S4, E3: Developing and Scaling Challenger Brands with John Stapleton (Entrepreneur, Speaker, Investor, Advisor and Mentor).

A founder of three start-ups, John is an expert at developing new and innovative brands. John now actively manages an investor/Non-Executive Director portfolio contributing value-added business growth advice, guidance and mentoring to business owners.

In 1987 John co-founded The New Covent Garden Soup Co Ltd., which pioneered and grew the fresh soup category in the UK. On reaching over £20m revenue, Daniels PLC bought New Covent Garden Soup Co in 1998. In that same year, John co-founded Glencoe Foods Inc., to bring the fresh soup concept to the US. On returning to Europe, John established a consumer branded food consultancy and worked with a number of corporate and early-stage growth businesses across the FMCG sector in the UK, US and continental Europe.

In 2005, John co-founded Little Dish, which supplies healthy, natural and convenient meals and snacks to children over one year old. Little Dish created the chilled toddler food category, developing full UK retailer distribution and became the go-to brand in fresh toddler food and healthy snacks. Having grown to approx. £15m annual revenues, John exited Little Dish in 2017.

Now leveraging his extensive experience, John provides business growth advice and mentorship to growing businesses; is a business thought leader and speaks on a wide range of entrepreneurial management & motivational leadership topics:  www.johnstapleton.eu/keynote-topics

Get ready to be inspired…..5-4-3-2-1. 

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Email: john@stapleton.eu

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Transcript

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You're feeling really down and you're constantly reliving it and over. And you should have, could have, would have. Don't get me wrong. We all do this, right? I'll just do it like for 10 minutes and then move on. Right. Because you can't undo it. Okay. Maybe you have made a mistake. Well, you've made it now. It's out there. Right. Done. Yeah. So figure out what to do next. Welcome to the Get Unstuck Fast Viscosity podcast brought to you by VLM training and coaching specialists across the UK and Australia hosted by me. Vicki Main. Are you a business owner, leader, or executive? Have you ever felt stuck or disappointed where your life or business is heading? Do you ever feel overwhelmed, compare yourself to others, or feel like you're swimming in treacle at times? This podcast is here to help you get unstuck fast, from viscosity to achieving escape velocity and expanding your knowledge. Our guests on the show will share practical tips and real life experience about how they got out of negative situations or circumstances to live their best life on their terms. We will be sharing real life stories from real people doing some incredible things. Stay tuned for our next guest. Welcome to season four, episode three of the Get Unstuck Fast Viscosity podcast. I'm your host, Bikki Mayne, and today we have special guest, Bikki. John Stapleton on the show, who is an awesome entrepreneur, speaker, investor, advisor, and mentor. Welcome, John. It's great to have you on the show. Thank you. That's a fantastic introduction. I just hope I live up to that as you've set it out, but yeah, let's go for it. Looking forward to this. Thanks, John. Well, first of all, I want to say you've had an incredible career and you've been a founder of three startups. Possibly more, which you might wanna share, and you're one of the Europe's leading experts in developing new and innovative consumer brands, including the new Covent Garden Soup Company Limited, which was pioneered, and you grew the fresh soup category in the uk. I was also customer of yours back in the day in the nineties and on reaching over 20 million in revenue, you sold New Common Garden Soup Company in 1998. So that's one of your. Amazing startups that grew and you exited that. Can you tell listeners about more of your career journey and what you're doing now? Crikey. How long do we have? I'm very happy to do that. I mean, if you want to go back to the beginning, professionally was 1987 when we set up Newcombe Garden Soup Company. I'm old, but I'm not that old. So I didn't do anything before of any significance, professionally anyway, Then I came out of university. So 1987 for a lot of people listening will seem like a long time ago. And it is a long time ago to the extent that we didn't have any fresh soup then. And I'm talking, obviously in the UK context, I know many of your listeners are from the UK and many from overseas as well, Australia and the US. But from a UK perspective, it'd be really obvious that, you know, fresh soup has been around for a long time. It's ubiquitous now. And those who were born after 1987 will go, really? Fresh soup has been a thing for a long time. Well, back in 1987, it wasn't a thing at all. All liquid soup was in a can, and if you wanted to get a manufacturer or somebody to make fresh soup for you or liquid soup for you, they'd say how big do you want the can to be? And we didn't want it to be in a can for a whole bunch of different reasons. Basically, if you put soup in a can, if you put anything in a can, you heat the living daylights out of it, right? Which is fine for a shelf life and making it safe and making it last long. But it doesn't taste so good. In fact, it doesn't taste of anything like you want it to taste. We wanted the soup that we made to taste, funnily enough, of the ingredients we put into the soup, right? So we wanted