Podcast appearances and mentions of Anna Jordan

Writer and storyteller JOHN OSBORNE gives us the five tracks he will meet in Hell!Music is a massive part of John's work as a writer and performer: his career kicked off with a Edinburgh show called John Peel's Shed, and he's also written and performed work called The New Blur Album, and My Car Plays Tapes. As well as getting him to select his Infernal Playlist, we talked about the eighties cartoon that has no lore, working with Craig Cash (Early Doors/The Royle Family), 'Three Lions' and why it shows the UK is unfair (again), and the nature of truth when creating something that is presented as autobiography. John also relentlessly tries to make everything into a positive, and Alex and Daniel do their best to foil him. This is Hell, after all.John's Bandcamp, where you can listen to many of his shows, is hereJohn's new poetry anthology Sandy Arse is out now. John says: "it's the first publication from a brand new (tiny) publishing company I have set up with Katie Cooper called Paper Boat ... [it's] a collection of seaside poetry. It has poems from some of our favourite poets, including Salena Godden, Inua Ellams, Luke Kennard, Ella Frears, Joe Dunthorne, Luke Wright, Henry Normal, Phill Jupitus, Martha Sprackland and Anna Jordan." FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIAInstagram: www.instagram.com/hellish_podBlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/hellishpod.comThreads: https://www.threads.net/@hellish_podFacebook: www.facebook.com/hellishpodcastTikTok: www.tiktok.com/hellishpodThe Hellish logo was drawn by Nick Roche https://nickrocheart.bigcartel.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot waved her legal right to anonymity for the trial of her then husband, declaring that shame has to change sides. Her then husband had drugged and raped her and invited other men to rape her, filming as they did so. He was found guilty of her aggravated rape, along with 46 other men. Gisèle has now written her memoir, A Hymn to Life and joins Nuala McGovern to talk about her decision to have an open court, the devasting effect on her and her family of her ex-husband's actions and finding love again in her 70s.New Ground is the UK's first purpose-built co-housing community for women over 50, designed and developed on their own terms. The women moved in ten years ago, and the community is still going strong. But what's it really like to live this way? Kylie speaks to two residents, Jude and Ann.Hannah Murray is best known for playing Cassie in E4's teen drama Skins, and as a regular in the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones as Gilly. But behind the scenes Hannah was struggling with her mental health, and she found herself involved in an organisation that offered courses in magical healing. The following year, Hannah was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She's since retired from acting and written a memoir about those turbulent times, called The Make-Believe – A Memoir of Magic and Madness.A newly qualified doctor, Charlotte Buttercase, has said she was subjected to repeated sexual harassment and intimidation while studying medicine at the University of Manchester. 32 other female students have now come forward to report similar abuse. Charlotte joins Nuala alongside Henry Budden, the co-chair of the BMA medical students committee. Mother Courage and Her Children is Bertolt Brecht's 1939 tale of a wartime profiteer who prefers to see herself as a savvy survivor and devoted mother. Currently on stage at the Globe in London for the first time, Nuala speaks to playwright Anna Jordan who has adapted the story for a modern audience. Why is this story one for retelling now and why does it continue to be performed more than 80 years later around the world?Produced by Kirsty McQuire Presented by Kylie Pentelow

New research shows that strength training twice a week can lengthen your life. Sarah Best and Emma Holmes, who are 49 and 51, will compete at an elite indoor fitness competition, the Hyrox World Championships later this month. Only the top 0.5% of competitors worldwide qualify to compete. They tell Nuala about how they achieved this impressive level of fitness and explain how you can be strong at any age.Lady Brittan is calling on the government to recognise those falsely accused as victims, when a perpetrator is released. This follows the release of Carl Beech who was jailed in part for perverting the course of justice. Beech, whose allegations sparked one of the Metropolitan Police's most high-profile investigations, Operation Midland, was jailed for 18 years in 2019 after his claims of historic child abuse against prominent figures were proven to be false. Now Lady Brittan is among those saying they should have been informed about his release. She explains why she is is a signatory to a letter to the Justice Secretary, alongside some of those falsely accused by Carl Beech. Mother Courage and her Children is Bertolt Brecht's 1939 tale of a wartime profiteer who prefers to see herself as a savvy survivor and devoted mother. Currently on stage at the Globe in London for the first time, Nuala speaks to playwright Anna Jordan who has adapted the story for a modern audience. Why is this story one for retelling now and why does it continue to be performed more than 80 years later around the world?Author Claire Powell joins Nuala to discuss her latest novel All In. It follows a couple on an all-inclusive holiday with their extended family and explores the strain that IVF can place on a relationship. She tells Nuala why she chose the setting of a luxury resort to explore family dynamics. Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Olivia Skinner

"Rhythm and News" hosts Anna Jordan, Aden Max Juarez and Nina Kremer discuss and predict the 2026 Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year, Album of the Year and Best New Artist.This episode was written and hosted by Anna Jordan, Aden Max Juarez and Nina Kremer; edited by Lizzy Liautaud; and produced by Kaylee Eiber. “Rhythm and News” is one of three shows on the Daily Trojan podcast network. You can find more episodes anywhere you listen to podcasts, as well as our website, dailytrojan.com.

Presentation College Athenry are the Connacht Junior Schools Girls Cup champions following a 3-0 victory over Colaiste na Coiribe this morning (Friday, 28th February 2025) in Fahy's Field. Molly Noone, Anna Jordan and Lily Mae Feeney got the goals. Afterwards, Presentation Athenry manager Joe Finnerty shared his thoughts with Galway Bay FM's Mike Rafferty. == Athenry will now play Munster champions Scoil Mhuire Greenhill, Carrick on Suir, who beat Mercy Mounthawk Tralee 5-3, in the FAI Schools All-Ireland semi-final.  That game is fixed for Tuesday (4th March) at 1pm with a venue to be determined.

GUESTS Mark Miller-Chef Underwood Bar and Bistro---Graton https://underwoodgraton.com/ AND Michele Anna Jordan

Athenry are against Dublin's Killester/Donnycarney this Sunday (14th July 2024) in the FAI under-17 Women's Cup Final. The Galway side reached the under-16 decider last year going down to Waterford's Bohemians.  The 2024 under-16 group were crowned All-Ireland winners against Mervue United and eight of that squad are involved with the under-17s. Goals from Mollie Noone, Clodagh Crowley and Anna Jordan helped Athenry beat Corrib Celtic 3-1 in the Connacht Final in February.  Kerri O'Driscoll (2), Jordan, Noone (2), Ella Farrelly and Crowley were on target in last month's All-Ireland semi-final win over Wexford's North End United. Killester/Donneycarney knocked out Waterford's Bohemians in the quarter-final before accounting for Shelbourne 4-1 in the semi-final.  Mia Byrne struck twice, with Victoria Dempsey and Kaytlin Campion also on target. Athenry have yet to win this competition but Salthill Devon were champions in 2022. Leading up to the game, Athenry FC manager Mike Noone joined Galway Bay FM's Darren Kelly on 'Over The Line.' == Kick-off at Mullingar Athletic FC on Sunday is 2pm. The 'Over The Line' weekend preview show with Darren Kelly broadcasts every Friday evening from 7pm on Galway Bay FM.

Award-winning book cover designer Anna Jordan, who's also a competitive swimmer, believes in having a life outside of design. She reveals why My Octopus Teacher means so much to her and how she sets goals in the classroom as a teacher herself, plus we learn why Backstreet Boys altered her life.

Designer, educator, and summer Anna Jordan talks about the heartwarming, heartbreaking, underwater documentary My Octopus TeacherDesigner, writer, historian Tim Lapetino and I get into the Sci Fi classic Tron from 1982And the 80s fun continues with the road trip comedy Midnight Run, with Bill Childs coming back to the show

We're bringing you a festive bonus episode with Savanna Jeffrey (Stratford East Panto / Get Up Stand Up) and Tara Boom (La Clique).Savanna Jeffrey is currently playing Winnie the Moo in Jack and the Beanstalk at Stratford East. Bith book and lyrics by Anna Jordan, Jack and the Beanstalk has music and lyrics by Stratford East pantomime veteran Robert Hyman and is directed by Denzel Westley-Sanderson. Savanna's theatre credits include the West End productions of The Book of Mormon (Prince of Wales Theatre) and Get Up Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical (Lyric Theatre). Jack and the Beanstalk runs at Stratford East until 6th January 2024. Visit www.stratfordeast.com for info and tickets.Tara Boom is starring in La Clique at Christmas in Leicester Square. Born at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004 and subsequently travelling the world to international acclaim, La Clique is widely regarded as the original Spiegeltent cabaret show that created a genre of its own. Tara is a foot-juggling, hula hooping, clown-tastic circus and cabaret star from Australia.La Clique runs at Christmas in Leicester Square until 6th January 2024. Visit www.lacliquetheshow.com for info and tickets. Hosted by Andrew Tomlins. @AndrewTomlins32  Thanks for listening! Email: andrew@westendframe.co.uk Visit westendframe.co.uk for more info about our podcasts.  

George Brooks interviews Anna Jordan-Douglass, the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Makefully Studios. Anna shares her profound journey through the realms of technology and creativity. Basked with an innate passion for making learning more interactive and fun, Anna explains the sheer magic of assimilating play with education and shares insights into her collaboration with the Jim Henson Company, and how she gathered experiences that later led to the creation of her very own Makefully Studios. With a strong team that shares a similar vision of fostering creativity and enhancing learning, Makefully Studios has emerged as a vibrant platform for crafting playful learning environments for children. Tune in to delve deeper into the insightful world of creative learning and Anna's impactful work in the field.

In this episode I speak about watching two Broadway Musicals: MJ and Back to the Future!  I also speak about watching the HBO series, Succession and wrap it up with another addition to our legendary segment “GOATs doing GOAT $hit” where we celebrate the true champions of greatness and highlight the phenomenal achievements of extraordinary individuals.   The Spun Today Podcast is a Podcast that is anchored in Writing, but unlimited in scope.  Give it a whirl.    Twitter: https://twitter.com/spuntoday Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spuntoday/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@spuntoday    Website: http://www.spuntoday.com/home Newsletter: http://www.spuntoday.com/subscribe   Links referenced in this episode: MJ the Musical: https://newyork.mjthemusical.com/ Michael Jackson - Dangerous Diary MTV 1992 HD: https://youtu.be/OWC5uPK93fE?si=MQpzBldf_k9gqxoO   Back to the Future the Musical: https://www.backtothefuturemusical.com/new-york/   Succession: https://www.hbo.com/succession/season-1   Rebirth of a Bad Boy: Diddy Explains Handing Over Publishing Rights & Reveals His ‘Total Truth' https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/rebirth-of-a-bad-boy-diddy-explains-handing-over-publishing-rights-reveals-his-total-truth/ar-AA1gEX69   Get your Podcast Started Today! https://signup.libsyn.com/?promo_code=SPUN (Use Promo code SPUN and get up to 2-months of free service!)   Check out all the Spun Today Merch, and other ways to help support this show! https://www.spuntoday.com/support   Check out my Books: Make Way for You – Tips for getting out of your own way & FRACTAL – A Time Travel Tale http://www.spuntoday.com/books/ (e-Book & Paperback are now available).   Fill out my Spun Today Questionnaire if you're passionate about your craft.  I'll share your insight and motivation on the Podcast: http://www.spuntoday.com/questionnaire/    Shop on Amazon using this link, to support the Podcast: http://www.amazon.com//ref=as_sl_pc_tf_lc?&tag=sputod0c-20&camp=216797&creative=446321&linkCode=ur1&adid=104DDN7SG8A2HXW52TFB&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spuntoday.com%2Fcontact%2F   Shop on iTunes using this link, to support the Podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewTop?genreId=38&id=27820&popId=42&uo=10   Shop at the Spun Today store for Mugs, T-Shirts and more: https://viralstyle.com/store/spuntoday/tonyortiz   Background Music: Autumn 2011 - Loxbeats   Outro Background Music: https://www.bensound.com   Spun Today Logo by: https://www.naveendhanalak.com/   Sound effects are credited to: http://www.freesfx.co.uk   Listen on: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts | Google Podcasts | YouTube | Website   EPISODE TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] What up? What up, folks? What's going on? Welcome to the Spun Today podcast, the only podcast that is anchored in writing, but unlimited in scope. I'm your host, Tony Ortiz, and I appreciate you listening. This is episode 243 of the Spun Today podcast. And in this episode, I speak about two Broadway musicals, which I can't believe I took this long to mention them, especially for one in particular. So definitely stay tuned for that. I also speak about watching the Succession Series. An HBO series that I was definitely late to, but had the added benefit of being late in that it allowed me to binge the entire series. And lastly, I wrap it up with another addition to our legendary segment goats doing goat shit where we celebrate the true champions of greatness and highlight the phenomenal achievements of extraordinary individuals. Stay tuned for all that good stuff. But first I wanted to tell you [00:01:00] guys about a. Quick way that you can help support the spun today podcast. Your support is greatly appreciated. Not only can it help out financially to help keep the lights on in good old spun today studios, but it definitely adds fuel to the motivational fire that I rely on to continue putting out episodes. And even more importantly, finding time to write. Nay, making time to write. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you to each and one of you, to each and every one of you that have shown your support to date. And thank in advance to each of you that will show support in the future. Here is one quick way that you can help support the Spun Today podcast. Definitely stay tuned for the outro of the episode where I'll tell you about a bunch of other ways that you can show your support. But here is one of those ways. And we'll jump right into the episode. The first musical that I wanted to tell you guys about was MJ, the [00:02:00] musical. Here is the official synopsis. He's one of the greatest entertainers of all time. Now, Michael Jackson's unique and unparalleled artistry has finally arrived on Broadway in a brand new musical centered around the making of his 1992 dangerous world tour. And created by Tony award winning director, choreographer, Christopher And two time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, MJ goes beyond the singular moves and signature sound of the star, offering a rare look at the creative mind and collaborative spirit that catapulted Jackson into legendary status. I went to check this out with my best friend, Steven. Shout out to Steven's Spun Today alumni, who has been on the pod several times in the past. We thought it would be cool to check out. You know, kid touching and molestation and all that, which has obviously [00:03:00] tarnished Michael Jackson and how we view him, all that aside. And I know in and of itself, it's like a controversial topic where some folks are like, no, they're all 100 percent rumors and nothing like that ever happened. Nothing was ever proven in court. And then the other folks on the other side where say. You know, the rumors have been rumors for decades for a reason. It's all true. It was even worse. I know the audience is split when it comes to that. From an artistic body of work perspective, he's obviously, as the little synopsis says there, one of the most legendary entertainers of all time. Now from attending and, you know, watching this musical, And for someone who likes going to like Broadway plays and musicals and enjoys that genre of art and acting and singing and stuff like that as a consumer, from that perspective, [00:04:00] we had a great time. And Michael Jackson in his heyday, I was a kid for that, a little kid, but I obviously know his music and his body of work and I think you'd be hard pressed not to find. Or to find someone that wasn't aware of any of it, but I obviously never saw him live or anything like that going to see this play, though, the way they did it, you definitely get that experience, albeit at a much smaller scale, but you definitely get the, like, you feel you're watching Michael Jackson. That's how good of a performance, not just the Michael Jackson characters did with it. But just the entire cast and the world that they built and created around it. And from a storytelling perspective, it was interesting how they did it. Because it is this very, and I guess, makes sense. In terms of it being like a deliberate conscious [00:05:00] move to do it this way. So you don't have to bring in a lot of like the things we know about Michael now. The allegations and court cases and... Drug abuse and, and stuff like that. So they didn't have to bring too much of that into the story because again, from a storytelling perspective, it's a very myopic focused view of his time around his 1992 dangerous world tour, which is his biggest tour ever. One of the biggest tours ever. And it was chronicling, the buildup to that, all the practice sessions. And how he was as an artist getting ready for that performance. And in the play, there is an MTV crew that was given access to chronicle this whole thing to do a, a piece on, you know, this very much anticipated world tour, which was based on true events that MTV [00:06:00] piece. Actually exists and I'll link to it in the episode notes for you guys to check out. So we got to see this interesting view of. That MTV camera crew. Trying to put together their creative vision of this documentary. While also getting close enough. Access to Michael Jackson to see his inner workings and stuff like that and picking up on. Certain things like. The beginnings of his drug addictions, which we know now ultimately led to his death in that he had a private doctor giving him shots or like IVs of trim butyral or something like that. I forget the exact medication name of what he ultimately died of, but it's supposed to be a strong ass, sleep aid. And so much so that he was getting that shit [00:07:00] injected on a nightly basis just to be able to try to get some sleep. And ultimately that's what he died of. And the doctor that was prescribing him the medication wanted him to go to jail for a few years and losing his medical license, I believe. But in the play, it shows him getting drugs from his manager or other folks like that were part of the stage team. I think it was his manager. And you get some insight into the all too common story of, you know, people in positions of power, whether it's in our music, politics, whatever, just having a circle of yes men and women around them that do what they want and don't really check them. And we saw that through the lens of, again, the beginnings of his drug addiction. And we also saw that same dynamic playing out with his financial team and how he wanted to pay for [00:08:00] this over the top concert and do like never before happened things like him being shot out of not a cannon, but something that shoots, shoots him out and onto the stage and him running out of money. And then Pushing his accountant and his financial team to mortgage Neverland Ranch, where he lived just to continue funding this artistic vision that he had, even though all the financial folks around him, lawyers, accountants, financial advisors warned him against it, he still ultimately got his way, i. e. via these yes men. So that was definitely interesting to see. They also showed. A direct correlation between his abusive childhood with how Joseph Jackson, the father was always depicted as, you know, being super, super hard stage dad, forcing them to practice [00:09:00] all the kids when they were the Jackson five for hours and hours on end, no breaks, didn't really have a childhood. You know, they had fame when they were young. So they didn't have a, you know, especially Michael being the youngest. Of them, of the Jackson 5, or second youngest, I believe. But never really having a childhood, or traditional childhood. They showed correlations of that, instilled hard work ethic. And they kind of papered over the, physical abuse in the play. With how hard Michael Jackson was on his crew and the choreographers and everything. And the dance team around him and how they were all exhausted and he would force them to to work hours on end just like his dad did to him and kind of showing that traumatic shift, trauma shift of, you know, him being the recipient of that and then dishing it out as he got older in the same exact way [00:10:00] and then seeing himself as, you know, becoming his father in that sense. But the play did a great job in also showing different. Stages within Michael Jackson's life, they showed him as a child, you know, as a flashback scene, because the entire thing again takes place around him working up to this dangerous world tour and being interviewed by the MTV crew and them filming and interviewing him in between rehearsals, etc. But while they were interviewing him, he would flash back and tell stories of childhood, of his mother and his father, Jackson 5, transitioning, going solo. And you got to see different actors, which did a phenomenal job of playing Michael Jackson. Now we did go on an off day, I think it was like a Tuesday or Wednesday. So every cast member, including Michael Jackson, wasn't necessarily the best. Number ones, if you will. I believe the young Michael [00:11:00] was, but I don't believe the middle Michael that they showed as well as the older Michael Jackson that's being interviewed. I think he was also the understudy, but I mean, these are all top tier phenomenal actors, right? All did an amazing job. And we got to hear all the hits, all Michael Jackson's hits, all Jackson five hits. And it really did feel like a Michael Jackson concert experience as a narrative choice. Again, it does seem to me to have been a deliberate choice to tell this story from a specific point in time. And in doing so not have to, or I guess they had the ability to paper over all the negatives that we know of Michael, like the drug abuse and child molestation allegations, so on and so forth. So you definitely lose something historically. From that perspective, but as a piece of [00:12:00] entertainment, we do wind up enjoying a shitload of music and just how they put the musical together. It was definitely an entertaining watch. And I definitely recommend it. MJ the musical, check it out back to the future. The musical, if you guys know anything about me, I am a huge, Back to the Future fan. I've spoken about the movie multiple times. I've highlighted how the screenplay for Back to the Future 1 is considered a perfect screenplay and I think it's taught in theater classes. It's my personal favorite trilogy of any genre, any movies, all time. And I've also said, controversial to some, that it's one of the rare occasions where the sequel, Back to the Future 2. is even better than the first movie. And I know that's blasphemous for some folks to hear. And even I myself go back and forth [00:13:00] between that thought from time to time. But just from the creativity of it alone to delve back into the first movie through the second movie and find ways to tie into the first movie, And make things that already existed within the first movie, make them that way because of the actions of the second movie, which was filmed and created. I think it was something like five years later. It's just fucking amazing from, from that standpoint. And I'm such a fan that my debut novel fractal Available now, SpunToday. com forward slash books, so you can find all the links of all the different places where you can find it. Back to the Future is an inspiration for that story. It is a time travel tale, as I like to say. Furthermore, I dedicated that book to my first [00:14:00] born Aiden, and the quote, the very first quote after the dedication section of the book, is a quote. From back to the future, part one from George McFly to Marty McFly, stating, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish absolutely anything in him speaking to writing his first novel. So there's a complete tie in on multiple levels there. I fucking love it. I literally have a life size replica of the hoverboard immediately to my left right now. That said, I signed up, or, like, I follow all the different Back to the Future fan pages, official, unofficial. And I saw months before that they were developing the musical. I also subscribed to a bunch of different newsletters having to do with Back to the Future and the DMC newsletter, even from the DeLorean Motor Company. And I signed up to be alerted when the pre sales went on, [00:15:00] and I bought these tickets months in advance, I think something like seven months in advance. That's how much I was anticipating going. So I copped the tickets and my wife and I, shout out to Zoila, sponsored alum, went to go see it and had an amazing time. Being such a fan holding, I'm both holding the musical to a very high bar. I don't want them to fuck it up while at the same time being completely biased and knowing that I'll find a way to love it some way or another. So holding my love for the story. And the history of the film aside, as much as is humanly possible and attempting to be objective, I personally thought they knocked it out the park. Now they clearly didn't have, I'm not sure if Back to the Future, if it's old enough, I think it came out in 89, where the story itself is public domain or if they actually got the rights to [00:16:00] retell the story in this format. Because I don't believe that Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale were involved with the musical. I could be wrong, but I don't believe they were. And I wonder if certain choices that they made throughout the musical had to do with not having the full rights, or if they had to do with just trying to retell the story on the stage. Because although it was still very, very, very true to the original Back to the Future 1 film, which was another thing that I was curious about if they were going to try to encapsulate all three films within the musical, but it wasn't. It was just a retelling of the first one. But everything is not, you know, word for word, verbatim, although it does have a lot of the same key scenes. But then... Certain other key, certain other key scenes. For example, the famous skateboard [00:17:00] scene in front of the diner, when Biff and his crew chase Marty and wind up crashing into the manure truck and Marty's getting around the skateboard, they didn't redo that scene, but in its place, they kind of extend the scene of the lunchroom where. Marty first confronts Biff, you know, where they both kind of grab each other and make fists and they're about to punch each other, but then Strickland shows up and breaks it up, essentially. And Biff tells him, why don't you make like a tree and, and get out of here. They elongated that scene instead and made that the chase scene and made it so that Biff was chasing Marty throughout the lunchroom. He was jumping over tables and hitting him with lunch trays and running through the school. And they had an original musical number there. So they took certain liberties that way. I guess it was easier to do [00:18:00] it that way. If it wasn't a licensing issue or concern, it was easier, it must have been easier to put that together versus the actual skateboard scene and having multiple cars and etc. But it was something that I was curious about. It was kind of interactive in that, you know, like they had the enchantment on the the sea dance and during it when Marvin Barry and the Starlighters are playing Earth Angel there were in the actual theater there was Bubbles, there was a bubble machine or something. There was bubbles going all throughout so we were in the first few rows and you know, we could swat the bubbles and that kind of built the atmosphere around around the whole thing And of course he did the Johnny B. Good scene in terms of the cast, all phenomenal. The gentleman who plays doc killed it. Oh, and that was another thing also, they did not do the, you know, terrorist Libyan terrorist [00:19:00] shooting scene, which I guess to make it more PG they made it that doc was using the plutonium for the 1. 21 gigawatt reaction that he needs. Within the flux capacitor to make the time travel possible, but that he was using an old radiation suit, which wasn't completely insulated. And that's how he wound up dying initially versus getting shot by the terrorists. But yeah, the gentleman who played doc amazing, super funny, steals the show. The guy who plays Marty's spot on, did a great job. But the person who played Crispin Glover's character of George McFly dead on balls accurate to quote Marissa Tomei fucking amazing spot on like they could reshoot back to the future drop this gentleman in place of [00:20:00] Kristen Crispin Glover who legend has it was like an absolute asshole on set and that's why he wasn't in part two or three, but. Drop him into that role and you wouldn't tell the difference. He was amazing. Fucking awesome. The guy who played Biff was really good. Really looked the part. Which brings me to the number one star of the show. The DeLorean. They did it so ill that it looked like an actual real DeLorean that was up there. I guess they just, you know, it's just like the outsides or whatever, but it really looked like an actual replica real DeLorean. And it's obviously the moment that all the fans are anticipating the most, you know, when they first see the DeLorean, which they did the big reveal and like the same same way at Twin Pines mall, [00:21:00] which then becomes Lone Pines mall at the end when Marty runs over. Old Man Peabody's Pine Tree. Symbolizing how the littlest change in the past could affect have a ripple effect on the future. But they did an amazing job with the car itself and then with the actual time travel sequence. So the theater, the decor of it, can't also, this is how it also immersed the, the crowd aside from the bubbles thing from, from earlier. The decor. The balconies on the sides, on the left, on the left and the right, they were also part of the decor. Like there weren't people sitting in the seats there. Instead, they had this metal widgets and circuitry spanning all of the balconies. And during the time travel sequence, like when Marty accidentally goes back to 1955, all those start lighting up in different [00:22:00] colors and it's reminiscent of the flux capacitor and the lights around the actual DeLorean, which they also show and really immerse you and bring you into it in that way. And then at the end, which was even more amazing because they could have just done that again. They with like a crane or something, something you couldn't see, but some sort of lift, they lift up the DeLorean. For the scene where, you know, the clock tower scene when he's going back to the future. They lift up the DeLorean and push it forward into the crowd. So it's hovering above us almost. Like above, the first couple rows. Not completely, but just enough for it to be off of the stage. Can you imagine the fucking lawsuit that thing would have fallen or something? But obviously it was secure and it was just so ill the way they did it. And I couldn't have been happier with Back to the Future the musical. I definitely, definitely highly recommend.[00:23:00] If I have the chance to see it again, I definitely will. Tickets should be a lot more reasonable now. That's the only issue I had with it. Although I was willing to pay, so whatever. But apparently it's not doing well, or as well as anticipated. And the. Ticket prices. I checked the day of for my same seat and it Was like 40 percent less in terms of the actual pricing But that aside it was an amazing experience. I Loved every bit of it. If you're back to the future fan as I am you will too Back to the future the musical Check it out HBO's original series succession Is a series that ran from 2018 to 2023. Like I mentioned in the intro, I didn't start watching the series until 2023. Literally while the final season was, was airing. [00:24:00] So, that came with the benefit of being able to binge it and see it all the way through. But in terms of sharing some of my personal takeaways and tidbits here. It's it shows a bit out of the zeitgeist. And some references might be dated, but we'll share them nonetheless for posterity. Here is the official synopsis. The Roy family is known for controlling the biggest media and entertainment company in the world. However, their world changes when their father steps down from the company. And as we like to do here on the Spun Today podcast, I wanted to shout out each and every one of the writers, starting with the show's creator, Jesse Armstrong. Followed by Jamie Carragher, Susan Soon Hee Stanton, Alice Birch, Miriam Batty, She a Batty, she knows she a 10. Georgia Pritchett, Tony Roche, Nathan Elston, Callie Hirshaway, [00:25:00] John Brown, Will Tracy, Lucy Preble, Jonathan Glaser, Ted Cohen, Anna Jordan, Mary Laws, and Will Arbery. Shout out to each and every one of the writers on Succession who put together an amazing show. And I particularly want to shout out the, the writers in this particular series, because they took what is the embodiment of quote unquote evil rich people, you know, just like the vile borderline sociopathic Narcissistic archetype of, you know, the greedy, quote, unquote, greedy, rich people. And they made us, the viewers, through the strong characters that they created, that the writers created, and that the actors, which were phenomenal, and I'll speak to it in a minute, brought to life. They made us, as the audience, connect [00:26:00] with those characters, and in some cases, in a lot of cases, actually root for them to win. Which, if you take a step back and look at the ruthlessness with how they navigate the world with little to no care of who or how they affected others. When you look at it objectively through that lens, it's like, fuck these people. But since they're developed so richly as characters, and it's such a character driven show in my opinion. we still connect with them and root for them on a human level. And that I think is a testament again to just amazing writing. So shout out again to the writers there. Now the cast absolutely killed it. Kieran Culkin is one of my favorite characters. He plays Roman Roy, the youngest of the four children. Brian Cox is the matriarch, the Rupert Murdoch like character who [00:27:00] created this Conglomerate multi billion dollar company. He's just amazing. Tom Wombs Gans played by Matthew McFadden. Such a cool character. Very selfish. It turns out as, as all of them have traits of selfishness, but he was in it for himself from the jump and. He plays possum throughout, so much so that he's married to Shiv Roy, the daughter, played by Sarah Snook, also does a great job, but she's like a, you know, princess, always gets what she wants, kinda has the quote unquote trophy husband, cheats on him, and he just takes it all, and his character is such that you hate him at first, so. because he's such a pushover and you're like yo stand up for yourself you fucking pussy then you wind up rooting for [00:28:00] him then you wind up finding out that either he's been running a game the entire time or he just got caught up in it and began running a game somewhere along the line and became fed up great characters both in real life British I believe it's a good job with the American accents there Same as Logan Logan Roy's character, Brian Cox. And by British, that's just my dumb American interpretation of their accent. You know, it could be Australian, Zealand, or who knows. Conroy, the eldest half brother played by Alan Ruck. Shout out to Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Really cool character. Shout out to the Conheads out there. Jeremy Strong. Not the eldest, but the eldest of the full siblings of the three, you know, Kieran Culkin's character, Sarah Snook's character, and himself, Kendall Roy. He was the heir to the throne, if you will. And in the very [00:29:00] first episode, which sets the stage for the entire series, the first half of the episode is him going through The process of getting ready to take over the company because the father had announced his retirement. He was gonna step down Kendall Roy is gonna take over and in that very first episode the father winds up Literally fucking him over and saying nah, I changed my mind. He's like, wait, what my You changed your mind. I'm supposed to take over next week. He was like now let's give it a couple more years I decided to stay on He was like, but we announced it to the world and the, you know, it's a publicly traded company and the stock and this and that and blah blah blah. He was like, yeah, that's all bullshit. Don't worry about it. And you have this tension within the family always throughout the entire series of the son trying to take over from the father, the father trying to maintain control, the father getting sick, the other siblings trying to vie for control, sometimes being on the same page with each other, most of the time not, and just like this complete [00:30:00] dysfunction. And it was such an interesting, family dynamic that really keeps you hooked. I also thought it was particularly interesting the way that the show was shot. And I got this from some of the, not behind the scenes, but the extras of the show where they, you know, interview different characters and they also have a podcast, et cetera. So I don't remember if it's from one of the extras or from the actual podcast, but one of the directors, I think the main one Mark Millard. Maybe it was Jesse Armstrong, the creator of the show, but they were breaking down how they shot in a way where they zoom in to the actual characters for emotional exclamation points. So they called it. And you notice that throughout the entire series where they'll, you know, they'll shoot a scene and then. For the character reaction, they'll zoom in to the character's face, which is pretty interesting. And he also mentioned that on set, they [00:31:00] always kept live cameras around so that the art, the actors themselves, they didn't know when they were being shot or not. So it forced them essentially to stay in character. And he likened it to filming theater, similar to when you go see a play. How all the characters, as long as they're on stage, they're in character, you know, that whether they're the main focus of a scene or not, or a background character, they're always doing something. They're always on, if you will, then I'm going to jump to in season two, episode 10, I jetted down here. There was a dope line that Logan Roy said again, the matriarch of the family played by Brian Cox, and he was speaking to money and wealth and how most things don't exist. Or companies rather. And he said that the Ford motor company hardly exists. He said that it's just a time saving expression for a collection of financial [00:32:00] interests. Again, all the Ford motor company was to this psychopath was just a time saving expression for a collection of financial interests. I thought that was such an interesting way, such a financially motivated lens to view the world through. And I just love the way that was phrased. All the four Ford Motor Company is, is just a time saving expression for a collection of financial interests. Jesus. There's a lot of double crossing in the show the siblings with each other, the father to the, to the kids, the kids to the father. There's a point in the season two finale where you think Kendall is going to rise to the occasion and, you know, be the heir to the throne that the father, [00:33:00] you know, wants him to be, that is grooming him to be. But he winds up double crossing his father again, as he did multiple times throughout the series. And I thought it was interesting that he had a lot of ups and downs, you know, he had addiction issues in the show. They reference all the time that he had a stint in rehab. And just from a mindset perspective, he was always either completely out of it and crying and in the dumps or completely manic and on the fucking ball. He reminded me a lot of Kanye. And or the public version of Kanye that we've been seeing in. You know, recent news and media cycles and all the drama around the Kardashians and all that shit and his manic episodes. That's what he was reminiscent of to me. I loved the relationship between two main characters, both outsiders of the family in their own right, which was Tom Wamskantz, which I [00:34:00] mentioned earlier, which was the husband of the daughter, Shiv Roy. His relationship with Greg Hirsch, played by Nicholas Braun, which is a second cousin, extended cousin to the family that they barely know, but that works his way into the fold and Tom brings him under his wing kind of because he sees himself in, in Greg in some ways, you know, being an outsider of the family, but also because he wants to have someone to have power over. And he finally found someone lower than him on the totem pole, if you will, within this family structure. And they just have a back and forth, funny, quippy, really interesting dynamic throughout the entire series. And I'll wrap it up with a, a line of dialogue from Alan Ruck's character, Connor Roy, when it spoiler alert, this happened in season four, episode seven. But Connor, who decides to run for president, out of all things, of the [00:35:00] United States, and Kieran Culkin's character, Roman Roy, hilariously tells him, don't you think you should try for something smaller first? You know, maybe like running a CVS or something? But Connor gets himself in a position where... essentially his actual, you know, the two rivals for, for president, the Democrat and the Republican running, they're neck and neck, like razor sharp, you know, 49 percent to 49 percent margins. And Connor is polling at like 1 percent or something like that. It's something, something sick that pretty much put him in a position to make a deal with one of the other guys where he would drop out of the race and His supporters would vote for that person, and that person would essentially become the, the president. And he's trying to see what he can get, you know, what position he could get from the person that would ultimately win. And one of them offers him to be the diplomat of Alman, which is a [00:36:00] country that I had never heard of. And he tells him that it's an interesting thought. He'll, he'll definitely mull it over. And that Oman is the poor man's Saudi Arabia and the rich man's Yemen. And again, I just thought what an interesting way to view the world and view things. But yeah, yo succession dope show. I definitely recommend you guys check it out if you're into that type of thing. It's supposed to be loosely based on Rupert Murdoch and you know, Fox news, that type of billion dollar conglomerate company and the tension and dynamics. Within his children, for example Rupert Murdoch, I think I've spoken about here on the past. One of them is like liberal, liberal leaning, which is kind of like Shiv's character in succession. And the other one is very conservative. Then they're both vying for succession of Fox, for example. So this show is loosely based on that, or at the very least, it's like one of those are imitates life imitates art type of things. [00:37:00] But that is my little recap and review on Succession, streaming now on HBO Max. Check it out. Goat doing goat shit. And I want to create a drop for, specific to this segment of the podcast because it is a recurring one. And I have some things that I've been tinkering with and working on. But speaking it aloud to see if I can hold myself to task because I've been meaning to do that, , forever. I just haven't gotten around to it, but the goats doing goat shit segment is a segment where I like to celebrate the true champions of greatness and highlight the phenomenal achievements of extraordinary individuals, especially when they do things that they do not have to do. And in this episode's edition of goats doing goat shit, I'd like to welcome none other Then Sean P. Diddy Combs to the list. Now, for the longest time, and still, [00:38:00] Puffy is known as being a ruthless businessman, if you will. Someone who hustled and busted his ass and built and created bad boy entertainment, which has brought us countless acts and music that we all love to this day. And many, many artists, but one thing that he did in building his empire from the ground up was recreate the, what some may say myself included, archaic, traditional, let's call them music artist deals, where the label that signs an artist winds up owning their publishing their masters, essentially making the lion's share of the money that is to be made from the art created by the actual artist. And the artist is often times in doing this type of bad business left fending for scraps. And music artists, [00:39:00] historically, this has happened to across different genres since the beginning of time. Some but few and far between have had more savvy, you know, teams and lawyers and sound financial advice around them and just the foresight of ownership. of your creation, being able to reap the benefits of it in perpetuity versus, you know, taking a bigger bag up front, but then never being able to profit from it down the line. So that's definitely been the biggest knock, in my opinion, on, on Puffy over the years in this respect. As of September of 2023, it became public that Puffy was returning his publishing rights. Which, by the way, he did not legally have to do. Returning the publishing rights to the artists and songwriters that helped him build Bad Boy Entertainment. Folks like Ma$e, which was the most vocal, [00:40:00] and actually recently dropped, and by recently I mean within the last year or two, diss tracks and did a lot of interviews and references to all of this, which are actually pretty good. Faith, The Locks, which is another vocal components of, you know, Puffy's business practices, 112, and the estate of Biggie, the Notorious B. I. G. They are all getting, or have gotten, their publishing back because the paperwork and agreements have all been signed and are actually finalized. And according to Puffy, in an interview that he gave to Billboard. He had a lot of offers back in like 2021 when, you know, like folks like Justin Timberlake and Shakira and a lot of folks were selling their, their publishing, their, their catalogs for like a hundred million dollars, $300 million, et cetera. He got an offer, an alleged nine figure [00:41:00] offer. To purchase his catalog, which included all the publishing that he owned, owned legally from all these artists. And that's when he supposedly decided to not sell and give the publishing back to the respective artists. It just took a lot of time between then and now to actually execute the legal documentation, etc. But I thought that was a dope move. It wasn't something that he had to legally do. Did Puffy make, over the decades, a shitload of money off everybody's catalog? Yes, of course he did. Was he legally correct to do so? Yes, he was. Whether it was ethical or moral or not, and hypocritical in some sense, those are all valid criticisms in my opinion, but he wasn't technically or legally... it wasn't something he had to do. So I definitely applaud him for doing [00:42:00] so. I'm always of the mentality of just own your shit and be of the mindset that if someone, a publishing company, a label, if you're in music, a publishing company, if you're in, you know, writing or creating different types of art, a platform, et cetera, if they're coming to you with a bag, To purchase outright, whatever it is that you created big bag, small bag, whatever. They would also pay you for just licensing it. It'll be a smaller bag, but in my opinion, and I'm not the fucking Messiah here, but in my opinion, if you're offering me a big bag to just own my shit outright, it's because you from a financial standpoint, believe that you're going to make that money back and more over time. So it would also be a sound business move from your perspective to license [00:43:00] it for a smaller bag for a shorter period of time, because you will also make your money back within that shorter period of time. And then some, and in that type of scenario, you keep your shit then afterwards, license it out to someone else, make money off of it yourself, maintain the ownership. So you could do whatever it is that you want with it in the future. Turn your book into a movie, turn it into a TV series after that, do both at the same time, turn it into a fucking VR spectacle that hasn't even been created yet, but will exist in 10, 15 years. And since you have the ownership of your IP, you could do that instead of handing it over for a bit bigger bag now, and then the company that purchased it from you. Maintains that ability moving forward. So again, with that said, I'd like to welcome Sean P. Diddy Combs officially onto the Spuntoday goats doing goat shit list. [00:44:00] And that folks was episode 243 of the Spuntoday podcast. Thank each and every one of you very much for listening. I really, really appreciate it. Before I let you go, just wanted to tell you guys about a Few quick ways that you can help support the spun today podcast. If you so choose, you continue support is amazing. I appreciate it very, very much. Whether you're using my affiliate link to shop on Amazon, which you can find that spun today. com forward slash support, or you're buying t shirts or coffee mugs or my books sponsored. com forward slash books, or using any of my affiliate links that all can be found that spun today. com forward slash support. Which will get you a discount on whatever said thing that it is that you're looking for that I have an affiliate link for. Whichever way you choose to support, it means a ton. I really, really appreciate it and just wanted to say thank you. Here's a breakdown of a few of the different ways you can help support the [00:45:00] Spun Today podcast if you so choose. And I'll check you all out next time. Peace.

