS at www.princewinestore.com.au or instore for your 10% listener discount.   B S F   Cobram Estate - Australia's most awarded extra virgin olive oil. Grown, harvested and first cold pressed in Northern Victoria BOOK: Anna has a book: The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray (plus: 3 books we want to read over the summer) SCREEN: Caro has a screen: The Eight Mountains (plus: 3 screens we want to watch over the summer) FOOD: Anna has a recipe, Christmas Wreath Pavlova (plus: 3 things we want to make over the summer) https://www.tamingtwins.com/christmas-wreath-pavlova/ 4 Eggs, Whites only 250 g Caster sugar For the couli: 150 g Raspberries 2 tbsp Icing sugar For the decoration: 300 ml Double cream 2 tbsp Icing sugar 150 g Cherries 80 g Pomegranate seeds 225 g Raspberries Fresh mint, Optional Instructions  Meringue base: Preheat the oven to 140C. In a very clean bowl whisk the egg whites until stiff. Gradually add the sugar, a little at a time, whisking well in between each addition. Draw a wreath shape on baking paper (or parchment NOT greaseproof paper) using a pencil, plate and ramekin or glass as a guide. Flip the paper over (so the pavlova isn't touching the pencil marks) and stick it to a baking sheet using a dot or two of the egg white mixture as glue. Spoon in dollops onto the template and smooth the top so it's flat. Bake at 140C for about an hour. Turn off the oven and allow the pavlova to cool in the oven. Couli: Meanwhile, make the sauce. Mash the raspberries and then squish through a sieve. Stir in 2tbsp of the icing sugar. Topping: Whisk the cream in another bowl and then stir in the other 2 tbsp icing sugar. When you are ready to serve, top with cream, fruit, coulis sauce and some mint springs. Also on the show: Why Anna is grumpy, what we'd like for Christmas and the musical & stage performances we are looking forward to next year, as well as the author conversations we are excited for. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Encore Presentation from August 4, 2023 Patrick answers listener questions about what to do when you see someone stealing the Eucharist, how can public school teachers respond to the LGBT agendas that seem to be taking over their schools, and how to tell people the truth about the dangers of marijuana Christopher - Is shopping stores that promote abortion a sin? Bill - Regarding stealing the Eucharist: We have ushers standing by the alter looking for this type of thing. Aurora - I was given a bunch of pride books to put in my classroom. What do I do about them being sneakier with putting this stuff in our schools? Anna - How can I argue with someone that marijuana is different from alcohol? Jason - My fiancé's aunt asked for the Eucharist to be placed in a pyx. What are the rules about this? Andrew - Is there a book that explains “stored up treasure in heaven” that Jesus talks about? Nicole - There are people who are born predisposed to addiction. Marijuana is so strong when people drive by. We should not have to be exposed to this drug. Julia - John's email about Cremation: In the Creed we do say that we believe in the resurrection of the body.

Patrick answers listener questions about what to do when you see someone stealing the Eucharist, how can public school teachers respond to the LGBT agendas that seem to be taking over their schools, and how to tell people the truth about the dangers of marijuana Christopher - Is shopping stores that promote abortion a sin? Bill - Regarding stealing the Eucharist: We have ushers standing by the alter looking for this type of thing. Aurora - I was given a bunch of pride books to put in my classroom. What do I do about them being sneakier with putting this stuff in our schools? Anna - How can I argue with someone that marijuana is different from alcohol? Jason - My fiancé's aunt asked for the Eucharist to be placed in a pyx. What are the rules about this? Andrew - Is there a book that explains “stored up treasure in heaven” that Jesus talks about? Nicole - There are people who are born predisposed to addiction. Marijuana is so strong when people drive by. We should not have to be exposed to this drug. Julia - John's email about Cremation: In the Creed we do say that we believe in the resurrection of the body.

Patrick answers listener questions about why women cannot be priests, how does God see us everywhere we go, and how do I explain the Trinity to young people? Tom - I have two brothers who left the Church. Does the Catholic Church evolve overtime in our understanding of God? If so, why can't we have women as Priests? Briella 7-years-old - How does God see us everywhere we go? Linda - I married a Catholic even though I wasn't Catholic. I eventually became Catholic! Denise - I am concerned about A.I. being high jacked. Are we becoming communist China when children are having trans surgery behind their parents back? Elizabeth - I was raised Catholic and a CCD teacher, but after the pandemic I started thinking maybe the Catholic faith is wrong. Why should I stay in the Church? Anna - How do I explain the Trinity to young people? I am also a teacher and I deal with pronouns by calling them by their names.

Government bailouts, asteroids zooming between the Earth and the moon and antigay legislation in Uganda After Giving Them Billions, The US Government Wants To Bail Out Moderna A large asteroid is about to zip between Earth and the moon Stephanie - Legislation in Uganda: the martyrs there were kill because of their opposition to Homosexual activity. Rod - When the bible says that the meek will inherit the earth, is it talking about the New Jerusalem? Patrick uses valerian root to help with occasional bouts of insomnia Todd - Is a baptism valid if a non-Catholic pastor says “you are baptized in the name of…?” Christie - Someone asked about the Indian children being abused and killed in boarding houses. How do I respond to this? Anna - How do I explain to a couple that they can't get married in the church because they are not parishioners? Elvira - Why did Jesus fall three times in the stations when Simon was there to help Him carry it? Matt - Is a Catholic who commits a mortal sin still a Catholic? Gabriella - What is the difference between enabling and being charitble?

Patrick answers the question of how often you should get your house blessed, talks with a caller about the annulment process in the Church, whether a Catholic should attend a non-Catholic church and how to talk with loved ones about homosexuality. Email from Anna - How often you should get your home blessed? Sean - Sister in law atheist who is interested in spirituality Barbara - Why is it difficult to get annulment and where do we get figures for success rate? Richard - I am a Catholic attending both catholic and evangelical mass - is that a sin? Sheryl - In RCIA- Can you explain the immaculate conception? How did Mary's parents accomplish that? Mary Beth - How do we accept someone who has come out as gay? Irene - Why is it immature faith to have emotions?

In this episode:Salt Life team members, Jenny D'Anthony and Anna McLean, discuss their journey to becoming team United Row. In the Summer of 2024, Jenny and Anna will be attempting a record-breaking challenge to be the youngest and fastest pair to row across the Pacific Ocean.Topics discussed in this episode with United Row:·       An introduction to Jenny and Anna·       How and where the pair met·       Their background in rowing·       The meaning behind the name “United Row”·       Their involvement with Salt Life·       Details of their upcoming race including how long they will be at sea and how many nautical miles they will cover·       Survival at sea including preparing meals and water, sleep and row schedules, boat maintenance and potential marine life encounters  Follow Kieran Anderson on Instagram athttps://www.instagram.com/kieranand3rson/Follow United Row on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/united.row/Follow Salt Life on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/realsaltlife/Shop Salt Life apparel atwww.saltlife.com

Special Guest Host Fr. Matthew Spencer answers listener questions about dealing with depression, if it's ever okay to use birth control, are there YouTube videos of real exorcisms, and how can I argue the pro-life stance in the case of incest or rape Lynn – I'm going through grief and depression after losing my mom and I need advice Colleen - Is it ever appropriate to use an IUD or birth control? Mark - I think we might be married in heaven - what are your thoughts on this? Mary - Should we have our property blessed? There was an accident and someone died. Sandy - Is it possible that a video of a real exorcism could be on YouTube? Eileen - My relative, a member of SSPX, says if there is not a Latin Mass available he is not obligated to go to Mass. Anna - How can I argue the pro-life stance in the case of incest or rape

Welcome to July 13th, 2022 on the National Day Calendar. Today we celebrate almost everyone's favorite veggie and their rightful place in history.  Fries are pretty much everyone's favorite vegetable, but depending on where you live they may be called something else. The recipe for French fried potatoes first appeared in an English cookbook in 1856, but some believe the name became popular during World War I. When American soldiers discovered the fried potatoes served in French speaking Belgium, the nickname took hold. Legend has it that potatoes were first fried in Belgium in 1690 during a particularly cold winter. When the river froze and people couldn't get to their supply of fish they cooked up potato slivers instead. And today no one would argue with making fries a meal. On National French Fry Day serve them with chili or cheese, ketchup or mayo or dare to go bare with some crave worthy seasoned fries. Anna: I can't stand the suspense. Marlo are you moving Fry Day to Friday, should we even be celebrating fries today?! John, what's the count on that petition? John: Not sure, but enough people have done their civic duty and voted so now it's truly up to Marlo. Anna: There's still time to visit frydaytoFriday.com to sign up and get a coupon for free fries. They're not closing it out till later today. Anna: How does this not make sense to you Marlo? Think of all the happy, hard working people who will be celebrating for years to come with another reason to say TGI Fryday! This is a historical moment. I hope you do the right thing. I'm Anna Devere and I'm Marlo Anderson. Thanks for joining us as we Celebrate Every Day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to May 12, 2022 on the National Day Calendar. Today we celebrate rowdy poems and technology that has stood the test of time. Anna: There once was a man from Nantucket… Marlo: WHOA! You can't read that on the air. Anna: I'm just reading a limerick. Marlo: Okay, but we can't actually read a limerick. They're simple five-line poems with a set rhyme scheme, but they are usually…um…a little off-color. Anna: How about this one? There once was a man from Madras… Marlo: Stop! We don't want to know how that one ends. On National Limerick Day everyone can google some for themselves if they want. And maybe write some clean versions. Anna: Oh, okay. There have been so many technological advancements in the past century that sometimes it's hard to keep track. Inventions seem to come and go, especially in the digital age. But a few devices have stood the test of time. Like the odometer. This device was invented way back in 15 BCE by the Roman engineer Vitruvius. He rigged up a chariot wheel with a feature that would drop a pebble into an attached box after the wheel had turned 400 times—which was exactly a mile. At the end of a trip, the driver could determine the distance traveled by counting the number of pebbles that had dropped into the box. Keep track of how far you've come today on National Odometer Day.  I'm Anna Devere and I'm Marlo Anderson. Thanks for joining us as we Celebrate Every Day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Show Notes: 00:00   Heat pumps should be called “slightly warmer pumps.” 03:10   Mags gets verified on Instagram and what it means … or doesn't. 06:22   Mags Rebranding Plan 10:00   Is “Generalistic” a word? 12:57   Weirdest movie ever! Or… Dan's failure as a projectionist. 17:30   Unnecessary glasses and paperclip retainers. 20:07   Listener question from Eli: Advice on social media posting and podcasting? 25:25   Malibu thrift stores … not your everyday thrifting. 27:20   Listener question from Declan: How do you handle being around people that have no regard for others' feelings? 33:55   The Envy trap. 34:50   Mags hopes to become more confident in her style, so she wears her friends' clothes. 38:10   Mags' redecorating plans. 40:10   Listener question from Anna: How did you choose your college, and were your happy with your choice? 46:00   Parenting when you're young or older? 48:45   Should Dan change his TikTok name to DanThurmon instead of Maggiesdad123? Show Sponsors: Girlfriend Collective - Girlfriend Collective is offering $25 off your purchase of $100 or more when you go to www.girlfriend.com/CHAOS. Hello Fresh – go to www.hellofresh.com/16chaos and use code 16CHAOS to get up to 16 free meals and 3 free gifts.

Welcome to December 27, 2021 on the National Day Calendar. Today we celebrate being nutty as a fruitcake and starting something new.  The holiday cheer may be fading fast but one treat is still alive and celebrating: the fruitcake. That's because they are built to last. In the early 1700s these dense cakes were baked during harvest time and loaded with nuts and fruits. But they were saved until the following year to ensure the next season's bounty. Fruitcakes also had quite a reputation for being sinfully rich. Queen Victoria was said to have waited a whole year after receiving one for her birthday before eating it, just to show proper restraint and dignity. But if your fruitcake has become a holiday joke, that gets re-gifted only to get tossed, perhaps you haven't tasted a truly delicious one. On National Fruitcake Day, make a pledge to find a good recipe for next year.    Marlo: While this month is nearly gone, it's never too late to start something new. In case you didn't know it, Anna it's Learn a Foreign Language Month. Anna: How are you going to learn a new language in only four days, Marlo? Marlo: I didn't say I was going for fluency. Just starting a new habit is what matters. John: Tim Ferriss, the entrepreneur actually has a blog post about how if you learn the 100 most used words in any language you can achieve functional fluency very quickly. Anna: I think I could do that! Marlo: I could do that too. Anna: You've got three days. Go! I'm Anna Devere and I'm Marlo Anderson. Thanks for joining us as we Celebrate Every Day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luke 2v22-38This week, Adam continues the Advent series and discusses a "Penultimate Perspective" by looking deeper at Simeon and Anna: How do their stories help us remember to wait? What if Simeon and Anna can help us find a way forward? What if Simeon and Anna don't tell us everything we should do politically, but they do tell us the first things we should do?Questions for reflection:What if followers of Jesus prayed about any political comment or idea before saying it to anyone or posting anything anywhere?What if we spent as much time and energy talking to God about our local, state, and national political concerns as we do talking to people and social media followers about them?What if we all agreed to pray everyday for God to call people of high character to run for public office?

"to renew and make new"We were delighted to be invited by the Resource Alliance and Salesforce.org to host a showcase on digital innovation in the sector. Better still they allowed us to record it so we could share it with you. We hear examples from Refuge, RNID, British Heart Foundation and Brain Tumour Research - all confirmed BDIDs (Big Deals In Digital).Michael – How RNID committed to becoming a digital-first organisation (from 12:30)Anna - How digital has helped Refuge have more impact (from 24:07)Athar – Using digital to support beneficiaries and managing change in one of the world's best-known charity brands (from 33:51)Rachael – Success in digital fundraising through Facebook challenges at Brain Tumour Research (from 45:10)Many thanks to our hosts and guests for their presentations, you can find a transcript of the episode on the website domoregood.uk.---You can find us on www.domoregood.uk or follow us on Twitter and Instagram. Get in touch if you'd like to feature or star on the show. It goes without saying really but the episodes contains our opinions - essentially things we overheard in meetings, stole from presentations and read in magazines. Thanks for listening.

Cast:Dr. Tara Egan, hostAnna, teen co-hostHey Parents,  Season 4 is kicking off today and we are super excited! This episode is kind of unique, Tara and Anna respond to some comments and questions from listeners and clients. It is full of great tips, anecdotes, and tools for parents and teens.Here are some examples of the questions that we cover:Anna - What is it like to have divorced parents?Tara - How do you manage work-life balance?Tara and Anna - How can I improve the connection with my kids as a dad?Tara and Anna - What do I do if my kids don't listen to me?Any questions you have for us to answer on the podcast? Go to www.drtaraegan.com and send us a message.To learn about Dr. Tara Egan's support for co parents, families, books, webinars, public speaking opportunities, and coaching/consultation services RIGHT HERE. To learn more about Dr. Tara Egan's child & adolescent therapy services, visit HERE.To join our private FB group for parents of high schoolers and soon-to-be high schoolers, visit HERE.To join us on Instagram, visit HERE.To learn more about Dr. Egan's online mini-course called "Managing Your Family's Technology and Social Media", created to help parents eliminate power struggles, keep your family safe from internet misuse, and reconnect with your family, go HERE.Podcast editing by Christian Fox

In this episode, Anna Jordan meets Lady Chanelle McCoy – entrepreneur and former Dragon on Dragon's Den Ireland. We talk about her time on the show and the barriers to growth for the CBD industry. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more podcasts featuring Dragon's from the UK version of Dragon's Den. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Don't forget to check out the video version of this episode and subscribe over on our YouTube channel! Would you prefer to read Chanelle McCoy's podcast interview instead? Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I'm your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Lady Chanelle McCoy, entrepreneur and former Dragon on Dragon's Den Ireland. Born in Galway, she co-founded Chanelle Medical, part of Chanelle Pharma, which was founded by her father. In 2015, Lady McCoy and business partner Caroline Glynn set up Chanelle McCoy Health, an R&D led pharmaceutical company. From that came cannabidiol (CBD) range, Pureis CBD. She was recently ranked no 23 in the ‘50 incredible people shaping modern Ireland'. She was awarded the All-Ireland Business Champion Award 2018 for her outstanding achievements in business leadership. We'll be talking about her time on Dragon's Den Ireland and the barriers to growth facing the CBD industry. Anna: Hi, Chanelle, how are you doing? Chanelle: Good. Anna, how are you? Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited about our chat. Anna:Oh, of course, of course. So, listeners and viewers might not recognise you straight away. But they might have seen you before on the Irish version of Dragon's Den. Chanelle: Yeah, that's right. I'm Irish, home grown – from the west of Ireland. I've spent over 25 years in the pharmaceutical industry. I'm very lucky to get the opportunity to do Dragon's Den, the Irish version. Dragon's Den is owned by Sony Music, and they franchise that out to 27 countries around the world. When I did Dragon's Den, when I started the first year, Ireland was the first country to have three female dragons and two male dragons. It was a fantastic experience to do it. I definitely made a few investments. Yeah, so it was great. Smashing. So, based on your time in there, what would you say are the biggest differences between the Irish version and the UK version? I've only seen a few clips of the Irish version, but for want of a better word, it seems nicer – less cut-throat, I suppose.  Chanelle: I mean, maybe that's more of a cultural thing as us Irish are quite warm and friendly, maybe. But no, I think that the fact that Sony Music are the owners, and it's a franchise, that the setting was very much the same, was very like this, the way we sit, and the seats and, and the whole kind of procedure of it as well. It is your own money that you're investing, that you have to bring that to the table, even though the cash sitting beside you is actually not real. We would record about seven pitches in a day. So you literally would have one after another, some of the pitches would go on for about an hour and a half, even though you only see maybe 15-20 minutes on the TV when it's edited down. The reality is you get no prior warning or visibility of the pitch that's coming into the den. So you're in between all this, like when the seven pitches are going on, in between that you leave the room, you go back backstage kind of thing. You wait until the room is set up, you come back onto your chair, the product is hidden, you've got no phone, you can't Google anything. And it's literally when that entrepreneur walks out of the lift that you get to know about the products. So, that's why the pitches would go on for more like an hour and a half, because this is your money you're investing, and you have to make a decision right there and then, whether you're going to invest or not. I mean, obviously maybe some people feel Ireland, the Irish was a bit tamer than England, but there were certainly a few of the pitches that we gave them a hard time with! The fact that it's every pitch is brand new to you. Why do you think that is? Is it more of like a production thing and gets an authentic reaction from you? Chanelle: I think it's twofold. I think that the entrepreneur coming in there pitching, knows that they've got this really short window to sell their story and their business to you. Those entrepreneurs coming in, most of them really need that investment to survive, and if they don't get it, their company will close, they're running out of cash, so there's from their side of the fence, they know that we have had no prior knowledge of their of their company. So they've got to pitch really well, from our side as well. That's the whole thrill of Dragon's Den is that it's instinctive, you have to make a decision right there and then, so that builds to the excitement I'm kind of the drama of it or the appeal of it. Absolutely. I'd like to talk a bit more about your time in the pharmaceutical industry, because it's certainly been a year for pharmaceuticals, for CBD and for the wellness industry as well. And there's so much to unpick with that. Starting off with CBD, the market has grown exponentially, it absolutely exploded, and it's becoming more popular with consumers. But there are still barriers to growth. Say for example, search engines, in my understanding, are reluctant to rank products with CBD and anything related. Tell us more about the barriers to growth in that particular market. Chanelle: If we look at where we've come in the last six years. Today, the CBD food supplement market in the UK is valued at £450m. Now to put that into context, what does that mean – is that big, is that small? If you look at vitamin C in the UK today, that's £115m. Vitamin D today is £145m so CBD today and we have eight million people that take CBD today in the UK. CBD today at £450m totally eclipses vitamin C and vitamin D together. But the exciting thing is that £450m figure will grow to £1bn in the next three years. We are delighted that our product, it's called Pureis CBD, and we're on the market over a year now in the UK and we're in over 1000 retailers. We're the first CBD food supplement company to command the UK market that's backed by clinical studies. And we invested over a number of years, we invested over £1.5m in extensive safety clinical studies, because that is the requirement by the UK Food Standards Agency, the European Food Safety Authority, because they say CBD is a new molecule in your body. We didn't take it prior to 1997, they want all these safety studies done. So, we just embarked on, while adhering to the legislation. We are the first CBD food supplement company in the world to use FDA-registered raw material. And that might not mean a lot to the consumer walking in off the street, but it means a lot to the pharmacists and the doctors. Because the FDA are the strictest food and medicine sheriffs in the world. It was great that we worked with our raw material supplier, and we were able to get that certification on our raw material. What's happened in the CBD industry this week [week commencing April 19, 2021], which has been incredibly interesting to watch it evolve. The Food Standards Agency, which are basically the governing body that look after the safety of food supplements, they set a deadline for the CBD industry this week that any CBD food supplements that wants to stay on the market has got to submit a dossier into the Food Standards Agency with a full suite of clinical safety studies. And if you do that, you are allowed to remain on the market. If you don't do that, you will be pulled off the market. And the Food Standards Agency this week published a list of the companies that are allowed remain on the market. There are only three brands on that list, and we are the first brand on that list. We are officially in full assessment with the Food Standards Agency, we're on that list, which is very exciting. Anna: How many were there to begin with? Chanelle: About 800. What will happen, as the weeks go on, there will be more companies added to that list. But if you're not on the list by June, you're off the market. But this is a very positive move. The UK Government trying to bring what is an unregulated CBD market into a regulated market, because this is all about consumer safety at the end of the day. And the issue with CBD is there are a lot of rogue traders and cowboys out there. That was validated by a paper that was published last year where a number of professors got together, they tested over 30 products that are on the market. The alarming results of that paper is that 55 per cent of products on the market today have illegal levels of THC. And THC is a psychoactive addictive part of the cannabis plant that you don't want in a food supplement. It's fine in the medicine space when it's released by a doctor. And also, of those products, 34 per cent of them have lower levels of CBD than advertised on the label. There's a huge issue with misleading the consumer and this is why the legislation has come in, because they want to clean up the market. So what you'll see over the next few months is you will see a lot of CBD brands will be pulled off the market, the market will consolidate and what will be left on the market will be very safe products that are backed by clinical studies. This will help demystify CBD and give us the really good reputation that it should have because it is not psychoactive, you do not get a high from CBD. CBD is not addictive. It's just got all the good healing properties. So that's in terms of a kind the market and where we are and how it's going to grow and with the legislation. What is really hampering the CBD industry at the moment and is really going to affect the potential growth and job opportunities in the UK, is we still have banks, financial services and payment gateways that will not trade with CBD companies. They treat us like we're in the porn industry, they treat us like we're illegal, so we can't open a bank account in the UK. We're dealing with lots of payment providers like Stripe, the two Irish boys, we tell them all about our clinical studies, we are fully ethical, we are now on the approved Government list. Computer says no, they will not support our business. You then go to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and you say well, we want to do some digital advertising and we want to run social media campaigns with our products. We have clinical studies here, we are very ethical. Again, computer says no, we don't deal with CBD companies. I think these types of institutions and these companies really need to wake up. They need to take their blinkers off and they need to think, ‘Okay, let's assess each CBD company as they approach us. Why don't we trade with those companies that are on the Food Standard Agency ‘Publish' list, because we know that they are ethical, they're safe. They've done their studies.' The London Stock Exchange has floated three companies recently, three CBD companies, one of them is the one that David Beckham's involved in. If the LSE is engaging and trading with CBD companies, well why won't other companies? What is the critical issue now is the Home Office. Okay, so the Home Office in the UK is the Government arm that is responsible for policing narcotics and drugs here – and what's been imported. Our raw material is manufactured in the United States. As I said, it's FDA registered, so it's really high quality. We are synthetically derived, so we are not taken from the plant. We have mimicked the DNA the plant, so it is not possible to have any THC in our products because we are synthetic. And the Home Office have said to us – now, this is not us, this is with every CBD company: No, you are not allowed to import your raw material into the UK. And because we bring our raw material into the UK, and then we get our products manufactured, our finished product manufactured in the UK. They say no, because your product might have THC. So we went to four labs that the Home Office use, these are independent Government approved laboratories, we got our raw material tested, we gave them the certificates, plus all our data from the FDA and said, ‘We don't have THC. We're synthetic, it's not possible.' And again, they're like, ‘Computer says no, sorry.'  What's going to happen now is you're going to see a lot of people like us leaving the UK. We get our product manufactured in the UK, we had planned with the manufacturing company we work with, that they were going to create 70 more jobs between now and the end of the year, because now we are launching a lot of different markets outside Europe and Ukraine and Russia and China. And we need lots of product manufactured. Those 70 jobs now will not be created in the UK because we've got to go to Germany and Ireland to set up, to find a new manufacturing partner and set up our production there. That's happening now, right through the CBD industry, where there will be huge job losses. They are totally suffocating the growth of what will be a huge market – not just for food supplements, but for the pharmaceutical industry as well. So, you spoke a bit earlier about the difficulties and the resistance to the CBD market, especially in the UK. Of course, we all know that, especially since the transition period ended Brexit has caused some troubles as well, it'll be great to hear from somebody who is a major trading partner of the UK. So as a business based in Ireland, how has your trading relationship with the UK been affected by Brexit? Chanelle: I mean, it's very difficult now. And we are trading both ways, we are registered as an Irish company. And we are now registered as an English company. We get our manufacturing done in the UK of our finished product. But now, because of Brexit, we will look to have a second manufacturing site as well set up. Because when we hopefully get our European license receipt for our products, for Pureis, we will have a lot of challenges having the product manufactured in the UK, and then shipping it to the likes of Germany and France, because customs, tariffs, duty, is crippling.  When we contact that customs and it's like, ‘Well look, you can get your customer to pay it, and then your customer in Germany can claim it back.' It is it is annoying for a customer to have to do that. And if they have an alternative to trade with somebody that's in a European country over you, they will do that, because they don't have that administration hassle when they're dealing with somebody else. It is very unfortunate that there is not a better trade deal between the UK and Europe. Also then bringing product in from Ireland into the UK, is very difficult. So what it has forced companies like myself to do is that when you're trading in Europe, you need to have a base in Europe. You need to move your manufacturing from the UK and position it in Europe, that is really the only way. When you're trading in the UK, what you need to do is set up a manufacturing facility in the UK to service your UK customers. That is a pity, because it has incurred a lot of costs for us we're trying to set up work with new partners, qualify them as a manufacturer for our product in Europe and also what it does is we now, for our European customers, we are now taking all our production out of the UK and basing it in Europe. The UK have lost out a lot. But no matter what way you look at it, upside down, inside out, that is really the only way because at the end of the day, this is about servicing your customer. It's about being easy to deal with in the eyes of your customer. And it's about not incurring costs in terms of extra customs and duty and taxes and all of that. So that's really the way we've navigated it, but I think if the UK had the chance again to vote to leave Europe, I certainly don't think they would. I've spoken to so many UK entrepreneurs, Irish entrepreneurs and our leaders, and they tell you that. Anna: So it wouldn't be the case where the UK is a significant enough market where the costs would be worth it on balance. Chanelle: I mean, what it just means now is that, if you want to trade with the UK, you want to supply product into the UK, you're better off to source it within the UK. And the UK might think, well, that's a good thing, because we're bringing more employment and more opportunity into the UK, because we're forcing people to set up to partner with manufacturers in the UK. But actually, your loss is much bigger, because Europe is much bigger geographically. And what you're missing out on, is companies like me, who want to service 28 countries in Europe, from a manufacturing facility in the UK, and we can't do it. We've spoken a little bit about your husband, AP McCoy. I noticed that in quite a lot of the bios and the introductions I read about yourself, that he's mentioned within that bio and is quite a significant part of it. And I wondered how that affects you. As you're a self-named brand, do you feel that your husband's presence and career kind of helps boost it? Or do you feel that you can't exist in your own right? Chanelle: I'm incredibly proud of AP and to go through his career, and to be the most successful winning jockey, and to be champion jockey for 20 years, and winning the BBC Sports Personality of the Year and be knighted by the Queen – it's a great legacy. It's a great achievement within what he has done. And he's been incredibly impactful to me. As I went along in my career, I was lucky – I met him when I was 19. I'm 44 now. We've done this journey together, where I've worked for my family business, while he was scaling the heights in his career. I suppose it was a great outlet for me, because, I had to work really hard, it wasn't like that I kind of floated through my job and I dipped out to go racing every week, it wasn't that case. I was very mindful of the fact that during that period, in our 20s and early 30s, that it was all about AP. Every time I went to the races, or you're out to dinner with people, everybody wants to talk about him. And that's okay, because it's incredibly dangerous what he does, it's very interesting when you get under the hood of like, the diet and the people he rides for, and all of that. I was very happy to go along, for like, 15-20 years, where people would always ask me about him. But I think, what was really where I benefited hugely, and it goes back to the environment you live in, you work in. His dedication, his will to win, his absolute resilience, definitely rubbed off on me and shaped my culture, shaped my values. He motivated me. That's why in the workplace, it's so important, as a leader, as a manager, that you are creating this environment, where you are inspiring, you're positive, you're giving people that self-belief because your behaviour as a leader totally rubs off on the people around you, and will become their behaviour – they will emulate that. He was a fantastic source of inspiration for me, because his behaviour kind of became my behaviour in the end. It was only really, when he stopped riding in 2015 and I started to do Dragon's Den, that people used to say to me, ‘You're on Dragon's Den, Chanelle? I mean, I didn't even know you had a job. I've seen you for years at the races.' And I'm like, ‘Yeah, yeah. I'm in pharmaceuticals, have been in here for 15 years.' So suddenly people started to say to me, ‘Oh, you're not just AP's wife then?' ‘No, no – I'm a human in my own right.'   As AP said to me, ‘Chanelle, it's your time to shine'. I've been in his shadow, very happily in his shadow and supporting him, so he's incredibly supportive when I did Dragon's Den, and now with my own business, and trailblazing in the CBD industry, because we're the first with our clinical studies. We're the first to get on this list, the Government list that was published this week. He's very supportive and very proud. He's been a massive help to me over the years and has definitely been the driving force. Anna: Well, that seems like a good place to wrap up. Thank you ever so much for coming on the podcast, Chanelle – it's been wonderful. Chanelle: Brilliant. Thanks for having me, Anna. It was really enjoyable. You can find out more about Lady Chanelle McCoy at chanellemccoyhealth.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more podcasts featuring Dragons from the UK version of Dragon's Den. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts, follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk (all lowercase) and subscribe to our YouTube channel, linked in the description. Until next time, thank you for listening.