tomato soup to taste like tomato. Now, tomato soup out of a can doesn't taste bad at all. It's very good, in fact. People like it. But it tastes something different than tomato. It's had a lot of sugar added to it. It caramelizes when you heat it up. But it tastes sweet, in effect. Which is why kids love it. Well, we wanted a tomato soup to taste of tomatoes. And if you grill tomatoes, you know what I mean? It's like, that's like kind of italic y acidity flavor, which is what fresh tomatoes are all about. And then extrapolate that across all the other flavors. So we wanted the product to taste of the ingredients we put into it, not at the process you use to make it safe and give it 18 months shelf life. So that was the basic starting point. And we, you know, didn't really know anything about the food industry or anything about business or almost anything about life because I was straight out of university. I had a degree in food science. So I knew a little bit about the theory about food, but no application, no real experience. And Andrew, my business partner, the guy that I met way back, whose idea it was actually, he was a stockbroker and he was a kind of a, you know, a good cook. And that was about it though, in terms of the food experience. So the two of us together, we met in Reading. I was at university there studying food science and he lived locally and he came to Reading. To ask the guys there, to ask the food scientists there, how do you go about making fresh soup? And of course he went to the wrong place. As an entrepreneur coming to a university, you know, you're talking two different languages. Science and academia is all about first principles and you come up with a theory and you test a small little piece and you move on from that over, over a number of years, you've ended up with a theory and you have it proven. And of course with entrepreneurship, you don't have the luxury of any of that time. It's all about gut feel and instinct and intuition. And you have a supposition and you have a bit of consumer insight and you extrapolate that into something more. And then you think you know what you're talking about until maybe somebody proves you wrong. And then you pivot and do something else because you figured out a better way of doing it. That's what entrepreneurs do. So asking the science guys at university in Reading, you know, how I go about making fresh soup, they looked at him like he had two heads and said, what does that mean? I mean, how could you do that? You'd kill somebody. The scientist said, you would kill somebody if you put soup in a carton. Because you won't be sterilizing it, like you put soup in a can. There's a reason why soup's in a can, to make it safe. And if you put a soup in a carton, we will kill somebody. We're told, don't even think about it. It's a bad idea. You will kill somebody. Now, when we sold New Covent Garden in 1998, I think we had sold, on average, about 50 million cartons of soup. 50 million of these. Wow. As far as I know, we hadn't killed one person by then. So, so much for that, but you know, people were very scared about doing things differently. And I think that's one of the problems you get as an entrepreneur is like, why would you mess with something that works? You know, there already is a soup destination. This is the only thing they say to us by the way, it exists already. If consumers want soup, they go down the soup aisle. So it already exists, you know. And, and we were trying to explain, yeah, fine, soup in a carton is something really different. Again, it's, it's made to taste different. Uh, so we're not trying to compete with those guys who already are happy to buy soup in a can. People who are prepared to pay money for that quality. So it's, it's fine. We're not trying to take them away from canned shoppers. We're trying to provide something different. And then the other experts or so called experts said, you'll never get that space. Your retailers would never give you this chill. They guard that chill space for their own label purposes. You know, back then, certainly there was very, very few, in fact, any brands in the chill space at all. It was all what we call own label. And the third thing they said was the carton. I mean, the consumers won't understand the carton. You know, the consumers, you don't put soup in a carton. You put milk in a carton. You put juice in a carton, 1987, but you don't put soup in a carton. Now, the one thing we did do right, we didn't know at the time, of course, was putting soup in a carton because the consumers loved it. You know, the product spoke freshness. It screamed off the shelf, said, I'm fresh. The consumers go, well, what's this thing doing in here? This doesn't belong in here. Oh, it's soup. All right. And eventually they bought it. And the whole idea of a brand is it talks to a target audience and it gets their attention and they like anything. That's not, that's something I could buy. So we had that repeat purchase. So those of you who said the carton won't work were completely wrong. Now we said the carton will work, but we didn't know why we were completely right until we did it. And that's the nature of being an entrepreneur. I think you have a bit of consumer insight and you think, you know, it's going to work. And if it does work, it typically works for a whole bunch of other reasons than you thought it would work. And you keep going and that's, you know, I grew up that way. I was my introduction to not just soup and not just to food, but to business. And so I've never done anything other than set up my own business and done things differently and booked the conventional wisdom and try to prove people who told me who are experts that I was wrong. I was trying to prove that they were wrong. Um, because I thought I had some insight that would have confirmed that I was right. It's not always the case. And sometimes you have to realize, Oh, I'm not quite right about that. So you do change things around and that's the nature of being agile and moving quickly as an entrepreneur. So I'll stop there, but maybe that answers your question a little bit, at least about Newcomer Garden and why we did it and how it works. Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, first of all, congratulations on what you did there. That really set you off on a propel to really take your entrepreneurship journey to the next level. And I guess from being a university student and collaborating with someone who was a stockbroker, as you say, Andrew, your business partner. Would you say some of it was luck or would you say it was very much determination that really set you off on that journey and just knowing what you wanted, knowing what problem you were gonna solve, and just really going for it? What was the secret source for you there? I think it is a question of determination, though. I, I love to say it was all determinations. Luck is involved along the way and, and it's not all down to luck. People say, oh look, you just, it's not that either. A lot of, a lot of hard work involved trying to prove yourself right. Especially everybody else is telling you you're wrong. I think the issue is though, that I guess like alluded to, it is about the determination. And I say a lot of times to people that they really should embrace adversity. I think entrepreneurial life is full of adversity and it's easy as I Normal person, and we're all normal people to kind of try to avoid adversity because who wants to live in an adverse world? It's, it's challenged, it's setback, it's been told you're wrong. It's falling over. It's tough. It's really, really tough. And I think as an entrepreneur, you have more than your fair share of adversity. But the point about it is that that's okay. It's not like the world is ganging up on you to single you out and make you feel shit, frankly. You might feel shit all the time, but you have to kind of think, well, hang on. Not to be this way, I could have gone and got a job. I'm not saying any other job has the absence of adversity because nothing worthwhile ever is. Somebody called Lou Oat, I think said, show me somebody who's achieved anything worthwhile in life, not just in business, but in life. And I'll show you somebody who has had to deal with adversity and has overcome adversity. And I really think that's pretty cool. I like that. The corollary of that I like even better, which is it doesn't experience adversity. You're not doing anything worthwhile. And it's a bit direct that, but it's actually been thinking about it. It's true. And who achieved anything exciting or interesting or innovative, or maybe even successful by not doing something worthwhile? Because, you know, putting yourself out there is all about not playing it safe. And if you're playing it safe. You're selling yourself short and you're not really doing what's worthwhile. So for me, it's kind of like we chose this world. Entrepreneurs didn't choose the path of least resistance. We chose the difficult path. And if you're in that kind of environment, then it stands to reason that you're going to get setbacks all the time. You're going to have people queuing around the blog to tell you you're wrong. Well, that might sound unfair. Well, fine. It's unfair if you want it to be unfair, but it's just the way it is. I mean, the point about unfair is unfair happens all the time. You know, life is unfair. I think this sounds really kind of like the now thing to say, but, but life really is unfair and it's only a problem if you want it to be a problem. And I kind of think the more you're an entrepreneur and the more you put yourselves in harm way and the more you swim against the tide and uproot trees and crush through walls and all those things that you're meant to do as an entrepreneur, in fact, you have to do as an entrepreneur because you keep getting going to be telling no, no, no, you're wrong. It won't work crazy. Forget it. Go back. You keep going to be telling that. Either directly or you'll be confronted by it because the consumer won't respond or whatever you try to achieve won't happen. All this is happening constantly. When you said I have a thick skin, I think I'm not be arrogant to the extent of I know better. Who knows if you know better, you might know better, but the idea is you've got some consumer or customer insight that says, okay, no, I do know better because this person who said no, or doesn't understand it, hasn't got it yet. Hasn't really, you know, got to the point where they can see what I can see. Yeah. You have to prove it. You have to prove that they're right. So this embracing adversity point coming back to that is, I think it's really relevant because it means it recognizes that adversity is a good thing in that the more adversity you have, the more likely it is you're onto a good thing and you have got a good idea and the more that's thrown at you like this and being unfair to you, singling you out. You chose the fact that, that, that you, you want to be put yourself in the way of challenge and setbacks because you're doing something new, you're doing something that everybody told you, who should know better, should be experts, told you wouldn't work. And you're saying, yeah, I hear you, but you're not