To get live links to the music we play and resources we offer, visit www.WOSPodcast.comThis show includes the following songs:Penelope Robin - Taking Back Sunday FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYAmy Obenski - Into The Caverns FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYAnna Jordan - Willing FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYSchantell Wharton - Someone's Forever FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYZhaklina - Game Over FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYCarlene Thissen - Clouds Above The Rain FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYKelsie Sims (writer Allan Korby) - I'm Outta Here FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYMegan Brickwood - You'll Never Find a Girl Like Me FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYCyn - Unbearable (with Thierry Coupey) FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYCatherine M Thompson - Swing Daddy FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYFor Music Biz Resources Visit www.FEMusician.com and www.ProfitableMusician.comVisit our Sponsor Anchen Entertainment at anchenentertainment.comVisit our Sponsor Bandzoogle at: http://www.bandzoogle.comVisit our Sponsor Release Checklist at ProfitableMusician.com/checklistVisit our Sponsor 39 Sources of Income at profitablemusician.com/incomeVisit www.wosradio.com for more details and to submit music to our review board for consideration.Visit our resources for Indie Artists: https://www.wosradio.com/resources

To get live links to the music we play and resources we offer, visit www.WOSPodcast.comThis show includes the following songs:Alina Sebastian - Eyes Of The Highway FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYAnna Jordan - Dog Sketch FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYMegan Brickwood - Hey Little Darling FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYLily Jewel - Timeless FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYActivateMe - When He Comes FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYJean Ann Garrish - Drummer In The Band FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYMeadowlark - Brainwashed FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYGIO - Someday FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYEggcorn - Undertow FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYDay Nah - Wild And Free FOLLOW ON SPOTIFYFor Music Biz Resources Visit www.FEMusician.com and www.ProfitableMusician.comVisit our Sponsor Bandzoogle at: http://www.bandzoogle.comVisit our Sponsor Release Checklist at ProfitableMusician.com/checklistVisit our Sponsor 39 Sources of Income at profitablemusician.com/incomeVisit www.wosradio.com for more details and to submit music to our review board for consideration.Visit our resources for Indie Artists: https://www.wosradio.com/resources

Anna Jordan, playwright (Yen/ Bruntwood Prize) and screenwriter (Killing Eve, Succession) on her early years of writing, how she got commissioned and developed as a playwright. Plus, a behind the scenes look at her writing process and how she deals with self-doubt and the reality of making money as a writer.  *ABOUT ANNA JORDANAnna is a playwright, theatre director, and writer for television. Anna is best known for her play Yen, which won the 2013 Bruntwood Prize, going from a successful run in the UK to be performed off-Broadway. Anna's TV credits include Succession (Season 1, HBO), Killing Eve (Season 3, Sid Gentle) and currently Becoming Elizabeth (The Forge / Starz). She originally trained as an actor at LAMDA and runs her own training company for actors and writers: Without a Paddle Theatre.*RESOURCES:Follow Anna:TwitterWebsite:InstagramOther links mentioned:Anna's article on Writing and PlaysJohn Yorke's book Into the WoodsreMarkable digital notebook

Mantis Radio 345 - The Allegorist In the mix Hungarian artist + sound designer Anna Jordan and The Allegorist. With music from clipping, Hexalyne, Livity Sound, OAKE, David Lynch, Skalpel, Lunar Blood, Mord Records, Commodo, Metalheadz, Black Sun Empire, Samurai Music, and lots more. _ playlist → darkfloor/mantisradio. support the show, get exclusive content → patreon/mantisradio.

Earlier this year, we had the pleasure of interviewing an incredibly talented Anna Jordan, aka The Allegorist, who introduced us to her creative world of music, visuals, poetry, paintings, and much more. We also talked about her fourth, critically acclaimed album 'Blind Emperor' and its creative process. Six months later, we've got another piece of the puzzle from the world of The Allegorist. The Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist made the mix for us, which we have listened to several times already. The mix is a dark, moody, and cinematic escapade that features tracks from our favorite artists like Voices From The Lake, Vivian Koch, Rival Consoles, and The Allegorist herself. tracklist: https://www.itsdelayed.com/delayed-blog/delayed-with-the-allegorist https://soundcloud.com/the-allegorist https://www.instagram.com/theallegoristmusic/ https://linktr.ee/TheAllegorist www.itsdelayed.com www.instagram.com/_itsdelayed_ www.facebook.com/itsdelayed

Welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. Today's guest is Sally Gunnell, entrepreneur, motivational speaker and former professional athlete. We discuss moving from sport into business and how older entrepreneurs can look after their wellbeing. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on workplace wellbeing. 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! Sally Gunnell podcast transcript Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I'm your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Sally Gunnell – entrepreneur, motivational speaker and former professional athlete. Born in Essex, Sally actually started out as a pentathlete and long jumper at her local ladies' athletics club. Over time her talent for hurdle events became apparent, winning her gold medals and championship titles across the world. In fact, she's the only woman to hold World, Olympic, European and Commonwealth Gold medals all at once. After retiring in 1997, Sally became part of the BBC Sport team and was a regular on athletics broadcasts in the early 2000s. Since then she's appeared on breakfast television shows as well as A Question of Sport and Total Wipeout. These days she runs Sally Gunnell Corporate Wellbeing to encourage wellbeing in the workplace. She also runs Optimise Your Age, giving health and wellness tips to the over 50s, alongside her husband Jon. We'll be talking about moving from sport into business and how older entrepreneurs can take care of their wellbeing. Anna: Hi there, Sally, how you doing? Sally: I'm very well, thank you. Yes! Anna: Great! The first point I want to talk about is you moving from sport into business. So how did you come to that decision? What kind of challenges did you have going from sport into business? Sally: Yeah, I mean it's always a difficult one when you retire and I guess it's difficult when you're only 27 years old. You're young and you've had one career and it's probably the career that you've had all your life, and then you think, "What do I do next?" So I guess I sort of did it in a way that I would have done with my athletic career. I had to know what I wanted to achieve out there. I had to have aspirations for new things, I had to learn new things. So I planned it, almost. But yeah, I mean, I look back now and I think it was a bit of a gamble. You're not quite sure where you were going with it. But actually, it made me realise just how much I'd learned from my athletics days and my achievements, and how much of that it helped me to that next stage of my career, but be able to pass that on for others. And I think that that's what came out of it. And that's what helped to make it as smooth as possible. For a lot of athletes, there seems to be a progression from sport into business. What kind of things did you take from the track into business? Sally: I think so much of it is about, yes, you've got to work hard, but you've got to work smart. A lot of it is about the sort of things that seem so insignificant, almost, for businesses or whatever, but it's about being the best version of yourself. What you eat, your sleep, how you exercise, it's all about your own performance, and whether that's performance in the workplace or performance with yourself at home, and how that can give you the confidence ,give you the ability, and all those sorts of things. They were sort of like the real area, and I guess a lot of it was about self-belief as well. That was probably the turning point for me, because I probably wasn't the most confident of people when it came to athletics and performing at that high level, but I overcame that. And I think some of the lessons that I learned and who I chatted to, and how I work that into myself, which made the difference becoming a high performance and to be able to give people the confidence to be able to go out and achieve what they can all achieve. That's really where it came from. I think it really helped that I achieved at that high level. So, you went through so many ups and downs, and I learned so much about myself, and I think that really helped to be able to share and explain that story to people. It surprises me that you said that you're not confident because you strike me as somebody who is very confident. How did you develop that going into the business world? Sally: A lot of it is about mindset, it's about what you believe. I think it's very easy. I think as a nation we are, especially women, we're very quick to put ourselves down and think that everybody else looks good, or "I'm not good enough." That's very much how I was, like probably lots of other people, but I'm working with sports psychologists and understanding how the mind works. Confidence comes from within. You've got to find confidence, you've got to shut the demons up and override it. A lot of that becomes part of visualisation. It's part of mentally preparing yourself, work that you do day in, day out to be a better version of yourself. It doesn't just click overnight. I think it was that the power of accepting that we do lead stressful lives and running at that top level was stressful, but it sometimes can be a good thing and to use it as a motivation as well. Just so many key areas that correspond and I think the synergy between performing within the workplace and being the best person you can be is so similar to that that sports field of achieving when all that often seems like everything we do – so many odds against you. Oh, 100 per cent. I can imagine there would be some kind of challenge between performing individual events on the track, and then having to work as a team on business all of a sudden. How did you cope with that? Sally: Yeah. Even though I was very much an individual on the track, it seemed like it, it was very different to a football field or whatever else or my relay or being captain of the women's team. Actually, there was an amazing team of people behind me: nutritionists, sports psychologists, physiologists, coaches. That was the difference of the four years from coming fifth in the Olympics to winning was building this amazing team around us. Lots of people have different goals within their teams, and that's the same in an organisation. It's about knowing that you need their support, you need their help, you need their skills to get the best out of yourself and the business that you're doing, to achieve what you've set yourself. So, it's no different in that respect. Even though I was the one on the track, there was an amazing team of people that got me to that start line. You always forget that there are so many people behind an athlete. There's also this rush to compare yourself to direct competitors and other entrepreneurs. I understand it was in the Tokyo Olympics where you were doing the hurdles, and you're on your way to the gold, and you got distracted by one of your competitors and it threw you off, and unfortunately it cost you the gold medal. How did you feel in that moment? And what kind of lessons did you learn from that? Sally: Yeah, I mean, I think I learned enormously. I was obviously massively disappointed, because I could have won that. And I think that's when it made me realise that I didn't win because I was worrying about things that are out of my control. I didn't have that sort of real confidence in my own ability. I guess that the whole mental side of it only really came on a year before those Olympic Games the following year. So, that was a World Championships in Tokyo, and literally 12 months later, I'd spent 12 months addressing that doubt. And boy! I always say that we're all born with that inner voice and it's always a voice that sort of says. "She looks good over there in that lane" and "She's won the European Championships." That's how I did and of course, you've got to have massive respect for your competitors. That's the same in the corporate world. Yeah, you can learn certain things, but I can't change those situations. So, why spend that energy and that worry and trying to change something that you can't? You can only control the controllables, so it was about blocking out all those sorts of things. That is when it comes back to knowing what you're trying to achieve out there and having clarity in your thoughts so that when you're on your path, and you're not going to get distracted by over here, and  what you're going to stick to and what that end result is. Once you have that in your mind then those other distractions are able to be blocked out during those times. So, yeah, it was about spending time doing that. It doesn't just happen. I would spend five minutes each day just sort of going through what I wanted to execute on that day, what was that perfect race and different scenarios - if things went wrong, if it was raining on the day or it's a difficult lane. It's just familiar in the mind, really, and I think sometimes in different organisations or within sport, you think it sounds like a negative, but I think you have to have every option open, but you know what it is that it's going to actually to take to achieve that higher level. I think that's part of goal setting as well. It's knowing what you want, but with flexibility. In this case, it is a literal 'sticking in your own lane' when you're competing. I think that mental health and its importance to performance has become so well recognised. I'm sure throughout your career, and especially now looking back. It's the same case in business as well as you're very well aware through helping companies with their employee wellbeing programmes. Tell us a bit more about what makes a good employee wellbeing programme. Sally: I think a wellbeing programme has to be one which is very much put together for the employees' needs. It's not just a one-size-fits-all, it has to really recognise it in what the issues are within the company, whether that's retention or whether that's making people present in what they're doing. Maybe there's some health issues or whatever it may be. So, I think it's really about finding out what they do, that scoping work at the beginning, and really finding out what the issue is and what people actually want. Then the programmes that work are the ones that are led from the top down. It's no point in just doing a wellbeing programme for one part of the company. They have to be able to see the top managers being part of it because they need it just as much as everybody else and to be part of that programme. Then it needs to be consistent. It's not good enough if you're just going to do it once a year or a couple of times a year. The programmes that really work are the ones that are consistently being put in and information and help and support is regularly there and people know where to go. They know where to tap into it and to be able to ask for help as well. I think they're the programmes that really work. I think that with all programmes there's so many different issues that people can cover within wellbeing. I know that at the moment, it's very much around mental health and putting First Aiders in, but people have all sorts of different issues around wellbeing. I think it's about addressing lots of different areas, whether that may be financial, whether that may be physical, there are just so many areas and I think it's making it right for that organisation. In your experience of talking to organisations and employees, what areas do you feel are overlooked, generally, in these kinds of programmes? Sally: I think the ones that the programmes that for a lot of companies we come across, they haven't got a programme, they literally may just tick a few boxes, through HR or whatever else. But a lot of people within the organisations don't feel like they're being supported, they don't know where to go, if they have got mental health issues, or whatever it may be. I think with what's happened in the last two years of the pandemic, people working from home or talking about the mental health issues, the confidence, and I think, a lot of organisations people working from home, it's finding ways of being able to reach out to people. It is about building resilience, but when you build resilience, you want to make sure that you've got the pieces in place to be able to help people build that resilience, whether that's work or whether they're in their own life, as well. For a lot of organisations, it's sometimes building that resilience piece is hard - if there isn't a water station nearby, or there's not a park to be able to get out to, or they don't feel as though they can just take a lunch break, all those sorts of things are just so important for people's wellbeing. That's why it has to be led from those top and that information is there and support. Often what I find is that people are just lacking that information – they want to be better, they want to help themselves, they want to be fitter, they want to know what it is, but they've never had that sort of knowledge. It's about giving people the knowledge and the support and how they get out, get that support from those organisations. We're talking online resources – or members of staff that they could speak to – where do they seek this information? Sally: There's all sorts of different outlets, depending on the organisation. We've got online programmes that we do, which are much more around podcasts that we can roll out to different people. But as people are getting back in the organisation, they want to see face-to-face, it's helping and supporting HR to be able to deliver that information, because every organisation has different ways of delivering it. It might be that it's a site that sits on your intranet to information in the toilets. That it's just finding what works for that organisation. A lot of the programmes that we're doing, we have been doing for the last two years, have been obviously very much online, they're podcasts and they're help and support. So, organisations can run them literally worldwide to every single person within that organisation, thousands of people because they have to, they can't just support one group, it has to be able to roll out. So, that's really helped us as an organisation to be able to reach as many people as possible. I guess, by doing that online and putting those programmes in sport, they have workbooks that they work to, and each month, we have a different subject depending on what that organisation may be. That might be around nutrition, sleep, finance, the physical side of things. That is designed around what that organisation needs. Wonderful. This is a tricky one, because of course, you can measure things like turnover and your forecasting figures, but how do you measure the success of an employee wellbeing programme? Sally: Well, that's why we really want to do the scoping beforehand. We send out questionnaires to people so that we can get what people's real issues are. Then at the end of a programme or six months through, we will then send out questionnaires to actually find out whether it's reached the right people, whether it's helped and supported them. We can then send back information to those organisations, because that is the biggest thing we've come up across. But we want to be able to see that change. By doing this, whether that's every six months or at the beginning of a program, and then at the end, we can see how people have engaged in the programme, and whether it's actually helped and supported them. Very, very key. Of course, the boss' wellbeing is as important as the employees', especially as they get older. What kind of tips do you have for older entrepreneurs to take care of their own wellbeing? Sally: Yeah, I think that it's people realising that you can't just keep going at 100 per cent. It's fine if you're in your 20s and 30s, but it does catch up with you. And it's the same for all of us, isn't it? So, I think the thing I've learned is that, yes, you have to work smart, and then how to work smart, then how nutrition and your sleep and the physical side of it can affect your performance. That's about thinking clearly, not having that dip in the afternoon, not being off ill, all those sorts of things. I think the thing I learned from sport, and that I try and pass on to whoever really, in an organisation, whatever age you are, it's those little increments that you think are so insignificant, but actually, they play a major part in being able to work day in, day out. I think with so much of stress and burnout, but stress is part of people's lives, but it's learning how to manage that. I think as we get older, it's about understanding that, actually, you need to get out of the office or get out of, you're at home, and taking that lunch break. If you need to go home and go to your kid's sports day, or whatever, it's all those little things, which seems sometimes so insignificant, are actually things that really play a major part in being able to work. And that's where it has to be led from the top, it's good to go off to the gym at lunchtime or to go for an exercise or walk with somebody, to be able to chat with your colleagues or whatever it may be. It's just allowing people to be able to think that that is the norm. And that's what it's okay to do. Yeah, absolutely. At this time, especially with what's happened over the past couple of years, I mean, it's, it's a prime opportunity to really make those changes, because the way that we work has fundamentally changed. Sally: Totally. I think now an organisation has to look at wellbeing, it's so high on the agenda. I think it's more than ever and it's giving people the confidence to get back into the office. I think that sometimes the younger generation, they're in and they're fine. But as we've all got used to working from home now, it's having that confidence, and that sometimes comes from support from the organisations to be able to do that. That comes under HR and wellbeing at the same time and knowing that you've got a great programme in place with people that understand and an organisation that understands to help you to be able to support you. Anna: Fantastic. Well, that seems like a great place to wrap up. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast, Sally. Sally: Lovely, thank you very much. You can find out more about Sally at sallygunnell.com. You can also visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more about workplace wellbeing. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts, on Twitter @smallbusinessuk (all lowercase) and subscribe to our YouTube channel, linked in the description. Until next time, thank you for listening.