In this episode, Anna Jordan talks to Will Butler-Adams, managing director of Brompton Bikes. We discuss taking over the company from its founder and the future of manufacturing.   You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on business succession and international trade. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Would you prefer to read Will Butler Adams' podcast interview instead? Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Will Butler-Adams, managing director of Brompton Bikes. He started at Brompton in 2002 as a project manager, moved up to engineer director and decided to take on the role of MD when a rival company was going to buy the company out in 2008. After making some changes, production sped up and Brompton now sells 55,000 bikes per year, with key markets in the UK and China. A UK-based Brompton bike hire scheme was launched in 2011. Outside of the firm, Butler-Adams is a fellow at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and the Royal Geographical Society as well as the City and Guilds of London Institute. He’s also a member of the British Manufacturing & Consumer Trade Advisory Group, consulting on post-Brexit trade deals outside the EU. We’ll be discussing what it’s like to take over a business from its founder and how to maintain brand loyalty. Anna: Hi Will. Will: Anna, good morning. Anna: How are you? Will: Well, very lucky. In the current climate, as we are seeing, some really, really challenging times both emotionally and also commercially, for many people globally. It's a pretty unprecedented time and we are finding ourselves as a business, one of the few sectors that has benefited from the current crisis. Anna: I understand you're in the factory right now. Will: Yep, I'm in the factory. We've traded non-stop throughout from the very first lockdown. And that has come with all sorts of challenges. But funnily enough, and we'll talk about a little bit more no doubt, that bicycle is a very, very useful tool in a situation like this. And there has been this sort of global enlightenment, to the value of something so humble as a bicycle. So, you know, we've contributed in our own peculiar way to try and to help people through this crisis. Well, I will start a little bit further back from here. When you when you bought the company, way back in 2008, you made a generous valuation estimate and you bought out the founder Andrew Ritchie's controlling stake in the company. Some might see that as a bold strategy. Why did you go for it at the time? Will: I joined the company in 2002, there were about 30 of us. Initially, I just thought I was going to muck about with a mad inventor making what looked like a fun and interesting product, not much more than that. And then [after] two or three years I'd move on. I was pretty young at 28, but the bike got under my skin and it affected my life. I wasn't naturally an urban liver. And yet, it's such fun living in London with this bike because it gave me this freedom. And I saw it had a similar, quite profound effects on our customers. That's very alluring and, in some respects, addictive. I was consumed by the company, entirely consumed by it. And Andrew, the inventor, is an absolute flipping genius. But he's not a builder of a business because he is much more of a sort of complete megalomaniac, detail, engineering right down in the nitty gritty. We're both engineers, but I'm more of a ‘vision, empowerment and grow’ engineer. And I wanted, by the time we got to 2008 – in fact, 2006 or 2007 – I wanted to commit my life to the product he'd invented, but I couldn't do it if he still had the control. The reality is that, even if you've made me the MD back then I wouldn't have had the control that I needed to do what I needed to do because I knew I needed to do things that he wouldn't approve of. He had to let go of control. It didn't mean I was then taking control because I never did. I just took out his controlling stake. But it then meant I had authority and autonomy to do what I knew needed to happen to the business for it to fulfil its potential. Were there signs that he [Ritchie] may have been getting to the point where he was more willing to give over some of the control? From what I've read, he was quite reluctant to delegate when he was in charge. Anna: Life isn't black and white. It's full of moments in time, and people, and there's a certain amount of luck. And it's whether you see the opportunity or the luck floating by and whether you jump on to it. But in this particular case, I think it was a moment in time where Andrew was getting so caught up in the detail. And when a business gets to a certain size, if you're trying to control everything, you've become the eye of the needle, and everything has to go through you. And you think that by recruiting people that you will find that then, you have less work to do. But if you are the person who is controlling everything, everything has to come through you. And by recruiting more people, you find you're even busier. That's what happened to Andrew: he got busier and busier and busier. It was making him unhappy. Because he was putting himself under so much pressure, there was a sort of nosedive where he was not enjoying himself because the business was becoming so successful. Also, I was being more confident. In the early days, the company was owned by him and his friends. His friends weren't Andrews. They were entrepreneurial, independent businesspeople in their own right. They could see and bring perspective and support Andrew to make the decision because they could see there was no way he could continue, because it wasn't his forte. So, they encouraged him to let go. It's worth saying that on many occasions, since then, he's vehemently regretted it because I've done things of course, which I knew I'd have to do that he didn't agree with. Tell me – what kind of protestations did he have? Will: It's about detail. Andrew is an inventor – in the absolute classic sense of the word. He spent 13 years, he hand-drew 1000s of drawings – technical drawings – not just for the bike, but how to make the bike and in insane detail. It’s something straight out of A Beautiful Mind. It's unreal that one human being could do what he did against a sort of backlog of everyone telling him, ‘What are you doing, wasting your time? You've tried, you fail, you're still at it, why are you still at it?’ He wouldn't give up. But he would worry about training and worry about tolerances, worrying about the grammar and would pick up on some problem, you know, six pages deep in our website, and ask me, ‘How would I let this happen?’ It's wrong, but in the grand scheme of things, when you're running a business and trying to do this and open up markets in Japan and an office in London developing this, he assumed that I would know everything and check every piece of written word and that I'd signed off every detail, but it doesn't happen like that. You have to find people better than you, you need to trust them, you need to allow them to make mistakes, just not mistakes that will take out the business. But his perception is that I was running the business – when it had 100 people, 200 people, 300 people, 400 people – in the same way that he ran the business when it had 40 people. That's just not possible. So that was the friction, and in some respects, still is a friction. In most cases, everything Andrew said was technically correct. It just wasn't the priority. And the problem is, when you're running a business and you're growing at some speed, you actually have to walk past things that are wrong. You're walking straight past something that is absolutely wrong. Unacceptable, not right. But you have to leave it because there's an even bigger wrong over there. You need to deal with the biggest [wrong]. It gives me huge pleasure that there are some things that I've been walking past for eight, nine, ten years. Finally, we've got the breadth and the capacity as a business to finally address some of these things that have been bugging me. But if you get distracted by every minutiae, as you're growing a business, you won't move the business forward because you'll never get to the most important thing that then allows you to move on to the lesser things and as you build down through the priority list. I think especially when you're starting a business, you're so used to playing all the roles, so that can be difficult to let go of. But interestingly, in Brompton’s case, when I joined, there were fewer than 30 people. I was the person running the machines. I rolled my sleeves up, spent three weeks running machines. The business was so small that that is what I did. That role has changed significantly. We now have offices around the world and we've got lots of people and I'm really doing nothing. That's a really tough call to design yourself out of a job, because there is no operational control in my role. Speaking of internationally – and you probably saw this coming – but I'd like to talk a bit about Brexit. We’re a week and a half in now. It's been ‘chaotic’, in a word, especially for exporters. I think that as somebody who has worked to advise on trade deals, and who wants to grow their market in other parts of Europe, especially for small business exporters, what do you think the forecast is for them, say the next three to five years? Will things get better? Will: What I would say – and this is not entirely directly answering your question, but indirectly does – when you're in business, you need to focus on things that you can control. You can control who you employ, you can control the culture of your organisation, how you present yourselves and what you do to inspire your team. What you can't control is FX (foreign exchange), what you can't control is Brexit. So, what you need to do is put in place strategies to mitigate the things that you can't control to allow you to get back to focusing on the things you can control. What happened with Brexit was, it started four years ago, we took a decision four years ago, to plan for the worst-case scenario. It took us about three months, the worst-case scenario hasn't then changed in three-and-three-quarter years, it's still the worst-case scenario. So, for the last three-and-three-quarter years, we've focused on growing our business innovating, distribution, communication – and we've doubled the size of our business. But what I saw over Brexit was many businesses got so caught up in worrying about something that they couldn't control, that they didn't do anything, they stagnated. They were worrying about the latest rumours – ‘I've heard it's that but maybe it's this or it could be this’. And I think in business, you need to not get distracted by things you can't control, focus on your core, focus on your added value, and manage the things you can't control by putting in place strategies to minimise the risk. Small business owners are so accustomed to planning ahead but without a lot of concrete information that's been difficult to do. Will: I'm not sure I agree. With a small business, you're more flexible than a bigger business, you're much more nimble. You have a tremendous advantage against some of the bigger players because you can adjust and you're smaller. I think it's not straightforward. It is possible to be able to try and mitigate those risks. And there aren't that many of them. Clearly Brexit is one, FX is another, trade tariffs is a third, but there aren't that many. And there's some good advice out there to support you. I know that Brompton has been open about being against planned obsolescence. This is where a company will manufacture a product so that it is unusable after a couple of years [or a certain period time], which is long enough where somebody can develop a connection with the product, but not so short that they get disengaged from the company and never buy from them again, there's regular income for that company. Phones are especially notorious for this practice. My question to you is that if a customer is only going to buy one Brompton bike for life, how do you maintain brand loyalty from customers? Will: The way you can maintain brand loyalty from customers is to give them a product that they may need to buy once in their life. Capitalism has done some amazing things – brought people out of poverty, it’s brought health, it’s brought education, but it has come at a cost to our planet. And certainly, in the last 50 years, increasingly. So, we have to rethink how we engage with consumerism and how we buy things and how we reuse things and don't just buy and chuck away and just, we're sucking value out of our planet, which our planet can't sustain. Apart from the fact that the customer must prefer the product they've had for a long time. If you've got some pots and pans that came from your granny or your parents or an old jacket or anything that's had longevity, you cherish it because it's given so much to and if you can keep it working for as long as possible, that makes total sense to me. Coming back to brand loyalty, there are things we can do to engage with our customers where they're having fun. We do races all round the world, not the last 12 months, but we do activities, we do events. And we want people to have fun, and this year with a fair wind we’ll make 70,000 bikes. I mean, they're like eight and a half billion people in the world of which nearly over 50 per cent live in cities. I mean, we haven't even started, the opportunities are immense. We want to create things, then actually what we want to do is when it's finished, which we're not out yet, we should be able to take the product back, recycle it and start all over again and have a full circular economy. Anna: Is that something that you're planning to do in future? Wil: Definitely. We need we need to do that, because there will come a point where the bikes that we were making 20 years ago, in some cases 15 years ago, have come to the end of their life, at which point for those bikes, we should be able to bring them back, take them apart for recycling, then round we go again. I've read that your marketing budget isn't huge, either. Will: I think the experience that a customer has with your product, too often, businesses are obsessed with selling you something. But that's not how you build a brand. A brand isn't what you feel when you bought it, you can buy anything. And the moment you buy and you have this sort of rush of, ‘Whoopee isn't this fantastic?’ The question is, go back to that same customer in two years’ time and say, you know that £100 you spent or that £300 you spent, was it worth it? And, sadly, in most cases against you might have never been used, or yeah, it was brilliant for about six months, and then it bust or something went wrong. There aren’t many things that that we absolutely cherish and love. I think the scope for us to be delivering a useful product, it's not just about buying, it's about looking after the customer for the life of the product. Things need looking after, which is why we have put in a lot of energy. If you like, our marketing budget goes into looking after the customers we already have – that's the most effective marketing budget. If the customers that you have really love their product, and when things go wrong, which they do, we look after them as best we can, then that's the best marketing you can get. So, spend your money on warranty or on customer service, customer support. And then when that's all perfect, you might have a little bit left over for doing some proactive marketing. But often people they forget about are the customer, they just want to go out and do this trend or get more new customers, forgetting about the ones they’ve already got. To round off, I'd like to talk a little bit about manufacturing in the UK. For a long time now it's dwindled, but then others have said, ‘Well, the UK is so innovative and it's still a very strong player in the manufacturing industry.’ In your view, where do you see it going in the next few years? Will: I think there is so much potential to manufacture in the UK, simply because the barriers to entry to doing efficient lean manufacturing are so much lower than they used to be. When I was at university, which is increasingly becoming quite a long time ago – Anna: Oh, I know the feeling! Will: Yeah! If you wanted to design something like a car, you needed a computer that filled up a room and they cost, in today's money, millions of pounds. So, the only companies that could afford the technology to allow you to design effectively were the Fords or the massive companies in the world. But you can buy a computer and start doing 3D design, you can get things printed in 3D in metal. If anything, manufacture’s become entrepreneurial again, because if you come up with an idea, if you can design it, you can print it, you can prove it, you can go on to social media, and then you can raise the money to get started. There's so much potential. The real sense of pride comes from, the reason that it's so satisfying with manufacture, is you see you’re creating something. It's that sense of creation, it's like growing plants – you're seeing something happen and come alive in front of you. You're creating something tangible – that's really, really satisfying. We've been encouraged and told that everything is on a computer and it's all noughts and ones. Actually, it’s the innate sense of pride about something tangible that's going out the door. I think actually the opportunities for it, not just in the UK but globally for manufacturing. Manufacturing doesn't need to be where there's cheap labour. Manufacturing is where there are the best ideas and robotics, semi automation, 3D printing, the cost of software and the ability to design, meaning the best ideas can sprout anywhere in the world, and you can manufacture locally, where the brains are. Anna: It would be a bit like, since the rise of social media and blogging, we've seen content creation go more into the individual’s hands, you feel like manufacturing can go from larger companies to individuals. Will: Definitely. It's a really positive thing because of disruption. I mean, if you look at things about flying taxis, people coming up, there are like 50,60,100 different companies around the world, all coming up with their different flying taxis. It was unthinkable 25 years ago, because it just wasn't possible for small businesses or small groups of individuals to try and come up with something so revolutionary, it would only be a LES four-digit or Nissan, or something – forget it. Yet, all these start-ups are doing it, because the whole engineering and manufacturing has been broken down and it makes it much more accessible. And if your idea is strong enough, if your passion burns bright enough, you can do it. Anna: Well, on that rather inspirational note, I'll leave it there. Thank you ever so much for coming on the podcast, Will. Will: Anna, it's my pleasure. Thank you for asking me. You can find out more about Brompton Bikes at brompton.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for articles on business succession and international trade. Remember to like us on Facebook at SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lowercase. Until next time, thank you for listening.    