right. I'm still going to do it anyway. And if that's the case, then it stands to reason you've got, you're going to have setbacks. So I think you just need to be okay with that. Um, because if you're not, you'll never get out of the blocks. If you're constantly thinking about what everybody else is thinking and what everybody else is telling you. And so there is, there is an issue of the final point I make about this is that there is an issue of being arrogant. And I, I would put it in the context of ego. I think you have to, to a certain extent, have a degree of ego. To stand there and listen to everybody telling me you're wrong and still say, I'm going to do it anyway, and I'm kind of right. You've got to go and prove it. That's the point. You can't just say it. You can, but you won't get anywhere. But the ego you have to actually do that and say that and maintain that position. I think that's what does make a difference. Now, sometimes that ego can tip over and become a problem, which is a real interesting balance to get right. But I think positive ego, I think in coin a phrase, if that, that makes any sense. It's something you need to have bucket loads of. And what were the times during the journey of setting up the new Covent Garden Soup Company and having, and going on that journey, were the times where your back was against the wall and you thought like, shit, like, this is just insane. What am I doing? And then having that adversity, and how did you get past that? Was it just, you know, going to bed, waking up the next day and thinking, what was I thinking? Or what were the times where you were like, this is, this is, Impacting you personally, or was it not too bad? Was it a smooth journey? I'm just curious because I'm sure there's other entrepreneurs out there who at this moment in time are thinking I'm giving up. I've had enough. You know, whether it's a cashflow issue or whether they're not reaching the target market and what, what advice would you give them based on your experience? Well, well, okay. Great question. And I can only go on the experience I've had. So I'm not for a moment suggesting that, okay, there's three businesses I set up. So I have three different versions of this story to succeed it, two businesses succeeded and then one, one failed. And you learn an awful lot more from the failure, by the way. But just let's talk about one of the successes, which is new Covent Garden. By the way, I refer to my career as a shit sandwich, just to be very clear, because I had a success at Starbucks, which is a newcomer garden tube company. I had another success, commercial success anyway, at the end. Well, the third business, not the end, the third business, which was a little dish. And in the middle, I had a failed business called Plain Cold Foods, which was the business in the States. Uh, so it was, it was a success. A bunch of shit and success again, and it's interesting to have it, you know, go that way around. It certainly wasn't the bed of roses by any means, but I think one of the differences was it was the first business. I didn't know any better and ignorance is bliss. And I just had a university. I didn't really know what I was doing, which brought its own challenges and made it quite difficult in lots of ways. I remember thinking. You know, I was responsible for things, which I clearly wasn't trained for. I was a scientist, don't forget. So I did develop the technology. We actually patented the technology to put soup in a carton. Can you believe? In 1987. And we thought that was a major issue in terms of IP. And it's probably important at the time, but not as important as I thought. Yeah. But having gone through that phase and developing technology, I was then responsible for other things in the business, like financial stuff and commercial stuff, which I had no training for. And I remember sitting there thinking, okay, so who's responsible for this? And then it would dawn on me that I was responsible for this. If I wasn't responsible for doing it, I was especially, certainly responsible for making the decision about it. Which is a very scary place to be when you think, how on earth did I get into this place? I mean, who thought this was a good idea? Answer me. Because, you know, who else is responsible for the business? Andrew and myself were kind of cracking on doing things. And while we were successful, we had a tiger by the tail in terms of demand because it began to work quite quickly. So there wasn't the kind of worry about this isn't going to work. There was a worry about that we'll screw it up, despite it being a good idea, because we had no idea what we're doing. But it wasn't like we were scrubbing around for demand, which might sound like, okay, that's success. That's great. You had an easy time. No, we had a huge struggle trying to keep up with demand and keep up with success. But I think mentally we had this tiger by the tail, so we weren't kind of sitting around wondering what to do. We were just going from one thing to the next, the next, the next. We're probably doing, making a whole bunch of mistakes. I mean, we definitely made a whole bunch of mistakes. We were a bunch of happy amateurs, really going from one thing to the next, you know, like headless chickens, almost. Luckily though, all the mistakes we made, none of them were terminal. As lucky as it could easily have been. You know, we developed a good product. We put it in a carton, which turned out to be great. And we loved it. And we built a factory, which made this stuff. And then we had to sell the stuff. I think one big challenge at the very beginning, which