WE ARE BACK! After having our fourth baby, we took a much needed break, although we didn't intend for it to last this long! Nevertheless we are here and fired up about podcasting again. In this episode you'll hear more about our purpose as "Outpost of Heaven," General Conference Note Taking suggestions (because that wonderful time of the year is here!), and a big announcement from Andrew. That's all I will say! You'll just have to listen to hear what it is! Thank you so much for listening and and hanging tight while we had our break. If you haven't yet left us a rating or review, we would absolutely love and appreciate you forever! LINKS Michael Dunn's Talk about Improvement https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2021/10/54dunn?lang=eng www.instagram.com/outpostofheaven EPISODE 14 You Can Poop Yourself! Pregnancy, Labor and Delivery from the Husbands Perspective ft. Logan and Anna Jordan, and Kayelee and Zac Cobb https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/14-you-can-poop-yourself-pregnancy-delivery-and/id1470326483?i=1000453843952

In this episode, Anna & Jordan talk about...  Anna's upbringing in a religious cult; The importance of knowing your true identity; Where we put our identity and how to unwind our identity from our beliefs and world views;  How to be more accepting and loving during a time when we are feeling pressured to put a steak in our beliefs;  and more!  About Anna Becker Guzman Anna was born and raised, in a religious cult, under total control, conformity, and a toxic view of God, herself, and the world. After being raised in isolation from the world and marrying at 15, she decided to leave everything she knew and start over at 23. Her journey since has gone from confusion, depression, and illness, to redemption and healing. She now helps others in finding a healthy relationship with God and themselves and breaking out of the boxes of conformity, to own their authentic identity.  Connect with Anna Blog link: https://www.captivetolove.com Insta: https://www.instagram.com/captivetolove/

What is the key to Succession's success? The hit US TV comedy-drama - with a heavy British influence - follows the incredibly powerful Roy family and the inner workings of their company Waystar RoyCo. The family fight amongst themselves over who will take over the global media and entertainment conglomerate after their father, Logan Roy. It's won countless awards and an adoring global fan base - so much so that a fourth series has already been confirmed. As season three draws to a close, we speak to one of Succession's former writers - Anna Jordan - about being in the writers room and what the key is to the show's success. We also ask her thoughts on series four and whether or not she thinks it will be the last... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. Today's guest is Sian Gabbidon, entrepreneur, TV personality and winner of The Apprentice 2018. We discuss her favourite task on the show and social media's depiction of entrepreneurs. This episode was brought to you in partnership with UPS. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on starting your own business.  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! Sian Gabbidon podcast transcript Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I'm your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have Sian Gabbidon – entrepreneur, TV personality and The Apprentice winner in 2018. With a keen interest in fashion as a teenager, Sian did a fashion design with marketing and production degree at the University of Huddersfield. She went on to create her swimwear brand, Sian Marie, two years before appearing on The Apprentice. But with a global pandemic affecting sun-seeking holidays, Sian quickly had to pivot to loungewear, reporting a loss of £47,000 from the brand. She's since bounced back, partnering with George at ASDA to launch her loungewear range at the beginning of November 2021. We'll be talking about growing your brand on Instagram and handling a business while ill with Covid-19. Anna: Hi, Sian. Sian: Hello, how you doing? Anna: I'm very well, thank you. How are you? Sian: Yeah, not bad. You started out posting your designs on Instagram after you graduated from university. At the time of recording, you've grown that following from almost 120,000 on your personal account, and almost 70,000 on your Sian Marie loungewear account. I'm sure our listeners would love to know – how do you engage with your audience and build your brand on Instagram? Sian: It's a lot more difficult nowadays than it was back when I first set up. Nowadays with Instagram, you have algorithms and all kinds of things going on that can help or not help. But for me, it was quite organic, especially back before The Apprentice on my business page. We just ended up getting quite a lot of stylists, and even celebrities and people following us because we have designs that others didn't really have. So, we just really organically grew that following and got more and more support. Then obviously pivoting into lounge, it's almost like a new audience has came about now as well. When I was first using Instagram, back in the day, when I first set the brand up, it wasn't as monetised as it is now. You weren't really paying to get seen, you were seen automatically. Everyone that follows you will see your posts, whereas nowadays because you have to pay for posts, especially as a business, it's a lot harder to reach the audiences. You just have to spend a bit more money now. Whereas back then it was a free for all and everyone just saw everything that you posted. I imagine stylists were probably looking through Instagram at the time to try and find businesses like yourselves. Sian: Definitely. I think stylists use places like Instagram for new talent. It's perfect for those guys – they don't have to go to a store to find things. They could literally just look online, find some really unique different designs. That's what we were all about, especially with swimwear. It was very much one-off pieces, and pieces that you wouldn't crash at a pool party in, so it was perfect for celebrities. What kind of advice would you give to creative entrepreneurs now to get noticed on Instagram? Sian: I would say now that it still does boil down to that raw talent. If you've got a raw talent and you create amazing designs and use the right hashtags – there's a few tricks of the trade within Instagram that will help you get seen. But I think having that talent – and engaging with the people that you want to see – or sometimes that can work is the kind of tricks of the trade within that you can use to be seen. But I think yes, it's mainly just about having the talent and getting your pictures on there. And pushing it as much as you can and being a consistent person, posting every single day, making the people that follow you almost know when you're about to post so that they can be prepared for it. There are peak times for posting. With Instagram, you should always be posting regular content without posting too much with them without not posting enough. It's a really tricky balance because you want to keep people engaged, but you don't want to annoy them. But I think as a designer, especially when we're creating, if you're creating pieces that are one-offs, get throwing them all on there and have a wall full of your work so that people, when they do find you, can just flick through and see everything. Once you became a bit more established, were getting noticed by the stylists and everything, I believe it was an influencer who wore one of your pieces and you got recognised off the back of that as well. Then the pandemic hit, and of course, people are not going on the sunny holidays. They're stuck at home and you had to pivot to loungewear very, very quickly. Tell us a bit more about how you went about doing that and how long it took. Sian: Yeah, so we were like, 90 per cent swimwear in the UK pre-pandemic, and then the pandemic hit. I think we just launched a range in the March, a full swimwear range. It was an absolute nightmare. People were sending stuff back saying that their holidays were being cancelled. I remember first hearing about coronavirus and having a bit of a, ‘Well, we'll see what happens. It's probably going to be fine'. I think back to May, and then this all kicked off. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.' This is destroying for my type of business. We did always plan to expand into new areas, just not as quickly as we had to do with the pandemic. It kind of forced me and us to expand quicker than we wanted to. But it's actually, out of such a terrible time, it's probably been the best thing that we've ever done. Because loungewear for me now – it's just proven how hard swimwear is, because it's seasonal. It's a much smaller demographic graphic in some ways than loungewear. And the way that, as a designer, and as a brand owner, the way that we turned around the product and made everything happen was so much quicker than it normally would be for a fashion brand. But I think I look at that now and pat myself on the back for being able to adapt it and change so quickly and react to what was going on. And yeah, survive it, I guess. One of the key attributes of a business owner is to be nimble and to be able to adapt very quickly. You even had Covid-19 yourself – how did that affect you and the business? Sian: Having Covid was dreadful. Even now, I can't taste or smell. It's so bizarre – it's been months now. And yeah, I can't taste or smell anything. On a personal level, having Covid myself was weird. I was more scared for family and friends, making sure that everybody else will be alright. My mum's literally just found out she's got Covid today. She's an NHS nurse. Covid itself was just such a strange thing to live through and to be a business owner through. Every business on the planet was affected in some way by it. And it's sad that some of them didn't make it. But you know, luckily for me, I could adapt. I was on the ball and I was involved. I think sometimes people think I'm just sat on a beach enjoying life. It's really not like that as a business owner – not for me anyway. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a thing with entrepreneurs, especially on social media, where they're sort of living the highlife and having a good time, but I think there's less of the imagery of, I don't know, sitting with a planning board at three in the morning and that kind of thing. Sian: Social media is amazing. But I think it does depict entrepreneurs and business owners in a certain light that makes everything look glamorous, which is what it 100 per cent is at times. But then there's a lot of the time where it's just hard work. You work long hours, you're full-on, there are a lot of hurdles, a lot of stresses. I think that's why probably a lot of start-ups struggle or they don't make it past certain hurdles, because they're expecting everything to be rosy and it really isn't. Even in my position now, we're doing really well, we're growing and we're going in the right direction, and I'm in a really happy place. But there are still hurdles, there are still issues, there are still stresses every single day, but as a business owner and an entrepreneur, are you ready for that? You're ready to attack that and to keep going. What's the most stressful thing you face as an entrepreneur? How do you tackle it? Sian: One of the things that I struggle with as an entrepreneur, it's a very funny one and I'm sure others would agree, is letting go of things and letting other people do them or manage them. My business, I started myself in my bedroom and I know every single part of the business, even now. And I think it's hard. I am all about my brand so everything I do is about the brand. And I care. And I think sometimes just letting other people manage things and having a team of people who you need around you, but then allowing them to do it for you. I really struggle with it even now, you have to as the business grows, but I like to do everything myself. I can't – you can't do everything yourself. Is that just a case of, ‘Okay, breathe'? Let them do the thing, trust them? Or is there something specific that you do to try and ease that anxiety? Sian: I think to help with that, it's about employing the right people. It's about making sure that they're well-trained and know what they're doing, and that they know you're there if they need help. If they really need to speak to somebody or ask someone. For me, it's making sure you've got the right people in place for the job. And then allowing yourself to be open to questions and giving help if you need to. Great. And another challenge that's coming up that may affect you, is the possible regulation of the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) market? Because I understand that you use a BNPL facility on the site. It's still under consultation at the moment, but how do you think that's going to change that side of the business for you as a retailer? Sian: Are they saying they're not going to allow it anymore? Anna: No, it's just that it might be regulated, like other credit facilities – credit cards and so on. So, it's more stringent checks and being more lenient with people who are struggling to make repayments and that kind of thing. But it looks like the retailers might have to be authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority as well. Sian: In terms of Buy Now Pay Later, and we do have it on our site, it does come in handy. The majority of our sales are just bought directly, through PayPal or credit card. So, depending on how that works, it might affect us slightly, but I think anything that's going to make people safer and help avoid them getting themselves into debts or anything like that, then, as a business owner, you've got to make sure people are safe, that's the priority. You started the business on a very low budget. What kind of advice would you have for, say, sole traders or entrepreneurs who want to start a business on a low budget? Sian: Anyone wanting to start a business on a low budget, I would say, don't be put off by that. And it actually was, I think, I would personally say it was great for me because it taught me how to be smart with money and how to reinvest profits. I worked full-time when I first set the business up, didn't take any money out of the business for myself for quite a while I just built the pot. And luckily working allowed me to do that. And me having really early mornings and really late nights to manage your business and a full-time job. But that was my plan. I didn't want to put too much pressure on making money to begin with, it was more about getting the right things in place, having the website, having some cash saved up for any rainy days or anything that I need it for. I would just say, you definitely can do it, you just have to be very smart about planning and money management. I'd like to talk a little bit about The Apprentice and your time on it. So yeah, you got right through to the final. What was the most memorable task for you and why? Sian: The most memorable task for me in The Apprentice was definitely the QVC task, like selling on TV. I remember taking a massive punt and saying, ‘Right, I'm going to pick the most expensive product that we could choose from.' And in my head, I kind of said to myself, ‘If we win, amazing. If we don't win, I'm probably going to get kicked off for this task.' But it was one where I thought, ‘You know what? I'm going to take a risk and I'm going to hope that Lord Sugar appreciates me taking the risk. And luckily, I think we won – I'm pretty sure that we won that task. And everything paid off for me. So yeah, that was my favourite one. Right at the very end, you and Camilla, you seemed to – not as much as other years – but you seem to be in quite a head-to-head with a lot of arguing. Then all of a sudden, once Lord Sugar had made the announcement, it's as if something just fell. And you're not best friends. But you know, you kind of made up again. Tell us what it's like being in that final, that final meeting room scenario. Sian: At the time, we were actually really good friends. And we were very similar age-wise and interests, whatever else. So, it was a really strange situation because it was like we were really buzzing for each other when the fan then you were competing against each other. But we knew that when we were in front of Lord Sugar and was in the final grilling, we kind of knew the situation. And we knew that we'd have to say things about each other's businesses and about each other. And I think we just kind of took it and ran with it. But we knew that off-camera and behind the scenes, we were friends, and we genuinely would have been whoever, whatever the outcome would have been and whoever would have won, we would have been happy. Had that been coming I would have been absolutely pausing for. It was a really strange one. But what obviously for me, I'll never forget the moment that I won. But then being in the final was another thing that I'll never forget either because it was a girl power final. Were you encouraged to ham it up or was that all real? Sian: Everything on the show is real. Everything that you see is real. It's emotional. You've been in there for a long time, we're tired, you've been doing all these tasks. And especially by the final I was a bit like, I'm so competitive as well, that I was like by this stage, ‘If I don't win now, I'm going to be absolutely fuming.' So fine. I was like, ‘I'm knackered, but this is the final hurdle now and I need to win it.' You know, I would have kicked myself if I'd came second. Anna: Well, great. I mean, that seems like a great place to wrap up. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Yeah. And it's been wonderful to have you. Sian: Thank you for having me. It's been great. You can find out more about Sian Marie at sianmarie.com. You can also visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more about growing your brand on social media. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and on Twitter @smallbusinessuk (all lower case) and subscribe to our YouTube channel, linked in the description. Until next time, thank you for listening.

In this episode I am joined by the amazing George King.  We have a great discussion about the set backs we have both faced regarding rejection for not only professional jobs but for Drama Schools.  George also gives us some insight into his brand new theatre company Odd Dog Theatre!  Have a listen to find out about the run up to their recent performance of the play Yen by Anna Jordan!  Support the show (https://paypal.me/ArtistIdents?locale.x=en_GB)

In this episode, Anna Jordan meets entrepreneur and The Apprentice 2019 winner, Carina Lepore. We discuss the law of attraction and starting a business in a field that you're not familiar with. This episode was brought to you in partnership with UPS and AAT. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on starting your own business.  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 the 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 Carina Lepore – entrepreneur and the latest winner of The Apprentice back in 2019. She's considered the most successful candidate of all time, winning nine out of ten challenges and never appearing in the bottom two.   Before she went on the show, Carina joined her dad to start a coffee shop business after his previous bakery burned down. Now Dough Artisan Bakehouse has two branches in London and has plans to take on Greggs. We'll be talking about the law of attraction and starting a business in an unfamiliar field.  Anna: Hi Carina Carina: Hello Anna: How are you doing? Carina: Yeah, good. Anna: Hi, Carina, how you doing? Carina: Hi, I'm good. You? Anna: Yeah, I'm doing well. Enjoying this lovely heatwave after the thunderstorms yesterday. Carina: I got caught in that! Anna: Me too. Oh, I know. I know. And you think, is it just going to be sun, shower, sun, shower. Carina: I know. It was awful. Okay, so the first thing I want to ask you is a bit about before you joined your dad's bakery business. You had your first business when you were 18? Tell us a bit more about that. Carina: Yes. So, I left school, left sixth form and I had been working for our small High Street shop, I suppose, and I was really just interested in the ways he ran the business. I would start to, at a very young age, say 14-15, I'd start to ask the right questions, just try and get involved with merchandising and his little takings book and where he would get stock from. I started to want to know more about the ways the business worked, really. So, I had that keen interest and drive at such a young age. It's obviously A-Level result day [at time of recording] and we've been talking and the main thing I've just keep thinking and saying is that when you get them results, you just think, ‘Oh my God. Is this making or breaking my life?' I remember that as well – and I remember I didn't get great grades, no, but I still had that entrepreneurial drive. So, I was going do something with that. That was more my route.   I then went and opened up a shop and I did a shop, car-boot sales and a market – Wimbledon Market. What I would do is I would buy my stock. A lot what Lord Sugar says, and now I can say to him, ‘Smell what sells.' I would pick top sellers and just bung them in my shops or whatever I had. That was me really. It was bold, it was brave. It was different. It was just something I wanted to do. I was just really excited by it. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Great stuff. What was your first business then? I believe you had a fashion store. Carina: Yeah, it was a shop called Faze. And it was – well, it was a phase actually, because it didn't last too long. It was more of an ‘I wanted to do it – this is what I was going to do'. It was a sort of, what you would call now, I suppose, clothes that you see on Pretty Little Thing and Boohoo – just fashion clothes for young people. I also started to sell, this was crazy, I mean, spotting trends is key for any businessperson. I started to notice people would like, I don't know if you know, you're going to be like, ‘What a weirdo', people used to wear, like, designer gold teeth. I remember the American fashion sites come in. I was like, ‘I'm going to source grills and sell them'. At the time I was so excited. I had this famous rapper come in, I was like, ‘Oh my God'. But that's what is exciting. Now 16 years on, it's the same sort of thing. You know, you smell sales, you spot a trend, you get a few influencers to put your stuff up. That's how the world is working. So if you think you've got a great idea – and I keep touching on it, and it's my thing today – is I've really learned a lot about different routes coming out of school for A level students really I've learned loads about the qualification that AAT offer. It's an accountancy firm, and they offer this apprenticeship in accountancy. I imagine if I'd had that running alongside me working and wherever it be, whether I was at M&S or Vibe (at the time), but I would have had that in the bag as well. It would have just made me feel even more confident because I would have actually known a bit about real numbers back then. Knowing your numbers in business is just so key, so crucial. I've learned loads from Lord Sugar, he could just whip numbers up like this. Whereas, with someone like me, it takes a lot more. But if I'd had, for example, that qualification with AAT I would have been up on his level. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess you've been learning as you're going along, and your dad will have had his own experience and his own business savvy. When you decided to pair up to start the Bakehouse, how did you weave your vision with his – and potentially his business partner's? What kind of challenges did you have there? Especially as a family member, someone who was quite fragile at the time. Carina: Yeah, it's been like a roller coaster. I'm even talking pre-pandemic, that's a whole different roller coaster. And so I think he just allowed me to run with everything, every element I just would run with and I don't know whether he just found this new confidence in me as a woman, maybe as a grown-up woman when I was 18. He was telling me, ‘Oh, what silly mistake, go and get a job.' Whereas now, I was taking an even bigger risk, I was leaving a secure job at M&S with a good salary to then risk us having barely any takings, just to do something risky, but also as a passion of his and mine. And that's what I really wanted to do. I saw it as an opportunity. He was going through such a dark time, and I've never seen him go through anything like that in my life. I did take it as an opportunity for me to help him for once in our lives and give back to him. It's worked very well, because he's got this creative flair. He can't talk, he can't relay information. If he was here now – oh, bless him. He's got this creative flair and anything to do with products and recipes, his personality just comes out in all his products and he's so fun. That's what customers love. But yeah, the business side definitely needed to take a different route, more of a structured route. That's where I think have helped him. Such a huge part of that route has been appearing on The Apprentice. And I understand that you watched the previous series before you went on. What did it teach you before you went on? Carina: Oh my God that show. It was between that and MasterChef, but I'm not a chef, so I was going to be one of them. I just loved The Apprentice and everything about it. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's the challenges, the team, Lord Sugar, the scary element, the adrenaline rush – I don't know. I used to always think it was one of them shows where you think, ‘Oh, I could have done that' or ‘I would have made that' and it's making the ideas. I just love everything about the show.   I just did the application one night on my phone and then suddenly got through and then just kept getting through the application process and I thought, ‘Wow, this is for me, this is meant to be.' That's when I suddenly switched into, ‘Now I need to win the show because this is want.' I want Lord Sugar to be my business partner. ‘This is for me' – that's what I kept thinking – ‘This is meant to be.' That's all I kept thinking and then actually getting on there, getting the call that they want you in the house. It was just this surreal feeling, what an experience. I loved everything about it. Just out of interest, how many steps are there in the application process? It's as tough as the show. They set you up from day one. When you turn up [at the audition], there's obviously London, Manchester and one other place somewhere. There's three application spots, I suppose. I went to the London one. So, it was over three days – Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I went on the Sunday. I remember I turned up and there was, like, suits everywhere. It was full of ‘Wolf-of-Wall-Street-type people' as I called them. It was like everyone was boardroom ready with their briefcases and there were a couple of people like me, more down to earth. We were the minority, 100 per cent. I immediately thought, ‘Oh my God – I just rocked up.' Then what they do is – it's very tough, and you learn straight away from that first task – they give you a number, I can't remember what I was, I'm thinking it was seven. Then you stand up in groups of ten or 20, whatever. You'd stand up on the line. You have to talk for 30 seconds, just talk. ‘Number seven – talk.' Anna: About anything? Carina: Yeah, anything. Some people tried to be funny, some people would go with the whole, ‘This is what I do.' Then it was a bit X Factor style. They'd call your number – half of you would go one way, half the other. That's how the process was – you kept moving up levels. The more I started to move up, I was like, ‘Oh, I must be doing something right. I'm not going down the list, I'm going up.' So you keep going up. Then I remember sneaking off. It got to 10pm and it's exactly how the show is, the days are long. They are so vigorous and they want to literally hone out the best people for this show that they keep you there. I'm ringing my sister going, ‘It's a school night you're going to have to put Lucas [Carina's son] to bed because I'm still here.' I didn't know what was happening. They could have kept me the whole night. Then you get to the next set of practice tasks and it's just so hard. I had to write a manifesto. I didn't know what that was. I was like, ‘What is this?' Yeah, it's a very challenging application process. But they obviously just want the best candidates. That's why they make it so hard. They need to set you up for how hard the show actually is. It's so hard. It's not for the weak. It's so tough. Anna: Yeah, it's a tough 12 weeks. I've read that you're a big believer in the law of attraction, and that it did play a part in you applying for The Apprentice in the first place. First of all, could you give us a bit of an explanation as to what the law of attraction is? Carina: Yes. I'm a massive believer. I started, when I suddenly just had something clicking, I can't remember the day. But I remember doing my vision board. The vision board obviously plays a massive part. If you need any books, definitely start with The Secret. It gives you everything you need. If you want to change your mindset – I used to struggle with anxiety and massively I still do. Try to breathe and think that everything is written and everything is for a reason and that it's about manifesting what you want and believing in what you want and achieving and getting your results, really. I remember this one example. I think I told This Morning or something I was on with Ruth and Eamon. And I remember saying, I sat in my shop – August is always quiet. We're going through the same thing now. So, I remember it was an August month, and it must have been 2018, just before I applied for the show. I sat there and I saw the AMS 1 (Lord Sugar's car). It was that car. It was like an entourage of three cars, I was like, ‘It's Lord Sugar.' I knew the car from the show. And I immediately saw it as a sign. This is meant to be my business partner. So that was all good. I then applied for the show in January and got on. It all happened quite quickly. If you believe and if you really think this is [meant to be]. I remember, that was a sign. I'm now going to either meet Lord Sugar, or I had Karren Brady on my vision board. Again, pre-Apprentice, she was up there, just as I didn't know… This is a thing with the law of attraction – you can put it out there, but you just you don't know where it's going to come in. You can't force it. It might just happen. Then it just happens that everything I have on that board was ticked off. It's crazy. I talk to my friends about it who are big believers. One of them is a big artist. He's really known in the world of music. He is just so successful with it. He has this vision board, he shows people what he puts on, he then takes it off a year later. It could take years, months, I don't know. But you'll slowly start to think that I'm actually getting everything I want out of life. That's what's so important. I could talk about it all day, I get so passionate about it. And I'm finding other people that really understand it and believe in that way of life. I appreciate that a lot of it is based on positive psychology – visualisations, gratitude, that kind of thing. What would you say to people who are more sceptical and think it's a bit victim blaming in some ways? Maybe there's a sense that if somebody in a business example, say you're struggling with their business, they're maybe not manifesting in the right way. Perhaps it devalues the work that the individual does and says it's more from the universe rather than the actions that the individual has put towards achieving their goals? What kind of things would you say to them? Carina: Yeah, people think differently to me, which is fine. But ultimately, you get the results that you are willing to put in. I'm not saying you've got to go and say this is the thing. This is what the books teach you. I might want a mansion, I haven't got a mansion yet, but as long as I keep believing that I'm going to have a mansion, then maybe hopefully one day, we'll just put it out there, just give it away and then stop thinking about it. But with regards to running a successful business, if my mindset was like, ‘That's it. What a bad month' or looking at takings for that month or, ‘We hit a pandemic, we can't trade anymore.' If you just say that to yourself all day, you're going to eventually get into a lull where negativity is just eating you up and you won't be able to see a way out. Anytime I'm having a bad week, of course, you have to then really think about your thoughts because they play such a big part. But it's very easy to get wrapped up in those negative thoughts. I even still struggle with it. For example, last month was a tough month, and I remember thinking ‘Ugh', but then I put a plan in place. That's all – you just got to spin it back to, ‘We're going to go again, team. Come on, let's go again, let's strive for more.' So, I have a bad day and then I'm suddenly back with a notepad and loads of notes. We go again and we push harder. But yeah, getting into a lull is hard, you've just got to find something that can find a way that can get you out, whether it's taking yourself away for a bit, self-love or self-care which is so important. Again, something I struggle with. I really have to force myself to switch off, but you have to because otherwise you'll be eaten up with all the bad thoughts. You just have to think, ‘Right, let's go again.' You know? With anxiety and having to keep your mental health and your thoughts and your mindset in check. In the last meeting that you had with Scarlett and Lord Sugar, and she said that you weren't an established business, you're a newbie and you didn't really know a lot about the industry. How did that make you feel at the time? How did you cope in such a high-pressure situation? Carina: Yeah, you do. You do want to just react instantly when there's something said about your business or yourself or your character or anything like that. It heightens the tension in the room – it's already really as high as it can be. I can't remember my answer. You might have it but I'm sure I was just more of the guidance. And I'd show I would just talk to Lord Sugar and say, ‘Well, I do know my business and I can tell you what I know about my business' and I would then just relay everything. I didn't understand her business. I would sit there. I think Claude said to me once, like, ‘You can you can take a nap now.' So maybe she didn't understand what I was trying to relay and that I didn't know my business. But yeah, even if you're a newbie and a start-up, like I've been touching upon, if you can get a great qualification, and if you can understand the importance of spotting trends, and run with it, take risks. Actually, that is exactly what I was just about to ask you. We do sometimes come across entrepreneurs or want-to-be entrepreneurs who are wanting to go into a field that they're not so familiar with. As someone who has been there, what advice might you have for them? Carina: I didn't know. And I still get dinged up on about being the baker who doesn't bake. That was the whole tagline I ended up getting from the show, but I didn't let it deter me or let it put me off. In them interviews that we do with Claude and the scary interviewers, it was so scary. They were just picking me up on the fact that, ‘How can you know your business if you don't know your business?' My argument was that you can be a club owner, you could be a restaurant owner or hotelier, it doesn't mean that I'm going to be the chef of the restaurant or the barman and I'm going know every cocktail, every recipe. It's more about your leadership skills, I think, and your passion for that business and that drive. I love everything about the bakery – I love bread, I love seeing them make it. It doesn't mean I'm suddenly going to muck in and make it, but I love the process. I love everything about it. That's where my passion shines through in customer care, the customer service piece. I tried to relay that in the show that that is actually more important. Knowing your customers and knowing what they want rather than me actually knowing how to knead a loaf. You employ people to do certain skills, you don't have to have everything. So that was my argument for the show. Any young people out there who have a passion for something, obviously learn about it and know your business, because that is very important. But you don't actually have to be the chef or whatever. Looping right back to the start. For people who have got their A levels today and they maybe didn't get the grades that they expected and they maybe want to go down the entrepreneurial route. What would you say to them?  Carina: I've learned a lot myself from the qualification that AAT are offering. I'm just going to throw out the link. Basically, it's an accountancy firm, and it's an accountancy apprenticeship. The link to that is aat.org.uk/123. The 123 spheres on the fact that knowing your numbers is so key. If you didn't get the grades you want and you know in your heart that university isn't for you, then definitely explore other routes, explore this route from AAT. See if it's for you. If you've got ideas about business, just make sure you've got a notepad, keep everything jotted down with what you want to do. Keep learning, keep networking. Get all the knowledge you need, reach out to people – some people will get back to you and give you tips and advice in the field you want to go into. Anna: Great. Well, that seems like a very good place to end. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Carina. Carina: Thank you. Thanks for having me. You can find out more about Dough Artisan Bakehouse at doughbakehouse.co.uk. You can also visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more on starting your own business. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and on Twitter @smallbusinessuk (all lower case) and subscribe to our YouTube channel, linked in the description. Until next time, thank you for listening.