There's nothing more infuriating than when people throw shade at the anti-diet perspective without bothering to actually research it. When "The Biggest Loser" trainer/shameless fatphobe Jillian Michaels arrogantly released a Youtube clip trashing the 10 principles of intuitive eating, WITHOUT EVEN READING THE BOOK, she REALLY pi***ed off the community! And none more so than my guests, anti-diet fitness trainers Anna Hearn and Shreen El Masry, who have been dying to come on the podcast and set the record straight! Finally the COVID window opened just a crack so I could record the very first IN PERSON podcast! Join us as we dissect Jillian's often hilarious inability to comprehend a life beyond diet prison. WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS 'PERMISSION TO EAT!!' It seems the lady doth protest too much - could it be that the Queen of Diet Prison is sensing the paradigm-shifting power of the anti-diet revolution? That's right folks, the unrivalled reign of Biggest Loser-esque terror is over!! Vive La Difference! Please note - this episode comes with a hefty side serve of calorie count discussions, so if you're in recovery from an eating disorder please consider your level of spoons to hear the diet talk. But, if you've had a gutful of igno-rants about anti-dieting, it's time to get ALL FIRED UP! Show Transcript:   LOUISE: So, here I am with Anna and Shreen. Thank you so much for coming on the show. ANNA: Thank you for having us. SHREEN: Yeah, thank you so much. LOUISE: It’s so exciting to be alive with actual humans in the room, and slightly weird. Why don’t you guys tell me all about what is firing you up? ANNA: We’re really fired up about Jillian Michaels and her aggressive fatphobic rant on intuitive eating. LOUISE: (sighs) First of all, I have to say I love how you say ‘rant’, it’s very proper and awesome. But yes, Jillian Michaels – Biggest Loser trainer in the United States. Horrendously fatphobic. ANNA: Yeah, I mean … she got her living, she makes her living from shaming fat bodies. I think that tells a lot about her character and where she’s going to go with her intuitive eating rant. LOUISE: So, she was on the Biggest Loser for years and years and years. Her website … well, she’s touting herself as the world’s best trainer. Like, the biggest expert in the world on all things fitness. Which, well … this is just a hunch, but I could find people on the planet who are more qualified. ANNA: Well, if you want to break down her qualifications, I think it looks like she’s done a couple of personal training qualifications, a couple of fitness qualifications and … SHREEN: One ‘woo woo’ nutrition qualification. ANNA: There is a nutrition qualification there too, but it doesn’t look like there’s any degrees or anything. So, when it comes to intuitive eating and looking at all of that, when we go into it you’ll realise, I think, that she hasn’t really done her research. She doesn’t understand it. And I think it’s interesting that somebody without that nutrition background or lived experience with that sort of thing talks about it the way that she does. SHREEN: I think as well, not only does she come across really aggressive and shaming, also I think her insecurity is really coming out in this video. Intuitive eating is a movement that’s really starting to take off, and she’s clearly threatened by it. You can see her defence mechanism is up, and she’s … you know, really, just … her demeanour is just awful. LOUISE: It's hard to tell, though, if her demeanour’s just awful because she’s defensive or because her demeanour’s just awful. SHREEN: Yeah, that’s true. ANNA: I kind of picked up on that and thought she was sensing a threat because intuitive eating is becoming more mainstream, people are becoming more aware of it. So that could threaten what she does, because she makes a living forcing people to lose weight. LOUISE: So, during the 90’s and the early 2000’s, like … it was a free-for-all with bullying people with larger bodies, as we saw. World-wide, the Biggest Loser was the number one show, and everyone thought it was okay. So, she’s had this unfettered ability to be horrible about body size and really belittling of people in larger bodies. And now, I think she’s realising it’s not okay to keep on doing that. ANNA: The backlash about it. LOUISE: So, just to set the stage. What we’re seeing … because I did see the internet blow up. It was a while ago now, but let’s face it - we’ve all been in iso and unable to talk to each other. So, she has like a YouTube channel and one of her YouTube little presentations - I don’t watch what she does, just for my own mental health - but this one was Jillian Michaels talking about intuitive eating. Which, oh my god … let’s just get Donald Trump talking about sexism. ANNA: That’s a great analogy. SHREEN: She’s basically, I think she’s just gone on the website and just pulled up the principles without doing any research into it or even understanding there’s over a hundred studies done on intuitive eating and there’s a whole book as well. She just went on there, read out these principles and gave her, I guess, her opinion.  ANNA: It became really clear that she hasn’t taken the time to understand it. She hasn’t learnt about the authors; you’ll see as she comes to the end of it, she talks about assuming that it was written by somebody who had just had some bad experience with diet culture, maybe had an eating disorder LOUISE: Oh my god, that’s so disrespectful SHREEN: So disrespectful. ANNA: No understanding or bothering to explore that the authors are actually dietitians who had come up with this approach because they had done so much work with clients who had struggled a lot and this is what they’d learnt from working with them over years and years. LOUISE: These are the gurus. Like, Tribole and Resch, they wrote the initial book Intuitive Eating and it’s just been updated, which is fantastic. But even that, even their book which is written from that perspective of helping people recover from eating disorders, that book is built on another big long history of social justice and fat activism. To not recognise that intuitive eating is part of a social movement and like, the way she presented it is like, she just stumbled across a webpage and … oh my god. ANNA: Definitely, yeah. And it came across very, very condescending. I felt really bothered … SHREEN: It’s so harmful, as well. That was the thing that really bothered me the most, was how much … I mean, she causes so much harm anyway, but the message was just next level harm. And if anyone was watching that and had no idea, the things that she was saying … yeah, it’s just not on. LOUISE: Oh god, yikes. So, we thought we would unpick Jillian Michael’s feelpinion to each of the ten principles of intuitive eating. And you guys have written some awesomely detailed notes. ANNA: We had a really good chat about it. LOUISE: Fantastic. But I’m so interested, because you guys both work in this industry as HAES® positive, body inclusive, weight neutral trainers hearing from almost like the personification of diet culture woman. SHREEN: She is the reason why people have so much fitness trauma and so much negative association with fitness. She’s causing that. ANNA: She is the epitome of diet culture. SHREEN: Yeah, she is the epitome of diet culture, for sure. ANNA: And I think we chatted about this as we were hanging out one day, and we just came across this as a topic that fired both of us up. And it’s frustrating when you see … when you’re so heavily involved in this space, and the HAES® space, and the body inclusive space, it can be … and luckily for me working here at Haven, this is the space I come to work every day. So, I’m not exposed to traditional diet culture unless I stumble across it or it’s brought to my attention. So, I couldn’t help but just be really quite wild about this. LOUISE: I love it. I mean, I don’t love that you’re wild, but I kind of do. But, yeah. It’s nice to know that in this industry there are people who feel really strongly about just putting an end to this. She’s what’s wrong with the fitness industry at the moment, and you guys are the future. And I think she can smell that. So, I think, like I … I managed to watch it and still shaking with rage but thank you for this glass of champagne. ANNA: I don’t think we could do this without a little bit of champagne. SHREEN: No, we need some bubbles. LOUISE: The first thing she starts with, so she’s actually going through all the principles. SHREEN:  Correct. LOUISE: Why don’t you give me the lowdown on your reaction. ANNA: Let’s kick off. So, she does go through the points one by one, and the first principle is ‘reject the diet mentality’. And I just want to point out a few things that came up for me that were just so apparent throughout. Her fatphobia is so clear. She’s driven, everything she says, and her approach is all drive by this. And I think she’s very ignorant, like she doesn’t see that there’s an issue with this. She comes form that space where it’s very normalised to shame fat bodies, it’s not okay to be in a bigger body. And she very clearly associates weight and health, they’re so closely tied, which I think it really problematic, obviously. So, in this ‘reject diet mentality’, what came up for you, Shreen? SHREEN: Well, the first thing for me was that she couldn’t distinguish a difference between fad diets and what dieting is, and diet culture. She’s like, “oh you know, if it’s fad diets we’re talking about yeah, yeah sure”, but this is a woman who has sold supplements in the past. LOUISE: She’s sold fad diets. SHREEN: She’s sold fad diets. And she is diet culture, so I guess she can’t … she doesn’t understand what diet culture actually is and why it’s so important to reject it. I mean, diet culture in the US alone is worth 70 billion dollars. ANNA:  She profits off it. SHREEN: She profits off everyone’s insecurities. So, she was just like, “reject diet culture? What’s this, what does this mean?”. And I really did sense there that her insecurity is coming out there because that is her, that’s how she makes her money. ANNA: Well that’s it, she’s really incentivised to support diet culture.  LOUISE: But the distinction that she made between “well, if it’s fad, but if it’s proper” … it just made me laugh, because she’s had no less than four separate lawsuits … ANNA:  Jillian? SHREEN: Yeah. LOUISE: Launched against her by her consumers who bought her caffeine-fuelled diet pills. ANNA: Which I think she might have … there might have been something on the Biggest Loser where she gave them to contestants unfairly, apparently, as well. LOUISE: Oh my god, scandal on the Biggest Loser. Like … ANNA: Well, the other thing that came up for me there was she said, “what is this, healthy at any size?”, and that’s immediately a red flag representing that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She hasn’t researched this because … I can understand it’s very easy to misconstrue Health At Every Size® for healthy at every size, but it’s quite a different meaning and that assumption that, you know, just assuming that we’re saying as a Health at Every Size® professional that all bodies are healthy, that’s not where we’re aiming. We’re talking about people being able to pursue health regardless of shape and size. LOUISE: Or, also, we’re talking about the choice not to pursue health and to be left the fuck alone. SHREEN: Yeah, there’s no moral obligation. If people want to do so, then it’s up to them. It shouldn’t be … they shouldn’t have to do it if they don’t want to, but that’s what diet culture is saying. ANNA: Your body, your rules. SHREEN: And this part of her rant really, really … we know that she’s incredibly fatphobic and she fat shames, but it just came out so much in that where she was again talking, talking about size 16. And she’s saying “well, you know, if you’re a size 16 of course I love you but you’re not healthy”. Which is just … LOUISE: Get fucked. SHREEN: Yeah, absolute garbage. ANNA: Yeah. And Health at Every Size® also is about respect for all bodies, and I think there is a real lack of respect in just making that assumption. You can’t tell. How does she know what someone’s health is, you know? What their metabolic functions are, their blood work, their social, mental health … you can’t tell that by someone’s size. SHREEN: Genetics, everything. There’s so much, it’s so multifaceted. LOUISE: Everything I think is just far too complicated for her. She has to actually, like … I mean, clearly, she hasn’t read anything or thought about anything. “Nope, that’s a number, that’s an assumption, and don’t challenge that”.  SHREEN: Yeah. And if someone’s watching that, I mean, how triggering. How much harm that one comment could cause somebody that could lead them down a path of dieting and to an eating disorder. ANNA: And especially if they were already vulnerable of somebody who would identify with being in a size 16, or plus. And also, size 16 is quite variable depending on which shop you shop in, you know? Where you get your clothes from. What’s a size anyway? What does it matter? SHREEN: Yeah, it doesn’t matter. LOUISE: Size is not the same as health, and she needs to pull her head in. I wonder if her YouTube videos come with a trigger warning. I don’t think they do, but they should. Because good point, you know, that she … everything she says is potentially a trigger. SHREEN: Especially the size of her audience as well, I’m worried. ANNA: She’s got a big reach still. Some of the comments though were interesting, some really great points. People were talking about intuitive eating and picking up on that she doesn’t understand it, she’s missing the point. LOUISE: That is really reassuring. ANNA: She stopped the comments, she cut them off. LOUISE: Oh no, they were too complicated. ANNA: So, the next principle is ‘honour your hunger’, and she said something pretty radical here. Well, it’s not really radical in the fitness world. These numbers get thrown around a lot. But trigger warning, there are numbers here. She says, “if you’re trying to lose weight, you can keep your body fed on as low as 1200 calories”. And that most women, especially those over, you know, relating to being a certain age, shouldn’t be eating over 1600 calories a day. SHREEN: Which is just absolutely unbelievable. She’s saying that … I mean, that’s what a toddler needs. A toddler needs 1200-1600 calories a day. LOUISE: How very dare she tell me how much I can eat, under a principle that says, ‘honour your hunger’. ANNA: She … on one hand, I’m not surprised she threw those numbers out because those numbers are thrown out all the time in the fitness world. I don’t know where … MyFitnessPal? LOUISE: Are they really? SHREEN: We were saying, MyFitnessPal may have started the whole 1200 calories thing … LOUISE: I think Michelle Bridges is guilty of that too. ANNA: Oh actually, you’re right, she had a program that was based on that. LOUISE: It’s just a nice round number, isn’t it? Let’s just pluck this out of our arse and throw that at all women. ANNA: What I find there though is that like Shreen said, it’s something that a child needs. And I just wanted to double-check that, because I’m not a nutritionist, I’m a yogi and I run a studio, but I wanted to check with somebody who does work with that. I chatted to our non-diet nutritionist Nina and she clarified that yes - this is generalisation - but that kind of number is something that would serve a child. Like, a toddler or a four, five-year-old. And then thinking about the effects of being on a low-calorie diet for a long period, things like loss of menstrual cycle, loss of bone density, fatigue, mood swings, constipation, blood sugar imbalance, stress hormones getting out of whack … SHREEN: Sex drive … ANNA: Sex drive … what did you say before? SHREEN: Dry vagina (laughs). ANNA: She didn’t mention that, did she? SHREEN: No. LOUISE: No, but that might be suffering all of them, you know? And why she’s so grouchy. ANNA: Memory fog and brain fog … memory loss and brain fog. So, these are all things that can be affected by not being adequately fed. And the better indicator of your needs are your body and your internal hunger signals. And we’re taught to … these external sources of just following this rule plan of 1200 calories a day means that if I need more than that – maybe at the time of my period especially I might need much more - and I’m just denying my natural hunger levels. LOUISE: The whole ‘per day’ thing really gives me the shits as well. SHREEN: Yeah, that’s a really good point. LOUISE: This is just a statistical method to help researchers make assumptions about nutrition. It’s not supposed to be something religiously followed. SHREEN: No, there’s no … ANNA: An individual thing, yeah. LOUISE: It’s bizarre. But, isn’t that interesting that even as she’s like, she’s trying desperately, the poor little thing to understand that this is a principle of intuitive eating but she can’t quite get there because she immediately lurches into “well, if you want to lose weight …”. I just felt like reaching through the screen and saying, “realise that intuitive eating is not a weight loss program”. ANNA: That’s half the problem, is that she clearly thinks that the only people who explore intuitive eating are going for weight loss. She says that a few times. LOUISE: Oh, she’s a scrambled egg. ANNA: Yeah. She doesn’t understand that the whole purpose of intuitive eating is more about finding a peaceful relationship with food and your body, not about trying to pursue making your body be something, a certain size. SHREEN: It’s about food freedom, it’s about having a healthy relationship with food, stopping the obsession. It’s not … it’s definitely not following these external rules. It’s about being in tune with what your body wants and needs and getting in touch with those signals. LOUISE: Different planet, I don’t think she’s visited. SHREEN: I don’t think she understands what the ‘honouring hunger’ … it’s a basic self-care need. If you’re not honouring hunger … LOUISE: Again, you’re mentioning a foreign concept here. This is someone who will happily live with a dry vagina, it doesn’t matter. SHREEN: Yep (all laugh). LOUISE: We all went there. SHREEN: She just really doesn’t understand and that is the reason why … people don’t give themselves enough food and they’re following diet plans, and they’re going to give themselves cravings leading to overeating and bingeing, and that’s perfectly normal as well. Other than ‘rejecting the diet mentality’ one of the first steps of intuitive eating is to just honour your hunger and it’s so important. It’s self-care. ANNA: It's so liberating too, if you’re been on the diet bandwagon for many, many years, to recognise that “hey, my body’s got a lot of wisdom, and it’s telling me, it’s giving me messages and I can learn how to reconnect with that”. And I think part of the common thread that comes up with what she says all the time is that … she thinks it’s all about ‘you can’t trust your body’. I think an important thing that I’ve learned is you can really learn how to trust your body. We get into this as we move into the next principle or two. It’s not about endless eating and not being able to, you know, like you’re just not going to go out of control all the time, which is what she sort of thinks. SHREEN: Point number three is that ‘unconditional permission to eat all foods’. LOUISE: She really had a problem with principle three. Like, she was visibly … SHREEN: Yeah, and she started comparing it to smoking, and credit cards, and it’s like …what are you talking about? ANNA: So yeah, this ‘make peace with food’, you’re right. And she talks about saying, talking about the ‘last supper mentality’, and she says, “I’m not religious, I don’t know what Jesus ate”. LOUISE: She really needs to read some books. ANNA: She needs to read Intuitive Eating if she’s going to talk about it. Because if she read it, she might really understand what that means. I thought it was quite clear just from the ‘last supper mentality’, don’t you think? SHREEN: You just eat everything in sight. LOUISE: I don’t even think it has religious connotations, I thought it was like a death row thing. SHREEN: Oh, that’s true … LOUISE: Like eating your last meal. ANNA: That’s right. And it makes sense, I think, if you think about that. You know you’re not going to have something again, so you want to make the most of it in that moment. And ultimately that’s what it’s about. I think that’s kind of clear. But she didn’t understand that, she was sort of like “I don’t like this intense, this hostile approach”. And I’m like, you ARE intense and hostile.  LOUISE: How is that intense and hostile? I’ve not ever read the ten principles of intuitive eating and thought “gosh, that’s angry”. I mean, gosh. Visit the internet, really (all laugh). ANNA: I think she is the, again, the epitome diet culture, and she is the hostile one. Think about the Biggest Loser, she is very aggressive and in-your-face, pushing her clients. So, here she talks about it all being about self-control and willpower, and I think that’s missing the point of intuitive eating completely as well. LOUISE: She just can’t … SHREEN: She doesn’t understand. If she’d read the book, she would understand there’s science behind it as well, if she … LOUISE: I don’t think if she read the book she would understand.  SHREEN: Yeah (laughs) ANNA: I picked up on that too, she’s [inaudible]. LOUISE: She almost yelled “You do not permission to eat”. Which was quite scary. SHREEN: Because I think that reflects her inner narrative. That’s what’s going on in her head. LOUISE: Yeah. Not … not relaxed, that’s for sure. That response to the third point was quite unhinged. ANNA: And like you said, relating the food to credit cards or smoking, that’s a completely different thing. I don’t think … you know, food is something that we rely on, like biologically … SHREEN: We need food to survive, we need food … and intuitive eating is about healing your relationship to food, it’s about having a healthy relationship to food, and you can’t have that if you’re restricting foods. That’s why it’s really important to give yourself unconditional permission to eat. And yeah, it is scary. Of course. It’s scary when you’ve come from that mentality, but it’s the only way for food to lose its power. ANNA: Yeah. And I think it may be a good point to think about how it’s helpful to be handheld through that process. It can sound really scary to somebody who’s new to it, or who hasn’t delved into intuitive eating too much, or worked with a coach or therapist or something. Maybe working with a. dietitian on this would be really helpful. I understand how it can feel like that lack of control, but I think that’s a period that sometimes is part of that healing process. When you let go of the restriction, and allow yourself full unconditional permission to eat, then you might explore some of those foods that were off-limits for a period. And it might feel like you are diving into them a lot. But … LOUISE: Which is perfectly normal. SHREEN: Yeah. LOUISE: The last supper effect … like, that actually, now I remember. The ‘last supper’ effect, it is the paper by Herman and Polivy, “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we diet”. That’s the ‘last supper’ effect. It’s a perfectly normal psychological response to restriction is to eat more. And the difference between that and going into massive credit card debt is if you keep giving yourself permission to eat, if you keep reminding yourself that the food’s always there, it’s perfectly safe and I’m allowed to eat it, you will naturally settle down when you get food safety. Eating is totally different to compulsive spending on credit cards. I think she’s just … a lot of people freak out when they let go of dieting and get into that all-or-nothing pattern with eating, but there’s like … a real difference between being in an all-or-nothing pattern of eating and adopting intuitive eating and going through that first phase of eating all the food. It’s just different, and its’ not pathological. It’s a normal response to restriction that obviously … she is so restricted and terrified of that. ANNA: It’s all about control, isn’t it? And I think that, you know, talking about the 1200-1600 calories, and I think she refers to that 1600 calories as something you should never, ever go over. So, as a woman, we’re meant to live our lives constantly not going above that. SHREEN: And it’s such a dangerous message. It’s just not enough food, at all. And it’s … and that’s what she’s selling to people, as well … LOUISE: She’s more like ‘honour your restriction’. SHREEN: Yeah! ANNA: We could reverse all of this and create a Jillian Michaels plan. LOUISE: The non-intuitive eating principles. Accept diet culture … what’s the second one? ANNA: Honour your hunger … don’t honour your hunger. LOUISE: Ignore your hunger. SHREEN: Ignore your hunger, yeah. LOUISE: Number three, you do not have permission to eat (all laugh). Alright, principle four? ANNA: Principle four is ‘challenge the food police’. LOUISE: Okay, so hers would be ‘obey the food police’. SHREEN: I don’t think she really understands that she is the food police. When she’s going through it? Like she is … the food police are all the things she’s already talked about. 1200 calories, 1600 calories, these are things that are the food police. ANNA: These are the rules. SHREEN: She doesn’t understand that principle at all. ANNA: The one thing that she said that I did agree with her on was “don’t beat yourself up”. I think she says it in a different way, she means it in a different way, because she kind of adds on and says, “don’t beat yourself up, but don’t fuck up”. Oh sorry. LOUISE:  Please, swear. ANNA: She says, not quite like that, but “maintain balance, it’s all about balance”. And don’t … SHREEN: And self-control. ANNA: So, “don’t beat yourself up, but just don’t do it”, sort of thing. SHREEN: Or, “you can do better”. She always says that, “you can do better”. ANNA: Yeah, so that message is like, it’s still that sort of shaming approach. SHREEN: Condescending. LOUISE: It makes no sense whatsoever. ANNA: But don’t beat yourself up, I mean, that’s important. LOUISE: You know what, ‘don’t beat yourself up’ means she knows people are not going to be able to do it.  ANNA: That’s a good point, yeah. Yeah, which she talks about the… LOUISE: … about going straight back to jail. ANNA: She talks about the stats, which is interesting. She brings up the stats. LOUISE: Oh, the stats. Yeah, that bit made me itchy. ANNA: That’s coming. It’s coming. The next one is ‘discover the satisfaction factor’, which I think she was actually in agreement with. SHREEN: Yeah, that one … she was saying, food for pleasure … I think that one was almost okay. ANNA: Like wow, okay, we agree. And then six was ‘feel your fullness’. And what came up here was again, it was just clear she hasn’t read the book because she didn’t understand that concept at all. LOUISE: She probably doesn’t know what fulness feels like. SHREEN: And then she started talking about how it’s in your head, and kind of went off … even I got a little bit lost with what she was saying. Like, “oh, we’re on fullness principle? I thought we were …” ANNA: She was kind of saying, yeah, she was kind of saying that if you’re not listening to your body, you’re not picking up your fullness levels, there’s something messed up in your head. And I was thinking, you know what? Sometimes I eat food and I’m quite satisfied physically but I’m still eating because the food’s really good, or I don’t want to … I’m eating in company and I don’t want to finish the meal and want to show that I’ve appreciated it … SHREEN: That’s the thing with intuitive eating, that it’s not the ‘hunger/fullness’ diet. And eating past fullness is normal. It’s totally okay. And it’s not just about eating, you know, getting in touch with your fullness signals. It’s about eating foods that give you pleasure and satisfaction. ANNA: Which is the ‘discover the satisfaction factor’. SHREEN: Which is the next one, but yeah. (sighs). LOUISE: God. So, if you can’t feel fullness, there’s something psychologically wrong with you.  ANNA: That’s the message that she’s giving, yeah. SHREEN: But not understanding that if you’re dieting or especially if you’re only eating those dangerous amount of calories a day, you’re going to be absolutely … LOUISE: You mean, like an adult [inaudible] SHREEN: (laughs). Absolutely starving and of course you’re not going to feel your fullness. But there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s just your body. Your body is doing exactly what it is meant to do. It needs food. ANNA: She doesn’t see that 1200-1600 calories as a restriction. She sees it as like … SHREEN: That’s her normal. ANNA: That’s food, that’s what you’re allowed during the day. LOUISE: So depressing. ANNA: Pretty sure I eat double or triple that. LOUISE: Oh, my goodness. ANNA: So, we’re at number seven. We’re still only … oh, over halfway. ‘Cope with your emotions with kindness’.  SHREEN: I think the thing is … LOUISE: That doesn’t really bring her to my mind. SHREEN: Yeah. She kind of goes “oh, yeah, I agree with this, but it shouldn’t just be one paragraph …”. And I’m like YES, there’s a BOOK. A book! There’s a whole book to go with this.  ANNA: She clearly seems to think it’s just this very basic, you know, overview … SHREEN: Guidelines. ANNA: Yeah, just these ten principles. She hasn’t read the book; she doesn’t know who wrote it. LOUISE: No, but this one really shat me to tears. Because this is where she’s saying that she’s had some childhood history with being maybe fractionally larger than someone else and has had to do, like … basically what she’s saying is that if you cannot lose weight and keep it off forever, that is your psychological fault. SHREEN: Yep. LOUISE: You haven’t done the work in therapy to fix your seemingly not thin body. Which is like, such a load of bullshit. And just unscientific and not sound whatsoever. And like you were saying before, people … she doesn’t understand that food is a relationship, and it’s a complex relationship. And the refusal to see anything other than like … she doesn’t even mention hunger as a reason to eat. Anything other than eating to a calorie control, anything else is incorrect. And we eat for an infinite amount of reasons and all of them make sense. And that’s what I love about intuitive eating, it doesn’t pathologise eating. It doesn’t pathologise hunger, it doesn’t pathologise fullness, and it doesn’t pathologise emotions as a reason to eat. And she clearly is. Seeing the function of how wonderful sometimes binge eating is as a way of protecting yourself from [inaudible] stuff. There’s no pathologizing in intuitive eating, but she’s full of pathologizing thinking that even to read statements like this, it doesn’t sink in. ANNA: She’s oversimplifying the whole thing; she doesn’t understand it at all. And this is where she moves into talking about the percentage of people that are successful versus not successful at diets. SHREEN: So, she acknowledges that 95-98% of diets fail. Is this where she starts talking about the Biggest Loser? ANNA: Yeah. SHREEN: She then starts talking about how the Biggest Loser, there’s a 30% extra success rate if you follow the Biggest Loser method. LOUISE: Really? SHREEN: Yeah. ANNA: So, she basically says, she acknowledges that the studies are very clear that 95% of people are unable to sustain a diet or sustain that weight loss, not a diet. But she says that actually on the Biggest Loser it’s only 65% of people that fail. So actually … SHREEN: So, she’s basically saying “we’ve got this success rate, if you do this …” LOUISE: Which study is this published in? Because the only study I’ve read from season 1 which is the … ANNA: The six-year study? SHREEN: The six year, yeah, really interesting. LOUISE: There were 16 people, and 14 of them regained. I don’t think that equates to 65%. Am I …? ANNA: I don’t know but even so … no, she says 35. So, 30% more than … she says 30%, 35% are successful. SHREEN: But even the fact that she’s now saying that 95-98% of diets fail, and she acknowledges that, but all that she’s been talking about is dieting. Diet the whole way through. She’s just completely contradicting herself. ANNA: Not only is it that they don’t work, but she continues to spruik it, continues to say that it’s possible, and if you do it her way, the Biggest Loser way … they did 7 hours of exercise a day, with gruelling regimes and being pushed and yelled at … LOUISE: And they all put the weight back on. ANNA: They put the weight back on. SHREEN: yeah. LOUISE: And their resting metabolic rate was screwed, six years later. SHREEN: Yeah, 700 calories it decreased by. They lost lean body mass, their fasting glucose increased, their blood sugar levels, yeah. They were the main things. But the fact that their metabolic rate decreased by such a large amount … especially where we were saying, she’s telling people to only eat 1200 calories but then you’re going to follow the Biggest Loser method, your metabolic rate’s going to drop by 700 calories, then what are you going to do? LOUISE: So, she lied about the stats on the Biggest Loser, and she’s not even talking to people about the metabolic impact. Because that study was fascinating, and I talk to clients about it. Because they predicted, the researchers predicted how much their resting metabolic rate would be dropped by …  ANNA: And what did they … LOUISE: And they found out it was even lower. So, they were worse off metabolically than they had predicted six years later. No one expected it to last that long, to have such a devastating impact. ANNA: Yeah, so it’s like a continued effect. It hasn’t regained back to before, pre … LOUISE: Exactly. And when stuff like that is suppressed, we know people are going to experience intense hunger, which of course you can’t honour. SHREEN: And the thing is, again, she’s completely misquoted this study herself but if she’d done her research she would know that there’s been over a hundred studies on intuitive eating that have been done that show you have better body image, higher esteem, improved metabolism, decreased rates of disordered and emotional eating, diminished stress levels and increased satisfaction with life. That’s over a hundred studies on intuitive eating that have been done. ANNA: And I’m pretty sure that you couldn’t say the same, with all of those positive effects, with dieting. LOUISE:  No, especially the ones that use her supplements, which show that everyone puts the weight back on. And the Biggest Loser study, everyone puts the weight back on … but let’s not focus on whether or not the weight comes back on. It’s actually the damage to the body and the metabolic systems that’s just absent from her rant. SHREEN: And not even the psychological damage, that’s not even mentioned. LOUISE: She’s evidence of the psychological damage. SHREEN: Yeah. That is true, yeah. ANNA: So, the next one is … principle eight, respect your body. LOUISE: Oh, fuck. ANNA: So, I think going back to when she spoke about size 16 always equalling healthiness, I think that shows that she doesn’t have respect for all bodies. And that kind of bothers me a bit. SHREEN. A bit. A lot. ANNA: It’s a big part of like, you know, our approach here and being a Health at Every Size® professional, you know? It’s about honouring and understanding and respecting that all bodies are different and need something different. SHREEN: And that you can’t tell somebody’s health by their body size, and that’s such … it’s a huge misconception as it is, let alone, I mean, Jillian Michaels saying this and it’s just … ANNA: Yeah, and just recognising that bodies are diverse, and they will do different things. Your health looks different at different points in your life. What you need changes day to day, and only your body really knows. You know? No external source, no trainer, no Jillian Michaels, no Dr Oz, nobody knows your body. SHREEN: And the whole principle of respecting your body is about being kind to yourself and compassionate and self-care, which is the complete opposite of Jillian Michaels. Like, she is just not kind. She’s not compassionate. She’s just shaming, judgemental, mean. Like … yeah. She’s … I just don’t think she even understands the word ‘respect’, quite frankly. LOUISE: Unless it’s like ‘respect my authority”. SHREEN: Yeah. ANNA: Something I noticed too, that came up before, was that because she’s so invested in it … have you heard of the concept of religion, like dieting? The religion of dieting? She’s so completely invested in it, she’s almost not willing to look the other way, or explore that there might be some truth in this, because she’s so invested, like financially and that’s her way of living … LOUISE: It’s her identity. ANNA: Exactly. LOUISE: It’s interesting, isn’t it? I think Alan Levinovitz, ‘The Gluten Lie’ … ANNA: That’s the guy. LOUISE: He talks about this, the religion of diet mentality. She is definitely the Pope. SHREEN: Quote of the day (all laugh). ANNA: So, then we come into ‘movement, feel the difference’. Which is principle nine. SHREEN: I think this one really got us fired up, didn’t it? ANNA: Well, the first thing that she said was like, “what is this? I don’t know what this ‘militant exercise’ even means”. LOUISE: That’s so funny (all laugh). ANNA: Like, really? Are you sure? LOUISE: She’s like, world-famous on memes for [inaudible]. I think I even did a presentation once where I used her with her finger in her face at someone as a demonstration of militant exercise. ANNA: Yeah, the kind of exercise that you don’t want to do if you want to have a sustainable relationship with movement. LOUISE: Yeah, your name’s on the t-shirt, love. SHREEN: Just telling people in this thing that, you know, this myth that’s just not true – ‘no pain, no gain’, that only hard exercise counts, it’s just utter rubbish. All movement counts, it doesn’t matter what it is. From playing with your kids, to hoovering, to dancing around your living room. LOUISE: Hoovering doesn’t count, I don’t even know what hoovering is … ANNA: She’s talking about hoovering, the hoover … SHREEN: Vacuuming, is that more Aussie? LOUISE: No, I don’t understand. (all laugh). SHREEN: But like, movement can be anything and you get the exact same health benefits from any type of regular movement, doesn’t matter what it is. But what she’s just trying to … she’s just bringing movement and aesthetics, that’s what she’s talking about. She’s talking about … ANNA: That’s a really good point, because if she was really interested in somebody’s health, then any kind of movement would be accessible, you know, like … SHREEN: Beneficial. ANNA: Helpful, yeah. SHREEN: Your blood markers, and stress levels, and sleep, it doesn’t matter what it is, it has the same health benefits. But she’s not talking about health. She’s talking about the way you look. ANNA: Yeah. She’s talking about ‘results’ a lot, and “if you want to get results fast” … because you know, let’s face it, she says “if you’re coming to look at intuitive eating, you’re trying to lose weight, you’re trying to get results fast.” LOUISE: Jillian! ANNA: “You’ve got to do a certain type of exercise, and my programs do that”. So, a little bit of spruiking her own programs too. SHREEN: What she doesn’t realise that she’s doing is having that negative relationship with exercise is not going to make people want to do it.  LOUISE: She doesn’t care about that. SHREEN: She’s the reason why people don’t want to go to the gym, or they hate exercise, because of people like Jillian Michaels. ANNA: Yeah, it’s that fitness trauma that you were talking about before. And what I recognise here, at the studio at Haven, community … in my experience, community has always been really powerful in building that sustainable and healthful relationship with movement. Joy and … SHREEN: And it’s that you enjoy, you [inaudible]. ANNA: And to want to come back, too. And that militant approach might work well for someone who responds to that but maybe for a short time. And then that motivation kind of wanes. And then it’s always trying to get back the motivation, you hear that a lot in fitness culture. But if you’re not coming at it from external, an external place, for external purposes, and it’s more about the … SHREEN: The way it makes you feel, using it as a tool for self-care rather than punishment … ANNA: Your mental health, having fun with your friends, it’s a completely different experience to being yelled at by Jillian Michaels. SHREEN: Her whole thing is yelling at people, making them feel guilty, punishing them. Like, and that’s just not what people need in a fitness professional. They need someone who is kind and compassionate and she’s just … that’s just not her, unfortunately. She’s just giving … ANNA: What is she? She’s the Pope of … the religion of dieting. She’s also the epitome of diet culture. She’s all of those things. And then the last principle is gentle nutrition, principle ten. LOUISE: I think this actually blew up her brain. SHREEN: Yeah, because she couldn’t understand the whole diet … principle one, principle ten … LOUISE: She couldn’t figure out how that fits with unconditional permission to eat. Because of course, if you have unconditional permission to eat, you’re going to stick your face into a burger for the rest of your life.  ANNA: Yeah, so again she thinks it’s all just endless eating. LOUISE: She’s stuck in that ‘all or nothing’ mentality. ANNA: Exactly, yeah. SHREEN: It’s funny, because she talks about that ‘black and white, all or nothing’ mentality and not understanding that’s exactly what she’s saying. Yeah. ANNA: Yeah, and again it came up just very, very clear that she hasn’t read the book, she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. SHREEN: Yeah, I think that’s the main … ANNA: This is when she said, you know, “it’s probably written by someone who has just really been hurt by diet culture and probably had an eating disorder, and, you know, probably just some random” and actually … LOUISE: Such a shame that she didn’t actually look at the author. SHREEN: Yeah, just even look up to who they were. Yeah. ANNA: It’s a little bit disappointing because you’d think somebody who has such a following, I think, has such a … I think there’s a moral obligation in a way to represent something that … when you have such a big following and you’re sharing something that can affect people deeply … SHREEN: It’s what we say, that she’s really coming from that dieting mentality and all that sort of shaming that she doesn’t understand that intuitive eating at its core is a self-care model. It’s very compassionate and she doesn’t understand that. Also. with intuitive eating, we’re not saying that it’s a solution for everybody. Everyone has the right to do what they want with their body. She just doesn’t understand the concept at all, what it stands for. ANNA: It’s like she’s on such a different planet, and it’s not … doesn’t come across as open to exploring that this might be something that really serves people. SHREEN: Yeah, and that it’s having such a positive impact. We talked about earlier with the … ANNA: Feeling a bit threatened by the impact on her, you know, her … LOUISE: To her bottom line. I also think that, I mean, if she really is undernourished to that point that she has restricted her entire life, one of the things that happens when you’re weight supressed is cognitive rigidity. ANNA: That’s a really good point. LOUISE: So, it’s quite hard to be flexible. We see that a lot with people who are suffering in the depths of Anorexia, that you simply cannot think. And perhaps there’s an element of that that’s happening here. ANNA: That’s really interesting. SHREEN: That’s a really good point. Because what dieting, that kind of restriction is doing to you … LOUISE: Well, it gives her massive benefits. Huge amounts of recognition, it gives her income. She can’t think out of it. So, there’s not a lot of reason for her, like … I think the reason for putting up that video wasn’t a genuine exploration of “what’s this thing called ‘intuitive eating’?”.  SHREEN: It was just to … LOUISE: It was just to kind of … ANNA: Debunk it. LOUISE: To debunk it and keep hold of her customer base. Look, let’s assume that she is interested in the book. Jillian Michael’s house is in Malibu, California. I reckon we just whack a copy in an envelope, address it to her, maybe she’ll read it. ANNA: Do you think?  LOUISE: Yeah? I don’t know. Maybe if all of our listeners whack a copy into an envelope … SHREEN: Yeah!  LOUISE: 20 copies, please read. Maybe. SHREEN: Maybe, yeah. LOUISE: But I don’t think that was anything other than a … it’s quite interesting, I’m seeing this more and more. The famous people, the people who have really invested in diet culture, even the obesity researchers and all of that. They’re all kind of getting a little bit nervous about this pushback. SHREEN: They should be. LOUISE: It makes me feel warm and fuzzy. SHREEN: It’s time. LOUISE: It’s got nothing to do with the champagne. I think the celebs are getting nervous, like “what do you mean, people in larger bodies are okay with themselves just the way they are?”. And finding non weight-loss things to look after themselves, oh my gosh. What a huge, horrible threat. So, we’re not sorry, Jillian, that we made you nervous. ANNA: Agreed. I hope it gives her a little bit of food for thought (all laugh). LOUISE: I don’t know how many calories would be attached to that thought (all laugh). ANNA: I have to say, like, the thing that I think fires me up the most is how fatphobic she is. SHREEN: And how much harm … that’s the thing that fired me up the most, how much harm she’s causing people out there. And having had an eating disorder myself, it’s just … LOUISE: Horrible. You can see how triggering it is. SHREEN: I can see what it can do, yeah. That’s what fires me up. LOUISE: and let’s not forget when we say fatphobic, we mean people who hate fat people. And that is really reflective … even though she is professing “oh, I’m going to love you … but you’re unhealthy so change”. That’s troubling. Using health as a halo, an excuse or a reason for my core treatment of you just based on your appearance. And that’s just … those days are done. You can’t do that anymore. It’s just not cool. And I do wonder if there is like a Biggest Loser university somewhere?  ANNA: Michelle Bridges went to it as well. LOUISE: Because the same kind of hatred of fat people, you know … again, like masked with a thin layer of concern trolling for your health was Michelle Bridges’ thing. Four years ago, when she was on Australian Story and she was saying “I’m yet to meet someone who is morbidly obese and happy”. So, for people who are listening from overseas, Michelle Bridges is the Australian version of Jillian Michaels. And what an awful comment. So, Jillian has been pushed back against from this video, right? Michelle was pushed back against from this video too, with really clear … I know we all live in a bubble, but with quite a lot of push back. ANNA: That’s good. Was she on … was that on like Australian primetime TV? SHREEN: She was on Australian Story. LOUISE: Yeah [inaudible] … it shows how deeply she feels [inaudible] about people she’s profiting from. Putting them through three cycles a year of 1200 calorie program and she knows it doesn’t work. But the thing is, what they do is they double down. People like this double down, when they’re called out, when there’s a pushback. Instead of kind of opening up and say, “okay, I should probably issue an apology, maybe take the video down, maybe do some work”. They’re not doing that. Jillian’s not doing that. ANNA: I think she just keeps responding. And she’s just responding with the same rhetoric, so she’s not … SHREEN: I think she kind of comments that [inaudible], to learn about it more, which is a shame. ANNA: And how did Michele Bridges respond? LOUISE: Doubled down on it. About health, “I care deeply about health”. ANNA: The whole thing with health and weight, this is what really frustrates me about it too. If she’s really interested in health, she could support all the behaviours that support someone’s health. LOUISE: Too complicated. Remember? Too complicated. Anything that actually involves having to think about something other than my own diet plan … ANNA: It makes me realise how happy I’ve become in moving away from all this, that’s why I got away from it. Because I learned about how there’s another way. Intuitive eating, Health at Every Size®, the body positivity movement … I started delving into it and it just felt so triggering being around other fitness professionals from the traditional approach. And this here, I’ve got to say, got me so fired up. I’m going to be fired up for a while from this. SHREEN: We talk about fitness trauma, and Jillian Michaels is causing that. LOUISE: May she go the way of the dinosaurs and … (all laugh). ANNA: Well, hopefully there will be less and less of her to be seen in the future and more and more of kind of this messaging coming up, challenging … LOUISE: Absolutely, I absolutely think that’s going to happen. You’ve just reminded me actually, she … because Jillian, earlier in the year before she posted the nasty intuitive eating thing, she said something nasty about Lizzo. SHREEN: Yeah, of course.  ANNA: That sounds familiar … SHREEN: Yeah. That was before …  LOUISE: A little while before, I don’t know. It’s Covid, none of us have a timeline. ANNA: She’s said some pretty horrendous things. SHREEN: Really horrendous things yeah. LOUISE: Again, like … “she’s clearly going to get diabetes” or something? ANNA: I think she said something along the lines of “there’s nothing sexy about diabetes”, or clogged arteries or something.  SHREEN: Something like that, yeah. ANNA: How can she … that’s so inappropriate. Lizzo’s bouncing away on stage. She’s got stamina, she’s got energy.  SHREEN: We don’t know anything about her or her health. ANNA: And why do we have to talk about that anyway? She’s this amazing performer and doing this really cool stuff. It’s wonderful to see some diverse bodies out there that are getting out there as much as the other, the thin ideal that you see everywhere. LOUISE: Yeah, the comments that she made were like “why are we talking about Lizzo’s body, we should be talking about her music”. ANNA: So, she said that? LOUISE: Yeah. ANNA: But then … LOUISE: And it’s really funny, because she’s saying that we shouldn’t be talking about Lizzo’s body, but her entire website is full of shots of her body. ANNA: Yeah, and that’s her thing. SHREEN: That’s her thing, yeah. ANNA: She’s always talking about people’s bodies. Size 16, yeah. SHREEN: Yeah, non-stop. LOUISE: The point I’m making is that you don’t say that about Lizzo. And the pushback she got after she made that comment? This is the future Jillian. Lizzo is setting the world on fire.  ANNA: We need more Lizzo. SHREEN: We need more Lizzo. LOUISE: and you are the biggest loser. ANNA: Well put. LOUISE: Oh my god, let’s finish on a high note. Thank you, guys, that was an elegant unpacking of Jillian Michael’s ten principles of not understanding intuitive eating (all laugh). And how firmly we can steer the ship to this new awesome way of looking after our body. ANNA: Thank you. SHREEN: Thank you.  Resources Mentioned: (Watch if you can stomach) Jillian Michaels' Igno-rant on Youtube Urbszat, Dax, C. Peter Herman, and Janet Polivy. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet: Effects of anticipated deprivation on food intake in restrained and unrestrained eaters." Journal of abnormal psychology 111.2 (2002): 396. News article about 4 lawsuits against Jillian Michaels for her weight loss pills Fothergill, Erin, et al. "Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after “The Biggest Loser” competition." Obesity 24.8 (2016): 1612-1619. Alan Levinovitz's The Gluten Lie Find out more about Anna Hearn & Haven Find out more about Shreen El Masry and Be You Be Free  

There's nothing more infuriating than when people throw shade at the anti-diet perspective without bothering to actually research it. When "The Biggest Loser" trainer/shameless fatphobe Jillian Michaels arrogantly released a Youtube clip trashing the 10 principles of intuitive eating, WITHOUT EVEN READING THE BOOK, she REALLY pi***ed off the community! And none more so than my guests, anti-diet fitness trainers Anna Hearn and Shreen El Masry, who have been dying to come on the podcast and set the record straight! Finally the COVID window opened just a crack so I could record the very first IN PERSON podcast! Join us as we dissect Jillian's often hilarious inability to comprehend a life beyond diet prison. WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS 'PERMISSION TO EAT!!' It seems the lady doth protest too much - could it be that the Queen of Diet Prison is sensing the paradigm-shifting power of the anti-diet revolution? That's right folks, the unrivalled reign of Biggest Loser-esque terror is over!! Vive La Difference! Please note - this episode comes with a hefty side serve of calorie count discussions, so if you're in recovery from an eating disorder please consider your level of spoons to hear the diet talk. But, if you've had a gutful of igno-rants about anti-dieting, it's time to get ALL FIRED UP! Show Transcript:   LOUISE: So, here I am with Anna and Shreen. Thank you so much for coming on the show. ANNA: Thank you for having us. SHREEN: Yeah, thank you so much. LOUISE: It’s so exciting to be alive with actual humans in the room, and slightly weird. Why don’t you guys tell me all about what is firing you up? ANNA: We’re really fired up about Jillian Michaels and her aggressive fatphobic rant on intuitive eating. LOUISE: (sighs) First of all, I have to say I love how you say ‘rant’, it’s very proper and awesome. But yes, Jillian Michaels – Biggest Loser trainer in the United States. Horrendously fatphobic. ANNA: Yeah, I mean … she got her living, she makes her living from shaming fat bodies. I think that tells a lot about her character and where she’s going to go with her intuitive eating rant. LOUISE: So, she was on the Biggest Loser for years and years and years. Her website … well, she’s touting herself as the world’s best trainer. Like, the biggest expert in the world on all things fitness. Which, well … this is just a hunch, but I could find people on the planet who are more qualified. ANNA: Well, if you want to break down her qualifications, I think it looks like she’s done a couple of personal training qualifications, a couple of fitness qualifications and … SHREEN: One ‘woo woo’ nutrition qualification. ANNA: There is a nutrition qualification there too, but it doesn’t look like there’s any degrees or anything. So, when it comes to intuitive eating and looking at all of that, when we go into it you’ll realise, I think, that she hasn’t really done her research. She doesn’t understand it. And I think it’s interesting that somebody without that nutrition background or lived experience with that sort of thing talks about it the way that she does. SHREEN: I think as well, not only does she come across really aggressive and shaming, also I think her insecurity is really coming out in this video. Intuitive eating is a movement that’s really starting to take off, and she’s clearly threatened by it. You can see her defence mechanism is up, and she’s … you know, really, just … her demeanour is just awful. LOUISE: It's hard to tell, though, if her demeanour’s just awful because she’s defensive or because her demeanour’s just awful. SHREEN: Yeah, that’s true. ANNA: I kind of picked up on that and thought she was sensing a threat because intuitive eating is becoming more mainstream, people are becoming more aware of it. So that could threaten what she does, because she makes a living forcing people to lose weight. LOUISE: So, during the 90’s and the early 2000’s, like … it was a free-for-all with bullying people with larger bodies, as we saw. World-wide, the Biggest Loser was the number one show, and everyone thought it was okay. So, she’s had this unfettered ability to be horrible about body size and really belittling of people in larger bodies. And now, I think she’s realising it’s not okay to keep on doing that. ANNA: The backlash about it. LOUISE: So, just to set the stage. What we’re seeing … because I did see the internet blow up. It was a while ago now, but let’s face it - we’ve all been in iso and unable to talk to each other. So, she has like a YouTube channel and one of her YouTube little presentations - I don’t watch what she does, just for my own mental health - but this one was Jillian Michaels talking about intuitive eating. Which, oh my god … let’s just get Donald Trump talking about sexism. ANNA: That’s a great analogy. SHREEN: She’s basically, I think she’s just gone on the website and just pulled up the principles without doing any research into it or even understanding there’s over a hundred studies done on intuitive eating and there’s a whole book as well. She just went on there, read out these principles and gave her, I guess, her opinion.  ANNA: It became really clear that she hasn’t taken the time to understand it. She hasn’t learnt about the authors; you’ll see as she comes to the end of it, she talks about assuming that it was written by somebody who had just had some bad experience with diet culture, maybe had an eating disorder LOUISE: Oh my god, that’s so disrespectful SHREEN: So disrespectful. ANNA: No understanding or bothering to explore that the authors are actually dietitians who had come up with this approach because they had done so much work with clients who had struggled a lot and this is what they’d learnt from working with them over years and years. LOUISE: These are the gurus. Like, Tribole and Resch, they wrote the initial book Intuitive Eating and it’s just been updated, which is fantastic. But even that, even their book which is written from that perspective of helping people recover from eating disorders, that book is built on another big long history of social justice and fat activism. To not recognise that intuitive eating is part of a social movement and like, the way she presented it is like, she just stumbled across a webpage and … oh my god. ANNA: Definitely, yeah. And it came across very, very condescending. I felt really bothered … SHREEN: It’s so harmful, as well. That was the thing that really bothered me the most, was how much … I mean, she causes so much harm anyway, but the message was just next level harm. And if anyone was watching that and had no idea, the things that she was saying … yeah, it’s just not on. LOUISE: Oh god, yikes. So, we thought we would unpick Jillian Michael’s feelpinion to each of the ten principles of intuitive eating. And you guys have written some awesomely detailed notes. ANNA: We had a really good chat about it. LOUISE: Fantastic. But I’m so interested, because you guys both work in this industry as HAES® positive, body inclusive, weight neutral trainers hearing from almost like the personification of diet culture woman. SHREEN: She is the reason why people have so much fitness trauma and so much negative association with fitness. She’s causing that. ANNA: She is the epitome of diet culture. SHREEN: Yeah, she is the epitome of diet culture, for sure. ANNA: And I think we chatted about this as we were hanging out one day, and we just came across this as a topic that fired both of us up. And it’s frustrating when you see … when you’re so heavily involved in this space, and the HAES® space, and the body inclusive space, it can be … and luckily for me working here at Haven, this is the space I come to work every day. So, I’m not exposed to traditional diet culture unless I stumble across it or it’s brought to my attention. So, I couldn’t help but just be really quite wild about this. LOUISE: I love it. I mean, I don’t love that you’re wild, but I kind of do. But, yeah. It’s nice to know that in this industry there are people who feel really strongly about just putting an end to this. She’s what’s wrong with the fitness industry at the moment, and you guys are the future. And I think she can smell that. So, I think, like I … I managed to watch it and still shaking with rage but thank you for this glass of champagne. ANNA: I don’t think we could do this without a little bit of champagne. SHREEN: No, we need some bubbles. LOUISE: The first thing she starts with, so she’s actually going through all the principles. SHREEN:  Correct. LOUISE: Why don’t you give me the lowdown on your reaction. ANNA: Let’s kick off. So, she does go through the points one by one, and the first principle is ‘reject the diet mentality’. And I just want to point out a few things that came up for me that were just so apparent throughout. Her fatphobia is so clear. She’s driven, everything she says, and her approach is all drive by this. And I think she’s very ignorant, like she doesn’t see that there’s an issue with this. She comes form that space where it’s very normalised to shame fat bodies, it’s not okay to be in a bigger body. And she very clearly associates weight and health, they’re so closely tied, which I think it really problematic, obviously. So, in this ‘reject diet mentality’, what came up for you, Shreen? SHREEN: Well, the first thing for me was that she couldn’t distinguish a difference between fad diets and what dieting is, and diet culture. She’s like, “oh you know, if it’s fad diets we’re talking about yeah, yeah sure”, but this is a woman who has sold supplements in the past. LOUISE: She’s sold fad diets. SHREEN: She’s sold fad diets. And she is diet culture, so I guess she can’t … she doesn’t understand what diet culture actually is and why it’s so important to reject it. I mean, diet culture in the US alone is worth 70 billion dollars. ANNA:  She profits off it. SHREEN: She profits off everyone’s insecurities. So, she was just like, “reject diet culture? What’s this, what does this mean?”. And I really did sense there that her insecurity is coming out there because that is her, that’s how she makes her money. ANNA: Well that’s it, she’s really incentivised to support diet culture.  LOUISE: But the distinction that she made between “well, if it’s fad, but if it’s proper” … it just made me laugh, because she’s had no less than four separate lawsuits … ANNA:  Jillian? SHREEN: Yeah. LOUISE: Launched against her by her consumers who bought her caffeine-fuelled diet pills. ANNA: Which I think she might have … there might have been something on the Biggest Loser where she gave them to contestants unfairly, apparently, as well. LOUISE: Oh my god, scandal on the Biggest Loser. Like … ANNA: Well, the other thing that came up for me there was she said, “what is this, healthy at any size?”, and that’s immediately a red flag representing that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She hasn’t researched this because … I can understand it’s very easy to misconstrue Health At Every Size® for healthy at every size, but it’s quite a different meaning and that assumption that, you know, just assuming that we’re saying as a Health at Every Size® professional that all bodies are healthy, that’s not where we’re aiming. We’re talking about people being able to pursue health regardless of shape and size. LOUISE: Or, also, we’re talking about the choice not to pursue health and to be left the fuck alone. SHREEN: Yeah, there’s no moral obligation. If people want to do so, then it’s up to them. It shouldn’t be … they shouldn’t have to do it if they don’t want to, but that’s what diet culture is saying. ANNA: Your body, your rules. SHREEN: And this part of her rant really, really … we know that she’s incredibly fatphobic and she fat shames, but it just came out so much in that where she was again talking, talking about size 16. And she’s saying “well, you know, if you’re a size 16 of course I love you but you’re not healthy”. Which is just … LOUISE: Get fucked. SHREEN: Yeah, absolute garbage. ANNA: Yeah. And Health at Every Size® also is about respect for all bodies, and I think there is a real lack of respect in just making that assumption. You can’t tell. How does she know what someone’s health is, you know? What their metabolic functions are, their blood work, their social, mental health … you can’t tell that by someone’s size. SHREEN: Genetics, everything. There’s so much, it’s so multifaceted. LOUISE: Everything I think is just far too complicated for her. She has to actually, like … I mean, clearly, she hasn’t read anything or thought about anything. “Nope, that’s a number, that’s an assumption, and don’t challenge that”.  SHREEN: Yeah. And if someone’s watching that, I mean, how triggering. How much harm that one comment could cause somebody that could lead them down a path of dieting and to an eating disorder. ANNA: And especially if they were already vulnerable of somebody who would identify with being in a size 16, or plus. And also, size 16 is quite variable depending on which shop you shop in, you know? Where you get your clothes from. What’s a size anyway? What does it matter? SHREEN: Yeah, it doesn’t matter. LOUISE: Size is not the same as health, and she needs to pull her head in. I wonder if her YouTube videos come with a trigger warning. I don’t think they do, but they should. Because good point, you know, that she … everything she says is potentially a trigger. SHREEN: Especially the size of her audience as well, I’m worried. ANNA: She’s got a big reach still. Some of the comments though were interesting, some really great points. People were talking about intuitive eating and picking up on that she doesn’t understand it, she’s missing the point. LOUISE: That is really reassuring. ANNA: She stopped the comments, she cut them off. LOUISE: Oh no, they were too complicated. ANNA: So, the next principle is ‘honour your hunger’, and she said something pretty radical here. Well, it’s not really radical in the fitness world. These numbers get thrown around a lot. But trigger warning, there are numbers here. She says, “if you’re trying to lose weight, you can keep your body fed on as low as 1200 calories”. And that most women, especially those over, you know, relating to being a certain age, shouldn’t be eating over 1600 calories a day. SHREEN: Which is just absolutely unbelievable. She’s saying that … I mean, that’s what a toddler needs. A toddler needs 1200-1600 calories a day. LOUISE: How very dare she tell me how much I can eat, under a principle that says, ‘honour your hunger’. ANNA: She … on one hand, I’m not surprised she threw those numbers out because those numbers are thrown out all the time in the fitness world. I don’t know where … MyFitnessPal? LOUISE: Are they really? SHREEN: We were saying, MyFitnessPal may have started the whole 1200 calories thing … LOUISE: I think Michelle Bridges is guilty of that too. ANNA: Oh actually, you’re right, she had a program that was based on that. LOUISE: It’s just a nice round number, isn’t it? Let’s just pluck this out of our arse and throw that at all women. ANNA: What I find there though is that like Shreen said, it’s something that a child needs. And I just wanted to double-check that, because I’m not a nutritionist, I’m a yogi and I run a studio, but I wanted to check with somebody who does work with that. I chatted to our non-diet nutritionist Nina and she clarified that yes - this is generalisation - but that kind of number is something that would serve a child. Like, a toddler or a four, five-year-old. And then thinking about the effects of being on a low-calorie diet for a long period, things like loss of menstrual cycle, loss of bone density, fatigue, mood swings, constipation, blood sugar imbalance, stress hormones getting out of whack … SHREEN: Sex drive … ANNA: Sex drive … what did you say before? SHREEN: Dry vagina (laughs). ANNA: She didn’t mention that, did she? SHREEN: No. LOUISE: No, but that might be suffering all of them, you know? And why she’s so grouchy. ANNA: Memory fog and brain fog … memory loss and brain fog. So, these are all things that can be affected by not being adequately fed. And the better indicator of your needs are your body and your internal hunger signals. And we’re taught to … these external sources of just following this rule plan of 1200 calories a day means that if I need more than that – maybe at the time of my period especially I might need much more - and I’m just denying my natural hunger levels. LOUISE: The whole ‘per day’ thing really gives me the shits as well. SHREEN: Yeah, that’s a really good point. LOUISE: This is just a statistical method to help researchers make assumptions about nutrition. It’s not supposed to be something religiously followed. SHREEN: No, there’s no … ANNA: An individual thing, yeah. LOUISE: It’s bizarre. But, isn’t that interesting that even as she’s like, she’s trying desperately, the poor little thing to understand that this is a principle of intuitive eating but she can’t quite get there because she immediately lurches into “well, if you want to lose weight …”. I just felt like reaching through the screen and saying, “realise that intuitive eating is not a weight loss program”. ANNA: That’s half the problem, is that she clearly thinks that the only people who explore intuitive eating are going for weight loss. She says that a few times. LOUISE: Oh, she’s a scrambled egg. ANNA: Yeah. She doesn’t understand that the whole purpose of intuitive eating is more about finding a peaceful relationship with food and your body, not about trying to pursue making your body be something, a certain size. SHREEN: It’s about food freedom, it’s about having a healthy relationship with food, stopping the obsession. It’s not … it’s definitely not following these external rules. It’s about being in tune with what your body wants and needs and getting in touch with those signals. LOUISE: Different planet, I don’t think she’s visited. SHREEN: I don’t think she understands what the ‘honouring hunger’ … it’s a basic self-care need. If you’re not honouring hunger … LOUISE: Again, you’re mentioning a foreign concept here. This is someone who will happily live with a dry vagina, it doesn’t matter. SHREEN: Yep (all laugh). LOUISE: We all went there. SHREEN: She just really doesn’t understand and that is the reason why … people don’t give themselves enough food and they’re following diet plans, and they’re going to give themselves cravings leading to overeating and bingeing, and that’s perfectly normal as well. Other than ‘rejecting the diet mentality’ one of the first steps of intuitive eating is to just honour your hunger and it’s so important. It’s self-care. ANNA: It's so liberating too, if you’re been on the diet bandwagon for many, many years, to recognise that “hey, my body’s got a lot of wisdom, and it’s telling me, it’s giving me messages and I can learn how to reconnect with that”. And I think part of the common thread that comes up with what she says all the time is that … she thinks it’s all about ‘you can’t trust your body’. I think an important thing that I’ve learned is you can really learn how to trust your body. We get into this as we move into the next principle or two. It’s not about endless eating and not being able to, you know, like you’re just not going to go out of control all the time, which is what she sort of thinks. SHREEN: Point number three is that ‘unconditional permission to eat all foods’. LOUISE: She really had a problem with principle three. Like, she was visibly … SHREEN: Yeah, and she started comparing it to smoking, and credit cards, and it’s like …what are you talking about? ANNA: So yeah, this ‘make peace with food’, you’re right. And she talks about saying, talking about the ‘last supper mentality’, and she says, “I’m not religious, I don’t know what Jesus ate”. LOUISE: She really needs to read some books. ANNA: She needs to read Intuitive Eating if she’s going to talk about it. Because if she read it, she might really understand what that means. I thought it was quite clear just from the ‘last supper mentality’, don’t you think? SHREEN: You just eat everything in sight. LOUISE: I don’t even think it has religious connotations, I thought it was like a death row thing. SHREEN: Oh, that’s true … LOUISE: Like eating your last meal. ANNA: That’s right. And it makes sense, I think, if you think about that. You know you’re not going to have something again, so you want to make the most of it in that moment. And ultimately that’s what it’s about. I think that’s kind of clear. But she didn’t understand that, she was sort of like “I don’t like this intense, this hostile approach”. And I’m like, you ARE intense and hostile.  LOUISE: How is that intense and hostile? I’ve not ever read the ten principles of intuitive eating and thought “gosh, that’s angry”. I mean, gosh. Visit the internet, really (all laugh). ANNA: I think she is the, again, the epitome diet culture, and she is the hostile one. Think about the Biggest Loser, she is very aggressive and in-your-face, pushing her clients. So, here she talks about it all being about self-control and willpower, and I think that’s missing the point of intuitive eating completely as well. LOUISE: She just can’t … SHREEN: She doesn’t understand. If she’d read the book, she would understand there’s science behind it as well, if she … LOUISE: I don’t think if she read the book she would understand.  SHREEN: Yeah (laughs) ANNA: I picked up on that too, she’s [inaudible]. LOUISE: She almost yelled “You do not permission to eat”. Which was quite scary. SHREEN: Because I think that reflects her inner narrative. That’s what’s going on in her head. LOUISE: Yeah. Not … not relaxed, that’s for sure. That response to the third point was quite unhinged. ANNA: And like you said, relating the food to credit cards or smoking, that’s a completely different thing. I don’t think … you know, food is something that we rely on, like biologically … SHREEN: We need food to survive, we need food … and intuitive eating is about healing your relationship to food, it’s about having a healthy relationship to food, and you can’t have that if you’re restricting foods. That’s why it’s really important to give yourself unconditional permission to eat. And yeah, it is scary. Of course. It’s scary when you’ve come from that mentality, but it’s the only way for food to lose its power. ANNA: Yeah. And I think it may be a good point to think about how it’s helpful to be handheld through that process. It can sound really scary to somebody who’s new to it, or who hasn’t delved into intuitive eating too much, or worked with a coach or therapist or something. Maybe working with a. dietitian on this would be really helpful. I understand how it can feel like that lack of control, but I think that’s a period that sometimes is part of that healing process. When you let go of the restriction, and allow yourself full unconditional permission to eat, then you might explore some of those foods that were off-limits for a period. And it might feel like you are diving into them a lot. But … LOUISE: Which is perfectly normal. SHREEN: Yeah. LOUISE: The last supper effect … like, that actually, now I remember. The ‘last supper’ effect, it is the paper by Herman and Polivy, “Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we diet”. That’s the ‘last supper’ effect. It’s a perfectly normal psychological response to restriction is to eat more. And the difference between that and going into massive credit card debt is if you keep giving yourself permission to eat, if you keep reminding yourself that the food’s always there, it’s perfectly safe and I’m allowed to eat it, you will naturally settle down when you get food safety. Eating is totally different to compulsive spending on credit cards. I think she’s just … a lot of people freak out when they let go of dieting and get into that all-or-nothing pattern with eating, but there’s like … a real difference between being in an all-or-nothing pattern of eating and adopting intuitive eating and going through that first phase of eating all the food. It’s just different, and its’ not pathological. It’s a normal response to restriction that obviously … she is so restricted and terrified of that. ANNA: It’s all about control, isn’t it? And I think that, you know, talking about the 1200-1600 calories, and I think she refers to that 1600 calories as something you should never, ever go over. So, as a woman, we’re meant to live our lives constantly not going above that. SHREEN: And it’s such a dangerous message. It’s just not enough food, at all. And it’s … and that’s what she’s selling to people, as well … LOUISE: She’s more like ‘honour your restriction’. SHREEN: Yeah! ANNA: We could reverse all of this and create a Jillian Michaels plan. LOUISE: The non-intuitive eating principles. Accept diet culture … what’s the second one? ANNA: Honour your hunger … don’t honour your hunger. LOUISE: Ignore your hunger. SHREEN: Ignore your hunger, yeah. LOUISE: Number three, you do not have permission to eat (all laugh). Alright, principle four? ANNA: Principle four is ‘challenge the food police’. LOUISE: Okay, so hers would be ‘obey the food police’. SHREEN: I don’t think she really understands that she is the food police. When she’s going through it? Like she is … the food police are all the things she’s already talked about. 1200 calories, 1600 calories, these are things that are the food police. ANNA: These are the rules. SHREEN: She doesn’t understand that principle at all. ANNA: The one thing that she said that I did agree with her on was “don’t beat yourself up”. I think she says it in a different way, she means it in a different way, because she kind of adds on and says, “don’t beat yourself up, but don’t fuck up”. Oh sorry. LOUISE:  Please, swear. ANNA: She says, not quite like that, but “maintain balance, it’s all about balance”. And don’t … SHREEN: And self-control. ANNA: So, “don’t beat yourself up, but just don’t do it”, sort of thing. SHREEN: Or, “you can do better”. She always says that, “you can do better”. ANNA: Yeah, so that message is like, it’s still that sort of shaming approach. SHREEN: Condescending. LOUISE: It makes no sense whatsoever. ANNA: But don’t beat yourself up, I mean, that’s important. LOUISE: You know what, ‘don’t beat yourself up’ means she knows people are not going to be able to do it.  ANNA: That’s a good point, yeah. Yeah, which she talks about the… LOUISE: … about going straight back to jail. ANNA: She talks about the stats, which is interesting. She brings up the stats. LOUISE: Oh, the stats. Yeah, that bit made me itchy. ANNA: That’s coming. It’s coming. The next one is ‘discover the satisfaction factor’, which I think she was actually in agreement with. SHREEN: Yeah, that one … she was saying, food for pleasure … I think that one was almost okay. ANNA: Like wow, okay, we agree. And then six was ‘feel your fullness’. And what came up here was again, it was just clear she hasn’t read the book because she didn’t understand that concept at all. LOUISE: She probably doesn’t know what fulness feels like. SHREEN: And then she started talking about how it’s in your head, and kind of went off … even I got a little bit lost with what she was saying. Like, “oh, we’re on fullness principle? I thought we were …” ANNA: She was kind of saying, yeah, she was kind of saying that if you’re not listening to your body, you’re not picking up your fullness levels, there’s something messed up in your head. And I was thinking, you know what? Sometimes I eat food and I’m quite satisfied physically but I’m still eating because the food’s really good, or I don’t want to … I’m eating in company and I don’t want to finish the meal and want to show that I’ve appreciated it … SHREEN: That’s the thing with intuitive eating, that it’s not the ‘hunger/fullness’ diet. And eating past fullness is normal. It’s totally okay. And it’s not just about eating, you know, getting in touch with your fullness signals. It’s about eating foods that give you pleasure and satisfaction. ANNA: Which is the ‘discover the satisfaction factor’. SHREEN: Which is the next one, but yeah. (sighs). LOUISE: God. So, if you can’t feel fullness, there’s something psychologically wrong with you.  ANNA: That’s the message that she’s giving, yeah. SHREEN: But not understanding that if you’re dieting or especially if you’re only eating those dangerous amount of calories a day, you’re going to be absolutely … LOUISE: You mean, like an adult [inaudible] SHREEN: (laughs). Absolutely starving and of course you’re not going to feel your fullness. But there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s just your body. Your body is doing exactly what it is meant to do. It needs food. ANNA: She doesn’t see that 1200-1600 calories as a restriction. She sees it as like … SHREEN: That’s her normal. ANNA: That’s food, that’s what you’re allowed during the day. LOUISE: So depressing. ANNA: Pretty sure I eat double or triple that. LOUISE: Oh, my goodness. ANNA: So, we’re at number seven. We’re still only … oh, over halfway. ‘Cope with your emotions with kindness’.  SHREEN: I think the thing is … LOUISE: That doesn’t really bring her to my mind. SHREEN: Yeah. She kind of goes “oh, yeah, I agree with this, but it shouldn’t just be one paragraph …”. And I’m like YES, there’s a BOOK. A book! There’s a whole book to go with this.  ANNA: She clearly seems to think it’s just this very basic, you know, overview … SHREEN: Guidelines. ANNA: Yeah, just these ten principles. She hasn’t read the book; she doesn’t know who wrote it. LOUISE: No, but this one really shat me to tears. Because this is where she’s saying that she’s had some childhood history with being maybe fractionally larger than someone else and has had to do, like … basically what she’s saying is that if you cannot lose weight and keep it off forever, that is your psychological fault. SHREEN: Yep. LOUISE: You haven’t done the work in therapy to fix your seemingly not thin body. Which is like, such a load of bullshit. And just unscientific and not sound whatsoever. And like you were saying before, people … she doesn’t understand that food is a relationship, and it’s a complex relationship. And the refusal to see anything other than like … she doesn’t even mention hunger as a reason to eat. Anything other than eating to a calorie control, anything else is incorrect. And we eat for an infinite amount of reasons and all of them make sense. And that’s what I love about intuitive eating, it doesn’t pathologise eating. It doesn’t pathologise hunger, it doesn’t pathologise fullness, and it doesn’t pathologise emotions as a reason to eat. And she clearly is. Seeing the function of how wonderful sometimes binge eating is as a way of protecting yourself from [inaudible] stuff. There’s no pathologizing in intuitive eating, but she’s full of pathologizing thinking that even to read statements like this, it doesn’t sink in. ANNA: She’s oversimplifying the whole thing; she doesn’t understand it at all. And this is where she moves into talking about the percentage of people that are successful versus not successful at diets. SHREEN: So, she acknowledges that 95-98% of diets fail. Is this where she starts talking about the Biggest Loser? ANNA: Yeah. SHREEN: She then starts talking about how the Biggest Loser, there’s a 30% extra success rate if you follow the Biggest Loser method. LOUISE: Really? SHREEN: Yeah. ANNA: So, she basically says, she acknowledges that the studies are very clear that 95% of people are unable to sustain a diet or sustain that weight loss, not a diet. But she says that actually on the Biggest Loser it’s only 65% of people that fail. So actually … SHREEN: So, she’s basically saying “we’ve got this success rate, if you do this …” LOUISE: Which study is this published in? Because the only study I’ve read from season 1 which is the … ANNA: The six-year study? SHREEN: The six year, yeah, really interesting. LOUISE: There were 16 people, and 14 of them regained. I don’t think that equates to 65%. Am I …? ANNA: I don’t know but even so … no, she says 35. So, 30% more than … she says 30%, 35% are successful. SHREEN: But even the fact that she’s now saying that 95-98% of diets fail, and she acknowledges that, but all that she’s been talking about is dieting. Diet the whole way through. She’s just completely contradicting herself. ANNA: Not only is it that they don’t work, but she continues to spruik it, continues to say that it’s possible, and if you do it her way, the Biggest Loser way … they did 7 hours of exercise a day, with gruelling regimes and being pushed and yelled at … LOUISE: And they all put the weight back on. ANNA: They put the weight back on. SHREEN: yeah. LOUISE: And their resting metabolic rate was screwed, six years later. SHREEN: Yeah, 700 calories it decreased by. They lost lean body mass, their fasting glucose increased, their blood sugar levels, yeah. They were the main things. But the fact that their metabolic rate decreased by such a large amount … especially where we were saying, she’s telling people to only eat 1200 calories but then you’re going to follow the Biggest Loser method, your metabolic rate’s going to drop by 700 calories, then what are you going to do? LOUISE: So, she lied about the stats on the Biggest Loser, and she’s not even talking to people about the metabolic impact. Because that study was fascinating, and I talk to clients about it. Because they predicted, the researchers predicted how much their resting metabolic rate would be dropped by …  ANNA: And what did they … LOUISE: And they found out it was even lower. So, they were worse off metabolically than they had predicted six years later. No one expected it to last that long, to have such a devastating impact. ANNA: Yeah, so it’s like a continued effect. It hasn’t regained back to before, pre … LOUISE: Exactly. And when stuff like that is suppressed, we know people are going to experience intense hunger, which of course you can’t honour. SHREEN: And the thing is, again, she’s completely misquoted this study herself but if she’d done her research she would know that there’s been over a hundred studies on intuitive eating that have been done that show you have better body image, higher esteem, improved metabolism, decreased rates of disordered and emotional eating, diminished stress levels and increased satisfaction with life. That’s over a hundred studies on intuitive eating that have been done. ANNA: And I’m pretty sure that you couldn’t say the same, with all of those positive effects, with dieting. LOUISE:  No, especially the ones that use her supplements, which show that everyone puts the weight back on. And the Biggest Loser study, everyone puts the weight back on … but let’s not focus on whether or not the weight comes back on. It’s actually the damage to the body and the metabolic systems that’s just absent from her rant. SHREEN: And not even the psychological damage, that’s not even mentioned. LOUISE: She’s evidence of the psychological damage. SHREEN: Yeah. That is true, yeah. ANNA: So, the next one is … principle eight, respect your body. LOUISE: Oh, fuck. ANNA: So, I think going back to when she spoke about size 16 always equalling healthiness, I think that shows that she doesn’t have respect for all bodies. And that kind of bothers me a bit. SHREEN. A bit. A lot. ANNA: It’s a big part of like, you know, our approach here and being a Health at Every Size® professional, you know? It’s about honouring and understanding and respecting that all bodies are different and need something different. SHREEN: And that you can’t tell somebody’s health by their body size, and that’s such … it’s a huge misconception as it is, let alone, I mean, Jillian Michaels saying this and it’s just … ANNA: Yeah, and just recognising that bodies are diverse, and they will do different things. Your health looks different at different points in your life. What you need changes day to day, and only your body really knows. You know? No external source, no trainer, no Jillian Michaels, no Dr Oz, nobody knows your body. SHREEN: And the whole principle of respecting your body is about being kind to yourself and compassionate and self-care, which is the complete opposite of Jillian Michaels. Like, she is just not kind. She’s not compassionate. She’s just shaming, judgemental, mean. Like … yeah. She’s … I just don’t think she even understands the word ‘respect’, quite frankly. LOUISE: Unless it’s like ‘respect my authority”. SHREEN: Yeah. ANNA: Something I noticed too, that came up before, was that because she’s so invested in it … have you heard of the concept of religion, like dieting? The religion of dieting? She’s so completely invested in it, she’s almost not willing to look the other way, or explore that there might be some truth in this, because she’s so invested, like financially and that’s her way of living … LOUISE: It’s her identity. ANNA: Exactly. LOUISE: It’s interesting, isn’t it? I think Alan Levinovitz, ‘The Gluten Lie’ … ANNA: That’s the guy. LOUISE: He talks about this, the religion of diet mentality. She is definitely the Pope. SHREEN: Quote of the day (all laugh). ANNA: So, then we come into ‘movement, feel the difference’. Which is principle nine. SHREEN: I think this one really got us fired up, didn’t it? ANNA: Well, the first thing that she said was like, “what is this? I don’t know what this ‘militant exercise’ even means”. LOUISE: That’s so funny (all laugh). ANNA: Like, really? Are you sure? LOUISE: She’s like, world-famous on memes for [inaudible]. I think I even did a presentation once where I used her with her finger in her face at someone as a demonstration of militant exercise. ANNA: Yeah, the kind of exercise that you don’t want to do if you want to have a sustainable relationship with movement. LOUISE: Yeah, your name’s on the t-shirt, love. SHREEN: Just telling people in this thing that, you know, this myth that’s just not true – ‘no pain, no gain’, that only hard exercise counts, it’s just utter rubbish. All movement counts, it doesn’t matter what it is. From playing with your kids, to hoovering, to dancing around your living room. LOUISE: Hoovering doesn’t count, I don’t even know what hoovering is … ANNA: She’s talking about hoovering, the hoover … SHREEN: Vacuuming, is that more Aussie? LOUISE: No, I don’t understand. (all laugh). SHREEN: But like, movement can be anything and you get the exact same health benefits from any type of regular movement, doesn’t matter what it is. But what she’s just trying to … she’s just bringing movement and aesthetics, that’s what she’s talking about. She’s talking about … ANNA: That’s a really good point, because if she was really interested in somebody’s health, then any kind of movement would be accessible, you know, like … SHREEN: Beneficial. ANNA: Helpful, yeah. SHREEN: Your blood markers, and stress levels, and sleep, it doesn’t matter what it is, it has the same health benefits. But she’s not talking about health. She’s talking about the way you look. ANNA: Yeah. She’s talking about ‘results’ a lot, and “if you want to get results fast” … because you know, let’s face it, she says “if you’re coming to look at intuitive eating, you’re trying to lose weight, you’re trying to get results fast.” LOUISE: Jillian! ANNA: “You’ve got to do a certain type of exercise, and my programs do that”. So, a little bit of spruiking her own programs too. SHREEN: What she doesn’t realise that she’s doing is having that negative relationship with exercise is not going to make people want to do it.  LOUISE: She doesn’t care about that. SHREEN: She’s the reason why people don’t want to go to the gym, or they hate exercise, because of people like Jillian Michaels. ANNA: Yeah, it’s that fitness trauma that you were talking about before. And what I recognise here, at the studio at Haven, community … in my experience, community has always been really powerful in building that sustainable and healthful relationship with movement. Joy and … SHREEN: And it’s that you enjoy, you [inaudible]. ANNA: And to want to come back, too. And that militant approach might work well for someone who responds to that but maybe for a short time. And then that motivation kind of wanes. And then it’s always trying to get back the motivation, you hear that a lot in fitness culture. But if you’re not coming at it from external, an external place, for external purposes, and it’s more about the … SHREEN: The way it makes you feel, using it as a tool for self-care rather than punishment … ANNA: Your mental health, having fun with your friends, it’s a completely different experience to being yelled at by Jillian Michaels. SHREEN: Her whole thing is yelling at people, making them feel guilty, punishing them. Like, and that’s just not what people need in a fitness professional. They need someone who is kind and compassionate and she’s just … that’s just not her, unfortunately. She’s just giving … ANNA: What is she? She’s the Pope of … the religion of dieting. She’s also the epitome of diet culture. She’s all of those things. And then the last principle is gentle nutrition, principle ten. LOUISE: I think this actually blew up her brain. SHREEN: Yeah, because she couldn’t understand the whole diet … principle one, principle ten … LOUISE: She couldn’t figure out how that fits with unconditional permission to eat. Because of course, if you have unconditional permission to eat, you’re going to stick your face into a burger for the rest of your life.  ANNA: Yeah, so again she thinks it’s all just endless eating. LOUISE: She’s stuck in that ‘all or nothing’ mentality. ANNA: Exactly, yeah. SHREEN: It’s funny, because she talks about that ‘black and white, all or nothing’ mentality and not understanding that’s exactly what she’s saying. Yeah. ANNA: Yeah, and again it came up just very, very clear that she hasn’t read the book, she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. SHREEN: Yeah, I think that’s the main … ANNA: This is when she said, you know, “it’s probably written by someone who has just really been hurt by diet culture and probably had an eating disorder, and, you know, probably just some random” and actually … LOUISE: Such a shame that she didn’t actually look at the author. SHREEN: Yeah, just even look up to who they were. Yeah. ANNA: It’s a little bit disappointing because you’d think somebody who has such a following, I think, has such a … I think there’s a moral obligation in a way to represent something that … when you have such a big following and you’re sharing something that can affect people deeply … SHREEN: It’s what we say, that she’s really coming from that dieting mentality and all that sort of shaming that she doesn’t understand that intuitive eating at its core is a self-care model. It’s very compassionate and she doesn’t understand that. Also. with intuitive eating, we’re not saying that it’s a solution for everybody. Everyone has the right to do what they want with their body. She just doesn’t understand the concept at all, what it stands for. ANNA: It’s like she’s on such a different planet, and it’s not … doesn’t come across as open to exploring that this might be something that really serves people. SHREEN: Yeah, and that it’s having such a positive impact. We talked about earlier with the … ANNA: Feeling a bit threatened by the impact on her, you know, her … LOUISE: To her bottom line. I also think that, I mean, if she really is undernourished to that point that she has restricted her entire life, one of the things that happens when you’re weight supressed is cognitive rigidity. ANNA: That’s a really good point. LOUISE: So, it’s quite hard to be flexible. We see that a lot with people who are suffering in the depths of Anorexia, that you simply cannot think. And perhaps there’s an element of that that’s happening here. ANNA: That’s really interesting. SHREEN: That’s a really good point. Because what dieting, that kind of restriction is doing to you … LOUISE: Well, it gives her massive benefits. Huge amounts of recognition, it gives her income. She can’t think out of it. So, there’s not a lot of reason for her, like … I think the reason for putting up that video wasn’t a genuine exploration of “what’s this thing called ‘intuitive eating’?”.  SHREEN: It was just to … LOUISE: It was just to kind of … ANNA: Debunk it. LOUISE: To debunk it and keep hold of her customer base. Look, let’s assume that she is interested in the book. Jillian Michael’s house is in Malibu, California. I reckon we just whack a copy in an envelope, address it to her, maybe she’ll read it. ANNA: Do you think?  LOUISE: Yeah? I don’t know. Maybe if all of our listeners whack a copy into an envelope … SHREEN: Yeah!  LOUISE: 20 copies, please read. Maybe. SHREEN: Maybe, yeah. LOUISE: But I don’t think that was anything other than a … it’s quite interesting, I’m seeing this more and more. The famous people, the people who have really invested in diet culture, even the obesity researchers and all of that. They’re all kind of getting a little bit nervous about this pushback. SHREEN: They should be. LOUISE: It makes me feel warm and fuzzy. SHREEN: It’s time. LOUISE: It’s got nothing to do with the champagne. I think the celebs are getting nervous, like “what do you mean, people in larger bodies are okay with themselves just the way they are?”. And finding non weight-loss things to look after themselves, oh my gosh. What a huge, horrible threat. So, we’re not sorry, Jillian, that we made you nervous. ANNA: Agreed. I hope it gives her a little bit of food for thought (all laugh). LOUISE: I don’t know how many calories would be attached to that thought (all laugh). ANNA: I have to say, like, the thing that I think fires me up the most is how fatphobic she is. SHREEN: And how much harm … that’s the thing that fired me up the most, how much harm she’s causing people out there. And having had an eating disorder myself, it’s just … LOUISE: Horrible. You can see how triggering it is. SHREEN: I can see what it can do, yeah. That’s what fires me up. LOUISE: and let’s not forget when we say fatphobic, we mean people who hate fat people. And that is really reflective … even though she is professing “oh, I’m going to love you … but you’re unhealthy so change”. That’s troubling. Using health as a halo, an excuse or a reason for my core treatment of you just based on your appearance. And that’s just … those days are done. You can’t do that anymore. It’s just not cool. And I do wonder if there is like a Biggest Loser university somewhere?  ANNA: Michelle Bridges went to it as well. LOUISE: Because the same kind of hatred of fat people, you know … again, like masked with a thin layer of concern trolling for your health was Michelle Bridges’ thing. Four years ago, when she was on Australian Story and she was saying “I’m yet to meet someone who is morbidly obese and happy”. So, for people who are listening from overseas, Michelle Bridges is the Australian version of Jillian Michaels. And what an awful comment. So, Jillian has been pushed back against from this video, right? Michelle was pushed back against from this video too, with really clear … I know we all live in a bubble, but with quite a lot of push back. ANNA: That’s good. Was she on … was that on like Australian primetime TV? SHREEN: She was on Australian Story. LOUISE: Yeah [inaudible] … it shows how deeply she feels [inaudible] about people she’s profiting from. Putting them through three cycles a year of 1200 calorie program and she knows it doesn’t work. But the thing is, what they do is they double down. People like this double down, when they’re called out, when there’s a pushback. Instead of kind of opening up and say, “okay, I should probably issue an apology, maybe take the video down, maybe do some work”. They’re not doing that. Jillian’s not doing that. ANNA: I think she just keeps responding. And she’s just responding with the same rhetoric, so she’s not … SHREEN: I think she kind of comments that [inaudible], to learn about it more, which is a shame. ANNA: And how did Michele Bridges respond? LOUISE: Doubled down on it. About health, “I care deeply about health”. ANNA: The whole thing with health and weight, this is what really frustrates me about it too. If she’s really interested in health, she could support all the behaviours that support someone’s health. LOUISE: Too complicated. Remember? Too complicated. Anything that actually involves having to think about something other than my own diet plan … ANNA: It makes me realise how happy I’ve become in moving away from all this, that’s why I got away from it. Because I learned about how there’s another way. Intuitive eating, Health at Every Size®, the body positivity movement … I started delving into it and it just felt so triggering being around other fitness professionals from the traditional approach. And this here, I’ve got to say, got me so fired up. I’m going to be fired up for a while from this. SHREEN: We talk about fitness trauma, and Jillian Michaels is causing that. LOUISE: May she go the way of the dinosaurs and … (all laugh). ANNA: Well, hopefully there will be less and less of her to be seen in the future and more and more of kind of this messaging coming up, challenging … LOUISE: Absolutely, I absolutely think that’s going to happen. You’ve just reminded me actually, she … because Jillian, earlier in the year before she posted the nasty intuitive eating thing, she said something nasty about Lizzo. SHREEN: Yeah, of course.  ANNA: That sounds familiar … SHREEN: Yeah. That was before …  LOUISE: A little while before, I don’t know. It’s Covid, none of us have a timeline. ANNA: She’s said some pretty horrendous things. SHREEN: Really horrendous things yeah. LOUISE: Again, like … “she’s clearly going to get diabetes” or something? ANNA: I think she said something along the lines of “there’s nothing sexy about diabetes”, or clogged arteries or something.  SHREEN: Something like that, yeah. ANNA: How can she … that’s so inappropriate. Lizzo’s bouncing away on stage. She’s got stamina, she’s got energy.  SHREEN: We don’t know anything about her or her health. ANNA: And why do we have to talk about that anyway? She’s this amazing performer and doing this really cool stuff. It’s wonderful to see some diverse bodies out there that are getting out there as much as the other, the thin ideal that you see everywhere. LOUISE: Yeah, the comments that she made were like “why are we talking about Lizzo’s body, we should be talking about her music”. ANNA: So, she said that? LOUISE: Yeah. ANNA: But then … LOUISE: And it’s really funny, because she’s saying that we shouldn’t be talking about Lizzo’s body, but her entire website is full of shots of her body. ANNA: Yeah, and that’s her thing. SHREEN: That’s her thing, yeah. ANNA: She’s always talking about people’s bodies. Size 16, yeah. SHREEN: Yeah, non-stop. LOUISE: The point I’m making is that you don’t say that about Lizzo. And the pushback she got after she made that comment? This is the future Jillian. Lizzo is setting the world on fire.  ANNA: We need more Lizzo. SHREEN: We need more Lizzo. LOUISE: and you are the biggest loser. ANNA: Well put. LOUISE: Oh my god, let’s finish on a high note. Thank you, guys, that was an elegant unpacking of Jillian Michael’s ten principles of not understanding intuitive eating (all laugh). And how firmly we can steer the ship to this new awesome way of looking after our body. ANNA: Thank you. SHREEN: Thank you.  Resources Mentioned: (Watch if you can stomach) Jillian Michaels' Igno-rant on Youtube Urbszat, Dax, C. Peter Herman, and Janet Polivy. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet: Effects of anticipated deprivation on food intake in restrained and unrestrained eaters." Journal of abnormal psychology 111.2 (2002): 396. News article about 4 lawsuits against Jillian Michaels for her weight loss pills Fothergill, Erin, et al. "Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after “The Biggest Loser” competition." Obesity 24.8 (2016): 1612-1619. Alan Levinovitz's The Gluten Lie Find out more about Anna Hearn & Haven Find out more about Shreen El Masry and Be You Be Free  