In this episode, Anna Jordan meets Dragon Tej Lalvani and entrepreneur Sam Jones. We discuss how pitching on Dragon's Den from both sides. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on perfecting your investment pitch.  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 the 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 Tej Lalvani and Sam Jones – one is CEO of Vitabiotics and Dragon on Dragon's Den and the other is an entrepreneur who, according to Touker Souleyman, gave one of the best pitches he's ever seen in the Den. Sam went into the Den looking for £60,000 in exchange for ten per cent equity of his internet browser company, Gener8. Wowed by the pitch, Touker Suleyman and Peter Jones teamed up to invest in the entrepreneur, leaving Tej and Deborah Meaden with cash in their pockets. Tej sought out Sam after the show, becoming one of a group of high-profile investors to back the firm. After four years on the show, Tej will be stepping back from Dragon's Den later this year to focus on growing Vitabiotics.     We'll be talking about making a pitch – from both sides of the Den.  Anna: Hi guys, how you getting on? Sam and Tej: Hi Anna, how are you? Anna: Yeah, doing really, really well. Thanks. Sam: Awesome. Good to be here this afternoon. Thanks for having us on. Right, we've got quite a bit to get through, as you've heard in the intro. I'll start with you, Sam, talk us through the process of going on Dragon's Den and anything that stood out to you particularly. Sam: Well, wow, I mean, what an experience. It'd be hard to put that into 30 seconds. But really quickly, I start with what's happened since and then I'll jump back to what happened during so. Since Dragon's Den, the reaction has been incredible. The pitch went viral. With about 20 million views on Facebook and other five million views on LinkedIn, we were averaging a new download every ten seconds for about seven or eight weeks. Off the back of that, more than 30 different press outlets wrote about us. We used this momentum to raise a modest round of funding, which we were super fortunate to be able to include. Of course, Tej Lalvani and bringing him on board alongside people like Tinie Tempah (the rapper) and Harry Redknapp (the football manager). It's been a whirlwind since Dragon's Den, which is amazing. Going back to the pitch – God, I mean, this was a hell of an experience. I think that we all know, from watching it on TV, that when you walk through those doors, and you come out of that lift, anything can happen. Of course, from the entrepreneur's perspective, you hardly sleep the night before, because you're just so nervous. So, you're standing there in this lift, light-headed and the butterflies are multiplying in your stomach and you're trying your best just to hold it together. But then your head's getting noisier – you can't even remember your opening line – and you're just trying to tell yourself to breathe. And then there's that moment where the doors open, and you walk out to the left. It's total silence. You see the Dragons sitting in front of you, just like you do on TV. You even hear the echo of your own footsteps as you're walking out to that mark on the floor to start your pitch. I think that's tough no matter who you are. That's tough. But that's how all of the entrepreneurs start on Dragon's Den. That's amazing because you looked so cool and calm when you were on the TV. It's hard to believe that all of this was rushing through your head at the time. Sam: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think you're standing in front of these five incredible characters that we've all seen on TV for so long. And of course, you know what each one of those investors can bring to your business. So, I think the real art is being able to calm your mind, take that breath, and then go in and communicate your pitch really clearly. Yeah, absolutely. And talk us through the stages before that, because I'm sure people who are listening or watching might be thinking of, maybe someday, going on Dragon's Den. Sam: Sure. In terms of preparing, well, the thing that I did really simply was I just practiced the pitch, probably 100 times – probably more than 100 times. I knew it inside out. Of course, I watched a lot of Dragon's Den as well. I imagined answering every question, but then more than that, I just knew my business. I know why I started Gener8, I know what we want to achieve. And then really the challenge was just keeping that mental clarity so I could communicate that to these guys when I was standing there. What about you, Tej – what were your first impressions when Sam walked into the Den? Tej: Well look, as an investor, as a Dragon, you look for a couple of things in terms of what they're pitching and the entrepreneur themselves. When you're investing, obviously, the pitch is important – to understand the clarity of it. And sometimes, you know, entrepreneurs don't communicate what it is. And of course, what Sam presented is not an easy thing to try and grasp in layman's terms. He did a great job of doing that. Then secondly is the opportunity you see in the business. It seemed a very strong opportunity to potentially disrupt certain things. You ask questions to the entrepreneur and you see how they respond accordingly. So the questions I asked, he responded very quickly, promptly and dealt with the issue, because sometimes entrepreneurs may deflect the question if they can't answer it. He took on board some of those points or concerns I had, and very clearly went through them and said, ‘Okay, that's a potential risk', ‘this is a problem and this is not the solution for it'. That impressed me. I think just the space as well, the tech space I was interested in. So really, there's a couple of things that you look at, and it sort of ticked all the boxes in my head as a potential investment. I thought it was a fantastic pitch, yeah. Amazing. Do you have anything to add to that as to what other entrepreneurs who may consider going on Dragon's Den can learn from Sam's pitch? Tej: Well, as Sam said earlier, one is about practicing and watching Dragon's Den. So few people actually come and really watch the episodes because everything is pretty much there. And you can see how sometimes you can go completely on a tangent because other entrepreneurs have not prepared, they've not been transparent. You could get a complete grilling versus having four or five offers sometimes. I think that that is important, preparation. Of course, nerves hit you, and some people can manage them better than others. The Dragons will be lenient if you do forget certain things, because there is that pressure on national television. However, it's how you deal with it. And this understanding – have you been actually prepared? The other important thing is understanding the full aspect – all of your business, the ins and outs of it. Sometimes, the entrepreneur says, ‘I don't really do that, that's not my role'. But it is your business. You're an entrepreneur, you need to understand everything about the finances, to the marketing, to the competitors. That is very important as someone who wants to pitch to Dragon's Den. Be clear for what you want and what you're asking for. They just sometimes come on and say, ‘I want this amount of money'. What are you going to do with that money? How's it going to work? And what do you really want from a Dragon? The clearer the entrepreneur is – the better, the more concise – and really try and explain your business in simple terms. And very quickly, people just someone's got one for now and you like, and half the time is the questions about trying to understand, ‘What does your business do'? So really, that is an important part. Get that sorted out and use the other time to try and get the investment and negotiate the deal that you want from the Dragons. Yeah, and sometimes it's not even on the show, because you've got the due diligence to go through afterwards. Off camera, of course. Tej: Yeah. I mean, that's a different process altogether. But I mean, in the Den, the idea is you have an intent to do a deal with the entrepreneur. And of course, during due diligence, certainties can probably pop up. The BBC can only do a certain amount of due diligence. As an investor and as a shareholder, there are things about shareholders agreements that you need to look at – the bank, the finances – is it correct? Is there more debt than what was given in the show? By the time you do a deal, it could take three or four months, and the situation may change for an entrepreneur as well. They're all aspects that get involved. But by and large we try and do every single deal that we agree in the Den. Great. Sam, coming back to you, when you were having your discussion with the wall, what was that like? What was going through your head? Sam: To be honest, I think that was quite a surreal moment, because I'd spent so much time, effort and energy in preparing to try to get to that stage. But when that happened, there is this kind of rush of emotion and adrenaline, where I think I was so pleased that when I asked to go to the back, I think you can see on the piece that is broadcasted on TV, I have this big grin across my face, because I'm there thinking, ‘Blimey, what a great place to be,' and reflecting kind of momentarily on the journey up until there. Before then, of course, thinking, ‘Okay, what are the offers in front of me? How should I go back and handle this?' So yeah, it was a fantastic moment, really. It must have been nerve-wracking for yourself, Tej, because you'd put forward an offer. You must just be sitting there in that moment thinking, ‘Well, what is he going to decide? Is he going to take it? Who's he going to go with?' Tej: Absolutely. I mean, it's, it's always a tense moment. And that's the fun of the show because you are competing against other Dragons genuinely for investment. And it's about communicating what value you can add as an entrepreneur to help the journey and grow the business at the same time. It's important from the entrepreneur's side and trying to communicate that at the same time. And of course, then you have the flexibility of percentage investment, whether you offer more money for the same percentage or whether you prepared to take less equity for the same amount of money. Those levers are there. And then you just see what happens. Of course, ultimately, the entrepreneur decides – they make the decision. You win deals and you lose deals all the time. Yeah, it must have felt like that on this particular occasion you missed out. Tej: Yeah, well, it felt like was I should have provided free office space! Anna: Touker finally shifted it! Tej: Of course it was disappointing. But equally, I believed in Sam's vision and what he was doing. We did reach out afterwards, got in touch and and subsequently made the investment because I thought I could add great value to the business. I thought this was a great opportunity. And so it worked out that way. Great. You say that you've never sought out an entrepreneur that's appeared on the show before – how did you go about seeking out Sam? Tej: Previously, if I've lost deals in the Den, or they haven't gone through, then usually I just didn't get it for a particular reason. I just leave it. But yeah, I thought that was an important decision. And at the time, Sam chose two people. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was a great opportunity. So, I contacted Sam, and, obviously the other Dragons, Touker and Peter, who invested. They were very happy to have me on board as well. We had a discussion and worked out a deal that was great for everyone. Talking post-pitch, what's in the future for Gener-8, especially in terms of managing customer expectation around what kind of rewards they can get, for example? Sam: Right now, the future is really exciting. We're growing incredibly fast still. So, 1000s and 1000s of new users are downloading Gener8 all the time. We're scaling the team. When Dragon's Den aired, there was just four of us. Now we've tripled to about 11 or 12 of us. There'll be 15 of us once we finish this hiring spree. Increasing internal capability is a key thing here. Additionally, we're working on our mobile app to get this developed, out in the world. We've got over 50,000 people on the waiting list for the app already, which is fantastic. From our side, it's full steam ahead. We're chasing down these opportunities. I mean, it really feels like we've captured the Zeitgeist in empowering people to control and learn from their data. We're just running full speed ahead with that, really. How do you scale up at such a rate as you are without over-expanding or taking any of those kinds of risks? Sam: It's amazing to have people like Tej, Peter and Touker – and some of our other shareholders too – who have also been in in similar fast-growth businesses. These guys have gone through it before. There is a tried and tested playbook. Particularly if I look at one of our investors, who is the former CEO of Spotify, he's been there with the explosive tech growth. Asking our shareholders and our board is always a great area to get guidance from. The other thing as a result of explosive growth is that, as you're saying, you need to scale up to meet your consumers' expectations. There's always a little bit of a time lag in there. It's a positive problem. Of course, it is a teething pain that you need to get through. To give you some context, we can receive over 1000 emails, DMs (direct messages) or messages every day from users and new users who are getting in touch. On Friday, when I left the office, we were down to zero in our inbox. On Monday when the team came back, that's today, we're at over 1700. Of course, there is this period where we need to put in place structures and capabilities and manpower that will enable us to respond quicker and more efficiently and more effectively. We're getting there. It's exciting, as you can imagine. Yeah. Tej, I can imagine your unique insight has been invaluable here as well, in terms of scaling up in a sustainable way. Tej: Yeah. What we like to do is work with Sam and see all the all the things he needs for the business to help grow it and we provide it essentially as a wish list. And whether it's opening doors or contacts or help on strategy or advice, we're available here to be able to help with the business because we all believe in the mission equally, too. It's a movement, as Sam was talking about, and it's a lot more important than just monetary. It's actually changing the game, people are able to control their data and monetise. Great. Coming back to a more general topic. Tej, you are very active on social media and you often ask your followers for tips and what their priorities are, what their business goals are. Have you ever seen an example of a bit of business advice or a mantra that's been presented to you that's made such an impression on you that you've adopted it yourself? Tej: With social media, I enjoy interacting with all the followers and I try and give bits and tips of advice that I've learned along the way. There are many that can apply to different people. And it's great to hear feedback from how it's helped change people or given them the push they needed to set up their business. To take decisions that need to be done that may be difficult. So, in terms of advice that I think they will follow is that there are a couple of principles in my life. One is that, as a person, I always want to learn and grow all the time. Number two is that if you want to do something, set up a business, you just have to get started and do it. A lot of the time people try and wait for the perfect opportunity or the perfect idea. That's really hard to do, because it doesn't exist. What usually happens is, when you come up with an idea, what you end up with is quite different to what you started with. I think it's always an evolving thing of business. If you have something, just go for it and see what happens. People have that hesitation. I believe in today's world, when you're selling a business, it's always important to focus on a niche, because there's no point in trying to be everything to everyone. You'd rather be great at something in particular which no one else can beat you at, then trying to provide something for everyone that's slightly better than everybody else. So, there are the essential principles. As for quick tips, I'd say, when it comes to setting up a business. A lot of the time when people start businesses, they imagine how it's going to be, but it's a lot of firefighting, a lot of problem solving throughout the way – as long as you're prepared for it. My wife set up a business recently as well and I told her that, and she realises that that's exactly what it is. There are always issues, always challenges. That could be small, it could be big. But if that's what your day is, and it's about, despite all that, how do you grow? How do you exponentially build your business at the same time? Yeah, that's also why as far as again, you should be working on your business, not in your business so that you can help drive it forward. And a similar question to you, Sam – what's the best piece of business advice you've ever been given? Sam: Oh, I've been given so much amazing advice that it'd be difficult to select one piece now. But something that I can tell you, or tell the listeners, which I think might be helpful. If they're ever looking to pitch for investment, or go on Dragon's Den, I think the biggest variable that will impact the outcome is how you think about yourself when you go into that situation. What I mean by that is that you need to start by reminding yourself that you're not singing for your supper. Never stand hat-in-hand, asking for money, because that's the quickest way to turn someone off. Instead, I think that you've got to believe that you're sharing a secret with the investor. So, you're telling them about an opportunity that they're not aware of, you're pulling away the curtain and unveiling a hidden truth that's been in front of their eyes all along. And if they're lucky, you might be willing to invite them on the journey with you. Now, how much more exciting is that? So, the tip that I would give is remember that you're sharing a secret, you're not singing for your supper, anytime that you're meeting with investors or asking for investment. Tej: I think it was Henry Ford who said this quote: ‘Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.' Because really, it's in a belief in your mind. And if you think you can't do it, then you're right, you won't want to do it. But if you think you can, and you want to do it, nearly everything is possible. Anna: Well, that seems like a great point to end. I'd like to thank you both for coming on. Tej: Thank you. It's been great. Thank you for having us. Hope it was useful. Sam: Thanks so much for having us. Anna: Thanks, guys. You can find out more about Gener8 at gener8ads.com and about Tej at tejlalvani.com. You can also visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for articles on perfecting your investment pitch. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and on Twitter @smallbusinessuk (all lower case) and subscribe to our YouTube channel, linked in the description. Until next time, thank you for listening.

Simon-Anthony Rhoden (IG:@simonanthonyrhoden)(TW:@simonanthonyr) is currently playing Aaron Burr in Thomas Kail's Hamilton at the Victoria Palace Theatre/Cameron Mackintosh, he was Lola in Jerry Mitchell's Kinky Boots (Playful Productions); Jim Conley in Suzanne Emerson's Parade (One-Off Productions); Lance in Mark Finbow's Beauties Legacy at The Keeper's Daughter; Man in Matt Peover & Hannah Eidinow's If I Should Stay (Desmon O'Conner & Sarah-Louise Young); Devon in Chris Urch's Married to the Game at the Theatre 503; Ash in Anna Jordan's Marianne at Without a Paddle. While in training, he has also performed in several shows such as Hannah Eidinow's Man of Mode as Young Bellair; Aaron Mullen's A Midsummer Night's Dream as Fairy/Flute the Bellows Mender; Joseph Blatchley's Mechanical Piano as Gerasim Cusmic Petrin; John Baxter's Vernon God Little as Pastor Lassalle/Brian Large; Lyndsey Turner's The Grace of Mary Traverse as Mr Hardlong; Rodney Cottier's Revenger's Tragedy as Junior; Gari Jones' Gas Station Angel as Mr Entertainment/Dyfrig.

Simon-Anthony Rhoden (IG:@simonanthonyrhoden)(TW:@simonanthonyr) is currently playing Aaron Burr in Thomas Kail's Hamilton at the Victoria Palace Theatre/Cameron Mackintosh, he was Lola in Jerry Mitchell's Kinky Boots (Playful Productions); Jim Conley in Suzanne Emerson's Parade (One-Off Productions); Lance in Mark Finbow's Beauties Legacy at The Keeper's Daughter; Man in Matt Peover & Hannah Eidinow's If I Should Stay (Desmon O'Conner & Sarah-Louise Young); Devon in Chris Urch's Married to the Game at the Theatre 503; Ash in Anna Jordan's Marianne at Without a Paddle. While in training, he has also performed in several shows such as Hannah Eidinow's Man of Mode as Young Bellair; Aaron Mullen's A Midsummer Night's Dream as Fairy/Flute the Bellows Mender; Joseph Blatchley's Mechanical Piano as Gerasim Cusmic Petrin; John Baxter's Vernon God Little as Pastor Lassalle/Brian Large; Lyndsey Turner's The Grace of Mary Traverse as Mr Hardlong; Rodney Cottier's Revenger's Tragedy as Junior; Gari Jones' Gas Station Angel as Mr Entertainment/Dyfrig.

Shipping across borders can be quite complex and is one of the main reasons many small businesses face export and expansion challenges. In this episode of Small Business Snippets, Anna Jordan discusses some of these challenges, the expectations of online shoppers and how the right partner can assist, with UPS's Marketing Director Arthur Lam and supplement provider YourZooki's co-founder, Marcus Mollinga. Find out more about consumers' expectations of small businesses in UPS's Smart E-Commerce report here. Want to read the UPS podcast instead? Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I'm your host, Anna Jordan. Today we have something a little bit different for you. We have a sponsored episode with our partner, UPS. I'm joined by Arthur Lam, director of marketing at UPS and Marcus Mollinga, co-founder of vitamin brand, YourZooki.        Anna: Hi, guys, how you doing? Arthur and Marcus: Good. Rather than me introducing you, and getting a bit winded, I'll let you guys introduce yourselves. Arthur, tell us a bit more about yourself and your role at UPS. Arthur: Sure thing. A little bit about myself, I've been very fortunate to have helped customers both big and small in the last 20 years at UPS in different capacities starting, originally, in North America, the nature pack. I'm currently now the marketing director for our UK, Ireland and Nordics businesses. Very happy to be here and to share my thoughts and best practices that I came across. Anna: And now you, Marcus. Marcus: Yep, so I'm one of the co-founders of YourZooki. YourZooki's one of the fastest growing companies in the UK. We specialise in liquid supplements, which are more bioavailable compared to capsules, pills and powders. Most of what we're going to talk about today is around international shipping and how small businesses can deal with the logistics and the issues that they face scaling up – and shipping and logistics. I'm going to start off talking to you a bit more Marcus, because YourZooki has scaled up majorly over the course of the pandemic. How did you deal with the logistics of doing that? How did your shipping provider help? Marcus: During 2020, we're in our fifth year of business now. Each year, we sort of doubled in size. Last year, we saw huge amounts of growth, especially on the online side of the business, so there's a fire alarm going off. Last year, we scaled really fast. Covid, for our type of business, that was good. In a sense where we employed lots of new people – more people interested in taking vitamins and supplements over other products. In terms of scaling and to triple a business in terms of revenue in the space of 12 months is a really difficult thing to be. So one of the major things we had to do was ensure we had the right partner to get things from A to B, because it's easy to acquire a customer to get the product made, then get an appointment from A to B is also one of the key elements in our supply chain. With UPS, for us to scale fast involves selling in different countries, and selling into Germany, France, Holland, Ireland is a huge market for us, ensuring that we can get product there, then (within?) a couple of day. Timeframe is key. And UPS, I think at some points, we used to go from having a couple of orders a day, four or five years ago, to having full lorry loads coming in two or three times a day daily just to get orders out. To really scale fast, you need to have a good product, a full supply chain from making the product to getting the product to the customer, and capital. We had to raise investment to take us to that next level as well to keep up with the growth. Arthur, how do you, or somebody like UPS, support a business as it scales? Arthur: A lot of businesses, such as YourZooki, are on markets that have gone through a rapid growth in the last 18 months. Especially within the challenges that we see from a pandemic standpoint, we've seen a huge surge in online shopping. While the shift towards eCommerce was kind of expected from a long-term trend perspective, but the global pandemic has definitely sped up that trend in regards to planning for changes throughout the shipping and logistics space. My advice is to really make sure that your business systems and processes are as seamless as possible, tailored to the individual strengths, challenges and goals of the business needs that some of the small and medium-sized business they're seeing. That's one of the reasons why we at UPS offer a range of services for businesses of all sizes. Maybe you are start-up looking for a free eCommerce shipping plugin, which allows you to integrate a wide range of UPS delivery services into your e-storefront. Or maybe you are SMB looking to expand your business overseas such as what we just heard. We have a variety of solutions to make the shipping process as simple as possible. But one thing that I would often remind companies, as we just heard, that they know what creating your product and shipping it out, it's one thing how about, we cannot really just focus on the post-sales aspect, including the hassle-free return process, will really be part of a kind of instead of just creating or acquiring a one-time shopper versus acquiring a long term repeat customer. To help companies to scale and to really understand that eCommerce market better. Our smart eCommerce report, which you can download via the link in the description box, included findings from surveys for over 10,000 consumers across some of the key European markets. In those reports, it says that 35 per cent of UK shoppers believe that it is easier still to return unwanted products in person. So, in a way that really tells me that there's still a lot of room to grow in regards to making the return aspect of the surface easier. If companies have goals to cultivate long term, repeat business, and want to provide a soft, smooth return, I think it is important to work with experienced logistic providers to able to streamline that process and be able to provide different options. We as UPS, for example, we do have a comprehensive parcel return service option. You can either pre-printed labels to ship out your order, your mobile barcode and also we have convenient drop-off and delivery points through our UPS access point locations. So really, you can choose the best fit for you, as well as for your customers. Yeah, I'm sure services like that are amazingly helpful. And of course, there's been loads of changes to shipping logistics recently. Next, I'd like to just talk a bit more about like how you safeguard against those uncertainties. I mean, of course, we've had Covid this year, which we weren't expecting. As a small business who ships internationally, how do you safeguard yourself against those kinds of uncertainties? Marcus: What we did – initially we were just a UK-based company, and we set up third-party logistics centres in the USA, in Ireland and in the Netherlands. What that allowed us to do, and, with Brexit, we were still using UPS. But we were really focused on LTV, which is the lifetime value of a customer. So any eCommerce company has to really focus on what is the lifetime value of a customer, and forced to open up a 3PLs in a separate company in a separate country to improve that customer experience, still using UPS to get the product to the end customer made complete sense for us, because we could shave off a day of shipping. What we did to scale fast, which I'm sure lots of other companies are doing, is looking at opening third-party logistics centres in different countries. How do you go about setting up these third-party logistics centres? Marcus: I guess it's like a dating process, you've got to speak to lots of different companies. Sue, who's our account manager at UPS, recommended a few companies we spoke to in different countries. But yeah, you've just got to get to know the company, understand their fees, understand how they work and ensure it's the right fit for your product. There'll be specialist 3PL companies for clothing, for food and health and wellness products like ours, for drinks, which might have ‘fragile' stickers on, for example. There's all these different types of three PR companies. And it's a similar process to finding an agency or whoever – you've just got to ensure you're comfortable with them as a business. Arthur: I think it's unexpected from a UK business standpoint, because of what we kind of discuss the changes in the United Kingdom from a Brexit standpoint, or EU VAT reform that we're seeing in July. Crossing borders now requires – coordination compliancy is a big issue, and also the right documentation and paperwork that goes all along with it. As we see that the new regulation takes hold and reforms take hold, we really need to help customers to pivot their business to ensuring that they have all the information that they need in regards to sending packages, receiving packages, working with different partners –  as Marcus has mentioned. So for example, a customer might not right now know that what they need in regards to shipping internationally because it is different from the past. Tools that we have at UPS including UPS treatability – it helps customers to really understand what some of the documentation does it require and also provide estimated landed costs, calculation including duties, custom fees and potential taxes. One of the most important things that I see for my best practice standpoint is really informing your end customers were doing the ordering process that are they expected to be paying for duties and taxes or when the retailer the company is taking that aspect of it included in the overall price. I think that's really speaking about customer experience. Another factor, as I mentioned earlier is kind of the EU VAT reform that started in July 1, really impacting any imports into Europe that's from worldwide, it's not just for UK that value up to 150 euros, and likely that it's going to change the way that especially for my eCommerce step one how what is the procedure and process is going to be so for people that are not aware, what's changing. So as of July 1, the VAT exemption for imports into the EU will the intrinsic value of 22 euros has been abolished. So before, there's no VAT to worry about going to this customer, so everything's fine and dandy. Now, the European Commission has created this, they call import one-stop shop, or IOSS platform that they have launched to help to settle this VAT in Europe for goods up to 150 euros. The last thing is the online marketplace. If you're selling on that the online marketplace itself will be responsible for the compliancy of the euro VAT, when you're selling goods up to 150 euros. Now, that's a lot of jargon. So far, not going to be able to explain all of the ins and outs in this particular podcast, but one thing that we do at UPS is really to continue our commitment in regards to supporting our small business customer through these changes. UPS has selected the test consultant PwC (PriceWaterhouseCooper) to offer IOSS intermediary and compliance service for our customers who currently don't have an EU based establishment. Our customers can register for these PwC hours as assistance on our website, if they so choose. Great. And of course, we're talking about small businesses as a customer. But we also recognise that especially since the pandemic has hit a lot of customers of your customers' businesses are going online and it looks as if that shift could move online significantly for the long-term. I guess, Marcus, is that works quite well for you because I mean, you're predominantly an online product though, I understand that you do sell in store as well. Marcus: To be fair, the majority is switched from month to month, but a big part of our revenue is still in retail. We're sold in close to 4000 stores worldwide. In the USA and GNC, Holland and Barrett and Boots in the UK, but we're also in hundreds of independent stores around the UK and Ireland and UPS do all of our deliveries to the independent stores. So, for example, a local pharmacy, and who's ordering a couple of boxes, and UPS does all of our B2B. So, so we use UPS as a D2C and a B2B solution. The shift online, from an operations point of view, is easier. But I still think being in retail is fantastic. You know, we have some great retail partners and it's mutually beneficial. We sell a lot of products in their stores which helps build the brand awareness for our brand. I don't think the high street is going to disappear. I think it's just going to change and how products are sold. And I still think more and more people will be shopping online, but I don't think the high street is going to disappear. I think they've just got to adapt to how they sell products and put more importance on the experience for the customer in the store. Absolutely. Staying on the online side of it. Arthur, what advice would you give to SMBs who are dealing with this changing market who are more and more online and their expectations as to what they would want from a business that is retailing online. Arthur: Yeah, so I think, for customer care, end customer by habits have definitely changed. And I agree with Marcus that the high street is not going to go away. I think people still need the interaction, still wants to see touch and feel and so on. They're probably just going to be operating in a different way.  Now, in regards to the changing habit and what they expect from retailers or cars, businesses, we saw that from a recent World Economic Forum report actually predicts by 2030, the last mile delivery expected to grow by 80 per cent. As we know, you can buy a lot of groceries online now, there's food delivery and online stores. All those things add up and unfortunately do create global emissions to rise and the transport sectors, contribute to around 21 per cent of that. And then roll freight is around 29 per cent. However, we do also see that consumers are really leading the charge and demanding more from businesses in regards to sustainability. Within our report, we actually did see some insights and findings, I can back this up as well. Consumers are not just right now, of course not in the boardroom to fall for any sustainability strategy of a particular business. But we do see that they are indirectly voting with their wallets during their purchasing decision. You see that our survey that 64 per cent of respondents actually said that it is important that a retail delivery partner offers sustainable delivery options. 32 per cent of shoppers wanted to see small and independent retailers offset their carbon footprint and deliveries. And an over a third of UK respondents said that they wanted to see retailers offer out alternative delivery options at a reduced price. For example, if I were to pick up from a locker or collection point, give me that option so that I can choose and be a responsible citizen while at the same time getting that flexibility and such. So, we are UPS we do offer this possibility via our UPS Access Points Locations, as I mentioned, offering free redirect options up to 15 minutes before they deliver, providing choice and convenience to our customers and that's for our customers who are businesses that are trying to provide that options to the end consumers to help them to become good corporate citizens as well. Marcus, are you seeing the same sorts of expectations in terms of flexibility and sustainability from your customer base? Marcus: I think sustainability is a huge thing at the moment. I think it's going to continue for the rest of our lives, hopefully. And we've invested quite a lot of money recently, we've recently had our products certified carbon negative – not carbon neutral, carbon negative. I believe we're one of the first supplement brands in the world to be certified as carbon negative. We've also implemented a recycling rewards scheme where we encourage all of our customers to recycle their sachets. In return, they'll get rewarded by points on the website, which reduces the cost price of the next purchase. I think consumers are happy to pay and invest more money into brands, who are carbon neutral or carbon negative or investing and giving to charity or doing something good for the local community. That's definitely a big part for people looking to set up a new brand. I think that, maybe ten years ago, that wouldn't be part of the business plan. But I think in today's generation, it definitely needs to be part of the business plan, where part of your business is dedicated to helping the local community and ensuring you have a positive impact on the world. Anna: Yeah, absolutely. I think consumers are becoming a lot savvier as to where items come from, and then they can do so much research themselves. I think that's such a huge consideration. Arthur: If I could add to that point, to follow up figures from earlier. But then there's one last one that I'll throw out, because it relates directly to what Marcus is saying. In the research that we saw in the report, it's very clear that millennials and Gen Z, that people who are under the age of 34, they have confirmed that 53 per cent of them in UK have said that a brand sustainability record is actually their number one priority. This is definitely a major shift from for the previous generations and other target customers. So, as brands continue to look for where they sit in regards to competitiveness and growth is definitely an area that needs to be focused on. It's very happy to see that, that all the work that YourZooki has been doing on that aspect. Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's brilliant. And so we've covered a fair bit of ground here, is there anything either of you would like to add or you feel would be relevant to anything that we've discussed today. Marcus: I think from a small business point of view, we first started working with UPS literally on our first orders leaving we were working from home, from the kitchen table doing one or two orders a week with UPS. They've grown with us throughout the whole the life of the business. And now we have a couple of loads every day come into the warehouse. So I think it's interesting to see how you can create a partnership and that partnership isn't there just for six months just to get you from A to B, but there were the whole lifecycle the business. Yeah, sustaining those long-term relationships is so important. Do you have any advice as to how to maintain these relationships? Marcus: I think, from my point of view, from a brand owners point of view, any relationship including the relationship of UPS, I think it's really important to have open communication, whether you're working with an investor, manufacturer, three PL or your logistics partner. So always good just to communicate. You always want someone you can pick up the phone to and just ask them a question. and you know the answer, and if they don't answer, they'll return the call. Lots of companies won't return your call. It's very difficult to win a business in the early days, where you can't pick up the phone and ask someone a question. And with UPS, especially during the Brexit scenario, we were on the phone to our account manager a couple of times a day in help and advice on how we get products into certain countries and the correct paperwork we need. It's a very personable approach, which helps us. It saves us money, because we're not having to employ someone else to head up that department and figure out themselves. We're utilising UPS as resources to help benefit our business. Great. Anything you want to add to that, Arthur? Arthur: No, no. I think as I mentioned earlier, the consultative approach that I mentioned. Everywhere we go through, we really want to partner with our customers through MP. So even in the upcoming seasons, we'll be working with our customers to understand how they are seeing their orders being projected so that we can work through to ensure that we can provide the top-notch service that they are looking for. I think, at the end, I think I would say is really I thank, Marcus and his companies I guess patronage in regards to from the beginning, and I'm sure that we would have more years to come to continue to partner and, as their company continue to grow into different areas, different continents, different lanes, we will be continue to be there with them through the process. Anna: Well, that's seems like a good place to wrap up, so thank you for coming on the podcast Arthur and Marcus. Arthur and Marcus: Cheers. You can find out more about UPS and the Smart eCommerce Report through the link in the description box below. Find out more about YourZooki by visiting yourzooki.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more articles on exports and international business. Remember to like us on Facebook at SmallBusinessExperts, follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lowercase and subscribe to our YouTube channel, using the link in the description below. Until next time, thank you for listening.  