In this episode I chat to Theo Paphitis, businessman, retail expert, shopkeeper and former Dragon. We discuss tips retail during COVID-19 and his experiences of surviving school and becoming a business owner with dyslexia.  You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on running a retail business and supporting employees with dyslexia. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Would you prefer to read Theo Paphitis' podcast interview instead? Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. In this episode we have Theo Paphitis, businessman, retail expert, former Dragon and shopkeeper. Born in Cyprus, Theo came to the UK at age of seven, living in Manchester then London. He left school at the age of 16 with no qualifications after having struggles with dyslexia. He started work as a filing clerk in a Lloyds of London brokerage, moving on to Watches of Switzerland at the age of 18. He had a stint in insurance then returned to retail, taking on names such as Ryman, La Senza and Robert Dyas. In spring 2011, he launched lingerie brand, Boux Avenue. Since then he’s created the Theo Paphitis Retail Group encompassing the aforementioned retail businesses and the London Graphic Centre, which he acquired in 2016. In 2005, Theo joined Dragon’s Den and in 2012 to focus on his growing retail empire. He came back for a few episodes last year to fill in for Touker Suleyman. 10 years ago, Theo started Small Business Sunday, #SBS, where entrepreneurs describe their businesses via Twitter. Theo retweets his favourites to his audience to boost their exposure. Today we’re going to be talking about retail in the age of COVID-19 and what it’s like being a business owner with dyslexia. Anna: Hi Theo. Theo: Hello! That was quite some introduction. Anna: Oh, I know. I tried to shorten it, but it’s just come out as ‘Theo’s done quite a lot of stuff!’ Theo: It keeps me busy. Anna: How are you today? Theo: I’m good, thank you – in a very soggy Wimbledon. Anna: Yeah, it seems like that all over the UK. I’m up in Scotland and it’s much the same. But that’s very much, you know… Theo: I did refrain from butting in there but thank you for doing that for me! Let’s crack on. I’d like to go back to – I believe you were 15 years old at the time – you opened up a school tuck shop, so retail must’ve been in your blood from quite early on. What was the inspiration behind that?   Theo: Well, the inspiration was actually a need. I didn’t even know what retail was. I’d been in shops, obviously, but at that age – 14, 15 – there was a need at the school. We didn’t have a tuck shop. And on the basis that I didn’t enjoy school very much and I wasn’t a model student in classes. When I suggested to the school that they fund me to do so, they jumped at it because I didn’t have to sit in class for too long, being disruptive. I’m sure that was the main reason. I thought it was a great opportunity, it was great fun. It was great to learn on the job, overcome problems – of which there were many – everything from litter to security to stock control. All the things that us shopkeepers do day-to-day now. So, your first retail job was at Watches of Switzerland and you sold a Rolex on your first day. Tell me what that was like and how did it spark your love of retail? Theo: On my first day, it was all very different for me from what I was doing as an office clerk before. There’s no paperwork involved, just loads and loads of shiny things. Watches and all bits and pieces. I spent the morning having my induction by the manager. And then I was let loose on the shop floor, a customer came in and there I was, extolling the virtues of the Rolex Oyster, that I’d only just heard of barely an hour ago. All of the information that’d been fed into me came blubbering out with some authority. And there you go – I had a sale. It was amazing.     We know that one of the things from this year is that online sales have exploded – what other changes in consumer habits have you noticed this year? Theo: When we went into lockdown, I said quite publicly that the longer this goes on for, the more consumer habits will change. And in fact, within the second week, I could see that digital was accelerating at unprecedented rates and I estimated at the time that we’d had at least five years of acceleration in the adoption of digital in the time from the end of March 2020 until the end of June 2020. Eventually, it was always in our businesses plan, investment in the digital side, that a lot of our business would go online. So, we’d already invested quite heavily as a business. But the acceleration in those three months was phenomenal. We weren’t expecting to get that level of increase until about five years’ time. Actually, coming back to that, your business portfolio is made up, as we heard in the intro, of a lot of retail firms that are traditional to the high street. That must mean you have quite a lot of faith in the future of retail on the high street, despite what naysayers might say and an encouragement to move towards more predominantly digital businesses. What would you say to that? Theo: I think that like many retailers, we’ve got two legacy, very traditional brands in Ryman and Robert Dyas. Robert Dyas has been trading for over 150 years and Ryman for over 125 years, so they’ve been a big part of the fascia of United Kingdom high streets over those times. But our services within those and the things that we sell within those businesses have changed quite tremendously in that time. And we always anticipated that some of our stores just wouldn’t make it out of the other side. That was always going to be the case. It was just a matter of when. There’s no point in keeping a store open if you’re the last person standing and nobody’s visiting the high street. Or, in fact, because of short-termism. And, quite honestly, workshy politicians not reviewing the business rates, which in itself has killed so many high streets. It’s not the rent, it’s the ancillary costs. We’d already planned for that. That doesn’t mean we had plans to shut all of our stores – far from it. We just need to make sure that we focus on the stores where there’s a community. That was always the plan and remains the plan. You’ve talked about an acceleration in adopting technology, do you think there will be some sort of push to reduce or reform business rates [in the longer term]? It’s been talked about for some time. Theo: It’s been talked about forever, but I use my words very carefully. I use the word ‘lazy’. I use it a lot when it comes to various people that have held the seat at no.11 that just couldn’t be bothered to put the work in to repurpose business rates. Business rates is an archaic tax from the 1500s. Ye Olde Internet Shoppe would not exist in the 1500s. The Exchequer needs income, of course it needs income, otherwise how are we going to pay for our services? But you can just keep loading it up on what is a very easy tax to collect and then put people out of business because you reach the law of diminishing returns. They needed to repurpose taxation to reflect the new modern and digital age. It’s very difficult for people paying rent and rates when other people are trading out of warehouses and contributing very little. It needs to be balanced – it has always needed to be balanced – but even more so now. Of course, since March, the present Chancellor has absolutely done the right thing in suspending business rates, giving a business rates holiday. That expires in March ’21 and it’ll be interesting to see what he does then. I can’t believe for one minute that he would even contemplate bringing them back. If he does, that would spell the demise of many high streets and many trusted names within those high streets. What do you think should happen instead? Theo: I think we’ve got to relook at the way we pay taxes. It’s very simple – it’s not complicated. It requires work, but we’ve got to look at the different ways of collecting taxation, whether it’s a sales tax or any other form of tax you put on, that is fair and allows people to trade on a level playing field. I think that arguably, for a long time, the worry has been the wealthy individuals who benefit from having those business rates and high costs in place. Theo: The fact remains that, with landlords, we’ve been able to negotiate as footfall has gone down in various parts of the country. We’ve been able to sit down with landlords a lot. We’re taking a lot less money now. If you want us to remain in your store, then we can only afford to pay X or Y and in the main, they’ve agreed. We’ve got so many stores where the rates are higher than the rent. That can’t be right. And obviously, you can’t negotiate with the Exchequer. Absolutely. Do you think there are certain types of businesses that would move into empty high street spaces in the future, especially when things start to settle post COVID-19? Theo: What we’ve seen is the conversion of many high streets into old age people’s homes where they’ve just built loads and loads of retirement homes, sheltered accommodation because it’s in close proximity – right on top of the high street. If that’s what we’re planning – to turn high streets into retirement villages – then that’s a different story altogether because that’s what you’re going to get. But high streets have really been the backbone of the community. So, you start destroying it and everybody stays in their homes and you’ve got millions and millions and millions of vans driving around and polluting the atmosphere, delivering a £4 or a £5 or a £3 product. Does that really make sense? What do you think about a digital tax? Theo: The Exchequer needs to collect income and that’s a great way of doing it.                     I’ll move on a little bit here. In the intro we mentioned Small Business Sunday which, on the day of recording (October 12th), launched 10 years ago yesterday. In your view, what is the greatest success story to come out of SBS? Theo: It’s got 3000 businesses at different sizes, different levels of activity. The biggest success story is the fact that it exists, and it allows small businesses and medium-sized businesses, all of a sudden, to get a leg up, get PR, get a social media boost, support for other SBS winners in the network. It boosts sales. It offers opportunities for them to collaborate. It gets them together at our annual event to hear great speakers, talk to them and inspire them about what the future holds. Don’t forget that it’s really tough to be a small business – 50 per cent of businesses fail within the first two years. And that’s probably normal because they haven’t got the skillset, the information, the support that they need. Some fail and then go on to run really successful businesses because they’ve learned from their failures. So, the whole gambit of SBS is to try and assist to lower that failure rate and give support and all of the things that small businesses need. It’s tough – if you’ve got two or three kids and you’re running a business from your kitchen table and you’ve got to balance a household. Where do you go for help when things aren’t running your way? Who can you talk to that’s having or has had the same experience as you? I can guarantee that someone form SBS has and someone will be able to talk to you about it. And somebody when you’re having a tough time is going to be having a really good time and there’s nothing better than to talk to somebody to bring you out of those doldrums and give you that burst of enthusiasm that you desperately need to get you going. Anna: Sometimes that’s all you need – I’ve seen some of the comments back and forth on the thread and it’s quite the community.   As mentioned in the intro as well, you struggled at school because you have dyslexia. From the research I’ve done, it seems like people with dyslexia felt discouraged at school (‘you have this, so you can’t do that’) but went on to be successful entrepreneurs because they worked hard at their other qualities, like social skills. How does that align with your experience of school and going into business? Theo: Oh, that describes me. When I turned 16, they showed me the door. Not because I was particularly disruptive, but because I was a lost cause. I wasn’t going to get any examinations. Anna: They dismissed you before you even took them? Theo: No, I did sit a few, but I ended up with great big ‘U’s. In fairness, I did get one certificate, and it was a Scottish certificate in colouring in maps. It was geography. And the reason I say it was a Scottish certificate is because we had the most amazing Scottish lady teacher who worked incredibly but had got all of our attention and made it very interesting. I always call it my Scottish certificate in colouring in maps. It was clear school wasn’t for me. Even to get through to 16, I had loads and loads of workarounds to try and get my work and homework done. I couldn’t do it in a traditional way. I was always problem-solving to try and achieve what other kids were achieving in minutes. It took me hours. I always found workarounds to deal with the issues so that when I actually went to work, dealing with issues and problems was a piece of cake – I’d been doing it all of my life. Some kids go to work, who had an academic upbringing at school, sit there and there’s a problem. Now they’ve got a problem. So that was one of the things that I benefited from. Anna: What do you mean when you say workarounds? Could you elaborate a bit? Theo: For instance, my first day at work, I had to go with a picture in my pocket. If I’m doing numbers – which I’m not bad at, to be honest with you – I couldn’t remember my times tables. It was a nightmare. But I could find workarounds. For instance, if I needed to do 12x12, it’d be 10x12 which is 120, and two more equals 24. That’d be 144. Or I’d break it down into fives or threes or ones to get there or find percentages. You always had to find different ways, it takes longer, but you get there. Anna: Exactly – and that’s what’s important. Theo: And then the biggest thing that changed my life was computers. I no longer had to worry about spelling or rubbish handwriting. All of these things I could get over, so I really embraced technology very early. Anna: That’s an advantage in a way, isn’t it? Theo: It is an advantage – and always has been – hence why I embraced eCommerce and digital and I embraced computers and had one of the first computers. I learned to program because there wasn’t any programs to give me what I wanted. I thought, “It can’t be that difficult, can it?” It gives you a push. It’s interesting to see that other entrepreneurs like Lord Sugar, Richard Branson and Jamie Oliver have dyslexia as well. Theo: Well, of course, a lot of dyslexic people are pushed to be entrepreneurs because they can’t get a job anywhere else. The key thing is that that it’s difficult to get a job when you can’t spell or you can’t read very fast. I can read, believe you me, I can read. Give me a contract and I will read it front to back and I will understand it and I will be as good as anybody else, but it will take me three times as long as anybody else to do. It’s just a speed thing. Exactly. Fortunately, we are in a better place now, especially in schools with picking up dyslexia earlier on, allowing longer exams and that sort of thing. But if you’ve got someone out there who’s still at school, has dyslexia and wants to be an entrepreneur, what kind of things would you say to them? Theo: Well, the good news is that it will be one of the least resistant paths open to them. You’ll find it hard to compete in the jobs sector when people have got all of these qualifications and you haven’t. But all I can say to them is make sure that when you become an entrepreneur, become an entrepreneur doing something that you love and are passionate about. You can become an entrepreneur doing lots of things but find something that you’re passionate about because on those dark, wet winter days, when things are not running according to plan and you’re down to your last few quid, you need that passion, that enthusiasm, that drive, to get you out of it. And if you’re doing something you’re not really passionate about, then you might, just might, throw in the towel. But it’s about doing something you’re passionate about. That’s the best chance of success. Anna: Well, that seems like a great place to wrap up. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Theo. Theo: Absolute pleasure. Find out more about Theo at theopaphitis.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more articles on retail and supporting employees with dyslexia. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening.   

In this episode of Small Business Snippets, I chat to John Tusa, author, journalist and one of the founding presenters of BBC’s Newsnight.  He shares his experiences of the boardroom and how risk analysis and cumbersome objectives can overshadow your organisation's core purpose.  You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on leadership and creativity in business. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Here's the transcript of John Tusa's podcast interview Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have John Tusa, author, journalist and one of the founding presenters of BBC’s Newsnight. He’s served on several boards including The British Museum, the Clore Leadership Programme and, since 2014, the European Union Youth Orchestra. On top of that, John was the managing director of the BBC World Service and London’s Barbican Centre. Today we’re going to be talking about the secrets of the boardroom, as outlined in his latest book, On Board: The Insider’s Guide to Surviving Life in the Boardroom. Anna: Hi John. John: Hi Anna. Anna: How are you doing? John: Pretty well, thank you. Looking forward to this, looking forward to talking to you. Great. So as mentioned in the intro, I’m going to start with your latest book, On Board: The Insider’s Guide to Surviving Life in the Boardroom. In the book, you talk about the importance of having a plurality of expertise, but at the same time make clear that artistic institutions and not-for-profits are very different from businesses. Are there any transferrable lessons from these types of boardroom to the business boardroom?   John: Well actually, my guru around governance, who was a major American businessman called Kenneth Dayton from Minneapolis, and he said that there is no difference between arts boards and cultural boards and corporate boards and, if anything, my British contacts said that cultural boards are much more complicated than business boards because they have so many different layers of accountability. There aren’t two worlds, there’s only one world and that is governance and the relationship between the supervisory board and the executive board. And, if anything, arts and culture boards are more complicated than the others. That’s not me saying it; that’s businesspeople saying it.   Ahh, that is interesting. I understand that, at times, the CEO of a company can also be the chairman [of the company board], but they can be very different roles. How do they differ, exactly? John: The CEO, managing director – call them what you want – are responsible for management, for actually running the place. And they are also responsible for devising the strategic direction of the organisation. The supervisory board are there to advise, help, encourage, monitor, warn and, if necessary, get rid of the chief executive. Again, my great American guru, Kenneth Dayton, said that governance is governance, that is, you look after the overall organisation, and management is management – and you mustn’t confuse them. And that is why anyone who thinks they can be a chairman and managing director, is riding readily, and speedily, for trouble. They’re separate functions. Somebody defined the role between the chairman and the chief executive as partnership, but separation. That is close partnership until the time that you have to sack them. That is an absolutely essential relationship – and a tension – but a constructive tension, at the heart of the governance management business. Right – so this is typically one of the most turbulent relationships you’d find in the boardroom? John: They can be. But on the other hand, I had at least two, maybe three, very good relationships with either the chairman when I was chief executive or the chief executive when I was chairman. And when you get it right, it is extremely productive, it’s very enjoyable and it’s very good for the organisation concerned. Let’s be quite clear – any organisation which has a bad relationship between the chair and the chief executive is in real trouble – and I saw several of those. You can’t take too much trouble over getting that relationship right and making sure the relationship is right. One of the key things about it is absolute openness and transparency. I said to my chief executive at the University of the Arts London, ‘You will always hear it from me first. You will never hear rumours and you will never hear gossip. If there’s anything to deal with, you and I will deal with it first – alone and properly.’ If you do it that way, you have trust, you have openness, you have transparency – and you can have a terrific and successful relationship. For a business owner or director who is fairly new, who isn’t used to the boardroom environment, perhaps is intimidated by it, what advice do you have for them in terms of survival? John: It shouldn’t be survival, in the sense that it is a key part of the relationship. If you are whatever size of enterprise and you have a supervisory board, the assumption is that it is a constructive partnership. But, as I mentioned before, the supervisory board mustn’t interfere in management. And also, a chief executive must make sure that the supervisory board doesn’t interfere in governance. It may be necessary sometimes to say ‘look, this is an executive decision’ or ‘this is part of management’ but it ought not to be a relationship of fear and, in any case, the chief executive should always have some idea of who the chair will be bringing on to the supervisory board. The really important thing is that the chair has to make sure that members of the trustee board are there to provide their individual skills, yes, but also to give good overall advice, but not to interfere. On that basis, it should be positive, harmonious, constructive and lead to the success of the organisation. How about managing tensions that come up between member of the board – what’s the best way to go about resolving those? John: It all depends what they are, but if there are tensions between individual members, you might have to decide that one of them is in due course invited to step down. Or it’s very important for the chair to make it clear if a member is overstepping their mark, being too intrusive, taking up too much time or being too unnecessarily dominant. The chair is responsible for the way the board works and they have to make it clear. I had one case at the University of the Arts London where I was chairman of the court of governors and one of the members of the court was the trade union representative and he refused to understand that he was there to look after the interests of the university as a whole and not just the trade union members. He would stand up and he would harangue the court as if we were a trade union meeting. I put up with this for two meetings and then I had a huge row with him and told him that this was not an acceptable way of behaving. It was a big public row, I didn’t enjoy it and in a way I regretted it but it made it clear to him and to everybody that that was not how the court was going to run and it worked very much better afterwards.    Anna: In the book you talk about managing egos. I suppose it’s just a case of reading the situation and on balance knowing how to deal with different types of personality in the boardroom. John: Yes, in general and overwhelmingly, the people I sat on boards with, who are people with real authority and substance and responsibility in the areas they came from, overwhelmingly understood that they were there to support the organisation. You are holding in trust for others. It’s not something where you play individual games with it. And overwhelmingly, the people I sat on boards with understood that very well and left their egos at the door. Absolutely. In the past I knew you’ve spoken about having ‘the wrong ambition’. Tell me a little more about what you mean by that and how it can affect your standing as a leader. John: I think that sometimes in life, and this is nothing to do directly with governance, that you may misjudge what your abilities are or what you might be doing. If you want this example, the worst one was when I decided to accept the offer to be head of a Cambridge college and I did that for all the wrong reasons. I did that because it seemed a posh thing to do, which it was. It seemed a good address, which it was. It was absolutely the wrong job for me. I shouldn’t have touched it and I lasted around six or seven months. There’s a sense of what can I do, what can I do well and when am I being prodded by a false ambition and false vanity? That’s an important part of self-preservation. There may also be some times when you shouldn’t accept a chairmanship. For a very short time, I had the post of chairman of the Victoria and Albert Museum and chairman of the University of the Arts London. That was, in retrospect, very unwise. Fortunately, the people at the University of the Arts London thought, ‘well, if he’s going to be chairman of the V&A as well, it’s obvious that that will be his first priority’ and at a very early stage said, ‘look, we’re worried about this, and we don’t think it will work. Would you like to think about it?’ And when I thought about it, I realised that they were absolutely right. It won’t work and once again, I’ve gone into that for the wrong kind of ambition. There will be a clash, and because I’d said yes to the University of the Arts London first, I stood down from the chair of the V&A. So that was the wrong kind of ambition and thank goodness, I was saved from getting into, what could have been, a very confused situation. Talking more about the board as a whole, in terms of chaos and crises, there’s possibly no bigger than what we’ve been experiencing over the past months. How do you manage difficulties in the boardroom when you’re going through something like a global pandemic?       John: With difficulty, and I think I’d try to go back to the basic principles of management and governance. Say, if I were chair of some organisation, I would expect the board of management to come up with a strategy – six months, one year, eighteen months, two years – first a strategy for survival, then a strategy for development then a longer term strategy. That would be put to the supervisory board, we would look at what the financial implications were, decide whether it was doable or not doable and then there would be a process of the supervisory board reviewing what management suggested, sometimes suggesting less, sometimes suggesting more, sometimes suggesting that they should be more ambitious in these times. You can’t, for example, because there’s a pandemic, just say ‘we’ll stop doing anything’ because actually, the implications are too great. So the times are tough but the way that people behave in them makes it even more important that they behave as a good board and executive together should behave. The behaviour shouldn’t change.    I’d like to go a little bit off-piste here. You’ve said that the BBC increasingly exercises ‘business dogma over creative values.’ What do you mean by that and how do you maintain creative values in a growing business? John: I come back without apology to ‘why are we here? Why are you here? Why is the organisation here? Why is the new organisation starting up?’ Because somebody wants to do something.   Business tools are just that: they’re a set of tools. If you are observing them and that’s all you’re doing, I don’t think that you’ll ever succeed. There are toolkits to help you succeed. What worries me about the BBC is to, too often, they go into forms of business behaviour which lose sight of the nature and the purposes of broadcasting and programmes and the needs of the audience. I’ll give you one example which I think may help. That is the whole business of risk analysis. Everyone says you need risk analysis and you’ve got to be very serious, you’ve got to know what’s coming over the hill. On one occasion we were looking at risk analysis for the university at the University of the Arts London. By the time the centre had listed its risks, every one of the six colleges had listed their risks and different faculties had listed their risks, it was about six or seven pages and, as I recall, about 130 risks. It’s ludicrous. And it was the chair of the audit committee, who’s an accountant, who said ‘I can’t deal with this, nobody can deal with this’. He said ‘let’s have eight, ten, a dozen, maybe – a dozen main strategic risks. He said let’s get rid of the rest. This becomes a separate activity in its own right, dreaming up risks. It’s ludicrous. And he also said, ‘if you’re going to have a risk register, why not have an opportunity register?’ He said that risk and opportunity are different sides of the same coin. Anna: Yeah, I understand. And I think it’s a good exercise for business owners to have this opportunity register. John: Can I also say about objectives? A good colleague of mine, actually he was the chair of the British Museum and he used to run Unilever. On one occasion, he was at the gathering of chairs of the major cultural institutions, had a meeting organised by the department of culture, media and sport. They were discussing – the chairs and the department, ministers and so on, the whole business of objectives. This man who used to chair Unilever said, ‘ you know, in my years of chairing Unilever, we would set about seven or eight objectives, and if I got most of the people, most of the time, to work to half a dozen of them, I thought we were doing very well.’ And he noticed that the secretary of state looked a little pale. Afterwards a senior civil servant came up to him and said, ‘you know when you said you could work to eight objectives and if six were observed, you were doing very well? He said that we in the department set 48 objectives this morning.’ That again is an example of a management tool becoming something completely useless. And by the by, the man who invented objectives said, ‘if an objective isn’t being met, you may have the wrong one. Ditch it, think of another one.’ That’s not a great use of your resources. I guess my final question is what advice do you have about setting objectives in the boardroom? John: I’ve always had a, what some would regard as an over-light view of objectives. I was managing director of the Barbican Centre for 12 years. In general, I say this without false modesty, it was a much better organisation at the end of 12 years than it was at the beginning. It wasn’t just me, of course, that was my team. And from time to time, people would say to me ‘did the corporation of London set you strict objectives, what you had to do? And I said no, they never said anything, but I knew that I worked to four objectives: 1) run a good arts centre 2) run it within the financial limits that you have 3) bring credit to the corporation of London so that everyone can say ‘isn’t the corporation of London wonderful? They fund the Barbican and 4) don’t insult the Lord Mayor. In 12 years, we didn’t need any other objectives. I would say strip yourself of these things and say,‘are they helping me do the things that I want to do, what the organisation needs done or are they a substitute for making sure the organisation works properly?’ And if you can shed all that and keep things clear, then the governance will work better and the management will certainly work better. What about critics that would say that you need SMART goals that are measurable and based on precise numbers? John: The answer to that is measures measure what measures measure. Measures hardly ever get to the heart of what an organisation is about. You look at the finances the whole time, of course you do. In the case of the BBC World Service, you looked at the audiences. You’re aware of numbers, you use them, but you don’t say that such and such a number is a success, and if we don’t it must be a failure. It’s much more complicated than that. They may be a guide, but they are not the most important thing which determines the success or failure of an organisation. Anna: Absolutely. I think in business today we do have a way of getting caught up in it and it causes a lot of tension and anxiety. Where, as you say, remembering what you’re doing, what people need and what keeps it going should be at the heart of it. Well, that seems like an ideal place to finish. Thanks ever so much for coming on the podcast, John. John: Thank you very much, Anna. Nice to talk to you. John’s latest book, On Board: The Insider’s Guide to Surviving Life in the Boardroom, has been published by Bloomsbury and is available now from Amazon and all other major book retailers. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more articles on leadership and creativity in business. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening. 

In this episode I chat to Jenny, businesswoman, investor and former Dragon. We discuss tips for investment in the time of COVID-19, exit planning and whether your business should still be accepting cash. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on raising capital and choosing the right payment system. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Would you prefer to read Jenny Campbell's podcast interview instead? Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Jenny Campbell, businesswoman, speaker, investor and former Dragon. Rather than going down the traditional education route, Jenny left school at 16 to become a cash counter and cashpoint filler. She worked her way up in the banking world and by the age of 23 she earned her banking qualifications and a Chartered Institute of Bankers prize. Her first taste of running a business was when she bought RBS-owned cash machine firm, Hanco, which she rebranded as YourCash Europe. At the time, Hanco had expanded too quickly and was making a loss. The company underwent a major operational restructure overseen by Jenny. In 2016 she sold the business for £50m. During her time on Dragon’s Den, Jenny invested in companies including Didsbury Gin, Look After My Bills, Driven Media and Carun UK. These days, she is the vice chair of the Prince’s Trust Enterprise Fellowship Programme and supports the Young Enterprise and the New Entrepreneurs Foundation. She’s also a dog breeder and an accredited breed judge. Anna: Hi Jenny. Jenny: Hi. Anna: How are you doing? Jenny: I’m really good, thank you. Really good. Anna: Great. OK, let’s get cracking. One of your mantras is to live by corporate standards but breathe like an entrepreneur. Tell us a bit more about what you mean by that. Jenny: Yeah, that really came out of the time when I was taking over the cash machine business then owned by RBS. I found the business to have got enormous growing pains [from] when it was incorporated in 2000 and sold to RBS in 2004. It had grown enormously fast and it did have an impressive customer and asset base, but it had grown up on very simple – if any – policies, procedures, people, codes of conduct, etc. So, the business I came to in 2006 was in quite a lot of chaos, to be honest. But I found that all the skills I’d learned over my banking career, which you don’t really appreciate at the time, but I could apply them to this business, particularly around change management, turnaround scenarios, risk management, process mapping – all those corporate things. I could apply them to this business and that’s what got me through the first two years in getting it ship shape. It was losing a lot of money at the time and by the time we got two or three years down the path it was breaking even and that lead into the management buyout. On reflection, when it came to selling the business, before that even became a management team buyout, I said to RBS, ‘Look, you’ve helped put the corporate procedures into this business but it now needs to have its entrepreneurial wings in order for it to be nimble and compete against its competitors in the UK.’ It’s important for a business of that size to have corporate standards, but it also needed to be nimble in terms of decision-making and innovation and product development, which we weren’t at that stage by still being part of a bank, due to how bureaucratic that can be in a big corporate.       How do you introduce ‘entrepreneurial wings’, so to speak? Jenny: Start with the people. One of my big transformations was the people – the quality of the people, the culture of the people. I turned over a lot of people in the early days, those who didn’t have the right skills or attitude to drive the business forward. I created a real people culture in the business: work hard, play hard, lots of rewards for delivering performance, lots of fun as well. And the ability for the staff to feel they had their own initiative to drive the business forward [was important]. You could always put your hand up to suggest this or get on with doing things and mistakes were made – you wouldn’t get berated for that – it was, ‘Get up, you’ve grazed your knees, let’s move on’. It was a real ‘can do, will do, want to’ attitude in the business and we lived it and breathed it from the top, right the way down.      On your time in Dragon’s Den, perhaps it was clearer that you’d come from this corporate background and moved up in the banking world, as opposed to starting up a business from scratch like some of the other Dragons and the other businesses coming in. What do you feel your experience brought to the table over the other Dragons who had started their businesses from nothing? Jenny: I came to pure entrepreneurship myself later in life when I went to Hanco (which then became YourCash), so I was in my mid-40s by then. But as I reflected on how I turned from corporate career to entrepreneur, some of my reflections were, firstly, around my childhood where my grandparents were all entrepreneurs – builders, printers, etc. in my local town, so I came from quite an entrepreneurial background. Yes, I went into a profession, but that was seen in those generations as safer and more secure and you’ve got the pensions and all of that good stuff. But I also dealt with entrepreneurs almost every day in my banking career, just on the other side of the desk. One of my roles was as a business relationship manager and I had 200 clients out in the community. Everything from famers to builders to lorry driver to retailers. I was working alongside those entrepreneurs for all of my banking career, so I just felt like I’d stepped from one side of the desk to the other, to be honest – and it’s in my DNA. What did you find was the biggest difference of going from one world into the other?     Jenny: Freedom, scary, exciting. You realise that there’s a lot that rests on your shoulders. The first month after we’d bought the business out, instead of me receiving a salary cheque on the 18th, I had to think about paying a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of wages every month and you feel responsible for people’s homes and families and that sort of thing. But equally, all of the freedom that comes with that and the responsibility to keep that business going and grow it.     Coming back to Dragon’s Den. Look After My Bills, in your own words, ‘negotiated hard’. What advice would you have for business owners who are looking for funding but are that sort of position? What negotiation tips do you have and what would win you over? Jenny: I think what wins me and many investors over is that, besides investing in that business and that product, you are ultimately investing in that person or persons. With the people standing in front of you, I’ve got to get a rapport with them straight away – that I admire them, I believe them, I’m confident that they can deliver on their proposal. The boys, Will and Henry from Look After My Bills, did negotiate hard, but that showed me that they had the experience to do that. I admire that. One of my other entrepreneurs accepted my offer before I’d even finished making it, but he was much younger and much more inexperienced. Will and Henry did a great job of negotiating and Tej (Lalvani) and I got a very small slice of Look After My Bills, but it proved to be a great investment as they sold to GoCompare ten months later and we got a very nice return on a very small investment. Anna: I think it’s interesting that because of them not budging much on their offer, Peter said that it shows a certain level of naivety, so it must be quite different between investors.     Jenny: Yes, but there’s quite a bit of gameplay in the negotiations – you’ve all got to play your own part. There’s admiration behind that hard negotiation stance as well. As an entrepreneur you’ve got to have some emotional intelligence as to where that tipping point is with the investor. You can push them so far, but you’ve got to realise where you’ll lose that investor, where they just going to sign out and say, ‘I’m out’.     Let’s come back to raising finance. Of course, we’re going through a difficult time at the moment – this is the first of the remote recordings we’re doing because of COVID-19. What advice do you have about raising finance in particularly tough times such as these?   Jenny: Is it any different in these times to pre-COVID? If anything, there are more options because of Microbusiness Bounce Back Loans etc around, so my advice is probably the same: cover a lot of bases in looking for those options. First of all, think about the structure of what it is that you’re looking for – are your able to take any debt into the business? That’ll save you giving away equity. Equally, sometimes it’s a strategic thing to find an equity investor because you get smart investors in the business who will help to propel your business further than if you were trying to do it through the existing equity structure. It’s always a balance of what your business can take and what it needs and that strategic aspect. I’m working with one of my businesses now on doing our first fundraise. I’m just educating them on taking those steps really carefully, to find the right structure of equity and debt and, crucially, the right people to come into the business. I always say to them, ‘This is like a snooker game: it’s not just about getting the first red ball down, but it’s about getting the black ball down, which is your exit.’ Every step is fundraise is important – you must think about how that impacts the next step and your eventual exit. But I think all those usual funding routes are there and, if anything, there is pent up demand from private equity and VCs to get money invested right now. Has COVID-19 affected the way that you invest in or the companies that you’d be interested in investing in now? Jenny: I don’t think it’s affected the way that I invest. Apart from not meeting in person, we’ve all got very used to tiled Zoom screens or Teams or Google. We’ve all got used to those virtual meetings, so the way in which I invest has not changed. Maybe where I invest has changed. Some areas you might have thought of investing in pre-COVID, but in post-COVID they’re either not the right areas or there are certainly better areas which have capitalised on COVID. I always say that wherever there are challenges, there are opportunities, and it’s just watching which ones will rise out of this. My Didsbury Gin business pivoted into hand sanitiser and they’ve done a fantastic job. Did I think I’d ever be invested in hand sanitiser? No! But it was the right thing to do and they’ve done very well. Anna: It’s been very much extremes – either a company has done very well or struggled quite significantly. Jenny: But that’ll be the true test of the entrepreneur in dealing with that. My eldest son has three restaurants in London, and it has not been an easy time. However, he’s probably going to come out of this leaner, fitter, stronger and with a different strategic path, which will actually be a better one. You as an entrepreneur have personally got to have the resilience, the foresight and the vision to deal with that. And that’s what the key strength of an entrepreneur is. Anna: And going digital has helped a lot of businesses. Ones that didn’t have a website before are very quickly learning and moving online. Jenny: Yes – you’ve got to go where the consumer is going to go which is a huge shift to online as you say.    I’d like to ask a couple of questions about your views in business. I’ve read that your plan wasn’t to become a business owner, rather, you ‘take things when they arise’ and when your children were young, you’d ‘just think about the year ahead’, contrary to popular business advice of planning one, three, five years in advance. What’s your view on planning vs spontaneity in business? Jenny: I mean, I always say that when I was 16, 18, 25, I didn’t really see much further ahead than the next year. As you get older, you tend to plan your runway out a bit more. But it’s always a balance for a business owner of never losing sight of today and the detail you need to do of today while balancing that with a vision of the future. And that’s a tricky thing sometimes – you can be lost in the weeds on a day-to-day basis and never have that time to think about the future. But you can find different places to do that future thinking. I remember when I was very busy in YourCash with the turnaround work. Where my vision and strategy used to come from was when I was on the running machine at the gym in the evening or in the bath. I used to come back fuelled with what we need to do differently, so you just need to find those spaces to let your head clear and think about the future of the business. You must do that and not just be lost in the day-to-day. Now I think I plan much further ahead, hence it’s actually driven my exit of YourCash because I’d been at the business for ten years. And I had half an eye on where cash was going as well in the future which proved to be quite prophetic. And equally I wanted another ten years in business doing other things, so focusing on the end game is quite important.      My next question was going to be about your exit from YourCash. Talk us through your exit plan – when did it begin, how did it unfold, did it change? Jenny: When you reflect on these things, again, I think it happened on the day I did the management buyout in 2010. The reason for that was as soon as the business became independent from RBS, I straight away started getting courted by other independents to amalgamate with them, so I realised from day one of year one that there was an opportunity for a trade sale. But I knew it wasn’t going to be right then when I put all of my energy and passion into buying this business out and mortgaged my home and I was on a journey and I was going to sell at an optimum time. But knowing those courtiers were out there, I played that dance with them for five years and it eventually reeled one of them in there for an exit. So there, you can see I was planning, even in 2010, to exit, probably five to six years down the path, which is what I did. I think in any market, I’ve seen in the supermarkets, in industry, etc. I’d say all businesses compete on the ground. But at top level, CEOs all meet each other at conventions and industry gatherings, and all have quite a professional and grown up relationship. I always had those relationships with the bosses of the other businesses and there were always muted conversations, seeing if there were any areas of cooperation and synergies between us. There’s a lot of dancing around handbags before you come to the formal marriage. Anna: I suppose it’s like networking of any kind, isn’t it? You’ve got to build it up quite slowly. Jenny: And it’s important to do that. That’s a really good point – I had extensive networks across my industry, not just in the UK but across the globe. I would take plane trips across the globe to go to certain conventions to make sure I had face time with people, so I was out there and present and had a really good black book.     Finally, given your background with YourCash, what do you make of cash vs contactless, especially in this COVID-19 landscape? Is it still worth it for businesses to accept cash? Jenny: Before I sold the business, there was also a challenge externally around the future of cash. And I think cash is still here for another generation in this country. It’s very entrenched in this country as it is in other countries such as Ireland and Germany. Yet if you look at other countries like the Nordics, they’ve been almost cashless for a very long time so where do we sit in all of this? I still think there’s a place for cash in the UK for a while because I don’t think we have all of the systems to donate to charities, to pay for certain things for the elderly and the disadvantaged, so all of the systems aren’t there yet to digitally support moving to totally non-cash. I do think there is a place for it and, to that end, that it’s important for retailers and businesses to accept cash, because not everyone is able or ready to move to digital. The consumers have to be educated and cajoled but not forced, if you know what I mean. Yeah, of course it’s important in terms of budgeting or for people who may not be best able to manage their money. Do you think we’ll ever go completely cashless and if so, at what point? Jenny: [laughs] Crystal ball again… I think we will, it depends how you define cashless, if you mean totally cashless. Surely in the next 25 years we’d go cashless, I would’ve thought, providing all of the systems are there to cope with that. But if you look at the young people of today, they just don’t carry cash – at all. And I myself would have always had cash with me and never have I used Apple Pay so much as in the past three months, and I’m much more comfortable with it now. That has forced buying habits but equally, I doubt very much that older people have changed their buying habits and the disadvantaged need to work with cash as well. Anna: Well, I’ll wrap up there unless there’s anything you’d like to add. Jenny: No, thank you for letting me come on your podcast. I’m delighted to come on any time and have a chat and happy to do it any other time you wish. Anna: Thank you for coming on the podcast. You can find out more about Jenny at jennybcampbell.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more articles on raising capital and choosing payment systems. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening.   

  13 year old Arthur, and his mum, Anna, join Dr Helen and Marianne for this first episode in our Young Voices podcast special. The pair share the two sides of this transition story, from Arthur coming out at age seven, through the day-to-day trials and tribulations of any normal teenager, to his aspirations of one day becoming an Olympian. Together, Arthur and his mum demonstrate that his being trans is the least interesting part about him. If you have been affected by any of the topics discussed in our podcast, and would like to get in touch, please contact us via the Help Centre. You can also contact us on social media where you will find us at @GenderGP on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We are always happy to accept ideas for future shows, so if there is something in particular you would like us to discuss, or a specific guest you would love to hear from, let us know. Your feedback is really important to us. If you could take a minute or two to leave us a review and rating for the podcast on your favourite podcast app, it will help others to discover us. Links: Mermaids http://mermaidsuk.org.uk/   The GenderGP Podcast Young Voices. Raising a trans teen   Hello, this is Dr Helen Webberley. Welcome to our GenderGP Podcast, where we will be discussing some of the issues affecting the trans and non-binary community in the world today, together with my co-host Marianne Oakes, a trans woman herself, and our head of therapy.   Dr Helen Webberley: This is the first of our series on young people and bringing to life some of our younger trans members of the trans community who’ve been gracious and generous enough to give us their time to tell you what it means to them to be trans and how it's affected their life in good ways or maybe some bad ways, maybe how it’s affected their families. So really, really, really excited to welcome Arthur and his mum today. So, Arthur, thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to throw you right into the deep and say tell us all about you and your mum. Hi, mum. Arthur: Well, I do karate. (unclear 1:11). Anna: How old were you when you remembered being trans? And you said, I’ve always been. And that's about right. It was so long ago, cause how old were you when you identified? It was about seven. Arthur: Seven, six. Anna: Six or seven years old when Arthur drew a picture and tried, and he didn't have the word like. Obviously, he didn't have the words. And I didn’t know the terminology either or anything. And he drew pictures. So he was about seven. So we've been in services since then. Since we came with yourselves, the stress of this beast, it's been gone, hasn't it? So you've forgotten about being trans, you’re just Arthur, aren’t you? Arthur: Yeah. That makes sense. Marianne Oakes: Can I just—what was your journey to finding GenderGP, if that’s not too big a question. It sounds like it was with the NHS before, would that be correct? Anna: Yes, Mermaids. Arthur: I got my hormone blocker through the NHS. Anna: It was a bit of a battle to get it, though. Arthur: I wanted testosterone. I needed it, I believe. But I couldn't, because of how old do you have to be for the NHS? Older. Anna: Fifteen, sixteen. Arthur: Fifteen, yes. He was panic-stricken, weren’t you? And we saw the firm, but no, we found out about GenderGP when we met Helen actually at one of the Mermaids residentials. And Mermaids are fantastic in the early days. We haven’t been for a few years, but we just said I think we're ready to check back in with them because I think he’s ready to find out more information about all the stuff that is coming up in the next few years and questions for other teenagers. So,

An Immigrant's Work Ethic, Where Vito found Anna, Clues to Success    In today’s episode, Anna tries to uncover Vito’s childhood, his thoughts when he met her, and his journey to building a million-dollar business. It will be a question and answer session as we learn Vito's story and the struggles he underwent from being broke to turning things around with only $197. Plus, stay tuned for the next episode where they turn the tables, and Vito interviews Anna!   “You must understand the world as a whole in order to affect the world as a whole.” -      Vito Lafata   In this episode: What it was like growing up in an immigrant household Where Vito was in life when he met Anna How he started in his online business Some of Vito’s biggest wins that kept him hungry for growth What pushed him to believe in forethought If he had to do it all again, would he change anything? His non-negotiable things that he does everyday   Resources: Visionary Toolbox - https://www.thevisionaryplanner.com/podcast   Connect with Vito Lafata:   Website- https://www.thevisionaryplanner.com/ Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/vito.lafata Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/vitoglafata/   Connect with Anna Renderer:   Website- http://www.annarenderer.com Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/annarenderer/ Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/annarenderer/ Twitter- https://www.twitter.com/annarenderer  