In this episode, Anna Jordan meets Spencer Matthews – entrepreneur, TV personality and angel investor. We discuss how his experiences with alcohol encouraged him to launch his low and no alcohol drinks business, CleanCo. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on branding and valuing your business. 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 Spencer Matthews' 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 Spencer Matthews – entrepreneur, TV personality and angel investor. Spencer rose to fame on TV's Made in Chelsea and has since appeared in other shows including Celebrity Masterchef and The Jump. These days, he is the founder and CEO of low and no alcohol drinks company, CleanCo, and an investor in Cheesies cheese snacks, mental resilience app, Halen and healthy meal delivery service, Munchfit. We'll be talking about starting a business post-pandemic and what Spencer looks for as an angel investor. Anna: Hi, Spencer. Spencer: Hi, how are you getting on? Anna: Yeah, I'm doing really well. Thanks. Yeah, looking forward to the bank holiday weekend, How about yourself? Spencer: Very much. So everything's slightly blurry at the moment, plenty going on. Delighted to be as busy as we are in this tricky time, but all is well. Great stuff. Okay. First, I'd like to ask you a bit about your business CleanCo, which we mentioned in the intro. And I'm sure people are thinking, ‘Oh no, not another reality TV star jumping on the bandwagon over a trend and starting a business around it'. But yours comes from a more personal place and your own relationship with alcohol. Talk to us a bit more about that. Spencer: Absolutely. I mean, I have that same reaction just in passing that many others do when reality stars or actors start businesses and expect it to be successful based on their personality, which often isn't the case. But no, my business – or our business, I should say – now we have an incredible team and fantastic shareholders and partners, which I look forward to getting on to, was born from a personal need. I drank excessively for many years – alcohol, I mean – for many years. I decided to make a positive change, and move and throttle back my alcohol intake, well, to the point of teetotalism. For a couple of years, at least, I noticed that there was very little in the way of a credible alternative or replacement in the space. And I personally have always thought that change is quite a tricky thing. When you develop behavioural patterns in society, it's often quite difficult to break them. And I think that comes from a lack of good products in interesting markets. The gap between desire and compromise is often quite vast. That's why people stick in the in the desire camp – because a compromise is a compromise. Who would want to compromise when what you're really looking for is desire? So yeah, I noticed that when I fancy a gin and tonic, that the next best thing was either just tonic water or Diet Coke. And actually, in the UK, in particular, that made me stick out. Making a positive life choice made me stick out in a negative way, which I also thought was exciting. We set about creating a clean drinking space where you can enjoy all the benefits of a non-alcoholic drink that's essentially seemingly alcoholic. Following in the footsteps of a very successful non-alcoholic beer, of course. So in a nutshell, we just wanted to give people the experience and the social experience of ‘having fun' in drinking alcohol without the high levels of alcohol. Yeah, absolutely. You talk about trying to do a positive thing with a negative reaction. Could you talk a bit more about what kind of reception you've had? Spencer: I just think in general, not everywhere in the world, but here perhaps in particular, and times are changing. When I was drinking my most was when I was a city broker. I'd drink every day and then socialise with clients and evening drinking was just so normal and, essentially, if you weren't drinking, you'd be perceived to be boring. In the case of women, if you're not drinking, people just assume that you're pregnant. It can't possibly be because you're busy or focused or ambitious. It's turned into being a negative thing and, by the way, I was never berating bias or anything, but essentially there's a negative connotation that comes with not drinking and I actually think that due to the name, non-alcoholic mocktails sound like a mockery. Now, why would anybody go to a bar and order something non-anything? If anything, you want to have a good time, so I just thought that, following in the footsteps of an already popular word with positive life decisions: clean eating, clean living, having a clean mind, a clean body, a clean spirit. I think we I found it interesting to try and associate the already popular word, which of course we're not looking to claim came from us, but really move it into alcohol and create a positive head space within a negative industry, I'd love to talk a bit more about the word 'clean' and your use of it within the branding, because my understanding is that it's got quite negative connotations in some health circles and that it's demonising certain foods which are fine in moderation. So, tell me a bit more about why you decided to go for that particular word in your in your branding. Spencer: Well, I just I simply – respectfully, of course – just disagree with that. I think the word 'clean' is a great word. And it does exactly what it says on the tin. And I believe that, if anything, it's really attractive and makes our proposition incredibly clear. Whether or not it's detrimental in other markets – I can't speak for those markets. I look after myself. I believe that I have a good, well balanced diet and that I'm healthy. And I often eat things that I'm sure are terrible for you. Well, living a balanced life is what we're all about. We are not anti-alcohol in any way. In fact, we encourage people to live life to the fullest and have an amazing time. We also, particularly in these times, in a post-Covid world, are about to become very vocal about the importance of moderation. Drinking clean should play a part in your alcohol regime. I think full strength alcohol will one day be a thing of the past. I'm not saying that alcohol will be abolished, and people won't drink alcohol. There will always be room for alcohol. But inherently alcohol when, again, we're not waving some big flag that alcohol is bad for you. But full strength alcohol certainly has done a number on me over the years, and I'm sure anybody can attest to the fact that you very rarely, or in fact, I'm pretty sure nobody has ever woken up saying, ‘I wish I drank more alcohol'. It's usually the other way around. Just my general decision-making process, being drunk is usually quite unhelpful. I'm sure a lot of people would agree! I'd love to move into your going into investing. This is probably something that people don't really know about you, as an angel investor. How long have you been an angel investor? What got you interested in it? Spencer: I've always been interested in other people and other founders and businesses. I'm kind of led – obviously being a founder myself – I'm quite a founder-driven investor. If I care an awful lot about team and I'm the founder and the vision, then in my opinion, there are chances of success, but that's often just a kind of gut feel. Or when you talk to someone, you evaluate in your own mind whether or not you believe that this person can achieve the things that they say they can achieve. I am one for a forecast, obviously. But I do think that forecasts change. If the first domino doesn't go the way you want it to go, then presumably, your model – I'm talking really early stage now – obviously, now we create a final financial model for CleanCo and the Americas. And as an example, we do it in such a way that we're pretty confident that we'll be within 2 per cent of our financial model. But at really early stage, you don't know if you're going to sell 1,000 bottles on day one or 10 bottles on day one. It's really hard to gauge where you're heading with stuff. Take Halen as an example, the mental health app. It trains your mental resilience. It's trying to destigmatise an industry which is mental health. Joe Bates is a fantastic character founder. You should interview him, if you don't mind me saying. You get a real kick out of it – he has the most wonderful story. He's an incredibly down to earth and sensitive individual who's gone through an awful lot but remains incredibly strong. And I think that's the kind of whole Halen idea. Halen is old English for hero. And it's a Halen was someone who conquers adversity. Back to this adversity point that we're all facing in some way or another at the moment. And it's just a really interesting and exciting idea. But I knew that I was going to invest in Joe before he had a business plan. We were on a bus to Twickenham, I think, with Jodie Kidd and his partner who are friends of ours. Vogue [Spencer's wife] and Jodie are friends and I had not met Joe. We were sat on the bus. And he was to ask him about clean, and this is about a year and a half ago, so we were far less developed than we are now. I was giving him my plans and projections and what I think was possible, and he shared the idea that was Halen with me. And immediately I thought, ‘Well, how brilliant'. He was describing it as the Peloton of mental health. I just thought it was fascinating. So then and there, I decided that we'd get involved in that. That can be seen as shooting from the hip and unlikely to ever hit any home runs. But I was in Halen at the very start, from the ground level. Almost any success that it experiences is good news for my investment. So I quite like really early stage stuff, albeit incredibly risky. And if you are listening to this, and I'm a seasoned expert, but just do be very aware that when making any kind of investment, there's a good chance you might lose money. Absolutely. The companies that you're invested in, as again mentioned in the intro quite closely linked, there is very much health and wellness and fitness. What do you look for in a company that you may be considering investing in? Spencer: Experiencing the team. It's my personal belief that no one individual has the answers to anything. And regardless of the life that you've lived, and the experience that you have, surrounding yourself with people who have more experience in the sector that you're looking to crack is always a good idea. Spare no expense to get the best people behind you. Incentivise them well, make sure that everybody is happy within the team and that they are delighted to show up to work every day and that they're incentivised to carry out the dream and the vision. If I can feel that from another team, then that's a good starting point. I've spent many years working in jobs that I really don't like, and you hear about all the time that people do things that they don't enjoy and live from paycheck to paycheck. That's fine, though. Everybody's different and everybody has different dreams and goals. For me, hopefully succeeding and being at the forefront of something is all about it being exciting. I struggle to sleep at night sometimes, because I'm so excited for the following day to arrive so that I can get back into what I was doing the day before at work – that for me is awesome. I'm very fortunate to be surrounded by others who share that vision. For us, it's like we're constantly smashing down walls, we're constantly feeling like we're kind of flying. That's the feeling that I want to harness. I felt that with Joe, and I love this team, I felt that with Munchfit with Angus, and I use the products obviously as well if you use something and it's fantastic, then good. There has to be a reason I've done all this rubbish television, right? If I can spread the word on an incredible product at an early stage and get other people to try it then perhaps that, in a strange roundabout way, is the value I can add to an early stage business having done the rubbish TV. And the last question I want to ask you is kind of twofold. Over the course of pandemic, unfortunately, we've seen a lot of redundancies. But we've also seen the number of people starting their own businesses absolutely skyrocket. From a business owner's point of view, and an investor's point of view: What businesses do you think are in need just now, what problems need to be solved? And couple of quick tips on how business owners can get started because it can seem so overwhelming, and there's so much information out there. Spencer: Not having to leave your house and anything that delivers to your house, obviously, is a great business model at the moment. At one point, we were uncertain as to what would happen with retailers, right at the very beginning of the first pandemic. We were unaware if the Co-op was going to stay open. All of a sudden, you're thinking about how we are going to eat, like, we weren't sure if Deliveroo would be operating or whatever. Anything that delivers things straight to your door is obviously great. Sorry, you kind of put me on the spot with that one. We've got the great Justin Hicklin, the chairman of CleanCo, here as well. What problems needs sorting, Justin? What do you think? Justin: Day-to-day? Spencer: Yeah, just day-to-day in the UK. Justin: People turning up and sorting out computers within half an hour. Spencer: There you go – computers. Justin is of a different age. Justin: I think all the pain points in life ultimately will have some sort of instant response to it. So, instant plumbing you can have, because people are not technically minded. Spencer: Electricians – it would be good if an electrician could be on call at all times. Justin: Premium plumbing service, premium computer services. If you've got a deadline and your computer crashes, you want somebody in half an hour and you're going to pay £50 to do it. Is that [already] available? If the answer is no, then that's an opportunity. Spencer: Excellent. Let's get the trademark registration on the line. Justin: We're going to call it Key. Spencer: Yes, Key. Lovely. Spencer: Well, I need anything that simplifies, essentially. Anything that makes life easier is popular, right? People like shortcuts to things. Justin: Actually, that's a really good idea, we should do that. Spencer: Okay, Justin. Well, why don't we talk about it after the pod? And if you're thinking about starting a business, or I mean, it's going to be ever slightly boring, because I feel like I might have already covered it, but surround yourself with excellent people don't cut corners initially, raise more money than you think you might need. Don't be too bullish on what you own at the very beginning. If the right person comes along, and the deal feels good, you should do it. Owning 100 per cent of nothing is nothing and owning a chunk of something valuable is valuable. So, I think you got a lot of people – who pitch to me, anyway – who have these wild views of where they're going to be in a few years, and they want to own 90 per cent of it. This is the ‘they'll sell you this for this huge number', and you just go, ‘But without key individuals, you'll get it nowhere near where you think you're going to get it.' So, 'share the love' is what I'm trying to say. And just be intelligent with the raise. I remember, right at the very beginning, I had very little idea of how to structure and start a business, I'd like to think I do now. And essentially, we needed maybe 12 or 13 times more money than I thought we might need. I was sitting with a really interesting and eccentric gentleman who's built businesses before and it was very funny. He asked me how much money I thought we'd need to get CleanCo off the ground. I was talking in the tens of thousands. I thought we needed £60,000, maybe £100,000. I was thinking about things on how we get it going. And then how do we build from a small start, and I'll always remember it, he said, ‘Mate, you need about £3m.' And I was like, ‘What?' And then you kind of learn, and we raised a bit less than that on our first round, we raised £2.1m. But then quickly, at the end of the first year, raised another £7m and, in fact, next week our opening round to raise three times that on top of it. We're moving incredibly quickly. To get something going, particularly in a market that doesn't really exist, churns cash like you wouldn't believe. See business as kind of like going to war: try not to go underfunded and under flanked. You need plenty of good company and plenty of cash. Nice. Just quickly, you've talked about really liking exciting businesses, but getting wild propositions. Spencer: I was guilty of it as well. I think you get so wound up in your own head that your idea is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I'm not saying that good entrepreneurs shouldn't overvalue their dreams, because it's [a case of] how do you get there. If you start tiny, it's very difficult to grow it into something really substantial. Dream big, for sure. But, if you're unable to back up a really ‘hockey stick' kind of aggressive forecast... Had I gone into fundraising meetings, without some of my partners at the very beginning, essentially on hot air, and they say ‘Oh, well, how do you think you're going to achieve this level of turnover in 2023', and you haven't got a really detailed, concise answer that fits the bill, you're never going to raise any money. You just need to be quite careful. I was looking to value CleanCo a lot higher than we ended up going to market with at the beginning, because I felt like this doesn't exist. We were going to be the best in the world, we're going to be the biggest no-and-low-drinks company on the planet. You just have to just calm down slightly and replace enthusiasm with projections that make sense to good people. I think there's a lot of noise out there in the market. Everyone thinks that they're the best and everyone thinks that their idea's going to change the world. It's just a question, I suppose, of judging one's character when you're talking to somebody and understanding what you think to be relevant and truthful. Anna: Well, that's a great place to wrap up. So, thank you for coming on the podcast, Spencer. Spencer: It was a great pleasure. Thanks very much for having me. You can find out more about CleanCo at clean.co. You can also visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more on branding and valuing your business. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and 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 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 meets Mark Wright – entrepreneur, TV personality and winner of The Apprentice in 2014.  We talk about work-life balance and maintaining a strong online presence for your business post lockdown. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on the pros and cons of business education. 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 Mark Wright'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 Mark Wright – entrepreneur, TV personality and winner of The Apprentice in 2014. Born in Armidale, Australia, Mark’s entrepreneurial family inspired him to go into business himself. He was backpacking when, with £172 in the bank, he decided to get to an English-speaking country to start earning. After coming to the UK, he found a job selling digital advertising services. Unfortunately, he was unable to secure a bank loan to start a digital marketing agency of his own, so a friend suggested he entered The Apprentice instead. Since winning the show, he’s launched five businesses and is the only winner to turn over in excess of £1m within one year. We’ll be talking about stress management and maintaining a strong online business presence post lockdown. Anna: Hi, Mark. Mark: Hey, how are you? Anna: Yeah, I'm really good, thank you. How are you? Mark: I'm really good. Thank you so much for having me today. I really appreciate it. Anna: Of course, of course. How is it down where you are? Mark: Listen, it's pretty good. We're pretty lucky considering everything that's going on in the world. I mean, not compared to my family in Australia. They think we're like aliens over here in the UK. Anna: Oh, I know. I’ve got a lot of family in Brisbane and they were just going about like everything's normal and I'm just going, ‘I’ve forgotten how that how that functions.’   Mark: I'm so jealous. People always say to me, ‘Why are you living over here? I've always had a good answer, but I'm not so sure right now! Speaking of you coming over here, there's a little bit I wanted to know. In the intro, we've talked a bit about you backpacking and you coming to the UK to start work. I know that this backpacking adventure has been pivotal to where you are now. But I'm wondering, what was the intention of it when you set out? Was it part of your broader plan to become a business owner? Mark: Well, it's a bit of a sad story really. I was dating a girl in Australia, and I had sort of found my passion for digital marketing, had my self-discovery of what I was going to do in life. And then I got my heart broken. I decided the best revenge was to go out and get out in the world. I got my backpack, packed it up with like three pairs of jeans, a couple of shirts, and off I went around the UK and around Europe, as a backpacker. And it started off as a well-intentioned holiday, with the view of being a tour guide, having some fun, seeing the world, seeing some different cultures. I loved it. I visited London, I fell in love with London, I love the UK. As I continued my travels, and started to run out of money, I decided I loved London, so why not go back there? I felt pulled, it had some good energy. I'm a big believer in getting those feelings. The best book I've ever read in my life in my career is called The Alchemist by Pablo Coelho. And there's a big thing, three set themes throughout the book, which is follow the omens. If you feel something, if you feel a pull towards something, if you get energy towards something, just go with it. You technically might not know the answers at the time but if you go with it, go with the vibes and you never know what's going to happen. And as they say, the rest is history. I got here. I was living in a hostel, a backpacking hostel, I had no money, I started door knocking for jobs, I got a job, worked my way up in the digital marketing community, thought I could do it better and took my idea on The Apprentice – and one thing just led to the next. I sit here today, and all these amazing things have happened. It kind of just feels like the click of the fingers or a blink of the eye. I'm Lord Sugar's business partner and I own all these companies. It's hard work, having goals, and almost it was preordained to a certain respect. Anna: You've talked about being a real goal setter, knowing where you're going to be 5-10 years’ time, but that seemed like quite a spontaneous move. Mark: Yeah, I think, how they say the biggest things happen outside your comfort zone? I think the biggest killer of people's success is comfort, staying in their mediocrity, getting comfortable doing things that don't necessarily challenge them, but make sure they stay safe. It's really easy in our society today. Particularly, what, in Australia, where I come from and in the UK and America, it's really easy to stay comfortable in the middle part of society. Every time I've gained any success in life, whether that's leaving Australia with no money and backpacking, giving up my job and my flat to go on The Apprentice, taking loans to start companies, whatever it might have been. Every time I've achieved something in my life, it's been from pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Just reflecting on that, Steve Jobs, who's the photo behind me, who I am in love with, basically. He always said you can – it's easier to connect the dots looking backwards and it's so true in my life, when I look back at any success I've had, yes, it's from setting goals and knowing where I want to be in life and focusing on who I want to be and what I want out of life, but also pushing myself to do things that I’m not necessarily comfortable with. With your jumping in and doing things attitude, where do you stand on things like MBAs and business education qualifications? What role could be play in somebody becoming an entrepreneur? Mark: It's an interesting question. I would much prefer the people I employee to have MBAs and the infrastructure and theory of growing and scaling and managing a business. As an entrepreneur, what I've found is that it's more the risk-taking the big-thinking and the strategy of the company that I'm responsible for. The funny thing is, most of the great entrepreneurs haven't written courses, they haven't written MBAs, and you can't teach what it takes to be a great entrepreneur, because a lot of it is instinct. A lot of it is huge, unsustainable risk-taking that wouldn't make sense if you saw it written in a course. I've never been to university, I don't have any formal education or degrees, or any of that sort of stuff. Listen, I haven't done it, but that's not to say that it doesn't work. I think knowledge is power and information is really key to success. Now, a lot of people do have degrees and have been successful, a lot of people don't, it's more just what's inside you as an entrepreneur: are you driven? Can you work consistently? Are you prepared to take big risks? Do you understand the industry or the business that you're in? That's the key – doesn't matter about what degree you've got. You can have a degree, you cannot have a degree, that's not a dictator of success. What is, is are you an expert in what your field is. If you are an expert, and you've got good work ethic, and you will stay in your industry long enough, you will eventually be successful. Great. You've said in the past that it's your bullish attitude that helped you get through The Apprentice. I wonder how your level of bullishness was at the beginning when you applied versus at the end of the show. Mark: I've always had a healthy distribution of confidence, I would say and that confidence, some would describe as arrogance. I would say healthy confidence has given me a bullish strength and approach in business generally, throughout my whole career, whether it's been in interviews, on The Apprentice, in business deals – and that confidence in either negotiating a deal, winning The Apprentice, is so powerful. I believe the key to higher performance is high self-confidence, high self- belief. Before you start working on other things, you need to really work within yourself to be confident. If you believe in yourself, and what you're selling and what you're doing, other people will buy into that, whether that's your employees on the journey, whether that's a banker to give you a loan, whatever it might be, that self-confidence is so important. I think I carried this air of confidence in from day one of The Apprentice through to the final and Lord Sugar and the other judges could sense it and I think also the other candidates could sense that and it's a pretty powerful tool in The Apprentice, but in business as well. And in your profile, when the series was broadcast, and under ‘what are your worst business skills?’ it says, ‘I have no bad business skills’. Would you see those still true now, with hindsight? Mark: Haha, you've really done your research. I mean, you do say some things on there that you look back and you get a bit of a tingle of embarrassment because you say some crazy stuff to be entertaining on the show. But, do I have any bad business skills? Listen, there's always things I can improve on. But I would say my gift in life is business. I'm passionate about business. I love business. I've studied every facet of it from small, medium, large, great entrepreneurs of all time. Listen, some people can play a musical instrument like you've never heard, some people can run 100 metres in ten seconds and under. My gift that I got was being brilliant at business. And that's my thing. I'd like to say I have no bad attributes – I'm sure other people would challenge that, but it's the thing I love in life. And I believe as well that you took forward this absolute commitment to business, to your business and to creating it and making it a success. But it reached a point where you were extremely stressed, burnt out, even to the point where one of the Lord Sugar’s aides approached you and said, ‘When's the last time you took a break, went to the gym. Tell us about getting to that point and how you felt. Mark: Listen, I think when you create a start-up business, I think the start-up journey is the hardest area of business. I own businesses at all different levels of turnover size, staff numbers and investment levels. For me, the hardest journey was that ‘zero’, starting a company, registering at Companies House, and going from zero to whatever. It's so tough. In the first two years of my business, I pretty much didn't have a day off. I wasn't sleeping enough, I wasn't eating well, I was drinking too much. It was because the work that was required in terms of stress levels, hours and just general demand of creating systems and processes in the business, signing up customers, keeping those customers happy, employing staff, getting equipment, getting investment. It was a very hard process. I gave up my life for the first three to four years for the business. The first two I wasn’t in existence to people who knew me. And I was working every hour that God gave, and it was tough. It was really tough. It wasn't good for my health. It wasn't good for my relationships. We talk a lot about work life balance, okay? You can love business, you can love what you do. But you do need to find time. It’s no good – as Lord Sugar's advisor told me – being the richest guy in the graveyard, and just dropping dead at work one day. You need to be able to create a life that you can live healthily. That was that was hard-hitting advice from a billionaire’s advisor. They’re saying that so it must be true, I thought. So, I've made more time to have a bit of balance in my life, so that the success is sustainable. Anna: I suppose it can be a cultural thing, especially in the UK. I mean, there's this real pressure from various different places, very much social media included in that, you need to keep going, keep hustling all the time. So I'd imagine that's not exactly helpful. Mark: You're right, we live in a culture of Instagram, of social media, where you go on there and you hear that if you work 100 hours a week, that's the way to get a million pounds and all of this stuff. A lot of the people that are saying this don't have a million pounds, point 1. Point 2 is you can work 100-hour weeks, but for how long can you do that? Oh, and Sugar is very proud of telling people that he is a multi-billionaire who is only at work Monday to Friday. He's never worked a weekend in his 50-year career. And I think that is really powerful because he's got the proof of the pudding. He is successful, he is famous, he is wealthy, but he has work life balance. And he'll tell anyone who listens. ‘I don't work weekends, I work Monday to Friday, and I work harder than anyone Monday to Friday.’ In my head, I know on Friday evening, as I'm driving home, that is it, my brain switches off, I spend time with my wife and my family. Then on Monday morning, I'm back to it. I think giving yourself in your brain that time to recharge, to relax, to create ideas, but also to spend time with your loved ones and just switch off. Burnout is a is a real thing. It's the same with a light – if you leave it on all the time, it'll eventually burn out. Your mind, your brain and your body are exactly the same. Sleep debt and all of those things are real, legitimate causes for business owners not making it. One of the things that we've noticed in this lockdown, and one of the things that's been key to many small business owners – often by necessity – is that when their physical buildings have closed, they've really amped up their digital marketing and their online presence. But now, as trading restrictions are beginning to ease, they're moving back into their bricks and mortar businesses. How would you recommend that they keep up that momentum of their online presence with their existing resources as they move back to bricks and mortar? Mark: Well, there's been a lot of good lessons in the pandemic, and I'm speaking purely from a business perspective. On the health side of it, it's been terrible, there's no doubt about that. But from a business perspective, it has shown us the good industries, the good businesses. It has also shown us areas where we can improve our business. It’s because a business that is reliant on a singular location that cannot trade because of something like a health pandemic, probably isn't a great business, so we need to be online.   Yes, having a shop and a store is a great customer experience, and something that we should never lose. But we need to have a blend of both. And when, if you've got good systems and processes, you can have the best of both worlds: a customer in-store experience, a high street experience, and also an online 24 hours, seven days a week business. You should actually be more profitable and more dependent with your business. But it comes back to systems and processes. The problem with online is that it never switches off. And that means as human beings where we can go in and check out an ecommerce store 24/7, we can check the Google Ads 24/7 and all of this stuff, but you've got to have people, processes and systems so that you still work normal hours. Anna: Absolutely. What kind of things do you have in mind? What kind of systems? Mark: I use tools for social media posts, scheduled tools, I use software to check all my marketing campaigns, suggest changes and do low-level stuff automatically. All my email marketing campaigns for my econ businesses are done weeks in advance, and it's all just scheduled into software. So rather than sitting there at eight o'clock, ten o'clock, nine o'clock on a Saturday or a Sunday, it's all done on the Monday ready for the Saturday. It's just using tools and technology to make sure that we're actually working. I hate this phrase, but I'm going to use it now: working smarter, not harder. Just making sure that we're doing stuff, just not working 24 hours a day because the internet allows us to. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we before we go? Absolutely not. I think it was it's great that there's podcasts like this. All I would say, to any business people out there that are listening to this is get yourself a mentor. If I've learned anything through my process of business, it is surrounding myself with great businesspeople that has enabled my success. Deals and success falls off other successful people, but to knowledge falls off them. And generally, when a business owner or an entrepreneur is failing, it's not through a lack of resource or finances – it’s lack of knowledge. And it's podcasts like yours and having a good mentor that really help people get over the goal line. So yeah, that's really it. And I think it's going to be a good time ahead. Where would you recommend finding a mentor? Mark: Well, there's this amazing tool called LinkedIn. Anna: Ah, yes – I’m familiar! Mark: And what I recommend is a good mentor is someone that's been there, done that and bought the T-shirt. And I always recommend someone that's either business or industry specific. You can go on to their LinkedIn, follow them on social media, see where they're speaking next, where's their next event, where's their next conference and go there, track them down and ask them to coach you, mentor you, even if that's through giving them equity in your business or paying for their time. Knowledge really is the key to scaling up a successful business. And if you've got the right people at board level of your company, it's very hard for that company to fail. And it's been a big lesson for me on my journey, and I hope that helps other business owners as well. How much equity would you suggest? Mark: It depends how great the mentor is. I mean, I've got Alan Sugar, and I gave him 50 per cent. I mean, the most amount of equity you'd want to give any shareholder is probably 50 per cent, 49 per cent, and you probably want to come back from there. For someone that's just going to attend board meetings, you're probably looking at five per cent-ten per cent. If you're looking at someone significant, that's going to be, taking an active role, 30 per cent. But it depends on the size of your business and the size of their input as well. Anna: That sounds like a good place to wrap up, so I will leave it there. But thank you for coming on the podcast, Mark. It's been fab. Mark: Thank you so much for having me. You can find out more about Mark at climb-online.co.uk. You can also visit SmallBusiness.co.uk for more on digital marketing and the pros and cons of business education. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and on Twitter @smallbusinessuk (all lower case) and subscribe to our YouTube channel, linked in the description. Until next time, thank you for listening.