In this episode I meet Deborah Meaden, businesswoman, author and Dragon. We talk about her definition of success and what makes a disastrous investment pitch. Be sure to visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more articles on pitching to investors.  Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Want to read the Deborah Meaden's podcast interview instead? Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Deborah Meaden, investor, businesswoman, author and one of the longest-serving Dragons on Dragons’ Den, second only to Peter Jones. She launched her first company at 19 years old, importing glass and ceramics and supplying UK retailers such as Harvey Nichols. She then took on a franchise of Stefanel, an Italian clothing company and sold it two years later. Next came her family’s amusement arcade business, where she went from shop floor worker to operations director before moving to Weststar Holidays. Within two years she became managing director and did a management buyout in 1999. Then in 2005, she sold the business for £33m. After deciding that retirement wasn’t for her, Deborah joined Dragons’ Den in 2006 and has since invested £3,746,000. Anna: Hello, Deborah. Deborah: Good morning. I’m still smarting for being called second best to Peter Jones! Anna: How are you doing today? Deborah: Good! Yeah, very good day – so far. Anna: Yeah, that’s it – you want to touch wood but unfortunately there’s not much wood in here at the moment…  Right, I’ll start off with something quite general. In the past you’ve said that you like success and successful people. How do you define success? Deborah: I can tell when someone is successful because they’re comfortable with themselves. And it’s odd because often when people think of success, they think of these driven people who are constantly reaching for bigger and more and more money and more profit and whatever. But actually, I consider success someone who’s reached that stage in life where they’ve thought, ‘This is great, this is good. It might not be great forever but I’m enjoying what I’m doing now – I’m having a great impact. And the thing that I’ve set out to achieve I’m achieving and I’m achieving well.’ That is my idea of success. You can tell when you’re around successful people – they enjoy it, they’re comfortable with themselves. Anna: So, it’s not necessarily financial. Deborah: It’s easy to say it’s not financial. Of course, in the early days when I didn’t have money, it was financial. But when you reach a level you can start thinking that money isn’t the be all and end all. The thing I always say about money is that it’s kind of the measure of business, or it has been in the past. It’s, ‘If I’m good at business, I make great profits.’ I think that’s changing and that suits me better. It’s more a case of, ‘What do I want my output to be?’ Of course, I’ve got to make money, otherwise I wouldn’t have a business. But do I want to have a social impact as well? Do I want to feel good about what I do? I’m much more comfortable in that space. Anna: Yeah, we’re seeing businesses move towards having more of an ethical basis in their business models, supporting animals, doing charity contributions on the side. Deborah: Yes, and I think it doesn’t have to be through charity, just behaving well. If you believe in something, it should be reflected through your business and treating your people well, being respectful of them. Making an impact in your community. Sometimes I feel the charity side can be absolving yourself of responsibility: ‘Let’s just give them the money and they can do the work for me!’ I feel there’s a bigger responsibility – we should all behave well in our business lives.            And no matter how successful you are as an entrepreneur, everyone has their own set of strengths and weaknesses. You said that when you were at Weststar, you lost some good people because you didn’t temper your approach to nurture them. Have you adapted to different personalities in the workplace since, and if so, how did you got about it?    Deborah: That is very very true. I’m very robust. And anybody who’s watched Dragons’ Den will know that I’m very robust. But what I mean when I’m robust is that I throw things out there and I’m hoping that people are going to challenge me. I’m not just saying it because I want everyone to go, ‘Oh yes, I agree with you.’ I put things out there and I want a lively, energetic conversation around the stuff. But I did realise early on that that doesn’t suit everybody. Sometimes I’d say things and they’d think, ‘Ohhhh, alright! Okay!’ They don’t debate it, they don’t discuss it with me. I think that’s part of experience: take yourself off transmit and receive as well as transmit. Anna: How did you put that into practice? Deborah: It’s a bit odd because, of course, life is about communication. I just realised I had a great group of friends that I communicate and debate with and I listen to and I think, ‘Why am I behaving differently at work?’ People are people – just because they happen to be in the work environment. Why don’t I just the use the skills I use when I’m outside of work? When you first meet people you sense them, you feel them out. Are they shy, are they very robust, are they gregarious? What are they? And you temper yourself to them. I just remembered to do that in the workplace and of course, the response was amazing. It just meant that people with a different style could find their style with me. We found a way of working together as opposed to [them] thinking, ‘I need to just shrivel up and leave the room because she’s said something that she obviously wants to happen!’ One of your greater strengths as an entrepreneur is your frankness. And we’re surrounded by so many options these days and plagued by indecision. How do you make good decisions as a business owner? Deborah: Well, the first thing is learning to make decisions, good or bad. It’s better to make a bad decision than it is to make no decision. In making no decision, you destabilise everything and everybody gets into this awful limbo land and thinks, ‘Ohhhhh, I really don’t know what’s going on’ and they lose the ability to make decisions. So learning to consider, know what you need to know, and the moment to say: ‘Right – I’ve heard enough, now I need to make a decision.’ I have watched people get trapped in this, ‘Oh, well I’ll just ask’ and ‘Maybe if we ask this’ and sometimes we get to a stage where we’re doing research and I’ll say ‘Okay, we need to stop the research now, because I think we know enough’. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be doing our job. The researchers aren’t going to tell us what we should do. They’re going to give us the information to help us make our decisions. We need to make those decisions. And coming back to different personality types, how would somebody who is perhaps less confident, less decisive – how do they make the most of their qualities as a business leader? Deborah: It’s interesting that you say ‘business leader’ because I was reading a really interesting book on leadership. It was saying that people need different leaders in different environments and at different times. If you think about the history of the country, we needed different people at different times and businesses are the same. Leaders are given permission to lead. It’s not like, ‘I’m a fantastic leader – I can walk into any environment and anybody will follow me.’ Because actually, if you don’t do a good job, I promise you that your permission to lead will be taken away very very quickly. People will just start finding ways around you. They’ll think, ‘You know what? They don’t know what they’re doing so I’ll carry on with my thing.’ So I actually think that knowledge and experience and proving that you’re good eventually attracts people around you. [They] work out really quickly, ‘Who is it that makes my life better because I can do my job better? I know they’re going to help me do my job better.’ Be good at what you do, be really helpful to other people. Recognise that you are all in this together because the more helpful you are, the more people look to you. We all think of leaders as these big strident people who are born leaders but actually in the wrong environment – and the wrong time – people will just say, ‘Oh, shush’. Anna: But sometimes people just need to be given the chance to come out and make those decisions. Deborah: Absolutely, and to get the feedback on those decisions. A lot of it is a lack of confidence. I’ve seen so many people sit in a room – and this has happened a lot since I’ve been on Dragons’ Den – suddenly, it’s like I’m the expert on everything. I’ve been on television, so I know everything. I’ve got confident, competent people who know way more about their subject than me, who will not stick their stake in the ground because they think, ‘Deborah’s in the room – she must know more than anybody.’ I’m like, ‘Guys, if I think I know everything, what am I doing sitting in a room talking to you lot?! I’ll just carry on, thank you. You know way more than me so could you just carry on making the decisions you made before the day I was on Dragons’ Den? It’s much more difficult now to get people to challenge me – and I love challenge. What’s the point of sitting in a room with people who are just agreeing with me? Anna: I feel like I should disagree with you right now, but I actually do agree!                   One of the companies you have invested in, ran into difficulty last year [the founder is no longer part of the company]. How do you know when it’s time to walk away from a business? Deborah: In the case of Gripit, it’s what to do. It’s come through and it’s selling to the US market. It’s when to stop or it’s when to say, in the case of Gripit, actually we’ve got a fantastic product here – no one ever questioned the product. So, what we’re going to do now is present it in a different way and have a completely different structure sitting behind it. I’ve got a feeling that if I wasn’t there, it probably would’ve gone. It was definitely in a very difficult moment in time. But I was able to see through that, underpinned by a product. What I do see sometimes is a product that is clearly failing. When you’ve got to wander around, holding up the product going, ‘Buy me, please please buy me’, that worries me much much more. If you’ve got a good product but the structure in which you’re selling it isn’t quite right, that’s a problem you can get through. If you’ve got a bad product and you’re having to work too hard to get out there, that’s the time to call it a day. You’ve got to understand why you’re at that difficult moment. Every single business I’ve ever been in has had a difficult moment and if you can’t work out what’s causing it – and see a way through it – that’s the time to stop. But if you can work out what’s caused it and think, ‘Oh, I can fix that’ then clearly, you need to carry on.      Anna: Coming back to Dragons’ Den, I’ve read that when you do a day of shooting you record six pitches. Most are about an hour long, but some are as short as 15 minutes while others are two hours long. What are the common themes run among the not-so-good pitches, the ones that tend to end after 15 minutes? Deborah: I’m not sure there’s a common theme. Sometimes it’s purely and simply: ‘That isn’t going to work’. It’s just, all five of us – and we’re all very different – but you’ve got a lot of experience sitting there, in a lot of sectors. And we’re not always right. Fantastic businesses go out there and prove us wrong, that’s brilliant, that’s fine. But sometimes you just think, ‘You have not thought that out’ and you fall at the first hurdle because what’s your market? How are you going to make it? What does it cost to make?        Anna: So, people come in with no idea… Deborah: Well, they come in with an idea sometimes and that is the problem: there’s a mile of difference between an idea and a business proposition. You’ve got to have something that I’m investing in – not just a thought. That’s one of the big issues.    Anna: Although that is to say that they’re quick because they’re weaker pitches than the ones that are longer and you want to know more. Deborah: Oh, absolutely. I think the shortest pitch I’ve ever seen is 11 minutes and it was a product where everybody was clearly just wrong on all counts. It was badly thought out, it was badly presented, there was no idea what the market was going to be, didn’t know what the cost of making it was going to be, didn’t know what the cost of selling it was going to be… that’s a quick pitch! There’s nothing to invest in here. I think the longest pitch I’ve ever been on was three hours. And to be honest, by that point you’re interested. We don’t sit there for three hours and don’t invest – we’re trying to unpick a business. Anna: Wow. What do you discuss in a three-hour pitch? Deborah: We’re trying to get to the stage where an investment is going to proceed because once we get out of the Den, not all of the businesses pass due diligence. I don’t want to waste my time or their time – life’s too short to agree something and then find afterwards, ‘Damn, if I’d known that I wouldn’t’ve made an offer’. So if you’re interested, it takes longer because we’re trying to eke out all of the things so it shortens the process. In my experience, when you come out of the Den, the longer it takes for that deal to get away, the less likely the deal is going to be. And I don’t want to walk out the Den and find out that actually, they haven’t got a patent, they’ve made a patent application. Or their numbers are wrong by a factor of 100. Or – this happens a lot – they have loans that were not disclosed in the Den. And I specifically ask now – people sometimes don’t count a Director’s Loan as a loan. Well, of course it’s a loan! It’s still a loan. So often we’ll come out and then find out that something wasn’t disclosed that should’ve been disclosed. Because in good faith, we’re both trying to find out about each other. And there’s no point me agreeing a deal in the Den and then walking out and thinking, ‘Ohhh, if only I’d known that, I’d have never…’ Anna: And you’re hoping to build a long-term business relationship so keeping stuff from each other at that point is never a good sign. Deborah: Actually, the deal just won’t proceed. We are agreeing to invest but between that and the investment is normal due diligence that you would do on any business. I might as well know in the Den what’s going on and if you haven’t told me something material, the trust is gone and I need to trust people. Anna: What’s the worst pitch you’ve seen in the Den? Deborah: Oh, it’s hard to tell. False fingernails for cats was a funny one. There was a fantastic – it was a guy who came up with an invention of a fold-out sunbed in a suitcase which you can take on holiday with you and take your suitcase down to the beach and then unfold it – because obviously people use all the beach chairs. You think, ‘You don’t seriously believe I’m going to carry a huge big suitcase on holiday with me.’ Anna: People only have so much checked-in baggage, you know? Deborah: At least he was thinking! Anna: Yeah, he can make one for himself. How about pitches that you turned down at the time but turned out to be quite successful after the show. Were there any of those that you thought, ‘Oh, I wish I got involved in that’? Deborah: I’m not an ‘I wish I had’ kind of person. I put everything into achieving the thing that I’m trying to achieve and if I don’t, I don’t. There will always be other opportunities. And I’m not just saying this: that’s the best kind of mistake to make. If you don’t invest in somebody and they go on and make a huge success, it’d be a bit churlish not to think, ‘Well good on you’. Anna: That’s a very mature approach to take. Deborah: We started off by saying I like success. I get no pleasure from seeing people fail. Even if a fleeting ‘I told you so’ crosses my mind, it’s very fleeting. Anna: I know for some people it must be quite difficult. Deborah: I’m actually quite hard to interview because people ask me, ‘What are you most proud of?’ and I honestly don’t know. I don’t really look back, I don’t worry, I don’t carry stuff around with me. Bad stuff has happened and at the time it was awful and two days later it’s gone. I’ve always looked forward. I’ve always been more interested in what’s coming up than what’s going on behind.                             Anna: And in the spirit of moving forward, we have a Budget coming up. What support would you like to see to support small business owners? Deborah: I would definitely like to see the EIS and SEIS schemes maintained, just in case there’s any consideration that they go. Because if ever there was a time for people to get their investment out of the bank and working with small businesses, that’s what we should be doing. We should be supporting them. What else would I like to see for small business? I think this is a very very difficult Budget because we still don’t know about the Brexit scenario and we have no idea on the basis on which that’s going to be very difficult to say what you want for a business when you don’t know what the landscape is. You asking me this question in a normal landscape, I’d say, ‘You can do A and B and C and help’ but I have no idea what we’re aiming at anymore. So I really don’t know which levers to pull. That feels really awkward for somebody who spends their life making decisions and working out what is the best thing to do now. Anna: Yeah – business owners are planning three, five, ten years in advance. They’ve just been at a point where they can’t. Deborah: Listen, we’re in a really funny time at the moment. We don’t know the landscape and we can only control what we can control. But I really do worry that there are some businesses that are really not looking at the potential pitfalls and preparing themselves for it. I’ve spoken to a lot of businesses who at first thought, ‘Well, of course Brexit won’t affect me’. That’s because they weren’t doing business in the EU, but they’re not really looking back through their supply chains, not understanding what could happen to the data within their business. There’s no agreement on data transfer. So, I think businesses should just look into themselves for a moment and think, ‘Actually, which bits of these could be affected in terms of a future trade deal?’ There’ll be a lot of stuff that’s left undone and you need to know your risk. With a lot of my businesses I’ve had to set up offices in Ireland, almost as an insurance to say ‘just in case we can’t directly trade with the EU without pretty hefty tariffs. I need to find a way of trading’. There are things you can do to mitigate on a best guess scenario – you’ve got to understand what’s at risk in your business.   Anna: That seems like a good place to wrap up. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Deborah. Deborah: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed it. Anna: You can learn more about Deborah at deborahmeaden.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more insight on preparing for Brexit planning and how to pitch to investors. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening.   

Anna Jordan talks to Jackie Fast, an entrepreneur, author, speaker and candidate on The Apprentice in 2018. We discuss how to build a business at home and how to get started with sponsorships.   Be sure to visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more articles on bootstrapping your business and managing your cash flow. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Read the transcript for the podcast interview Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. In this episode we have Jackie Fast, an entrepreneur, speaker, author and former candidate on The Apprentice. She came to the UK from Canada in 2007 as a first stop on her European backpacking tour but decided to stick around and work as a sponsorship director at the Data & Marketing Association instead. In 2010, Jackie began building her business, Slingshot Sponsorship. She sold the firm in 2016 and is now running REBEL Pi, a Canadian ice wine company.  We’ll be talking about building a business from home and how to make sponsorship work for you. Anna: Hello, Jackie. Jackie: Hello, Anna. Anna: How are you doing? Jackie: I’m very good, thanks. Great. Let’s start with your arrival in the UK. What made you decide to give up your backpacking adventure to work in London and build a business here instead? Jackie: Honestly when I arrived – I’m from a small town in Canada – my experience was minimal. I’ve always been very ambitious and very determined. A lot of the people around me were not so much. So when I came to London it really was to explore Europe because obviously people talk about it and I’d never been to Paris. When I landed in London I was just overwhelmed with the energy of the city – not necessarily the energy you’d get from a city like New York but the people and the views that the people had here and the types of work that they were doing. I met a lot of people in finance and I didn’t even know that was a job that you could have and I was just blown away. It wasn’t an immediate thing. I was supposed to be here for two weeks and then travel the rest of Europe and then I was like: ‘Oh, I love London, I’ll stay a couple more weeks, that went on to a couple more months and then I was like: ‘I don’t want to leave’ and then over time I thought: ‘I just really want to stay here.’    When you launched Slingshot Sponsorship you only had a laptop and £2,000. How did you support yourself financially in the early days of the business? I’m sure a lot of our listeners will want to know. Jackie: Not well! I’m pretty frugal, actually – generally. But basically, over those initial months I just cut back hardcore. I didn’t really leave the house for weeks on end. I wasn’t eating beans on toast, but I was certainly eating a lot of ready meals and stir fries and cereal. But for the first, I’d say, year and a half, I wouldn’t even go to Starbucks. I couldn’t even afford takeout coffee, quite frankly, because every single pound I saved was going towards hiring my first employee and it was really hard. Slingshot got successful early, but I didn’t really have personal money for at least two or three years, I’d say. And you know, I only literally just bought this house when I sold the business. Up until then, all my friends owned houses and I couldn’t afford to – I was renting. But I always had it in me that I’d make that sacrifice. We’re recording in Jackie’s house, by the way, just for a bit of context. What about income? Jackie: So, £2,000 could pay the rent for four months, basically, and I took a couple of commission-only things. I had a lot of small clients. It took me nine months to secure my first client. So, I’d take small jobs that’d pay £500, £600, £1,000 and I’d just live off those kinds of things and those kinds of projects. I worked hard to try to get people to give me money, like all small businesses do, but I was really conscious about how much money I spent. And our website is a great example. When we launched Slingshot I went out to loads of agencies, everybody was quoting something like £7,000, £6,000 and I didn’t even have the money. I ended up going to a digital agency who I knew through the Data Marketing Association and asked to swap, to be kind of like a case study for them. It was kind of like a guinea pig thing and I ended up paying, like, nothing for it. I just bartered for everything. Anna: It’s interesting because they say entrepreneurs, even when they start earning a lot more money, still have the frugal mindset all those years later. Jackie: Yeah, I’ve always been like that. My husband jokes a lot because before I sold Slingshot and after I sold Slingshot – there’s no difference. We have a nice house and we’ve had some great travelling experiences for sure. But I don’t spend a lot of money – we don’t spend a lot of money. Almost all of the money I made from Slingshot has been reinvested in other businesses. I bought our house which is a huge accomplishment for me, but everything else has gone into making more money.            Anna: Usually we ask about our guest’s specialisms, which in this case is sponsorships. Jackie: It’s everything, Anna. What do you mean, just sponsorship?! For a beginner, what is sponsorship and how can a small business owner make opportunities work for them? Jackie: In a nutshell, sponsorship is a collaboration between two businesses. Most people look at sponsorship as a transaction of giving somebody logos or branding or badging in return for money, but in a lot of cases the big sponsorships are done in contra. In a way, the website agency I was just talking about – I swapped to be a case study for them and they gave me a website. In a sense that was a sponsorship and I think the future of all business is sponsorship. Most people will be familiar with stuff like FireFest and Beats by Dre. All of that is sponsorship.     Any kind of collaboration between two organisations is effectively sponsorship. How do you handle that first approach, then? I imagine that those relationships and creating those first impressions are very important. Jackie: Actually, one of the things you said was the right and the other thing you didn’t. A lot of people think it’s who you know. Everybody thinks: ‘Well, I could sell sponsorship if I just knew the head of HSBC.’ I know the head of HSBC and I’ve never ever sold him anything because I everything I ever had wasn’t a good fit for what they did. Knowing people isn’t the point but what you also said is having a first impression. Where people fall flat is they don’t really understand what they’re selling, they don’t package it very well and they don’t value it. It’d be like going into a shop without a price tag, with rubbish stuff in the window, you wouldn’t go in. Same deal with sponsorship. And I think there needs to be an increase in professionalism for making those approaches and I think that Slingshot was testament to that because effectively, that’s all we did. I didn’t create events, I didn’t make something better – I took what I had and made it valuable to brands. When a small business is starting out, what kind of information and events can they seek out to help them? Jackie: I think there are two things. If you’re a rights holder, say you are an event or an online publication or a podcast or a travel blogger or whatever, it really is about how you package your assets and then understanding which brands to approach. I’ve written a book called Pinpoint which is the only book dedicated to sponsorship sales. If you are a brand looking for a sponsorship, that in a way is easier because everybody wants money but from a brand perspective, it really is Is the event you’re interested in going to speak to your target audience? Do you have a good reason for being there? Is it authentic? Are you going to approach it in an interesting way? How can you connect with people in a genuine and authentic way? And that’s best done by market research? Jackie: I think it’s dependent on the brand but yeah, market research, I think, understanding your audience. Let’s just say you’re after mums. Let’s say you’re a new gym for mums, or… I don’t know, I’m not a mother, this is the worst thing to go! You can actually look for a platform out there to reach mums. Race for Life is a huge one and it’s in local communities. But let’s say you want mums based in Leeds. You can find forums and groups within Leeds and the events they’re approaching or the physical venue space. There might be a digital community or a forum and then say: ‘This is my product and I’m interested in working with you as a sponsorship.’ Not advertising – I’d never recommend advertising. And most people will have a sponsorship package. What kind of things should you be looking for in that package, then? Jackie: I would always look for opportunities that go beyond a logo – I don’t think badging is valuable anymore. Brand recall used to be valuable in the 80s, but we’re hit with 60,000 messages a day now. Your brain just gets tuned off. So, I’d be looking for what kind of assets engage with your audience. Speaking opportunities would be something because they give you an opportunity to talk. Guest blog spots, posts, can we run a joint promotion, a campaign? Can we distribute free product? Those are the kinds of things I think really push the needle on sponsorship.     As mentioned in the intro, these days you’re running Rebel Pi, an ice wine company, which is quite a niche. It’s also quite a risky business – you were explaining that it’s very dependent on temperature, weather conditions and people being able to pick grapes quickly in the middle of the night at short notice. How do you manage this risk, particularly in terms of cash flow? Jackie: I’d probably say that I’m not managing it well. I went from selling ideas to selling a physical product which I wanted to do to test myself. It is very hard from a production standpoint because the only way to make ice wine is picking grapes at below -8C. If it doesn’t get below -8C, you don’t have a vintage, you don’t have a product. So, you have to be patient, you have to work with really smart people in the vineyard who know how to create ice wine each year and you have to be willing to ride it out. In our first year, we’ve done really well, we’ve sold about 60pc of our bottles. It’s now listed in places like City Social, 67 Pall Mall, Pied a Terre, Dinner by Heston – all those kinds of top places. Now for me it’s asking: ‘Do we have enough production for next year?’ We’re holding back stock, so that if we didn’t get a vintage next year, we could then still distribute. I wouldn’t want you to be able to go into a restaurant, be able to order it and then next month you can’t – for 12 months. I’m managing stock but from a financial perspective, I’m taking a hit, basically. I’m not talking about being profitable on this until year three, really. It will be – if all things go to plan – it’s not winter yet – if all things go to plan, it should be fine for next year. But in the event that we’re not, I’m looking long-term at this.   I created this product because I was on TV and I didn’t want to waste my 15 minutes of fame. I wanted to have something that people could buy. That was a stupid strategy because the majority of the people who watch The Apprentice are 14-year-old girls. They can’t even legally buy my wine! I launched the business with an expectation that was incorrect and I’ve had to fix it. I’ve changed the strategy and everything’s fine. It’s great – I’m super-excited to be working with a product that you can touch, you can taste – I’m excited about it.     It does seem like you have a very clear target market, especially the premium which I think people are moving away from more disposable, fast type things to buying less but better quality. It’s a better direction to go in. Jackie: For sure – people are drinking less, people are buying less, but when they do it, they want to enjoy it. That’s certainly what I’ve found personally, and amongst my group of friends. And the greatest thing about ice wine in the UK market is that almost nobody’s had it. When do you get to give somebody a first? It’s so unheard of. I’m so excited about that.          Yeah, for sure. You mentioned The Apprentice and it giving you a kind of platform. But you were already a seasoned and successful entrepreneur when you went on The Apprentice, having sold Slingshot. Alan Sugar even fired for you for being too experienced to be the business partner that he wanted. What did you get out of the programme in the end? Jackie: I’ll go back to the first part. The only reason I did The Apprentice was because I sold my business. I don’t know if I would’ve had the courage to do so before, but I’d built enough of a name for myself so if I came across looking awful, at least I had a fallback on my previous success. Well, I mean you don’t know. You have no idea what you’re going into, so I was lucky. Anna: So much of it is in the edit as well, isn’t it? You never know what’s going to happen! Jackie: It’s unrealistic to think that – first of all, it’s an entertainment programme and I am not stupid to not be aware of that. It would also be naïve to think that you are 100pc great 100pc of the time. There are very long days, you’re working with people you don’t know, you have no idea what to expect, you can’t prep at all. All of those mistakes that I made that were absolutely hilarious, I totally made. That’s not an edit, that’s 100pc what I did because that’s what happens – that’s what happens in life. You just don’t have a camera following you around 24/7 waiting for you to mess up. But in terms of what I took away from it, so when I got asked, I was like: ‘I don’t even know if I can do this’, but then I did. My husband was very kind and said if I was awful, we would fly to India and blow off steam for a year. Fortunately, we didn’t have to move. Now, in hindsight, if you asked if I would do it again I would do it in a heartbeat. It was so different than what I expected. What I got out of it was experience doing totally different things which I love. If I could spend a year doing that every single day, I would. Anna: Oh yeah, the variety’s so much fun. Jackie: I got to make doughnuts, I sold stuff at a bodybuilding thing, I created an art gallery. You couldn’t do those things in a lifetime. I was really fortunate to do that. I still talk to Claude Littner (one of Lord Sugar’s advisors) a lot and he’s been great and met some great people on it as well. What was your favourite part of the process? Jackie: I think my favourite part – at the time it was pretty stressful – I can say that I didn’t love being in the house. I loved doing the tasks. My favourite task was possibly the art task. Wait no, actually, that’s a lie – the shoe task! I lost, but my favourite task though. What made it your favourite? Jackie: I got to design a shoe! I love shoes and I got to be the boss, which I like to be because it’s easier. It was a lot of fun. It also played to my wheelhouse like selling stuff to businesses – and B2B sales is what I do. You said you got along well with Claude. There was one contestant you didn’t have a particularly good relationship with. What advice do you have for working with a personality that clashes with your own? Jackie: I think The Apprentice isn’t a real-life situation. My recommendation to myself was having more patience which I did not have. In a real-life situation, honestly, and this is not what people would say – avoid the person, quite honestly. You won’t always get on with everybody, and people won’t always get along with you. And that’s OK, there’s nothing wrong with that. Being able to work with somebody that you don’t like is an asset. I wouldn’t try to beat a dead horse. You shouldn’t really be there to make friends with people, you’re there to do your job. You should also try not to make their job harder. My honest advice would be to have minimal interaction with the person you don’t like. Anna: Just trying to stay out of each other’s space, I guess. Jackie: Which in The Apprentice was impossible because we were living together!   Anna: Smashing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Jackie. Jackie: Thanks for having me, Anna. Anna: You can find out more about Jackie at jackiefast.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more guidance on bootstrapping your business and managing your cash flow. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening.    

Anna Jordan meets Piers Linney, an entrepreneur, investor and former Dragon on Dragon's Den. We discuss the most memorable pitches from the show as well as Piers' first foray into entrepreneurship.    Be sure to visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more articles on starting a business and raising external finance. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Want to read the interview instead? Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Piers Linney, an entrepreneur and investor who is best known for his time as a Dragon on Dragon’s Den. We’ll be talking about Piers’ enterprising beginnings and how you can drive your small business forward, even during difficult spells.  Anna: Hello Piers. Piers: Hi Anna. Anna: How are you? Piers: Very good. Anna: Great. OK, as the intro suggests, I’d like to go back a bit. As we know, it’s easier for entrepreneurs to get started earlier and reach a larger audience, helped by the likes of selling platforms like eBay and Depop. But you were just as entrepreneurial, even when you were a teenager – that was before the introduction of social media, apps. I understand that you used to sell the Sunday papers, but you bypassed the… Piers: Ah, you’re going way back now! [laughs] Yup, yup, I did. So, you bypassed the newsagent because you saw a gap in the market there and you want to the wholesaler and distributed the Sunday paper around your neighbourhood. Piers: Yes, so, just going back to your earlier point. The fact that you can start a business more easily these days – there are platforms that help you in terms of distribution – it doesn’t mean you should. It’s still about the idea. What I learned early on – I’ve always been fascinated about business, really – I grew up in a village in Milltown, so a lot of the neighbours had their own businesses. I didn’t really know anybody who had a job in terms of getting up in the morning and going off to work. They were builders, joiners, jobs that you work with your hands. Maybe owned a quarry. I sort of thought: ‘Right, I had a job’ which was my paper round, which paid £5 a week. If I was late it was £4.50, which shows you how long ago this was. And I thought: ‘This is just a mug’s game’. It was very cold up in the north in those days. Global warming’s made it easier. And I thought: ‘What can I do?’ So, one morning on a Sunday when they [the newsagent] didn’t deliver, my dad said to me: ‘Could you get me my paper? I don’t want to get out of bed.’ And I said: ‘OK, I’ll go and get it for you.’ And he gave me 50p. I said: ‘Hang on a minute, that’s pretty good money compared to what I’m earning on my paper round.’ The next-door neighbour said to me: ‘Oh, can you do the same?’ My dad was telling him about the new service. And I thought: ‘Hang on, there’s something in this.’ I flyered my whole neighbourhood and built a paper round. I was earning £15-£20 on a Sunday morning for doing a bit of a longer paper round, but it was first entrée and my first understanding that if you find a niche and you find a product or a service that somebody wants and it adds value to their lives, and they’re willing to pay you more than it costs to deliver that service, i.e. it’s profitable, then you can create value and – in this case, it was a small example – some wealth. I used that money to buy my first and very expensive BMX. And through that I understand that the idea’s great and the execution clearly, but what it also came down to is a lot of hard work and graft. I Imagine it must’ve taken quite a bit of confidence as well at that age. How did you approach the wholesaler and how did they respond to you? Piers: I’ve never lacked self-confidence and it’s probably something that’s helpful in being an entrepreneur. Becoming confident or becoming a leader in many ways is something that can be instilled in you or you can be born with it, or it’s something you can learn. In the military, they can train leaders. I was always confident, and I could see the opportunity to make money. And again, the wholesaler, all he got was another customer, it just wasn’t a newsagent. His bundle of papers, rather than drop it outside a newsagent, was dropped off at someone’s house, at a residential address. He didn’t really care – he was just making a bit more money.                 I understand that your mother set up her own business after retiring from nursing in the NHS, I’m sure that was some kind of inspiration to you.   Piers: People say to me: ‘Who are your role models in life?’ I’ve never had formal mentors. My initial role models were my parents. My dad was a Mancunian working-class lad who got into Cambridge on a scholarship, so he was bright. Then after that, it was people that I worked with. I’ve always worked with people who are more senior that are better than me. Then after that, I’ve always tried to hire people that are better than me. I’ve had three meetings today and they’ve all been with people that know more about something that I’m looking to get into. And that’s really important because you never have all the answers. The world’s moving so quickly now and the market is so dynamic that you can’t be expected to have the answers. And if you think you have, you’re probably wrong. What would you say in terms of small businesses being able to hire better talent? Perhaps because they’re nimbler, they can innovate at a faster rate. Would you agree with that? Piers: I’ve been through this quite a few times where you’ve got a small business and you want to attract talent. Now, a couple of things: the first one is that, really, you shouldn’t be concerned about where talent resides. If you want to have a talented forklift truck driver, they probably need to live reasonably close to your warehouse. But if you’re looking at the creative economy and tech-based businesses, talent can live anywhere now. It doesn’t matter. The idea of a city even is arguably unnecessary going forward into the future. Don’t worry about where talent is, just go for the best talent. You’ve then got to be more creative to access more talent because they’re going to have more people talking to them, they might have a nice cushy job in a big company. You’ve got to be more creative about how you bring them onboard, about renumeration. If you’ve got a company you intend to sell or float one day, you can offer people shares. You shouldn’t give shares in a company that’s intending to be a lifestyle business forever – unless you’re going to make money in dividends. Think about how you’re going to add value to their lives. A lot of the entrepreneurs I come across think that these senior people who are joining them are doing them a favour. But you’ve got to remember that you’re doing them a favour actually because if they didn’t want to leave corporate life and do something more interesting and entrepreneurial where they have a better work-life balance, they wouldn’t be talking to you. And when you bring people onboard – no matter who they are, how talented they are – think very carefully about handing out shares. Make sure that when they leave, for whatever reason, you can get them back. But the talent is out there. And the other thing about talent that I’m very passionate about is diversity. There’s a pool of talent. If you’re looking for people who look like you, have the same religious beliefs as you, same sexuality as you, they live in the same area and went to the same school as you, you’re limiting your talent pool. Don’t do that. You need to think about diversity in all of its forms, especially in terms of thought as well, to access a broader and deeper talent pool. That’s the competitive advantage. There’s a huge amount of talent out there. I’m a trustee of Nesta as well, the innovation charity, and if you look forwards, the research about robotics and AI, menial jobs and even jobs such as accountants and lawyers [are at risk]. Software’s pretty good at adding up numbers, it’s pretty good at looking at datasets and applying logic to it. It’s not just Uber drivers and forklift truck drivers that have got a problem; it’s the professions. So, creativity is what differentiates us from the machines. And the talent you access in the future is going to have that creative edge. My mantra is that you’ve got to have a plan, but your plan has to have some growth in it. Add some creativity, some innovation, some differentiation to your product or service to attract different customers. Having no plan for growth, in a world that is changing very quickly, is a very bad plan. You wake up one morning, and you find your market, your customers, your product, your supply chain – something’s changed which means that you’re no longer relevant or you no longer have a profit margin. Anna: I was actually reading an article about ice cream vans the other day and they seem to be a type of business that – there are some that have moved forward but a lot of them are in the same types of vans, still doing your normal vanilla with a Flake and they haven’t moved on and they’re wondering [why they’re falling behind]. Piers: They should be doing smoothie vans! Anna: Yeah! Piers: It doesn’t matter what you do, 20-30 years ago – I’m generalising now – you could do that. I don’t think it’s a wise plan these days – ice cream van, corner shop, tech company, it doesn’t matter – to rest on your laurels. You’ve got to keep talking to your customers about what it is they want so you understand change, ideally before it happens.                        You’ve spoken a bit about instilling the values of entrepreneurialism. How are you doing that with your two daughters? Piers: Another interesting thing I’m quite interested in is the future of work, the future of employment. Dell has some research that says in 30 years, 85pc of the jobs that exist don’t exist today. There’s other research that says ten years out, half of them don’t exist today. You’ve got an education system that’s training your children to enter a world that the teachers don’t understand, that I don’t understand. It’s very difficult. They’ve got to equip kids with these sorts of skills and keep them as a rally car, as I call it, to the unweighted so you could go left or right as you go over the brow of the hill – and that’s hard to do. My daughter – I’ve got a daughter called Tiger. I got called into school, actually, by the head teacher. She said she’s been selling things at school and they need to talk to her. I thought she’d made a couple of quid. I asked what happened and the teacher said: ‘She got some erasers and she was making them funky and selling them on at a margin.’ I asked how much money she made and she said £60. They said that I need to tell her off and I refused. I take the point about taking money off the other kids, maybe there should be some kind of bartering, but I’m not going to punish my daughter for being entrepreneurial and making some money – that’s all she’s ever seen me do! Anna: Exactly. Do you know who her dad is?! Piers: It was quite interesting to see that. I bring them up to – they’re young, so I don’t really sit them down and go over how to start a business with them. But I think they get it, that my view is that – especially when they enter the labour market – is if you can, work for yourself. It’s got its problems, you sacrifice, it’s got its risks, but at the end of the day you’re masters of your own destiny. You seem to have a knack for identifying emerging markets as well [Piers launched cloud tech firm Outsourcery before the cloud was popular]. What kind of emerging markets do you see coming up?  Piers: I was into the telecoms which was the tail-end of that, really, the particular way it was done. I was into cloud and cloud is the way things are now. Since then I’ve been looking at what I do next. I made some investments, some work and some don’t, and I’ve been looking at doing something big, something disruptive. I’ve been looking at wellness, so health, fitness and now I’m looking now more at going back almost into what I know, which is markets, SME services. I’m trying to disrupt those because a lot of them just have not changed, even since I was in them ten years ago. And even ten years before that, they haven’t changed. I think there’s an opportunity in there in services for small to medium-sized businesses to disrupt markets.      Coming on to everybody’s favourite, Dragon’s Den. I’m sure you would’ve had a lot of pitches in your time on the show, but which was the most memorable one for you and why? Piers: There’s two, I suppose. I’ll give you the negative, funny one first. That was Bathomatic, which was a chap that turned up wanting £1m or £2m for 20pc and he had a product which pretty much filled a bath and dropped some rose oil in it. I said I’ll do that myself actually. I don’t need to spend £15,000 on something that turns a tap on and off. We asked what the money was really for. He had this pretend plaque/device that didn’t really work, it was a mock-up, and he said he needed a floor in the Shard for the marketing suite. You laugh at that, but I’ve heard about entrepreneurs who have got equally bonkers ideas and raised money from people. That was one of the comedy moments. The most interesting one for me was a company that at the time was called Lost My Name and now it’s called Wonderbly. That was the leading producer of personalised children’s, it was books, now it’s increasingly content. They raised investment from the likes of Google and other venture firms, and they’ve been growing. I was one of the first to do real tech on Dragon’s Den. There were four or five Israeli entrepreneurs walked in the Den and they all had their venture capital term sheet and I thought: ‘What’s there not to like?’ They knew what they were talking about and that’s been very successful. So hopefully out of Dragon’s Den I’ll make some money because it’s like a portfolio – some work, some don’t, some you lose money, some make money. Anna: Yeah, it was as you were saying as well, personalisation is a huge market and growing, as is tech, so combine that – Piers: Personalisation is everywhere now. I’ve met lots of founders recently and whether it’s books or baby’s clothes, technology allows you to do that now. It was very hard, very expensive to do this. Companies like the Moonpigs and all those kind of people in the world and the moo.coms, personalised greetings cards and business cards, is normal now. It was very hard to do a decade ago, so personalisation is somewhere where you can really add value. People want to see personalisation, they want to see provenance, they want to know the founder’s story. The new consumer that’s beginning to amass disposable income, they want to see more, they don’t want to have some clever advert that’s sold on something they don’t really want. But increasingly, people are interested in – not all sectors – but they’re interested in where did this product come from, who’s put it together, what’s the ethos of that business – how do they treat their customers, their employees, the environment – locally, globally. That’s what you need to think about because especially on the eco side of things you’re seeing now that the Millennials, whatever you want to call them – Gen Z – Millennials now have the… Anna: Hiya! Piers: Like yourself. Millennials are mid-level managers in most companies now, they’re moving up, because they’re getting older. And they are changing the way in which products and services are consumed – because these were little things that didn’t matter too much, they were seen as ‘got to have it for the marketing’. Now you’ve got to have it because if you don’t have it, they’re not going to buy your product or service. Anna: And it’s so easy to research as well. So, if there’s something you fall down on, people can research it. Boom – there you go. Piers: That means you have to be transparent about it as well.  Because if you’re not, people are going to start asking questions. You don’t have to be, always. There are lots of people that make good money out of businesses that don’t do any of this. They just found a product. I mean, mobile phones. I used to be in mobile, and people made a lot of money out of it and the service was pretty awful. But at the end of the day, they had a product that selling it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Because it was an amazing new product that everyone wanted, nobody had one, so you couldn’t really go wrong – and those markets haven’t really changed much since. At the time of recording, it is Small Business Advice Week. This year it’s running from 2nd-8th September. First off, it’s a little bit difficult to get around this topic and it may very well change by the time the podcast goes live. What advice do you have for small businesses to prepare and operate in the event of a no-deal Brexit? Piers: Well, the problem with that is that we don’t know what a no-deal Brexit means. That’s the bad thing about it: we should not be in this position. The economy depends upon entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship and innovation. And having a period of time where – and I’ve seen this – on a large scale and also on a small scale, where investment, decisions, sales cycles, things have been delayed. That slows the economy down and it has slowed the economy down and that’s going to continue. And even if we end up with a no-deal, and it’s been said that over time, we’re all dead. So, if you’re looking at it in one year it’s probably bad but in five years, ten years, things change and water will find its level again. But there’s going to be a period of time where the innovation in the UK, the economy and entrepreneurs are being stifled. And I don’t care what the outcome is, we should never have been put in this position. So, in terms of answering your question, it’s very hard. It actually makes sense, and I hate saying this, it does make sense in many ways to delay investments. Maybe in terms of marketing or looking overseas or EU relationships or your supply chain. Just give it a week. It was worse six months ago, at least now you’re looking at maybe days and weeks. It’s a very hard question to answer. Anna: It is, isn’t it? Piers: It’s incredibly frustrating. Anna: Yeah, we’ve had so many people ask. Piers: There’s no easy answer to that, sadly. Possibly something a little more positive. What is the most common question you get and what advice do you give small business owners in return?    Piers: One thing I’m talking about this week a lot is financing. I’ve worked in the US quite a lot and you look at entrepreneurs there and even small business owners, the ones who aren’t looking to grow exponentially, it’s about if you need to grow a business sometimes, your net income, your profits, don’t provide sufficient capital to fund your growth aspirations. You need to raise money. That could be debt, it might be equity. It depends where your business is in its life cycle and its profitability, and your balance sheet. And a lot of UK entrepreneurs, it seems, are afraid of raising external finance. So, raising external finance isn’t for everybody, but given the numbers are 70pc-80pc of UK businesses would rather forego growth than raise external finance, that needs to change. I don’t know exactly how much, but by changing it you can put more into the engine of the UK economy, and how these businesses grow. And that’s really simplistically about understanding your options. There are lots more options now: peer to peer lending or challenger banks or angels or angel funds, crowdfunding. There’s lots more ways you can raise capital which you couldn’t do five, even three years ago in some cases. Go and look at the options if you need to grow, understand them and then it comes down to a contract. Be happy with the terms of that contract and the small print. Can you lose your business, can you lose your shirt? Are they draconian terms? This is where you need a good lawyer, I’m not joking about that either. When someone hands over a term sheet or a document for debt (or a shareholder agreement if you’re looking at equity), you need to understand exactly what that means for you and not just if things go well. You need to understand what happens if things don’t go well. Extreme examples – there’s no point having an investment agreement where you are restricted, you have a veto of you raising debt and equity if you need to raise more because they can hold a gun to your head, essentially. There’s no point having documentation for your start-up which says that in year four, you will hit this EBITDAR number (Earnings Before Interest, Depreciation, Amoritisation and Restructuring or Rent costs) or they have swamp rights. They can take over the board and fire you. They’re extreme examples, but I’ve seen them. Both professionally and I’ve seen them in things put before me as well. So, understand the detail and the small print and make sure that if things don’t go to plan, you know where you stand. And I’ve known one example recently where someone built a business, they had a 12 million evaluation, they raised £2-£3million and within a month, they were out. They missed some sales target. But don’t be afraid of raising finance if you want to grow because otherwise in many, many cases, you can’t really grow. Anna: Well, that’s it from me unless there’s anything else that you’d like to add. Piers: No - we’ve covered some ground there. Anna: Thanks for coming on the show, Piers. Piers: It’s a pleasure. Anna: You can find out more about Piers at pierslinney.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more information on starting and growing your own business. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening.   

Anna Jordan meets Nicola Horlick, an investment fund manager and founder of business P2P lending firm, Money&Co. She talks about the slowing economy and why you should never go into the restaurant business.    Be sure to visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more articles about peer to peer lending.   Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Want to read the interview instead? Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Nicola Horlick, an entrepreneur and investment manager with other thirty years of experience. She’s the CEO of P2P investment firm, Money&Co, and as such, we’ll be talking about business finance. Anna: Hello, Nicola. Nicola: Hi. Anna: How are you doing? Nicola: Very well, thanks. First, I’d like to ask you about moving from finance. How is it becoming an entrepreneur for the first time having worked in that industry for quite a while? Nicola: Yeah, well originally, I worked for big banks and I was very lucky. I started at a big bank that was going very strongly and after that I was sent to another bank which had a very major problem with one of its businesses and I had to turn it around. And then I went to the French bank, SocGen (Société Générale) and they asked me to set up a fund management business for them literally from scratch, so it was just me, a Frenchman and a secretary on day one. That naturally took me to the point of saying “I really need to do something on my own now.” I’d sort of done everything within the banking environment and having literally set up a business from scratch it then gave me the bug, so to speak. The next step after that was to set up a fund management business with no big bank – just me – and getting some backers. I set it up in 2004 and it was approved in 2005 by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) that was Bramdean Asset Management. I’ve set up numerous different businesses since then, mostly around finance. In 2011, I set up a private equity business called Rockpool with two guys who are both ex-3i (an international investor group). I then also set up some film finance businesses and I got involved in the music industry and I listed a vehicle on the London Stock Exchange to invest in alternative investments. And then I’ve done less successful things like setting up a restaurant which was a very, very bad idea. I’m still trying to extricate myself from that now. But you know, it’s led me to a different world, really. And then ultimately I set up Money&Co in 2013 and Money&Co is a peer to peer lending platform. So, it’s individuals who want a better rate on their cash lending to businesses to help them grow. Our bad debt experience to date has only been 0.04pc per annum. We’ve actually only had one bad debt in five years. And so with this, it’s not that we’re unique – there are others, Funding Circle is massive – that lend to small businesses. We take a more considered approach. It’s mainly because I’m a fund manager and I’ve been an investor for so long. Whereas a lot of the people running these businesses might come from different backgrounds – they might come from tech or marketing backgrounds rather than money management backgrounds. What criteria do you look for in the businesses you want to invest in? Nicola: So, we have some very basic requirements, like you must have three years of filed accounts; the company must have been profitable in the last year of operation; and it needs to demonstrate to us that it’s affordable for them to borrow so we’ll never ever lend to a start-up, for example. I’d like to talk a bit about the peer to peer lending market. On the retail side, the FCA are introducing tighter rules for retail investors after the collapse of Lendy. How is that going to affect the business investment side and the industry as a whole? Nicola: Well as far as I’m concerned, it’s a very good thing. Because when it started it was what was known as ‘light touch regulation’. So there weren’t many rules and it did concern me that there were people running these services who often didn’t have a financial services background and I’m not sure that’s the right thing for the lenders. A lot of them are older as well and are looking for income and it’s important to protect them as much as you can. So I actually welcome the new regime which is going to come on 9th December by the FCA which is going to tighten up on all of this stuff because it’s hopefully going to mean that the right people are lending and that the people doing the lending on their behalf are better qualified to do that and that their money is better protected. So, Money&Co, as far as you can see, will always exist as a P2P lender? Will you ever introduce other products? Nicola: I mean we could, but that might confuse people. I think we should focus on that because there are huge opportunities in lending. My own background is very much an equity background, so I’m relatively new. I’ve only being doing lending for five years out of 36 years of being in financial services., so I’m a relative novice. There are huge areas of lending that you can bring into the P2P arena. So for example, leasing is an absolutely vast industry. There’s £100bn a year of leasing contracts in this country, 25 of which is business critical leasing. So that’s the printing press for the printing company or the trucks for the trucking company or the dental suite for the dentist: things that those businesses can absolutely not do without. There is absolutely no reason you can’t put those in a P2P environment, those types of loans. And housebuilding is a very good example of where banks are reluctant to lend – there’s a shortage of housing in this country. There’s no reason why we can’t devise a product and in fact we are in the middle of doing just that, for that industry to build more houses. And that’s taken us to the point of thinking that prefab has never properly taken off in this country. It’s much more of a thing in countries like Germany and Austria, but that’s a way of building them much faster and in a much more eco-friendly way, because you can insulate them in the factory and you can put the houses up in a couple of weeks. You can fast-track the build so that instead of having men standing out in the rain putting one brick on top of another, which is crazy in this day and age, you can assemble them really fast and you can make much more interesting developments architecturally. It’s a bit like LEGO; you can have all different shapes and you can make it more interesting. So, we’re looking at ways of raising money from institutions to actually fund housebuilders. Now these would still in effect be P2P loans but from an institution lending to a housebuilder rather than an individual lending to a housebuilder. Coming back to you as an entrepreneur, I understand that Money&Co has suffered a significant financial loss [£1.4m going into March 2018]. You have said there’ll be a substantial profit going into March 2020. What are your recovery plans and how will you go about setting them? Nicola: Ugh, this is such a typical Daily Mail story. If you actually look at how much money we’ve lost in the last five years and compare that to Funding Circle, it’s a fraction of the amount. Funding Circle in 2018 lost £50m in one year. Money&Co has made very small losses relative to Funding Circle. My aim is to make the business profitable as soon as possible because I don’t really believe in building businesses that make losses and losses and losses. And we could’ve lent an awful lot more money if we’d burned more money, but that’s not our approach. Our approach is to build it in a very steady way and I do expect to make a profit… well, certainly break even in the year to 2020. In fact, we may not because it depends how much we spend on marketing. And you know, if we really want to accelerate the growth of the business, we may decide we want to spend more on marketing. If we spent less, we could make a profit; if we spent more, we’re going to end up with a bigger business the year after. It’s a fine line. How do you make that decision of whether the marketing is worth it? Nicola: Well, just before I spoke to you, we were having a meeting about that and just going through our marketing strategy and trying to decide how much we should spend. It’s quite formulaic, really. We sort of know. Of course, we’ve got this problem – not really a problem – but the fact we’ve got the FCA which is tightening up all the rules which makes direct consumer marketing a little bit more complex than it was previously. But it’s a bit binary, you know – if you spend this amount of money on Google in its various forms, you’re likely to get a certain number of clients. So it’s really a matter of how much we want to put into the hopper and how much we’re going to get out at the other end. And also, how many loans we’ve got that we think need to be funded? But assuming we are able to get the institutional money that we need to get to help us fund housebuilders, we’ll certainly be at break-even and probably make profit by the year to March 2020. But I don’t make any apology – it’s a start-up fintech business. That’s what fintech businesses do, make losses. You started up in 2013, correct? Nicola: So the company was formed in 2013 and then we launched the business in 2014, April, the site went live. And we completed the first loan in July 2014.  Right, OK. Normally with a start-up company, it’s usually the first year or so that’s a bit crackly but then it starts to even out after that. Nicola: What, in terms of profitability? Anna: Yeah. Nicola: Yeah, well not in fintech. If you look at all the people with fintech businesses who have been running them over the last few years, you’ll see that they’ve all made big losses. It’s sort of accepted that when it’s a new industry, you’ve got to establish the industry and you’ve got to throw money at it in order to create it. It’s not like setting up shops – well actually, shops are a pretty bad example because they’re not very easy to do these days – but there are more traditional businesses where somebody might have been working for an engineering company and then sets up on their own. Usually the rule is that companies move into profit in year three, in its third full year of operation, that’s what I’d normally expect. But you know, with this, there’s a discretionary element to it which is the marketing spend. We could just run a business that is profitable and keep it small, or we could decide to make it to make it a lot bigger and in order to do that we need to spend a lot of money on marketing. What do you think about the state of business in the UK, especially in the light of Brexit? Nicola: Nobody seems to have noticed that the economy has slowed down very significantly. And we do see it – though a lot of our loans are property-backed loans, we do have some engineering businesses, for example, that we’ve lent to, that are beginning to see a slowdown. And that is Brexit-related in that uncertainty means that people don’t make decisions. So, businesses have not been investing because they don’t know what’s going to happen and there is evidence that car manufacturing companies, for example, are beginning to move things out of the UK. And the number of cars being manufactured in the UK is down 20pc so far this year on the same time last year. These things are beginning to impact on the economy, and they’ll have knock-on effects on all of the businesses we lend to, which is one of the reasons for being very cautious and one of the reasons why I have been so cautious about growing our book. But yeah, I have found generally, during my investing life, that I make a lot more money in bad times than in good. Because in good times any fool can make money, because everything is going up. In bad times, your skill comes into play. It sounds counter-intuitive, but I’m likely to be lending a lot more money in a recession than when things are booming because I will be taking on less risky loans. It’s just that lenders tend to withdraw; they react to recessionary conditions. The banks react during recessions. So, during a recession, there are more opportunities for people who have money to lend. I expect there to be a recession and I expect to build the loan book faster, rather strangely, than I was when things were going really well. When things were going really well, you had Funding Circle throwing money at these borrowers, you had banks, you had international banks, you had vast amounts of money sloshing around. We had quantitative easing – a lot of money being printed. If it’s being printed you’ve got to do something with it. All of that will come to an end and it’ll be much harder for borrowers to find lenders and that provides us with the opportunity and means we’re more likely to find better-quality borrowers during that period of time. And one last thing I’d like to talk about. So the restaurant, Georgina’s, that you used to run, went bust. What are the toughest lessons you learned as an entrepreneur? Nicola: Well, it’s not quite true to say that it went bust. What we did was we closed it down and we moved to a different location. Although it wasn’t called Georgina’s – we called it The Walrus Room – and it was in Battersea Rise. It’s more a bar with food rather than a restaurant. And we’ve just got a new manager to come and manage it. I’m still involved in it, but it’s a nightmare industry and I absolutely recommend that nobody should go into restaurants. I think it only works if you’re a really talented chef and it’s your restaurant. Or if you’re Pizza Express. Anything in-between doesn’t work, so just a vanity thing where you open a restaurant because you like the idea of owning a restaurant, that’s a very, very bad idea. What are the toughest parts of running [a restaurant]? Nicola: Well, the costs are just ridiculous. The rents on the high street are still ridiculously high. A unit on Georgina’s – the original unit – the annual rent was £65,000 a year. The Council Tax was £28,000 a year, I mean it’s outrageous: £28,000 a year?! Then one-sixth of your turnover goes to the VAT man, plus we had 14 employees because it was a full-service restaurant. So, we had to pay 13.8pc of the wage bill in national insurance. You’re basically in business to pay tax and rent – that’s it. And the idea that you’re going to make a profit, unless you’ve got some really big-name chef behind it, is pretty much impossible, in my view. And finally, coming slightly back to my first question, what tips do you have for entrepreneurs – or want to be entrepreneurs – starting their own business for the first time? Nicola: You need to make sure you’ve got some proper funding. A lot of people end up funding their business through credit card debt or getting loans from loan sharks, I mean that’s just absolutely not the way to do it. The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) is a very, very good thing because it allows you to raise £150,000 and the people who invest can get 50pc back as long as they’re UK taxpayers. And so I think people need to put in the work at the beginning to make sure they’re raising the money before they’ve actually started the business and they shouldn’t be putting their life savings at risk and they shouldn’t be putting their money on credit cards or going to loan sharks. It’s really important to make sure that the business is financed properly from day one.  Anna: Great. Thanks ever so much for coming on the show, Nicola. Nicola: Not at all. Anna: You can find out more about Money&Co at moneyandco.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on alternative investments. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening.      

Anna Jordan chats to Caprice, a supermodel turned entrepreneur. She tells us more about the struggles of the model stereotype in starting her first business and protecting your brand when you enter a licence deal.    Be sure to visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more articles about starting a company and Government funding for small businesses.   Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Prefer to read it instead? Here's the transcript. Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Caprice Bourret, a former model turned businesswoman. You might recognise her from the front covers of Vogue and Esquire or from her appearance on Channel 4’s The Jump in 2017. She’s here to talk about moving into the business world and the experiences that came with launching her lingerie brand, By Caprice and her homeware range, By Caprice Home. Anna: Hi, Caprice. Caprice: Good morning! Anna: How are you? Caprice: I’m…OK. Anna: Nice. Right, let’s crack on. When you retired from modelling you were well-known and then you moved into the business world where you were relatively less well-known. How did you rebuild your reputation in another field? Caprice: That took quite a few years. I’m not going to paint a beautiful picture because it wasn’t. The stereotype was quite severe. I didn’t think it would be that difficult coming from being a well-known model to having credibility in the business world was difficult. But it took a lot of tenacity and I had to ascertain stockists. So, I would call up and go directly to the CEO and try it that way because with buyers I was a bit chopped liver, regardless of who I was, so I went to the CEOs. I said, “Listen, I’ve got this great idea and this great brand”, ba ba ba. And most of them – you know, when you invest in a new brand, you’re talking about a massive investment in some regards. When I started, it was a licence deal so they would invest. I know because I invested at least a half a million into a new brand, so I know it was a hard sale. And then when I started supplying myself, I didn’t have any sales so they just thought, “We’re just not going to invest – we could go with this brand and we know off the bat that we’ll make a quarter of a million in the first drop. Yeah, she gets notoriety and she gets press but we don’t get any sales traction.” So it was really really difficult initially. The stereotype worked to my advantage in a way because I did get the meetings with the CEOs or the CEOs went to the buyers and said, “Listen, you have to take this meeting.” But then it worked against me because they thought, “Oh, a model. Come on, she’s going to be here one day and out the next. Forget it – we’re not going to make this investment.” But all I needed was one stockist and I got the one stockist and then I worked at it and the sales were great. Then I went to the other stockists and said, “Listen, you can stereotype all you want but I got the sales.” So, I had to be very patient and in business it’s hard. Every time you fall down you’ve got to get back up and if you think you’re not going to fall down, then shame on you, because it happens. The ones that are successful are the ones who keep getting back up.       Anna: You must have thought about branding yourself before you retired from modelling and building it up slowly. How did you start that when you were still modelling?   Caprice: Welp, I have to tell you that when you’re in the modelling business – and not only the modelling business but when you have some notoriety behind that and you become sort of a household name – you start to believe your own bullsh*t, I have to tell you. It’s fantastic on the ego but you don’t think it’s going to end, ever. But for some reason – I think because I know what it’s like to not have enough money to eat – I know what it’s like to be really really down and out, from nothing. When I was 18, my mom said, “See ya, good luck, write me a postcard!” I had no money, it was hard. When I started building my career, it makes you a different person: it makes you a grafter, it makes you hungry, it makes you smarter. So, I knew that the modelling industry would – I was in my 30s and that’s, like, one foot in the grave regardless of how successful you are, so I knew I had to think of Plan B. So, I thought, “What will everyone buy into?” Boom: lingerie. Easy peasy. Right? So I had to think about that while I was at the top of my game because that’s when I had the power – which I did – and I initially started out with a licence deal because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, so I let someone else take the risk. I convinced the CEO of Debenhams to do that and he did and that was a smart risk to take because I made them very very rich! Then I took the licence back and started to supply myself.         Anna: Let’s talk a bit more about the licensing. You were doing that six-year deal with Debenhams and with By Caprice Home you’ve just done a licence agreement with Sadaqat. They must’ve been totally different experiences. What kind of tips do you have for entrepreneurs who are going through that licence agreement process for the first time? Caprice: So, every deal is different. Let me explain what a licence deal is to begin with. I give them my name and they develop my brand and supply it. Boom. You get five to 12pc of sales. Now with Debenhams, they had creative control, they basically did everything and all I had to do was say, “OK, that’s pretty, yeah great”. It was pretty straightforward stuff. But with Sadaqat it’s a different kind of deal. I have creative input and control, because my name is much more established and I need to protect my name. So, it’s even more to my advantage to be more intertwined and not just to say, “Here’s my name, go get ‘em, bad boy, let’s do this.” With the Sadaqat licence deal I had to build my brand first, [they] didn’t just take me on board with this new idea. I was supplying myself for two years – and then I had the power. Then I went to Sadaqat with gold on a tray saying, “Hey, listen, after two years, we’re making money.” And they were like “Oh, oh.” They’re like the Victoria’s Secret of the home world so there were no qualms – they took it. Obviously, the contracts are iron-clad, you have to – but even with the lawyers I’m telling them what to say and what to do. I mean, you’ve got to be careful. You’re lucky if you get a good lawyer and a good standard contract but you even have to tweak the contract. You have to protect yourself, you have to protect your brand because when you enter the corporate world, they don’t have the same passion. They don’t dot their ‘i’s or cross their ‘t’s. They have more money than God. You know, even though I have a licence deal, I’m very intertwined. Every single stockist I’ve gotten myself – even with Sadaqat – but I have this monster machine. I’m still micro-managing my brand right now. And for me it was really important to go with one of the big boys because now we’re expanding to the world. I just got into Bed, Bath and Beyond, into Macy’s, I’m hoping to sign a deal with this massive conglomerate and they base themselves out of Dubai so I wouldn’t be able to expand the way I’m expanding now [without Sadaqat]. This is another thing in business: you need to know your strengths and your weaknesses. Though some people become very complacent, “Oh we’re making money, we’re making six figures, this is great”, ba ba ba, but you have to keep growing. If you stay stagnant, you will die. And I didn’t have the capability to grow my brand. I needed more people – and even though I was working 12-hour days, I’d just had two babies and they are my priority and they are my business. So, I just couldn’t do it myself and that’s why I went for a licence deal. Anna: Do you feel you were slightly taken advantage because of your lack of business experience in the early days? Caprice: If you think you’re being taken advantage of then boo-hoo on you! It’s your responsibility to go out there and to learn, so that no one ever takes advantage of you. So I’m never a victim here. I am taking full responsibility for everything that happens in my life and that’s my power and that’s what I recommend to all – especially – I’m all about the women and I’m such a supporter of women in business and women in general. Don’t ever be a victim because a lot of us play that card. Don’t do it – you lose your power. You’re not a victim – you take responsibility and you move forward. I learned every integral part of my business. I mean, I trained the people who are so-called ‘specialists’. I know how to manage my brand, I know how to market my brand, I know how to negotiate, I know about the factories. I know a lot about production – I don’t know everything about production – but it hasn’t been a detriment to me, not knowing everything about the factories. But I made it a point to educate myself and I never went to university, I’m a grafter. It’s all about Googling, researching, asking and just doing. Sort of learning from the streets, learning from your mistakes and never making them again. Anna: Has Brexit had any impact on the business? Caprice: Yes. With the exchange rate – massive. Not so much on me anymore. When I was supplying myself, it killed me. The sterling dropped so tremendously and then obviously sales were impacted. It’s tough, I’m not going to lie. Retail is tough. That’s why I need to expand to the world. Anna: I’ve read that when you started By Caprice that you made underwear and swimwear that you wanted to wear and that went wrong because sales suffered as a result. Caprice: Oh my God, everyone knows?! I know now that my personal taste, no one else likes. So I will never let my ego get involved again because I lost money. It makes me laugh with corporates, right – they spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on these marketing research groups. Just look at your sales! Look at your weekly sales and understand your customer. Anna: I understand that you were looking at the sales when you were partnered with Debenhams and that’s how you got ahead and got yourself out of the licence agreement to start supplying yourself. That’s what I do, every single week. I’m obsessed with sell-through on every single stockist and that’s how I get to know my customers. And you know what? By the way, my customer changes. It used to be so young and I catered to that. Now, maybe because I’m middle-aged, it’s getting slightly older: age 18-42. It used to be 18-30. So I have to cater to that, the designs are different – they’re a little bit more elegant, a little bit more timeless, rather than quirky and fun. Anna: Now we have more celebrity-led products, but you were among the early adopters. Caprice: I was the first one. I know Elle Macpherson was doing it but only in Australia, she hadn’t come over [to the UK], so I was one of the first ones. That’s why it was so difficult for Terry Green – he was the CEO of Debenhams – to come on-board right away because this was a new concept. It wasn’t tried and tested. He took a big leap and was hailed king of innovation as a result because we sold out in, like, two weeks. This was the initial stages in 2000, I think. That’s why I initially stopped doing a licence deal with Debenhams because I knew I wouldn’t be the flavour of the moment and they’d dump me. I had to be on top of my game and supply myself to other stockists while my name was hot, while the brand name Caprice was popular – and respected. Anna: How do you think celebrity products have evolved since the early noughties?        Caprice: You know what? It’s saturated. The market is absolutely saturated with celebrity endorsement. I think with some of the celebrities, it works for a year and they’re finished. Then they see who the hot Love Island winner is of that season and then they go with it. With my product it’s different. I actually supplied, I actually paid for the business, I’ve actually become a brand name. I’ve gone past the celebrity endorsement. This is a business.     Anna: What kind of difficulties did you face in moving away from Debenhams? Caprice: The biggest difficulty was that I was risking all my own money. In that first drop I almost lost a quarter of a million. That hurt! And then with the exchange rate – although it impacted me in 2009 – I lost over a million, just in exchange rate. I was so silly. I didn’t understand forwards, I didn’t understand how to buy currencies because remember all my factories were in China, so I was paying for everything in American dollars and then I was getting paid by my stockists in sterling. So I was constantly exchanging money and I just didn’t understand how to do it properly. I didn’t understand forwards, I didn’t understand how to hedge, I would just buy on-spot. How stupid was that? It went from 2.05 to 1.37 almost overnight. I didn’t understand it so I lost a lot of money, so I never made that mistake again. Anna: Of course, because you have to wear all the hats, as they say, when you’re a business owner but there are some things you just don’t have a natural knack for. Caprice: No, and you know what I did? I did research and there’s some great, great Government funding and you have to go and research it. And there are people out there who will help you. This country encourages small business. There’s so much help out there – it’s really, really impressive, actually.    Anna: Was it a combination of the money you made from modelling plus Government investment? Caprice: Yeah, it was my savings, which I lost a lot, so I was hurting. Yet my brand was doing really really well.  By the way, everyone, I pay all my taxes and I’ve paid a lot of taxes for the last 500 years. I have the right to access this and I was smart enough to do this, otherwise I would’ve lost my business. Anna: It can be so volatile. Caprice: Oh, you just don’t know. Not only that, I had to completely readjust my business plan. But thank goodness, one thing that was really important to me was the people who worked for me – I’m quite loyal. So, I wanted that to be the last port of call to get rid of any employees. You’re supporting families, for goodness sakes. So I was fortunate enough to keep my employees but I had to readjust my whole business plan.    Anna: What kind of adjustments did you have to make? Caprice: Well, I had to cut back, even my collections, I had to cut back. I couldn’t take any risk anymore. Before, I was buying a lot of extra stock because I knew the buying patterns of my stockists and my stockists were buying differently. They were much more cautious. And they weren’t buying enough – I knew they weren’t buying enough. So I would take that risk and I would buy deeper at my own risk. I had to stop doing that. So it did impact because I would run out of stock and that’s not good for a business as well – if you’re selling two months later then you have ‘out of stock’ all over the place, it’s a disaster, but I couldn’t take that risk anymore.   I think for people starting out, understanding cash flow, because normally when you start a business you don’t see a return for three to five years – know that. And passion – you’ve got to be obsessed with what you’re doing because you live it. Anna: Great. Well, that’s it from me unless there’s anything you’d like to add or any other wisdom. Caprice: Honey, we killed it – ten times over! Anna: Ha! Thanks for coming on the show. You can find out more about Caprice at capricebourret.com. You can also visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for entrepreneur Q&As and other advice to help you start your own business. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Until next time, thank you for listening.