In this episode, Anna Jordan meets Paul Lindley – author, campaigner and founder of Ella's Kitchen.  We talk about relearning the valuable business skills you had as a toddler and why you should consider becoming B Corporation certified.  You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on exit strategies and making your business greener. 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 Paul Lindley'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 Paul Lindley, author, campaigner and founder of Ella’s Kitchen. He launched the company in 2006 after being dissatisfied with a lack of healthy, tasty and convenient food for children. He sold Ella’s Kitchen to Hain Celestial in 2013, stepping away from the business completely in 2018 to focus on his social campaigning. In the same year, he was appointed chair of the London Child Obesity Taskforce by Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan These days, Paul is the chair of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights UK and a trustee of Sesame Workshop, the creators of Sesame Street. He also sits on the board of social enterprise, Toast Ale.   We’ll be discussing what it takes to run an ethical business and how you can relearn the unexpected business skills you had as a toddler. Anna: Hi, Paul. Paul: Hi Anna, how are you? Anna: I’m alright, thank you. How are you? Paul: Good. I'm feeling I'm feeling quite positive. Actually. I had my Covid jab this morning. My arm’s sore, but it's an excuse to think positively about the future. Anna: Yeah, yeah. Paul: It is incredible what they've done. Over the last six months as a business or like the last year, but as a business, to take all that innovation through to get 25 million people within, what, 12 weeks? Anna: I know, I l know. Paul: It’s been an awful year, in so many ways. But you know, we've got a lot to look forward, we've got to pick on the things we've learned, we've got to celebrate some of the pivoting that businesses have done the innovation that's come around the resilience, the community that we've built over this time and sort of build back better, but what suffering we've had this last year. Okay, so let's just jump straight in. In your book, Little Wins, you talk about the business skills that we have as a toddler that we unlearn. So, what kind of business skills are you referring to? What kind of practical exercises can business owners do to relearn these skills? Paul: Thank you for coming in straight away with Little Wins – it's such a passion of mine. The book came out of my experience of building Ella’s Kitchen. Inside of me – in this grey haired 50- something-year-old – there's a little boy. I think that was the key within Ella’s Kitchen, that we had this childlike mindset of that we could do stuff, we could have an imagination and a free-thinking that would make me make the business work when everyone was saying that the odds are really stacked against you. So, I took that and I took the heart of our hero, our core consumer, and thought through the skills that toddlers have, and how we use them in our company. Then I took a step back and thought, ‘Well, everyone was a toddler.’ Everyone can unlock their personal potential as an adult or a business owner – not by learning new skills, but by relearning and rediscovering those old ones of imagination and free-thinking and self-confidence. And a whole nine of them that I put in my book. This is to simplify this complicated life that we've got to allow us to make decisions in business or in our personal lives, like toddlers do with much less information, and move forward with positivity and a ‘can do’ mindset. So really, it's about that idea that you can become the best person of the person you once were, the best version of a person that you want to work by having this type of mindset. You can bring that to your personal life, you can bring that to business. The sorts of things that I talk about are the fact that toddlers have such confidence, such creativity – they dive right into things and never give up, they get noticed. They're honest with each other, they show their feelings, they have fun, they involve others, all sorts of things that, to be honest, by the time we're all around four or five years old, we must think, ‘Life's great, I'm only four or five, and I've learned all these skills, I'm going to live to 85. What more is there to come?’ The truth is that whether asked how our society works, whether it's parenting or education, or the corporate system, narrows our vision, and it sort of asks us to conform. If you're a small business owner, if you're an entrepreneur, you want you and your team not to conform, you want you and your team to imagine things that could be possible, and to go and do them to have the wherewithal to do it to go and do them. It's really all about the mindset of the corporation, the culture, the mindset of the culture of the business. You as the business owner, you as the senior person in that accountancy firm, you've got the opportunity to set that. I think it's by setting up systems and processes and recruiting the right people that have the mindset so that you can be brave and curious – both of those things unnecessarily because what is true for any business, or any of us in this world right now: if we do nothing, we keep the status quo, we'll move backwards. The world is changing at such a rapid pace, we have to innovate, we have to try things that may or may not work. We've got to build the confidence and the bravery and the curiosity to experiment and find that way through because that gives us the edge. That's really cultural, I think. You can set your corporate reward system to set bonuses wholly on financial performance, wholly on growing five per cent from last year. We all know we've yet, well, maybe we should have set a five-year bonus that doesn't expect us to grow in any given year, because we're trying things that are going to really deliver in three-or-four-years’ time. We're happy to make mistakes and get it wrong. As long as we can iterate and we can learn, we can adapt, and we can build something from those trials and errors, then we have a better business over a five-year period. So how and I would advocate that we certainly didn't tell Ella’s Kitchen businesses I'm involved with now, though, is build a bonus scheme based on one year wholly on financial performance. Obviously, you need a successful sustainable business that makes profits and that interest should be tied to bonuses. But living the values of the reason why your company exists, I think, should be embedded within the way people are remunerated and motivated and rewarded for contributing to their company. Setting your values, for example, at Ella’s Kitchen, we had five. One of them was to be childlike. So that might be okay for a consumer brand that's got a kind of fun personality for the marketing people to deliver. But if you're the payroll person or the accounts receivable person, how do you interpret being childlike into your work? One of them one year brought ring and renamed the remittance advices to be ‘from my piggy bank to yours’. That was the habit, they reworded it, that was the small thing that they did. But it brought a smile to the person who's in the business that they were dealing with the parent and had to come from, and that person may have been a parent or may not may have talked to somebody that was a parent or may not. It was the way that, just a tiny little language change, we could get people talking about our business. And that was a real ‘thinking like a child’ aspect. That person got that part of their bonus based on that. So that's one thing that’s really around the culture and the systems that you set out.  Ultimately, you want to employ people with an open mindset who do believe in the reason you set up a business and believe that you can get there. Because if you're a small business, it's probably against the odds that you will get there, and unless you stack yourself with people who believe it and will go out of their way to do it because they motivate, you inspire them. They know what the mission of the business is, you know what the business plan is, what it takes to get there – and everyone works on that together to deliver and that's where this idea of thinking like a toddler can really be impactful. Right. So, I'm going to go from starting a business, right through to exit. One of the key decisions, if you're looking to exit, is who you're going to pass your business on to, and are they going to carry on as you would see fit. I guess with Ella's Kitchen, because your vision and your values are so deeply ingrained in the brand, how did you go about making the decision of finding the right successor for the business? Paul: Well, when you sell your business, it's hugely emotional. And it's very personal. So, my experience may be very different to others. Some people want to sell a business, walk away, don't really care what happens. They want the money in the bank, and they created something from nothing and that was their job. I named my business after my daughter. I have, as you said, very personally set the vision and the values of how that the first number of years went for Ella’s – it does matter to me still, what becomes of Ella’s and that it maintains those values. There are two things:  Who do you sell to? Who succeeds you as the chief executive? So, who do you sell to? I sort of thought of this as a horse race in a way and there were three jumps to get over and each of them was associated with the word ‘value’. The first jump to get over, and if a potential acquirer couldn't get over that we wouldn't talk to them, was values. Do they see the world in the same way as we see it? Will they support and protect the way we've seen the world and the way our business has been successful, because we've seen the world that way? Will they tinker with it? If they tinker with it, we’ll tell them now it’ll fail. And don't – let's stop the conversation. But if they do see the world in the same way, if they believe the why of why we set ours up and why it's successful, and they give us the confidence that they won't tinker with that, then we're over that first hump. The second is value – we've all worked really hard to create something of value, you need to pay as the price that that value should deliver – there's obviously an overlap between the two. If there's overlap, great, we can continue the race. If there isn't an overlap, we need to walk away because that's just not recognised. Then we get over that second hurdle. The final fence is really around added value. In my view, it's sort of what added value are they going to do to this business to make it better than we could do without them? Maybe they'll open up more markets, maybe they'll have their own factory, but we can be more efficient and better supply chains, lots of reasons why. We can start to get into the deal and the labels. We were very careful to go through that when we sold. Then it was okay – I stayed on board for another year, I ran that business, and Ella’s Kitchen for $300m business for a year, delivered what we promised and then wanted to stand back. And then it was, well, who is going to deliver and keep the heartbeat of this company going? I'm a big believer in promoting and rewarding from within a company with sort of developing talent and making people feel as though they can get to the top. We have some excellent leaders within the business. Third, the guy that took over had been in the business three or four years, was the sales director, seven years later is still the CEO, a guy called Mark Cuddigan. He is just awesome. He has the, you know, sometimes I joke that perhaps Mark is the best leader that Ella’s has had. But he has taken that business, keeping its heart, keeping its soul, keeping that mission and that vision as a feeling rather than something in the head and he delivered it with his own handprint with a team that has gone on and expanded. The value, the sort of impacts that the business has, both in terms of shareholder return and stakeholder return and delivering a mission to help children live better lives. I think you've got to do your homework for who that person is, if you care what happens next. I think it's absolutely based on values and how people see the world. And we looked for five leadership skills, really. I always do this with any sort of recruitment, no matter what the level. If they aspire to be a leader, if we want them to be able to inspire their team going forward. And those are about emotional maturity, because it is going to be a roller coaster ride. You've got to take the rough with the smooth and you've got to be mature about that. It's about a drive for improvement all the time, never been satisfied that where you are is where you're going to get to, driving your processes, your systems, your products, culture, everything forward all the time constantly. It's about effective communication. So many mistakes in business happen because we don't hear each other properly –and we don't take the time to talk to each other or listen to each other. That effective constant communication is absolutely vital. The final thing is that rather ability to see in the wider context of where our business sits in the industry, where the industry sits in society and what we can control and what we can't. That kind of leads to the fact that you don't have to actually win every battle, you want to win the war in the end if you achieve your vision. You can collaborate with your competitors in certain areas, you can do things together that will improve not only both of your businesses, but also the consumer or the client's life at the end of it by working together sometimes, or working with your suppliers or your customers. So, those are the five things and Mark excels at all of those. I would say the learning that I've seen from others, and which I was determined not to do, was my time was over. If I was going to stand back, I'm standing back. I'm there at his ear if he wants advice and he's counselled to device in the past in attendance tenders. But don't be a backseat driver – let them make the mistakes or the failures that they need to make to understand how they can get to success. Be a counsel. I think that the two most proud things I have about the Ella’s Kitchen experience happened after I ceased to be CEO. The first one is that it became a B Corporation. Mark and I worked with the shareholder and with the team to make sure that we’d qualify for that. I’m incredibly proud that Ella’s Kitchen was one of the first B Corporations in this country. I think the B Corp movement is an incredible movement to nudge forward the way we do business to a much better place. The second thing is, I think for the last five years, Ella’s Kitchen has been voted one of the UK’s Best Companies to Work For. And that's Mark, inspiring his team to really enjoy working there, really feel as though they're achieving something, being rewarded however which way that is for that contribution. We've talked a lot about inside the organisation and what's effective. And of course, you're an advocate of B Corp. A lot of small businesses today are wanting to show customers their ethics and their ethical credentials. How would you suggest small businesses go about proving how ethical they are? Paul: So what B corporations are, they're businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance. They set themselves up for public transparency and legal accountability to deliver on more than the purpose of making money. And they hold themselves accountable for that. What the process is, you have to do this survey, where it's really hard to pass, but you only need 40 per cent to pass. But it's hard to get to that point, since we've looked at all aspects of your business – governance, the supply chains, the people, finance, loads of things. You have to do things to make sure that you'll have a structurally sustainable business, then once you pass that you've got to go into your constitution of your company and change it effectively to say we're not just about shareholder return and maximising that, we're about stakeholder return and optimising that, we care about the environment and the communities that we draw teams from and we sell to. Each of those things are as important as the profit that we make. Think about it, the business that we operate is in the ecosystem of all sorts of other things that are happening in the world. You want a healthy interdependence between communities, the planet, and business and profit that works together. So I can give you statistics to show that B corporations perform better financially over the long term than non B corporations, I can show you that cost base is more efficient, because people stay longer because they see and believe in your mission and it’s verified, and you know where you're going. What it brings it validates your reason, your why, your mission – it tells your staff and your potential staff that you are committed to it and Ella’s Kitchen and some of the new businesses I'm involved with, we've had staff applying, team people applying to the roles because it's a B Corporation. It protects you versus your shareholders, if you like in that you can create more environmentally friendly packaging, but it costs a penny more, you can't be fired for by that because the environmental impact is as important to the profitability of the company. And you create you join this network of wonderful business leaders that really tried to use business as a force for good. I'm a huge advocate of that – it puts pressure on yourselves to live, to walk the walk of what you're talking. But it's ingrained and it helps you think through the social, the environmental and governance aspects to make your business not only the best in the world, but the best for the world as well. My hope is the future of business. And by looking at the first five years of B Corporation in this country, which we've just passed our fifth birthday, it's growing, growing like nowhere else in the world. And those businesses are performing better with more and more loyal and engaged staff. Anna: That's interesting, because I would have thought it's because consumers are becoming savvier, that it would be more of a draw for them. But I never thought that would attract employees who would be looking for the B Corp certificate. Paul: I would just say that back to – it’s people, again, consumers and employees are people wanting to find things that live what ethics and values they have in their head. If that's buying something because it's got a little knitted bauble on the top of the smoothie that going to get towards grannies versus one that isn't maybe if they employee wants to work for somebody that isn't just about making money for the shareholders, but it's also helping society where we've got a problem with loneliness with older people, that person's happy. They're just people an answer that I really think business. I don't think business is really about economics, although it has to make money. It's about psychology. It's about understanding why somebody is going to change their behaviour because you exist, and that behaviour is going to improve their lives, you're going to be able to make some sustainable returns out of it. And we all want to live in a better world because we feel really good when you create a business that does that every one of your team well, and the consumer will as well, because we're all just people. Anna: Well, I can't follow that, so I'll wrap up there. But thank you ever so much for coming on the podcast, Paul. It's been great. Paul: Absolutely welcome, Anna, and I’m delighted to share some things that I hope can help others. You can find out more about Paul and his book ‘Little Wins: The Huge Power of Thinking Like a Toddler’, at paullindley.uk. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more articles on exit strategies and making your business greener. Remember to like us on Facebook at 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.

Michelle Heffernan invites book critic Dymphna Nugent and playwright Anna Jordan onto The Sunday Grill to chat about the explosive 'Acts of Desperation' - the debut novel by Waterford-born author and journalist Megan Nolan.

Following Ep 171 about great patterns for baby knits and Ep 172 about good yarns for kids and baby knits, this week is a roundup of all the community feedback on both these subjects. I'm also asking for some suggestion on behalf of Kat, a lovely listener, who is undertaking a fairly arduous physical challenge. She'd appreciate some suggestions on how she can record this with an accompanying knitting project. All of the chat for this feedback occurred within the Shinybees Podcast Community. You can join for free at shinybees.com/community Kat's Project Hey Jo, do you remember the interview question 'What yarn would you take on a desert island'? I have a similar dilemma: I'm planning to embark on a long distance hiking journey from Belgium tot Santiago the Compostela (2400km). Not in one go, spread over different holidays. Not sure if I'll ever make it but I like the clear focus. I'll be starting hopefully in March with the first stretch from home to the south trough Belgium. That should fit in the current Corona regulations. Being a Knitter, I find myself contemplating the travel knitting almost as much as the actual walking :D I can't take a lot of yarn to keep weight down. I plan to take two projects: * A recreational lace shawl * A project that captures the memories of the journey day by day. Could be as simple as one garter ridge per km. Or I'm thinking some sort of modular knit with every small module representing a day. I don't really know what I want to track yet: weather (sun, rain, cold,...), feelings, distance, landscape. I don't think I can take colours to represent the different items because it's hard to predict how much yarn I would need per colour. Maybe texture is better. Anyone got ideas? Yarn, patterns, textures? Which items I could track? Yarns for Baby Knits Continued From the community, here are some further suggestions on great yarns for baby and kids knits. Helen Swann suggested Sheepjes Colour Crafter as a good alternative to Stylecraft DK. It's 100% acrylic, like Stylecraft DK, but squooshier, with a fair amount of drape. At £1.99 per 100g and in 94 shades, there's bound to be shades you will like. Wendy Dinnage has been knitting for a couple at work who are expecting a baby. They're vegan and very environmentally aware. Wendy decided to use Nurturing Fibres Eco Bamboo as it has great eco credentials. Patterns for Baby Knits A perennial favourite, Elizabeth Zimmerman's Baby Surprise Jacket from The Knitter's Almanac was suggested by Helen Talbot and Linda Hartley. Knitted With Love by Jane Ellison is a favourite of Nichola Nolan. It's currently out of print, but most of the patterns are available as single patterns from Purl and Jane. Nevis top-down cardigan from Marianna's Lazy Daisy Days was suggested by Laura Stephens. This designer also does some lovely preemie sizes too. Alison Naylor's favourite is the Overalls with Cable Detail and Dorothy Helen baby blanket by Oge Knitwear. Leafy Abby Blanket from Silk and Wool by Leyla Alieva was suggested by Maureen Bulger. She's knitted it a number of times and it's gone down really well. A couple of bonnet suggestions – from Anna Friberg, the Sunshine Bonnet by Katarina Lindhagen, and the Beloved Bonnet by Tin Can Knits was suggested by Laura Stephens. Jade Hawson, who is a new listener, did a fantastic Mosaic Blanket (Purl Soho) using a colour changing gradient yarn, which looks fab! Anna Jordan suggests the Gramps Cardigan by Tin Can Knits. Anna Grim likes to make Allsorts the Owls for new parents. Linda Hartley favours the Troublemaker Cardigan by Kathryn Folkerth. Shownotes for this episode are at www.shinybees.com/173 Credits Music for this episode is by kind permission of Adam and the Walter Boys with ‘I Need a Drink'.

This episode Nancy & Sam discuss the shocking and powerful play drama Yen by Anna Jordan. The audio of the first half got mangled by the internet, so this one jumps in partway through - in this epic half-discussion, however, is covered themes of nature vs. nurture, the harsh choices around family life, and the depiction of intimate acts on the stage. It's certainly a cheery one!Have some feedback? A play you'd like us to cover?Visit the official podcast twitter @playgroundpoddyChat to host Nancy @N_NetherwoodChat to host Sam in person if you happen to recognise him

Interview with writer, director and acting coach, Anna Jordan (30/01/21)

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.    

It’s a miraculous journey done every year. An estimated 1.2 million snow geese are part of the annual Pacific Flyway migration, traveling thousands of miles as they head south for the fall and winter. Fortunately, the Sacramento Valley provides just what is needed for these boisterous birds to rest and refuel. Rice fields provide more than 60 percent of the fall and winter diet for these hearty travelers, as well as the flocks of migrating ducks. “The Sacramento Valley, I don’t think you can overstate how important it is, especially for wintering waterfowl,” remarked Mike Casazza, Research Wildlife Biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center. “We’re in a Mediterranean climate here, so they’re not facing climatic extremes. These birds, they’re primarily coming from the northern latitudes. They come down here, to spend the winter. The environment here is just ideal. They can relax in a rice field. There’s food here for them.” Snow Geese share local rice fields and adjacent wetlands with many other bird species, and it can be a balancing act to make sure the finite habitat can best support this diverse ecosystem. Andrea Mott, Biological Science Technician with the U.S. Geological Survey, is among those studying geese populations, including snow geese, to see how their growing population impacts other waterfowl species in our area. To do that, she and colleagues have placed GPS/GSM collars on about geese, which allows them to continual monitor their migration via their computers. Currently, about 100 geese are being studied. This allows researchers to better understand where they are moving around the valley and the fields they are using. They have transmitters on ducks as well, so areas of overlap can be studied and analyzed. “Technology has come really far in the last several years,” Mott said. “It used to be that we put a transmitter on and we had to be within a mile or so of the bird to hear a beeping to understand where it is. With these, once we put them on the goose, they have solar panels so they recharge and keep the battery up. It literally just transmits its locations through cell phone towers and then sends it to my computer. Then, I can look on my computer from my desk and see where all of my geese are.” The monitoring system provides a location of each goose every 15 minutes. The data is saved and offloads every 24-hours, showing where all of the geese have been. This information helps researchers better track the goose migrations and much more – including how high they are flying and “accelerometer data” – showing the movement of the goose; whether it’s flying, sleeping, eating or walking. Mott said the Geological Survey work is made possible through a collaborative effort, including the California Department of Water Resources, Ducks Unlimited, California Waterfowl, and UC Davis, along with many others. The goose tracking information will be reviewed and critically analyzed before any future steps are made to make sure the Sacramento Valley best serves the entire array of migrating wildlife each fall and winter. Episode Transcript Mike Casazza: The Sacramento Valley, I don't think you can overstate how important it is, especially for wintering waterfowl. Jim Morris: Mike Casazza, Research Wildlife Biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey on the importance of rice fields for wildlife, including more than a million snow geese, an iconic and boisterous bird in our region. Mike Casazza: We're in a Mediterranean climate here, so they're not facing climatic extremes. These birds they come primarily from the Northern latitudes and come down here to spend the winter. And the environment here is just ideal because they can relax in a rice field, there's food there for them. Jim Morris: Maintaining that habitat is important, and you're about to find out how researchers work to keep balance in this diverse ecosystem. Welcome to Ingrained, The California Rice Podcast. I'm your host, Jim Morris. Proud to have worked with California farmers and ranchers for 30 years helping tell their stories. Winter in Sacramento Valley rice country is a great time. The harvest is done and these rice fields have a tremendous value as wildlife habitat for millions of birds that are making their annual Pacific flyway migration. I'm visiting with Andrea Mott, Biological Science Technician with the U.S. Geological Survey. Andrea, you are working to try to help maintain this healthy population. What are some of the areas that you're working in? Andrea Mott: I'm just looking at snow goose populations and just seeing how the healthy, or maybe a little too healthy population, may affect other waterfowl species that also winter in the Valley. Jim Morris: It does appear that we have a very healthy snow goose population. Some of that is good, some might be challenging, but generally speaking how has that population been in recent years? Andrea Mott: It's kind of increasing exponentially, so every year we're seeing more and more snow geese calling the Sacramento Valley their wintering grounds. Jim Morris: Why is it important to track their population? I believe it has something to do with the other wildlife that depend on the rice fields and making sure there's a good balance. Andrea Mott: There's a ton of overlap in habitat between snow geese, other species of geese, and then ducks and swans as well. So they all depend on the rice and the rice fields that the Valley has. There's a ton of overlap, so we're just monitoring to see if too many geese may end up being detrimental for waterfowl populations, ducks specifically. Jim Morris: How do you do that? How are you able to track geese? Andrea Mott: We put out GPS/GSM collars on these geese and we can monitor them from our computers. So, I can essentially see where they're moving around the Valley, what fields they're using, and then we also have a bunch of ducks transmittered, so we can see where major areas of overlap are and go from there. Jim Morris: How do you get the transmitters on the geese? Andrea Mott: We have to trap them. We use rocket nets where we set them up in an area where a bunch of geese are hanging out and we essentially just shoot these nets over a flock of geese, and it just traps them. We go pick them up really quick, and put them in crates, band them, and throw a collar on them. Jim Morris: How many geese are you tracking at any given time? Andrea Mott: We have about a hundred active right now. They're not all in California. Some of them went to the Central Flyway, which is kind of the mid-continent, like the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, and that area. It's a collar that goes on the neck of the goose. So yeah, technology has come really far in the last several years. It used to be that we put a transmitter on and we'd have to be within a mile or so of this bird to hear a beeping, to understand where it is. Where these, we can put them on the goose. They have solar panels, so they recharge and keep the battery up. It literally just transmits its locations through cell phone towers and then sends it to my computer, and I can just look on my computer from my desk and see where all my geese are. Jim Morris: How often can you track the birds, and why is it valuable to know where they are? Andrea Mott: We have the collars set to take a point, or like a GPS a spot, every 15 minutes. Then it saves up that data and then offloads it every 24 hours. So, I get a day's worth of data every 24 hours on where all of the geese have been. It's just really important to see what they're doing, where they're going. Like, we've been able to look at crazy migrations that they've been doing like flyway switching. You know, sometimes they'll stay in California one winter and decide they want to go to Nebraska another winter. We can see all of this stuff from these collars. Jim Morris: I'm picking California for my winter as opposed to Nebraska, but that's just me. If you have your laptop open, and what is on the screen that we're looking at? Andrea Mott: This is the website that all of the GPS points get uploaded to. So, here we're looking at a snow goose that was collared up on the North Slope of Alaska. It is a male, and he's back here in the Valley. We can see here, this yellow line is just kind of where he's been in the last couple days. So yeah, he's in a rice field around here, currently. Jim Morris: Tell me a little bit about some of the travels he's made, if you don't mind. Andrea Mott: Yeah. He's just kind of bopping around the Valley. You know, I'd have to look at it a little closer, but most geese spend time in the rice eating and then spend time on refuge areas to sleep, and loaf, and that kind of thing. Jim Morris: So some of that is predictable. Like you say, they come here, they need to rest and refuel, but it is interesting that within that group I imagine there can be some variables. So, one of the reasons why it's important to track it through the computer. Correct? Andrea Mott: Sometimes a goose will just get a wild hare and just go fly off into some weird spot, and that's a cool thing to see. And we get geese that end up in places that we didn't expect them to be. Like I have one of our snow geese is in Mexico right now. Jim Morris: Besides your ability to track their journey, do the collars help in any other way? Do you receive any other data through them? Andrea Mott: They don't just give us GPS points. They also can give us elevation data, like how high they're flying. They can tell us temperature, outside temperature, and then we have accelerometer data, which I mean I know doesn't mean a lot to many people. But essentially, it's the movement of the goose. So, a lot of times we can see, based on this graph, if it's flying, sleeping, eating, walking. We can see what it's doing based on the data that these collars can take. Jim Morris: A lot of the conservation work I see in the Sacramento Valley, there are partnerships that are important to get successful results. Is that the same case for the work that you do with the USGS? Andrea Mott: Absolutely. This is a major project. Lots of collaboration from Department of Water Resources, Ducks Unlimited, California Waterfowl Association, so it's a ton of people that are helping. It's not just USGS. Jim Morris: Have you traveled and done work like this elsewhere? Andrea Mott: I was really lucky and I got to go to Alaska in summer 2019. It was their molting grounds. So for about a four-week period snow geese and all geese can't fly because they molt all of their flight feathers. So we just corral them into a catch pen, and band them, and I was able to put collars on them up there in Alaska. Jim Morris: I'm glad you went in the summer. I'm reasonably well-traveled, but I've never been to Alaska, but I'm fascinated by it. So, where in Alaska were you, how long did you stay, and what are some of your observations about that area? Andrea Mott: I went all the way up to the North Slope, which is the furthest north part of Alaska. There's a ton of snow goose colonies up there. I was up there for about a week or so. Jim Morris: I'd love to know a little more about the landscape. It sounds really interesting. Andrea Mott: It's tundra, so it's not like the mountainous landscape that a lot of people picture Alaska. It's pretty flat, a lot of little seasonal ponds and stuff, which is super important to all of the birds that nest up there. But yeah, I essentially flew into the biggest major town and then we took a helicopter out to a river delta where we camped for about a week. Yeah, we had to have polar bear fences up just in case a polar bear came into camp, which it didn't thankfully. Jim Morris: Oh, yeah. Andrea Mott: But yeah, it was pretty crazy. Jim Morris: Any interesting things that you saw or ate while you were there? I mean did you have a caribou burger or anything? Andrea Mott: No. No caribou burgers. We essentially just had to bring some food out with us. But everything was just very different than everything down here. I saw so many birds on their breeding grounds that I've never seen. Like I've never seen baby specks because they're always adult-size down here. I did see some polar bears when I was up there, so that was really cool. From a very far safe distance, thankfully. Jim Morris: Well, that's good. Andrea Mott: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it was really, really cool. Jim Morris: You say specks, those are a specklebelly or Pacific greater white-fronted geese. Do I have their title correctly? Andrea Mott: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Jim Morris:  Tell me a little bit about some of the observations that you've seen since you've started this work, and what are some of the things also that you've observed and learned when you've been in and around the rice fields? Andrea Mott: I've just noticed how much these geese actually use the rice. I am not from this area, so when I got here for the first winter I was like, "Wow. This is the most waterfowl in one area I've ever seen in my life. This is amazing." And people are like, "Yeah. It's because there's all the rice agriculture here, and it really helps support such a large population." Jim Morris: When you're in the field and you're looking over the data, it's pretty cool to have that visual. Right? I mean it's extremely foggy today, but normally seeing thousands of geese in a field, I find it pretty uplifting. Andrea Mott: Oh yeah, for sure. I love just going out and doing field work because I get to look at all the geese and the ducks that are around and just the sheer numbers that are here. Jim Morris: Tell me about the journey that they make, because you've been on different ends of the Pacific Flyway Migration, and to think about that they do it every year is unbelievable to me. Tell me about that journey. Andrea Mott: It's absolutely nuts how far these geese migrate every year, like thousands of miles. They're down here, they go up to Alaska, remote parts of Canada, Russia even. And, with these collars, we're able to actually see these migration pathways and kind of see where they're going, if they're taking weird different routes, or the same kind of route. So we've been able to really see interesting detail on their migration, their nesting grounds, and their wintering grounds. Jim Morris: One of the things that I've learned with the U.S. Geological Survey, I thought years ago that it was simply just geologic-type subjects. And, in visiting with some of your colleagues on our giant gartersnake podcast, Episode 11 if you want to check that out it's really cool, Anna Jordan and Allie Essert, Giants in the Rice Fields. Did you work on the snake project for a while too, and what were your experiences there? Andrea Mott: Yeah. It was cool to just get outside of the bird world for a minute, so it was a cool experience. Snakes don't scare me- Jim Morris: Oh good. Andrea Mott: ... so that was fine. But yeah, it was neat to see the other species that really use the rice outside of the winter season. Jim Morris: What do your friends and family think as you're tracking geese with radio collars, and handling snakes, and everything? Are they surprised? Andrea Mott: No. I mean my parents think this is the coolest thing they've ever heard. On a regular basis they tell me they can't believe that this is my job and it's super exciting. But yeah, a lot of my friends are like, "What is it you do again? Chasing geese around the Valley?" Like yeah, that is what I'm doing. Jim Morris: I love that sound. It takes a while for all this data to be gathered and then decisions to be made to make sure the populations are all sound, so where are you in the process? Andrea Mott: We spent the first couple years collecting the data, trapping the geese, and now we're in the data analysis phase, where we're starting to look at the big-picture questions and figure out what we want to ask with this data. Jim Morris: How does it make you feel, knowing that you're playing a role in hopefully having healthy populations of wildlife in rice country for a long time to come? Andrea Mott: It's very important to maintain these bird populations from a wildlife aspect, but also conservation hunting, and all of that. I want to be part of what preserves these animals for years to come. I love when a huge, huge flock gets up and starts swirling around, and the sun hits them just right, and just the noise, the sheer noise of how many are there. It's just a really cool thing that I hadn't really seen before in my life. Jim Morris: That will wrap up this episode. Thank you to Mike Casazza and Andrea Mott with the U.S. Geological Survey for their time and insight. You can learn more about their work and listen to past episodes at podcast.calrice.org. You can also subscribe, and we appreciate your feedback. Thanks for listening.

In this episode I talk to Trinny Woodall, TV presenter, author and founder of makeup brand, Trinny London. We discuss influencer marketing and augmented reality within the beauty industry.   You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on SEIS and the importance of communities. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Would you prefer to read Trinny Woodall'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 Trinny Woodall, fashion and beauty guru, TV presenter, author, entrepreneur and new entrant in the Telegraph’s Top 100 Tech Entrepreneurs 2020. Formerly one half of Trinny and Susannah earlier in the 2000s, she now runs Trinny London, an online make-up company providing personalised stackable products. It includes the Match2Me service which matches Trinny London make-up to a person’s skin tone, hair and eye colour. The business is worth £46m. We’ll be looking at influencer marketing and the changing habits of beauty consumers.     Anna: Hello Trinny. Trinny: Hello, Anna. How are you? Anna: Yeah, I'm doing all right. Thank you. How are you? Trinny: Very well, thank you. Anna: Great. First, I’d like to talk about your business background. Trinny London is pretty on the pulse when it comes to emerging business trends – personalisation, building social media communities, the founder being an extension of the brand. Of course, you will have a team behind you, but it looks like there is some knowhow there already. Is this your first foray into business particularly in the pre-Trinny-and-Susannah days? Trinny: Even pre-Trinny-and-Susannah days, I had gone into finance. So, I started my career in commodities, selling commodity funds, which I detested. I would go down from Earls Court to Tower Hill and I would have the FT on the outside and inside, I'd be reading the Daily Mail. But there was an obligation in my mind, because my dad was a good businessman, an entrepreneur. I was the youngest of six kids and I think I didn't feel smart enough for university. I started as a secretary in a physical trading house. I was surrounded by business conversations at the dining room table because my father, brother and brother-in-law were involved in the same business. And then, when I was doing my foray into the City, I realised how much I disliked it and I wanted to do something else. But there was a part of me that wanted to have a business. I think I always had that from a very young age. I fell into television and before I even did TV, Susannah and I had a column and the internet started emerging as a as a platform that econ was just starting in ‘98. I really thought it was so interesting that you could do some form of personalisation online. And with all the traction we had with our followers on Trinny London, I remember I spent a weekend and I was doing a fast, I had very bad skin, so I was doing this fast, very weird thing. But my brain became very clear. I thought, ‘What can one do that could bring together what the internet's beginning to offer and refine choice?’ I think the idea of refinement of choice was a really big one for me. And that came about in Ready 2, which was something that we started in 1998. By 2001, it had closed. The idea for it was a portal for women with fashion and clothing and beauty. We just couldn't get to the profitability, because there wasn't enough traction online of being able to do a transaction so you could take a commission, so it didn't happen, but I loved it. Susannah didn't love it, because for her, she loves more the creative side of things. We then did television and spent ten years doing TV shows around the world. And during that time, we had an agent. I also was more of the kind of driver of the business side of what we would do next. I’ve got lots of beeps by the way going in this podcast because as much as I love tech, I cannot for the life of me get my notifications to turn off on this laptop. I will apologise for the beeps. I'm trying to get Slack to quieten down, but it's not going to happen. So, there was that moment, after about 10-15 years working with Susannah where we both felt a fatigue with what we were doing. I think I will never stop loving the concept of making over a woman. And by that I don't mean make somebody who looks bad look good, but just moving their sense of how they see themselves. Then I had this idea for Trinny London at the back of my mind, and I didn't realise until I look back at certain things, and people remind me how early on I had that idea. And in those last few years of making over women in every different country, I would be in Poland using Inglot makeup, and then I'd be in Israel using MAC and then somewhere else, I noticed the team of makeup girls would always do the same look on everyone and I felt that I kept saying to them, ‘Look, they have all have a different skin, hair, and you must look at colour palettes and look at how you can put them differently on women.’ And I felt that was something that really didn't exist, that level of personalisation. And I also felt that it's something that really didn't happen in store. I thought, okay, it's going to be online. And by the time I made that decision, I'd started developing with an SEIS scheme, I'd gone and I thought, ‘How can I raise some money?’ I was really coming to the end of my royalties from the different shows I'd done. Probably I was the most broke I had been in 15 years. But sometimes that's when you got to do stuff. With the SEIS scheme, you can raise up to £150,000 and it's 50 per cent tax back. Two people who were kind of committed to me as a businesswoman, they knew I had a good work ethic, a friend of mine’s mother and well, one of my daughter's friends. The mother who I didn't know that well, but was in beauty. She runs beauty at Mintel research, and my daughter's Godfather, both believed in my work ethic. So I asked them, and they put in £150,000 between them. I then had the opportunity to explore. I think if you look at all different entrepreneurs, they either start tiny, and every time they get a tiny bit of revenue, they invest in something else. And I think the younger you are, the easier that is to do. But I was 50 when I started this, so I knew I needed to really accelerate to get that proposition out there. I raised that money – probably the most expensive money I raised in terms of the percentage of revenue I gave away, the percentage of the value of the business I gave away for that. But I wouldn't have got it got off the ground. And one thing I've learned in life is you must never ever regret any decision you make. I got to that point and I think then I knew from what I'd learnt in the past with Ready 2 is I had felt an inexperienced businesswoman so I had hired what I deemed to be really experienced people in their field. The CMO I paid at that time £100,000 to because I'd raised £7m for Ready 2. I hired a CEO who came from Barclays, because I thought she'd be a good – CFO, CEO background – and a lot of other women who were in quite high-powered tech. There was a huge amount going out in salaries and a really high burn rate per month.   I knew that with that £150,000 I've got to do a really good business plan, I've got to show a prototype, I've got to show where I'm going to get it made, I've got to show how I'm going to make the money. And I was building up a little social media following. I'd started on it – I realised I just wanted to do video because I come from television. And it was gaining traction. By this stage, I had a very nice guy called Mark who became my COO, and he had a CFO background. When we were doing those spreadsheets, which any small business, you spend days doing those projections, months doing those projections. People can do crazy projections. And I kind of knew, I wanted projections that, when I went into an investor meeting, I could say, ‘This is really why I believe I'll get to that revenue in 2020,2021 and 2022.’ We did it as a percentage of a conversion of my social media following. And as that social media following grew, we felt that between two and two and a half per cent of those people would buy from the brand. And now, three years later, the valuations are actually probably double what you said, because we've had huge growth in the last six months. But it's been based on that, there hasn't been a huge amount that's changed. I hired that middle management, that C-suite, a year and a half into the business. I hired a CMO. I hired a strategic CTO, I have a very nice CTO who started with us early, but he was more he's now head of development. And I hired an MPD. And I was at the stage where I got enough revenue in and I thought I can sustain those salaries. Because otherwise all you're doing is earning money to pay the salaries, and I wanted to earn the money for growth. Absolutely. As you there are a few different things in there that I'd like to pick up on. First of all, women investors, especially when they're pitching, they have a harder time because they’re often all-male panels or a majority male panels. What kind of unique challenges did you face, being a woman but also being a woman in her 50s? Trinny: I think the challenges I face were those two plus somebody who was known, but known in a different industry. That might have got me the meeting, but it was oddly prejudicing in other ways. People put you in a box. And we think in the press, they make assumptions. They don't know what you're like as a businesswoman, they've just seen you on television, which might seem to investors a light-hearted industry. There's a sort of double importance to make them appreciate and understand that you will know how to run a business and get the right people at the right time to support you in running that business. I probably went to see 22 VCs before I had somebody say. ‘Actually, I get it.’ I always thought I want to be more than a makeup brand owner. I want this to be a community for women to feel good. It was about having every age represented, every skin tone represented, every type of woman could feel that she could identify with what we were offering. So convincing investors of that, instead of our target market is 18 to 34. Because many investors said to me, ‘Love it, but can you just skew the whole thing and do it for the Millennials?’ And I was like, ‘No, to me, the gap in the market is 35 to 55.’ It's for everyone, but this is a huge gap. So I want to definitely have over 50 per cent of my customers from 30 to 60. So I just felt that there was this real untapped market in a very, very crowded area. Yeah. And you've got to stick to that vision I think if I look at the difference between what Trinny London represents and what Trinny Woodall represents, they're not all the same customer, but a lot of people from Trinny will convert to become a Trinny London customer. And there's a lot of people on Trinny London who don't even follow me, so I love that.   We have these Trinny tribes that have stopped around the world and about 70,000 women around the world who are part of our Facebook tribe, which is in their area. And that, to me, is that other part of the business when I say that Trinny London isn't just a makeup brand. I think that the word ‘community’ has been very overused in brand building, because it might have been started by some men in dark suits in a room of a very commercial business. I think community has to start organically. And then you have to feel how can you harness what is in fact, a sort of fan base, a passion? People are the most passionate about your brand, how can you harness them? It's not going to become a multi-level marketing business. That's not what we are. But how can we make them feel good about the fact that they, for free, love to chat about Trinny London?    Yeah, you were saying as well, one of the problems you had earlier on was of personalisation and reaching enough women and even on What Not to Wear, in a series you can only do maybe six people at a time. Whereas with social media that's completely revolutionised that and you can have a much broader reach now. That has brought about the Trinny Tribes on Facebook. I'd quite like to know, was that part of your plan originally? Or did that come about organically? Trinny: I think that the very original Trinny Tribe were people who follow me on my Instagram. And some of those were like, ‘Are you the person who used to be Trinny of Trinny and Susannah? Yeah, I used to be that person. Now I just do my own thing. And they follow that. There was a woman called Kelly in north west England and she just started a Facebook fan page. And she took a bit of our logo and called it Trinny Tribe and said if there’s anyone else who’d like to know what she's doing at the moment and follow her. This is, as we launched the brand, I mean, literally, maybe a tiny bit before. These people started joining. And then somebody said, ‘Well, I'm in London, I might start a London one.’ And so we saw our logo on Facebook, or a picture of me or a bit of yellow, really random little things that you put on Facebook. And so we thought, ‘Okay, well, what we can't have this very fragmented interpretation of our brand, because it sort of dilutes what we are and, and in a way there is an association there with the word ‘Trinny’. We approached the admins, and we said, ‘Look, we just love what you're doing, would you like to be more connected to us, and we can give you a nice logo for your area and think of ways that we could… you could come in for a drink occasionally and it’d be lovely to meet some of you.’ They were very excited. And so that's in a way how it began. And then we assigned a woman who did a lot of stuff on social media called Paris, to be the contact for those people. We then said, ‘Look, we think admins a horrible word, let's call you ambassadors, or ambassadresses.’ So they love that too. We have some of them in unit for a little brainstorm, what they liked about things and what they'd like more of, just so there was that feeling that they are a part of the growth of what Trinny London represents. Yeah, exactly. I know I can imagine that over COVID the habits of beauty consumers has changed because Trinny London has quite a soft, radiant glow-y type of makeup which people are actually saying is quite good for Zoom calls rather than something that's very heavy that you'd see more on a night out. How would you say that your customer base has changed over COVID? Is it more people who would be going to the makeup counter who are now looking online? Trinny: For sure. And as you were saying there is a certain advantage to having the social media videos because you bring in the people who are less seasoned when it comes to makeup, maybe want to try and explore it a bit. They have tutorials on how to layer different pots. There are a couple of things I would like to talk about before we wrap up. First off, within the beauty industry, we see a lot of influencer marketing but with your Ambassadresses is there as much a need for that? What kind of role does [influencer marketing] play? Trinny: it's interesting, in a way, because I have across Instagram and Facebook, about 2m followers, I am to an extent an influencer. And because Trinny London is my revenue stream and my brand building, I've never done any deal with anyone. I talk about Zara a lot on my own channel, because I think it's the most internationally available. And I talk about what I love. I was very reticent [about influencer marketing]. When we tried very early on, we worked with rewardStyle. And we paid – what for us then – was a fortune to get them to select the people they thought were good influencers, and I found incredibly low conversion. I think our strategy has been far more that when we look at for Facebook advertising, for example. Facebook advertising has changed their algorithms, so that instead you can still designate an audit audience. But they can also say, ‘Okay, we'll take control of that earlier stage.’ And we will find the algorithm of the people who are buying from you already and match it and do their weird magic, which… it's a computer teaching another computer to teach another computer, it's like a dark hole. Any brand that's going down that route, and deciding to do it, and I do think it's a far more successful route for the influencer route and for our brand, is the importance that these shouldn't really always look like ads. And because people are engaged by something that grabs them that they think is something they're going to learn from. So sometimes you and I would look on our feed and would see an ad, it will grab us, because it's a really clean ad, it's like this will clean your teeth better than any other toothbrush. And you're like, ‘Okay,’ but some other things need a story to be told. And sometimes you think you've got 30 seconds to tell that story, or you've got five minutes to tell that story. But some of our most successful ads on Facebook are just actually women saying, ‘I'm trying this’ and they're telling their story. We have a lot of content, we have at any one time about 200 ads running on Facebook. And that is a strategy that was implemented when our CMO joined us, Shira. Because she said, ‘Look, we really want to put in the marketplace a lot.’ And everyone is going to be attracted by a different bit of content. I think there are some good influencers. But generally, an influencer is a business. And we must respect and appreciate that as a business. But I think to be a really successful influencer, you have to have a proportion of your feed being, ‘This is what I really love, and there's no ad or whatever involved.’ And when you see an influencer, where it's basically ad or affiliation, ad or affiliation, that’s it, there's no objective, ‘This is what I really think about the product.’   The other problem we've got as consumers is magazines are drying up and magazines are going online. The concept of the war between advertising and editorial, which used to be quite strict in a magazine, is very blurred online. Because magazines need to make a revenue, and the revenue is they write an article and the user clicks through and they have an affiliation to that product. And that happens whenever I'm on any magazine. That's a revenue stream. We know that if we read an article in a magazine, and these are the top 10 there'll be a click through to all of them and the magazine is making money because that's the only way they can make money. They are an influencer on a grand scale, but they are still getting the cut like the small influencer is getting a cut, so I'm not sure. But to answer your question in a very long-winded way, for our business, the influencer model is not the right model. There are beauty businesses in Germany, there's a young beauty brand called Bananas or something I can't remember, it's quite often young brand, like a Glossier but younger. And their model is a purely influencers. They put all their revenue that I might put into Facebook into 200, 300, 400 key influencers and it's very successful with them. Is that an age thing or an attitude thing? I'm not sure. Anna: I guess knowing your business as well. I mean, it's going to be different. You're going to have different target audiences, you'll find them in different places. So I definitely think that you do what's right for you. Okay, last thing I'd like to talk about is the the future of Trinny London, and where it's going. Match2Me is a huge part of the overall brand. Do you see yourself moving it on a bit? Say, with augmented reality. We were seeing it with L'Oreal, having apps that you can put makeup on your face virtually, things like that. Do you ever see Trinny London going that way? Trinny: I think that's the fundamental difference between what a lot of brands did during COVID is they did virtual trial, because they knew all their customers wanted to try. Virtual try-on to me, to date, is still gamification. The majority of them come with filters. And it's kind of, for some women, it's like, ‘I know, I'm not going to look like that, because they've made my face perfect.’ Is it just a fun way to play? And would it make me buy the lipstick? On some brands, the conversion is great, because it's catering to an audience that already is building and doing filters on Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok and therefore, they love it. And it kind of makes sense. I think Match2Me is unique, because there is no other beauty brand that is actually saying, ‘Let's look at your skin, hair and eye. And let's look at the refinement of choice of colour that suits you.’ I think that can't be replicated. I mean, I haven't seen anyone do it. And I've been working with four or five different augmented reality and virtual trial brands and have come to the conclusion that, in fact, we are going to develop something internally. Because what I see is very set out of the box plug-ins, and I want to do something which is a step ahead of what these people are currently offering. There is a huge, very interesting opportunity for brands to really personalise and personalise to their customers. But I think there's going to be cleverer ways than just what is still a little bit of gamification. Anna: So, something that perhaps isn't on the market yet? Trinny: Not on the market yet. Anna: Well, that sounds like a good place to wrap up. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Trinny. It was great to have you on. Trinny: It was lovely to talk to you.              You can find out more about Trinny London at trinnylondon.com. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for articles on starting a business of your own and building social media communities. Remember to like us on Facebook at SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lowercase. Until next time, thank you for listening.

In this episode I talk to Merlin Griffiths, pub owner, mixologist and bartender on Channel 4's First Dates. We discuss current difficulties in the hospitality industry and how you can cut your costs.  You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on running a hospitality business and the latest COVID-19 measures. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. We've paired up with Smart Energy GB to bring you this episode.  Would you prefer to read Merlin Griffith'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 Merlin Griffiths, pub owner, mixologist and bartender on Channel 4’s First Dates. Merlin grew up in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He used to own the Priory Tavern in north west London, with his wife, Lucille. These days he runs Maltsters Country Inn, located in Badby. Cocktails are a staple speciality on Merlin’s menus as he’s been a bartender and mixologist for 20 years. He first appeared as the bartender on First Dates in 2013 and the show is currently on its 14th series. We’ll be finding out a bit more about him as well as the challenges facing the hospitality industry.   Anna: Hi Merlin. Merlin: Hi Anna, thank you for having me. How are you doing? Anna: Of course – I'm doing very well, thank you. How about you? Merlin: Yeah, yeah, all things considered, well, I think, yeah. Now, many of our listeners would recognise you as the man behind the bar on First Dates. Tell us more about how you got into the hospitality industry and then onto the show. Merlin: Hospitality – what a trade to be in! It's one of those things, isn't it? Do you plan to go into hospitality? Some people do they really do? I don't think I did. I was quite young, when I first started working as what we call a barback, up in the West End of London. I think I lucked out by getting into the right bar at the right time. This was just as that cocktail renaissance was starting to happen in the mid-90s. Yeah, for me, I mean, it was one of my first jobs in London. I was just happy to have a job really, to work all hours all days or, yeah, do just about anything necessary. You know, it wasn't probably until about five or six years in and you start going, ‘I'm still doing this?’ This is more than just a stopgap of a job, isn't it? Yeah, I think this is now officially a career. And yeah, that's where it's led to now via corporate money. I had a good stint working for five-star hotels out in India for Taj hotels. I was living in Bangalore for a good while. From there, I was headhunted into Bacardi Global, as one of their global ambassadors for Bombay Sapphire gin and Oxley gin at the time. That was a great experience – almost four years bouncing around the world teaching people how to make martinis and from there into pub ownership. It was at that point where we suddenly thought, my partner and I, we’ve been looking at this, and especially on my travels – I've been in America loads – I have this idea that a good American neighbourhood bar, you can still get a really well-made Cosmo or Margarita as well as decent draft beer. And I had this idea that why can't you do the same in a sort of a British pub setting, you know, the cocktail side of things, the drink side of things shouldn't really be mutually exclusive. Cocktails and cask ales, quite literally. So that's sort of where we started cocktails and cask ales and no screens and no machines, because I decided there were enough TVs in pubs at the time as well. Pubs should be sociable. And so that's what it led to that. And it was while doing that, there was a job advertisement for Channel Four. They were looking for a bartender. That's it, it was literally advertised as a job and I was like, ‘Okay, I think I could pull out a small amount of time to have a go at that too’. And I was lucky enough to land it – it’s a fantastic role which I've really, really enjoyed. Just out of curiosity, how do you get headhunted as a barman? What kind of things are they looking for and who approaches you? It’s an odd one, you see, because the social media side. You go online these days and you can find loads of really good bartenders up and down the country and all around the world. There's a really developed network nowadays. But we're going back ten years and it wasn't as developed as we know it now. For me, moving into the job of First Dates, for instance, I was very lucky thanks to the Bacardi Global support. I've done a whole bunch of videos of online training and bits and bobs for them at the time. If you if you literally just search ‘find me as a cocktail bartender’, there were about three pages of me making nice and dry martinis, and Tom Collins [cocktails] and so on and so forth. So really, I think, you know, a certain amount of luck, but at the time. These days, you really have to work hard for it. Anna: I imagine it's not just the showy, throwing bottles over your shoulder and setting things on fire, either. Merlin: No, but that's also fun. Obviously, I was never much of a flair bartender. For me, it always has been about customers and customer service. That's the real key for me as a people business. And I've always said that. The clues in the name hospitality: we’re hospitable. And that's genuinely what we get up to here. It's not about how well can you can mix a martini or how well you can keep your cask ale, all of that. At the same time though, what's really important is how you deal with people, I don't like to use the word customers – ‘guests’ is better. You know, how you deal with your guests, who become friends as well, your local community, especially in the pub game. There is loads to think about when it comes to running a pub. When you took on Maltsters, it was in pretty bad shape when you took it on. How did you turn it around without blowing your budget? Merlin: Slowly but surely, evenly divide the task up piecemeal, otherwise these places can become. Anyone who's taken an old pub or an old, an old tumble-down pub. Why call nil-premium size, anyone who's done that journey knows what I'm talking about, when you have to divide up the task because otherwise it can become overwhelming. Unless you've got unlimited budgets and contracts as to throw it all in one big hit, which let's face it, most of us don’t. I know that at small business level we tend to sort of bootstrap our way up. First things first, yes, I'm going right what obviously, I need to get the kitchen, clean, comfortable, hygienic. Once you do that, we need a basic bar and trade area. So they're the first two things you look at, then we start looking at upgrading the function room, then we start looking at doing the gardens, then we can start looking at doing any of the letting rooms that are available here and things like that. Slowly but surely, now we're only just over three years into our journey here. There's still lots more to do. But you just take it one chunk at a time and make it manageable. One of the things I noticed when I was looking around was that the TripAdvisor reviews before you took [the Maltster] on were also not great, they tended to be one star. How do you recover from these kind of bad TripAdvisor reviews (or other platforms that are similar)? Merlin: I don't know in all honesty. I don't really keep an eye on that side of it. I'd rather keep my eyes on the people that are coming in and the customers that I do have. I think it is as a small business, it's a whole other job managing online and especially getting involved in managing reviews. Some people do very well at it, my hat goes off to them. I decided that my efforts are better placed elsewhere in the business, in looking after those people that I can see in front of me and those people that phone me here to make bookings. Anna: Do you think it was worth would be worth hiring a separate person altogether to deal with that side of things?   Merlin: If you can afford it. I don't know if I can! I mean, that's what sort of segways neatly to the work I've been doing with Smart Energy GB as well with this guide advice. I mean budgets are tighter than ever at the moment. Crikey.  You’ve been vocal on Twitter about how the government has been handling measures affecting the hospitality industry during the coronavirus pandemic. What do you think of the action being taken and what measures would you like to see? Merlin: Honestly, I don't think it's my place to say yay or nay. It's too easy to bash any point of view that people might have at the moment or any approaches that have been taken, realistically, as a small business owner from talking, honestly, so much of it's out of our control. And so much of it is out of my control, at the end of the day, whether I agree with things or not. And in all honesty, what I've really spent since March and up till now doing is looking at what I can control, because it's so easy to feel helpless in these situations. It really is, you know, when you're faced with ever higher hurdles to jump, ever more onerous bits of legislation to go through. But with the help of peers as well, I stay in touch with a large network of publicans these days. One of our groups, we've got about 250 of us chatting away. And it's lovely to be able to bounce ideas off each other and get advice about ways of doing things. This helps you feel more in control, honestly. That's really useful. Because otherwise, it's very easy to get quite down about the whole thing, angry and shouty, or just generally depressed and withdrawn. And, yeah, it's tough. I'm not going to say it's easy. But nonetheless, by approaching this with the idea of what can I control, it certainly makes you feel a little bit better. Ordinarily, I’d be asking about what small improvements hospitality businesses can make to improve and grow, but unfortunately the situation is different right now. What advice do you have for these business owners to get through this time, both professionally and personally? Merlin: I'll start with the personal one. You know, honestly, for me, do one non-work activity that brings you joy, at least once a week. Honestly, it really does feel like we're hardwired to work 24/7, but it is important to try and do that one thing that's just for you, however much you convince yourself that there isn’t time. I cycle – that's my thing. I'll take a couple of hours each week and go for a long ride. I'll get, you know, I'm really sorry. I'm one of those weirdos who dresses up in Lycra. Anna: Oh no, I’m a keen cyclist myself – no judgement here at all! Merlin: I don’t know what age you turn into, what do they call it, a MAMIL (Middle-aged Man in Lycra)? Anna: You’ve got time yet! Merlin: Good, thank you. But honestly, seriously, what I say just do this one thing that brings you joy, even really, if that's something as simple as pulling yourself down to the local park, right, sitting on a bench in some peace and quiet with a cup of tea or coffee and reading a book or doing the crossword, whatever it takes just to try and remove yourself for a moment. It's incredibly important. I think whether people realise it or not, there's this underlying bubbling stress and tension, and especially more so as a small business operator these days. In the survey work that we've done here, as well as 69 per cent of changes in their financial situation has led to negative impacts on their mental health. So, all of that needs to be dealt with, somehow, it really does, before it bubbles over. You can't hold it in. Talk to people as well, you know, utilise your peer networks, really. Friends are really wonderful if you've got a good friend and will listen. But sometimes there are sector-specific things and business owner-specific things. It does help to talk to other people in the same situation in the same boat. Try and get involved in some of the groups that are out there, you know, maybe just to vent a little bit and get it off your chest. Anna: Yeah, I think as a business owner, sometimes you're inclined to put other people, namely your employees, first. Merlin: Always employees. They're like a little family. Honestly, they're extended family. Any small business person knows that, they're the biggest asset you have in your business, your team, your staff, your people. You’ve got to look after them. I mean, in March that was that was the first thing was stressed us – what are we going to do, that stuff we need to make sure they looked after? Like many of us, we looked at our cash flow and thought, ‘Oh, crikey’. Well, it's going to be a while before we get the furlough payments into pay them. So how do we go about this without also bankrupting the business? The true way to look after my staff is to make sure that they've got jobs to come back to as well. You know, and so yeah, we had some very frank and honest discussions with our staff, and they were absolutely brilliant. They worked with us and completely understood. I think we were incredibly lucky to have the team that we do, we really are. I love them all to bits. We've seen on the website that with the increased rate of redundancies, more and more people are interested in starting their own business. What would you say to somebody who wants to start a hospitality business? Merlin: It's hard work but go for it. Honestly. Put in the hours and you get the rewards, quite frankly. It's a great trade to be in. I think it's an absolutely great trade. I've been there – 25 years now behind bars and involved in hospitality in one way shape or form. And ten of those as a landlord. It is absolutely tremendous. I'd say that's awesome. Do it. You know, ONS stats say that 99.6 per cent of British businesses are classed as small to medium businesses. Anna: Most are micro businesses too. Merlin: Yeah, most of those are micro businesses usually. So, best part of six million. It was Napoleon quote who said Britain is a nation of shopkeepers, wasn’t it? Yeah, that hasn’t changed. You know, the small business is what makes this country tick. It absolutely does. It's so incredibly important. Absolutely important. And it's not just that, and it's not just the standards we hear about, you know, jobs in the economy and so on. This is families, livelihoods, children, the socio-economic impact here at a macro level is really far-reaching is incredibly important. It's really easy to sort of get the view these days that Britain's dominated by big business, but of course, they've got marketing budgets, and that's why you hear about them. But really, as you can see from those statistics, 99 per cent it's small to medium – all hail the little guys. I'm going to head back – we started this or with advice as well for small business owners. Let's have a look. What else have we been recommending to people? Controlling controllables is what I wanted to touch on, really. Rent, this is a really big one, but you've got to open conversations with the landlord, haven't you at the moment. Trust me, it's tough to keep calm, but you have to keep calm and do that with a level head. Yeah, again, staff you need to control. This is looking after them in the best ways possible. And now if you're doing this alongside changing your business as well, hopefully, maybe you could find other ways to pick up some hours for staff if you're been exploring the possibilities to go. Normally I serve a bit of food or a bit of drink, but suddenly, well, now you start looking at your site going, ‘I got a licensed A3 space, it's a commercial site. What else can I do with it?’ This hopefully brings out new work, new workflows, new ways of operating, whether that's local groceries, setting yourself up as a sub postmaster, you might do local deliveries, hot takeaway, cold takeaway, there are so many different bits and bobs going on here. There are operators even doing full meals to cook at home from their kitchens, bathrooms being sent out, that there are so many different things. But these are good ways to assure your business so you can provide the hours for your staff. And then you start looking at utilities, get a handle on utilities, and honestly, there again, they're an important part of what you do. And this is where you get into this idea of marginal gains. I'm a big fan of marginal gains, they are a great thing as long tail effect, because if you do enough of them, they actually start adding up to be a significant gain for your business. Anna: If people want to make those marginal gains, how would they go about that? One of the clearest easy wins, contact your energy supplier and see if you can get a smart meter. I think it's a really good, sensible thing to do. up to date information on how your business is running and how much things are costing is essential now more than ever. This is more than just turning lights off. You could start controlling your stock levels, your exposure, and that sort of sense. Tighten up your menus to focus on the crowd pleasers and the profitable dishes and so on. I want to know how much stuff costs to run now, I really do. I've got a sneaking suspicion that I'm going to be able to save a fortune on extra kitchen extracts and some of the electrical hardware in the kitchen, especially, you know, I'm interested to look at when my chef turns this on, when he turns it off, is it actually necessary at certain points If I can save maybe eight to 12 hours’ worth of electric a day, and trust me, you're talking high kilowatt devices here. Ronnie, you know, he was running an electric pizza oven, for instance, out there, they know this is a 12 kilowatt device. Yeah, this isn't small beans we're talking about anymore. These are ways of controlling what you can, knowing that you've trimmed the fat, made your business lean, all those little these things, again, tend to be little things that are going on. They also tend to be at normal trade times, tends to put these things on a back burner – ‘Oh, yeah, I must have looked at that one point’ or they’ve got a whiteboard in the office or a Post-It note somewhere or a to-do list or what have you. And you sort of eventually get around to them. Now is the time to dive into all of that stuff and start getting a really good handle on what you do and the way you work and being prepared to change as well. We all have to adjust. Anna: Yes, it’s also amazing what some small business owners have done in adding in new kinds of services. Merlin: Yeah, it's fantastic for the rural side of things. I'm loving the fact that loads of rural pubs, for instance, are reinstating lost village services like post offices and shops. The fantastic thing is if you look at them as standalone things, I can see why they largely closed in a lot of small villages. It's very difficult to make a profit as a small village shop, given the cost of renting a building, and so on and so forth these days. If you're already doing that as a pub, and you've got the space to expand to a retail offering, right now it's a given win and you're engaging with your community now in new ways, by restoring the services, it’s fantastic. Let's not forget a lot of rural communities as well have people who will be shielding in certain ways or you know, just sort of largely keeping out society's way. So, a chance for them to literally just be able to walk down to the end of the street and get a bottle of milk or something without having to go into town is huge for them. Absolutely huge. Anna: Is there anything else you'd like to add? Merlin: I tell what I will add. Really plug into these hospitality networks, the industry networks, take advice where you can get it, speak to your accountant. If you don't have an accountant, take free financial advice from your bank as they will always be happy to give it, but wherever you can, take that advice. The more people you speak to, the more you suddenly realise you're not alone in all this. And there are ways still to sort of keep the glass looking half full, even though it may look half empty, if I can be so frank. But we are, as I say, creative, resilient, adaptable, this is hospitality! Challenges are something we routinely rise to, something we're very good at overcoming in this business. Anna: Well, that seems like the ideal note to wrap up. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast, Merlin. Merlin: Thank you so much for having me on, Anna, thank you. Watch Merlin in First Dates on Channel 4’s catch-up service, All4. You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more guidance on COVID-19 measures and running your hospitality 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 Charlie Mullins, founder and chairman of Pimlico (formerly known as Pimlico plumbers). We talk about how to build a customer base in the early days and upcoming IR35 changes.   You can also visit smallbusiness.co.uk for more on running a family business. Remember to like us on Facebook @SmallBusinessExperts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lower case. Would you prefer to read Charlie Mullins' 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 Charlie Mullins, businessman and founder of Pimlico Plumbers, now known as Pimlico. After finishing an apprenticeship in plumbing, Charlie launched Pimlico Plumbers in 1979. He started out with a second-hand van and a bag of tools, gradually building up the business. Pimlico reached a £1m turnover in 1994 and currently has a turnover in excess of £50 million. In 2015, Charlie was awarded the UK’s first OBE in relation to plumbing. Earlier this year, his son Scott took on the role of chief executive while Charlie went into the role of chairman. Anna: Hi Charlie. Charlie: Hi Anna. Thanks very much for having us on. Been looking forward to this so I’m very excited, thank you. Anna: Great stuff. How are you doing today? Charlie: Very good. I’m in Marbella in Spain at the moment and we have a small business out here – also to do with Pimlico – and yeah, life's good. I'm going to come back right to the beginning of the business, and a lot of our small business owners are in the early stages themselves. And I'm sure they're wanting to know how you built up your customer base in the early days, especially without tools like social media. Charlie: Yeah, well, thinking back then, back in 1979, I finished my apprenticeship and had been working as self-employed, and then started working in the Pimlico area. I started getting repeat work and that undoubtably, whatever service you're offering, is quality of service. That's what's going to get you customers and keep you busy. I have to say I was a pretty good plumber and offering the service to people required. It starts with word of mouth and then other people will recommend you to other customers. I  quickly learned that the art of it is to retain your customer and back in them days, I think I was working on that basis, and you go to these customers regularly, and that would just sort of get more and more. I quickly learned that it’s retaining a customer that gets you through. First of all, it gives you a customer base, and then it gets you through any difficult times that you may like recessions or lack of work. As the business has progressed, we have a policy now at Pimlico once you’re a Pimlico customer, we work on the basis that you’re a Pimlico customer for life. I would say to anybody starting out, retaining your customer is the way to build up a great customer base. What is the secret to retaining the customer?   Charlie: Quality of service. Quality of service can mean many things: turning up on time, dressing correctly for the for the job, having identification on you, be very transparent in what you're doing, make people aware of your rates before you start, get the job done, tidy up after you. And I think in general, just your sort of behaviour in somebody’s house or for a customer, just be as professional as you can. That could be whether you're in their house, or you're running a business from the internet, or you're sort of got a shop or whatever you got. Undoubtedly, the way forward is quality of service, whether it be a product, whether it be something you're fixing, something you're selling, it's all about quality of service. Anna: I think part of the reason that you became successful was there is a bit of a reputation for cowboy plumbers back then and you wanted to set yourself apart. Charlie: Yeah, well, again, I had the idea that, I thought that when I first started Pimlico that I was doing anything clever, I just thought it was common sense things. I know common sense isn’t that common. I wrote a list down of all the things – or not all the things, but about 20 items that I've heard over the years that customers get unhappy with a plumber. You can do that in any business you're in. Find that what upsets customers and just do the opposite. So, customers used to be very unhappy about a plumber not turning up on time, not finishing the job, leaving a mess, not clearing away any rubbish not being transparent, making excuses why they're not a job, so I thought just done the opposite. In business I’ve also learned to be honest, if you're not getting there because you've got delayed or you're running late or you can't make it, be honest with the customer. Not keep making excuses about ‘I broke my arm’ or ‘my van’s broken down’. I've learned is that customers don't want excuses. They want results. I understand that financing is essential to the running of a business, especially when you're trying to grow. I know that when you're trying to expand Pimlico plumbers, back in 1990, you sought out help from the bank but unfortunately, they turned you down. Can you go a little bit into what happened there and how you overcame it? Charlie: Yeah, well, the business in 1990 was going okay. And what I wanted to do was buy a different premises to operate from, a larger premises. Basically, I went to the bank and they and they lent me the money to buy this property – it was about a quarter million pounds, this was December 1990. Everything was going great. They lend me that money and then around about April, all of a sudden, the recession’s kicked in, maybe I wasn't that aware of it. The recession kicks in, and then the bank basically comes down, I was getting in difficulties with run-ups and debts and didn’t get on top of things. They came down to reassess the property to see whether I could get some more money on it, keep things going. They actually went the other way and told me it's not worth a quarter million pounds now – that's worth £50,000. So, I’d ripped it all out to refurbish it for when we were going to move in, and all of a sudden, it was a property not finished. Basically, I was trying to get an overdraft and keep things going, or even a loan, but they weren't having none of it. If anything, well, they just went the other way. They said, ‘Look, we want our money back.’ And I know people think they can't force you into it, but I borrowed it on another property that I'd owned. And they said to put that property in an auction and I’d get £45,000 for it. Well, I didn't do that. I sold it for £90,000 in the end. With the property that I had in the I was borrowed the money for, they told me to sell that and give them the money I get on it. Well, I didn't listen to them. Well, I don't like banks anyway, they’re crooks in suits – they lend you an umbrella as long as it’s not raining. Anna: I think people do underestimate the power that banks have, especially in situations like these. Charlie: Well, what you mustn't get into is a situation where the banks running your business, telling you what you can do and what you can't do. And they were difficult with me so I said to myself, ‘I need to get rid of you people’. So, we carried on working, sold a few bits and pieces, made a lot of changes in the business and got rid of the bank. I've changed banks, I don't I'm not sure how good banks are these days with businesses. All I do know is that thing I've been with this bank since about 1991/92. I've never met my bank manager. I never will. There's just no point now – I can't work with them. They just left a bad taste with me, as far as I'm concerned. All I do now with the bank is put money in and take it out. Part-way through business, you decided to steer away from solely doing plumbing into other services like air conditioning, carpentry, commercial heating services, what kind of challenges did you face in shifting Pimlico's business model? Charlie: Yeah, it wasn't overly difficult because what I was finding that, with plumbers and engineers, we were sending them to jobs and then customers had a carpenter and needed an electrician, or they had wall damage and needed a plasterer. I just found it so difficult to recommend people because not everybody works on the policy that we work on or the way that we operate. And again, that what I have to say is that it's only common sense and being very professional. But there are so many bad tradesmen out there – I'm not suggesting that's all over because there's some great tradesmen out there. So, the fact that they kept asking for people, and I wasn't comfortable recommending anybody, we started getting our own people. We started employing a carpenter, employing a builder, employing a plasterer. When you go to a job, and if the customer’s happy with you, and all sudden, you've got to send a carpenter or another tradesman, they’re even happier with you because it just flows nice. And they know what they're going to expect. If we're running it on the same terms, which we did, and it's just developed from there, we we've got roofers, air con, electricians, carpenters, painters, tilers. Yeah, all in everything, I think. Were there any sort of changes in legislation or anything related that you had to deal with in taking on different kinds of tradespeople? Charlie: Well, we've got one set of rules and regulations for everybody, so everybody follows our guidelines. And whatever requirements are needed for electrical work, or gas work or roofing work, there's just a formality. The most important thing is that you've got your rules and regulations worked out and everybody complies with that. If it's a successful model, then why would you need to change anything? You just follow the same pattern. And to this day now, like 40 years down the line, it's the same thing. We're seeing with a lot of small businesses right now that they are indeed changing their own business model, say going and taking more of their service online or offering takeaway service at home meal kits, that kind of thing. How has Pimlico adapted to the changing conditions around COVID-19? Because it's not just a central office, you're going into people's homes as well. I can imagine there is more to do in that respect. Charlie: Well, you're right, the world has changed and it’s changed businesses. And again, you have to improve your quality of service to people. And immediately, what we've done was geared up all our tradespeople that go to people's houses with all the requirements: gloves, shoe covers, sanitisers, sinks in their vans, masks. We've got them all geared up correctly, we’ve also done the same for our office: social distancing, temperature machines we've got in there, all the bits that you need to run proper business. And I don’t think it's a big deal if you think about it. It's just like a few things that you put in place. Unfortunately, a lot of people with things in business, they make it too complicated. We didn't stop throughout the epidemic, we haven't stopped and we won't stop. We were allowed to continue working, being essential workers, but we just made sure that it's a safe working environment. From a customer's point of view, we would bring them up and say that you can just let the engineering leave the door open, you haven't got to be in the same room. He’ll come in, do the job, leave, close the door, then you obviously pay by credit card. And that went down quite well with customers. That isn't so how much the case now. People seem to be getting a little bit more used to the situation, the virus is out there, but some people are very cautious. And we're doing what we're required to do, and it's welcome. How do the rules and the guidelines that you give to employees translate to contractors? Charlie: Look, engineers work on a self-employed basis. Some of them have been with me for 30 years, 10 years, five years, 20 years. There are a couple of differences about holiday, sick pay, but as far as working under their umbrella or working on a rules and regulations, it makes no difference whether you're self-employed or employed, the guidelines are the same. You turn up, you do the job, you do what we want you to do, and that's it. Okay, we've had a couple of problems, but it's no big deal. Another potential difficulty we will be facing in the future, year is we've got changes to IR35, coming in April. I do understand that there has been some ambiguity [for Pimlico] in the past around contractors’ status and their rights. I'm wondering, with these changes coming in, how exactly will that change the way you operate? Charlie: Yeah, look, it won't change the way we operate. What it changes is the contract for that engineer. If it says he’s not self-employed, then yes, the choice is PAYE or he needs to go somewhere else, basically. But again, I'm going to say, I don't think it's a big deal. Unfortunately, if they're not going to let them be self-employed, then obviously, they're not going to earn as much, they're not going to be able to claim so much, sort of tax deductions. But there are pluses – they get holiday pay, sickness and they can claim for unfair dismissal. But our policy isn’t necessarily, we’re not trying to get rid of people, we want to retain our engineers. We went to the Supreme Court on this where one of the engineers evidently had a heart attack, but there was a little bit more in it than that, I don’t know why he had a heart attack, non-related to work, and he was self-employed for seven years. And all of a sudden, he wanted to take the advantages of being employed. And we knew that was incorrect. But we went to the High Court and various other courts and it took about eight years, and the end result the Supreme Court came up with that he should have been an employee, but no big deal – we've changed their contracts – the tax people are happy with it, our accountants are happy with it, and we're happy with it. If there's big challenges out there, you just got to try and challenge it that works for everybody. Contractors have already been hit quite hard by COVID. And I can imagine if employers are less willing to pay increased taxes and contributions, they may be get less work from their existing clients as well. How will these changes affect the balance of employees to contractors that you currently have? Charlie: Well, it’ll affect the balance. If they can’t be self-employed, then they’ll have to be PAYE.  But I don't think we'll be cutting their numbers down. I feel we can address it accordingly and work on something that everybody's happy with. I don't think that it’s a big deal but in the same token it's just changes. And if that's what we have to do, then that's what we do. There's a massive demand for skilled workers who can demand good money. I think if you're paying good money, you’re a good company and look after your staff, and keep them busy all year, then people are going to want to work for you. The last question I want to ask is, as mentioned in the intro, your son Scott has taken over as chief exec. And Pimlico is very much a family business because his children, your grandchildren, are also heavily involved in the business. For our audience out there who have family businesses of their own, how do you set that line between work and family life and keep them separate? Charlie: This is a difficult one, and I'm probably going to say, working with your family doesn't work for everybody. And if it does, work it’s great and if it doesn't work then it's terrible, of course. How do you keep it separate? I just think that, obviously, when you're at work, I don't think family issues come up, or that you get too involved with family things. And obviously, when you’re outside of work, you're going to get involved in a little bit of family work things, but I think it's nice to keep them separate as best you can. I didn't really plan anything but when we’re at work and, as much as we’re family, I don't feel that it's the big part of it anymore. In other words, they’re doing the job, they're happy doing it, we're happy with them. I know it's difficult when you've got talk to a family member about it, but on saying that, most family members understand how you operate, and they follow the guidelines. But of course, there’ll be hiccups, bits and pieces. I think we have about 12 or 13 members of family there and all I can say that it's great because I think we're all drinking from the same teapot. And it seems to work. But yeah, that's been our uphill sort of tasks. I'm on my fourth wife now! I’m joking. It can be difficult, but I think pluses outweigh the minuses. Look, you can't run any business, whether it be your family or just other people working for you, without the ups and downs. With any business there's going to be many sleepless nights, there's going to be many struggling for money, but once you get it going, I mean, there’s no business like your own business. Anna: Of course – I think that's the reason that so many people go for it. Charlie: Yeah, that’s right, and a lot of people that want to start their own business, they're toying with the idea for years and playing around with it. They say, ‘I don’t know when’s the best time and Christmas is coming and winter's coming’ and it comes every year, and then it's, ‘This is bad, and the banks are not lending and interest rates’ and they ask me when's the best time to start your own business. Well, the best time to start your own business is when it suits you. You need to get up there and just make it happen, that's what it's about. All the talking doesn't make you a busy business where actual action does, and you’ve just got to get it started. You got a 10,000-mile journey and that starts with the first step, you've got to make that first step in business. It just develops. I mean, I didn't set out to run the largest independent plumbing company or service company in the UK, I set out just to be a plumber. And once I got the bug a bit of the demand and you can employ somebody, and it goes from there. I say this to anybody starting out or even if you're just a small business, the ways to become successful, obviously, quality of service, I'll always say that's number one. And number two is to employ people take on staff, whether it be friends, family or people you don't know but are believed that you need to employ people to grow your business because this is not about one person. It's a team affair and your business is only as good as the people that work for you.      Anna: Well, I think that is an ideal place to wrap up, so I'll leave it there. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast, Charlie. Charlie: That's been good and obviously if anyone wants to check the website at pimlicoplumbers.com, there are some pieces on there. As Charlie said, you can find out more about him at pimlicoplumbers.com You can also visit small business.co.uk for articles on building your customer base and running a family business. Remember to like us on Facebook at Small Business Experts and follow us on Twitter @smallbusinessuk, all lowercase. Until next time, thank you for listening.

Anna Jordan Douglass, the founder and Chief Creative Officer of Makefully, a studio & consultancy specializing in research, design and production of educational media, technologies & learning environment for kids. A former VP of digital development & Interactive at the iconic Jim Henson Company, A PhD of creative education from University of Wisconsin & now at Makefully she's working with every big name in children's entertainment & education to bring kids directly into the creation process w/ a co-design method she's adapted all around the ideas of interest-driven learning & purposeful production. Anna is not your every day creative mind, but she sure the hell is one of my favorites, taking principles of science & academia and applying them to prove that not only can learning be fun, but that it must be. If you're a youth marketer, a creator of content for kids, or if you're a parent, I think this one is a must-listen. Find out more about Anna & the Makefully team:https://makefullystudios.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/annajordandouglass/Follow the "Pop-Marketer" Joe Cox on Social MediaTwitter: @joenormalInstagram: @joecoxInstagram "The Pop-Marketer": @popmarketerLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jocoxMedium: @joenormalhttps://www.pop-marketer.com/

Anna Jordan Douglass, the founder and Chief Creative Officer of Makefully, a studio & consultancy specializing in research, design and production of educational media, technologies & learning environment for kids. A former VP of digital development & Interactive at the iconic Jim Henson Company, A PhD of creative education from University of Wisconsin & now at Makefully she’s working with every big name in children’s entertainment & education to bring kids directly into the creation process w/ a co-design method she’s adapted all around the ideas of interest-driven learning & purposeful production. Anna is not your every day creative mind, but she sure the hell is one of my favorites, taking principles of science & academia and applying them to prove that not only can learning be fun, but that it must be. If you’re a youth marketer, a creator of content for kids, or if you’re a parent, I think this one is a must-listen. Find out more about Anna & the Makefully team:https://makefullystudios.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/annajordandouglass/Follow the "Pop-Marketer" Joe Cox on Social MediaTwitter: @joenormalInstagram: @joecoxInstagram "The Pop-Marketer": @popmarketerLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jocoxMedium: @joenormalhttps://www.pop-marketer.com/

This week's guest is Bruntwood Prize winning playwright, screenwriter and director Anna Jordan. Her work has been performed in theatres around the country from the Royal Court to the Royal Exchange. On screen you'll have heard her whip smart dialogue in shows such as Succession and Killing Eve. Her down to earth charm is combined with a furiously wicked humour – finding laughter and hope in the darkest of places. And it's this combination that is so striking in her monologue for The Bunker's Everywoman, in which playwrights wrote confessions on parenting and identity. Anna's piece was on her miscarriages and navigating a potential motherhood whilst losing her own mother. In Anna's signature style, the account is far from hopeless, more, it's an honest tale about a subject that is still so little spoken of without shame and fear. Anna had three missed miscarriages before she had her son (who makes a star appearance). She talks to us about trying for a baby, the losses along the way, what a missed miscarriage is and the choices that follow. We discuss how writing can help us find a way to remember and the joy of finding just the right word for some of the most painful experiences of life. Anna explores the shame of blood, who to tell about your miscarriages and the act of falling in love with her pregnant body after years of self-scrutiny. She says ‘if one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage then why as a society don't we talk about this more? Why is it that anything that occurs below the belly button and above the knee of a woman is talked about in whispers?'We do go to some darker places here about so take care if you've been affected by miscarriage.CW: Miscarriage, deathAnna is a terrific workshop facilitator and will running a Nurture Ideas and Keep Them Alive workshop on Thurs 3rd Sept, perfect for anyone who wants to get that writing idea down on paper however experienced you are- you can book on eventbrite HEREAnna is represented by Camilla Young at Curtis BrownRead more about Anna's experience in her blog HERE*For support about pregnancy, miscarriage and pregnancy loss/still birth you can contact:Tommy's CharityThe Miscarriage Association provide free advice and supportAnd Sands.org for stillbirths and neonatal... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The NHB Playgroup from Nick Hern Books brings you one free play to read and discuss each week, followed by a Q&A with the writer. In this episode of The NHB Playgroup Q&A Podcast, we spoke to Anna Jordan about her hard-hitting but tender drama Yen, winner of the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting in 2013. See more about The NHB Playgroup and find out how to get involved here: www.nickhernbooks.co.uk/playgroup See more about the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting here: www.writeaplay.co.uk/ Host: Siân Mayhall-Purvis Producer: Jon Barton Executive Producer: Matt Applewhite 

Remember when nuance was a thing? Once upon a time, it was an earmark of a civilized society to cultivate conversations where a difference of opinions could be aired with equal parts grace and wit.   Hosts Colleen Powell, Anna Jordan, and Jenn Batchelor are reviving nuance. Join us (and the occasional guest) in the space between small talk that skates the surface and a deep dive from the couch with your therapist.   The Medium Talk Podcast: coming to your earbuds on January 7th, 2020.

It's the last episode of 2019 and Colleen is sharing what she learned this year from listening to all her guests. This year provided so much food for thought as she listened and learned from a variety of people. Find out what were the most popular episodes and which ones have stuck with Colleen long after the microphone was turned off.   Colleen also announced her future project, The Medium Talk Podcast with Jenn Batchelor and Anna Jordan. It drops in January and she'd love for you to be a part of the launch team. You can join the team here.   Also mentioned in this episode: Episodes 47, 54, and 59: Sexual Orientation and the Church part One, Two and Three Episode 48 :Parenting in an Age of Judgement Episode 50: Separating Church and State, God and Politics Episode 60: Reclaiming the Singular Narrative  Episodes 46: Post Incarceration Rehabilitation and Employment and Episode 55: Mass Incarceration and Prison Reform Episode 69: White Supremacy and the Church Episode 72: Listening Across Differences Episode 74: A Conversation About Outrage Culture Episode 79: A Conversation About the Role of Government #ListenFirst Living Room Conversations Pantsuit Politics The Medium Talk Podcast  Medium Talk Instagram

In this episode we talk Enneagram, or rather the pros and cons of this ancient self-knowledge tool.  Colleen chats with two friends, Jenn Batchelor and Anna Jordan (from episode 77), about why they love the Enneagram, how its current popularity has effected its use, and what can be problematic about the Enneagram.  Whether you've been doing a deep dive into the Enneagram for months, or you've just started wondering what the heck it is, this conversation will help you to understand the highest and best uses of the Enneagram. If you are new to the Enneagram you can find information at the Enneagram Institute.  Check out The Liturgists Enneagram episode (episode 37) for a great overview of each of the nine types.  Annie F. Downs EnneaSummer is another great introductory series.  Suzanne Stabile is our favorite Enneagram Wizard.   Connect with Anna and Jenn!  They are both writers for the very popular Coffee + Crumbs website. You can find Anna on Instagram or at her website.  You can find Jenn on Instagram or her website.

This week's discussion deals with the topic of transracial adoption and parenting.  Guest Anna Jordan is a writer and educator as well as a mom to three, including a son who came to her family through adoption.  Anna and Colleen discuss Anna's family's story, the unique challenges that face transracial families, and how the conversation around transracial adoption has changed in the last 30 or so years.  They also delve into adoption ethics and what family's need to consider before diving into transracial adoption.   Follow Anna!  Find information about Anna on her website and follow her on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.  Also, if you are interested in more information about Anna and adoption check out her appearance on the Coffee and Crumbs podcast.   Also Mentioned in this Episode: No White Saviors instagram account Lord of the Flies by William Golding The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

It was in Manchester in 2013 that Anna Jordan won the Bruntwood Prize, the UK's biggest national competition for new plays. She's now back in the city with her new adaptation of a stage classic – Mother Courage. Bertolt Brecht set his play in 17th century Europe during the Thirty Years' War but Jordan has moved the story into the future. It's 2080, and Europe no longer exists, the countries have been replaced by a grid system with individuals struggling to survive between the warring factions.Six-time Grammy-winning composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard has written the music for all of Spike Lee's films since Jungle Fever in 1991, and this year he was nominated for a Bafta and an Oscar for his original score for Lee's latest, BlacKkKlansman. The composer discusses his approach to his film music, and the challenge of writing the soundtrack for When the Levees Broke, Spike Lee's 2006 documentary about the devastation of Blanchard's home town of New Orleans.The success of Get Out at last year's film awards gave many horror fans a sense that the genre was finally getting the attention it deserved when it came to the big prizes. But that hope has been dashed as once again, horror has failed to be included in any of the high profile categories in awards such as the Oscars and the BAFTAs. Actor and writer Jacob Trussell, horror film and music producer Mariam Draeger, and critic Gavia Baker Whitelaw discuss why horror should be getting more prizes at the big film awards.