I underestimated was how long it would take to actually put soup in a carton. It took us 18 months to put soup in a carton. You might think, well, yeah, I mean, that sounds ridiculous. Right. But yeah, just at a moment there to explain that at the time, I think I already said that, you know, there's no fresh soup. So cartons like these you'd find in the supermarket, but really they had milk in them and the systems designed, the filling systems, the machines designed to fill these things were all designed around. Milk, which is, doesn't have any bits in them, right? It's liquid, only liquid, and it's cold. And when you have hot stuff, you feel this hot. When you have hot stuff, it's very non viscous. So it's very watery. Trying to fill watery stuff with bits in it is really, really difficult. I sometimes describe it as, you know, you've got three egg cups and you got a big bucket of hot water and you got bits in them and you got to pour this stuff into each egg cup. So each egg cup is full. And that's it. And each egg cup has the same number of bits in it, and you don't spill any. I need you as quickly as possible because it's a, I think it's a crazy idea. Whoever thought that up, again, me, and then we had to kind of make that work. It took 18 months to get a system that would fill soup with bits in it into the, we're not splashing all over so you could seal it. I mean, why would it take 18 we had raised a certain amount of money to get us through that period of time, which we thought it'd be like, you know, 18 weeks or whatever. We didn't think it'd be 18. We thought it'd be like a couple of, maybe two or three months because we thought that'd be a straightforward challenge, a challenge nonetheless, but one that we didn't kind of think it'd be. It would set us back so much. So all the money ran out and, you know, the window was closing in terms of the viability of this project, because we couldn't get this to work. We couldn't launch because we couldn't, you know, you're right. And at that point you do sit there, you know, with soup on the walls and soup in the ceiling and no bloody soup in the car from thinking what we underestimated completely how much of a problem this would be. And, you know, I guess we found a way to make it work ultimately by hook or by crook, by doing all sorts of things. We didn't really. Anticipate having to do, and then we got to a point, okay, we now have technology, we had safety, we have shelf life, we have products, we have cartons, we can launch. And then it worked. Once we got product on the shelf, people bought it off the shelf. But that's knowing the end of the story. At the time, you don't know the end of the story. You're sitting there going, when is this problem going to end? When am I going to break through and get onto all your problems? I know, I anticipate. So it's a difficult place to be. But, you know, I think you just have to be tenacious and have resilience and resilience, you know, it's one of the things I look for in people when I recruit them for businesses these days or have done in my businesses since then. And it's one of those kind of elusive qualities that you can't really tell until you're in the shitty place where you have to deliver a lot of resilience to get out of that shitty place. It's difficult to kind of uncover that. But, you know, life at New Covent Garden was all about all of that. So it was successful on the outside, it was successful on the inside too, but a huge amount of challenge to actually get it right. And that was a great learning curve for me for, for 10 years to go and do the next thing. And thanks for sharing that. It's really insightful. You talked about having. Your shit sandwich, if you like. And the second part of your entrepreneurial journey was going to the US, setting up a new company and, or scaling over there. What were your biggest learnings from that experience? And you talked about failure, but I'm sure there were lots of lessons that then took you to your next business, which was co founder of Little Dish. Yeah, and we really shouldn't gloss over the whole Glencoe food, which is the U. S. business so quickly because it's easy and it's very tempting to do so because it was a failure. It's kind of like, Oh, you know, that didn't quite work out, but you know, the next one day, let me talk about that. It is about learning from failure. And my experience was really a pressure learning from failure. I keep saying the ones who listen to me and those who know me better. Are sick and tired of hearing me saying that the five years in the States, that failure, I learned more from those five years than I did from the two 10 year successes either side. When I say success, I mean, commercial success. We set up Newcomen Garden and we set up Little Dish and there were completely different businesses at different eras and all the rest, but, but we set it up, brought in shareholders, got a nice exit. Everybody benefited from it. And some of the shareholders were very happy. Products were great. Consumers loved this. Retailers loved this more or less most of the time. Retailers never loved it all the time, but it was a success on any level you want to look at. Now, by definition, if that's how you measure success, then Blanco Foods, the bit in the middle, it was a failure. It's never the case that it's completely a failure, because if it's a failure, really, obviously you won't do it. You won't even do it. But if it becomes obvious that it's a failure at the early stage, when you shut it down and move on. What happened really was like a death by a thousand cuts, because you kind of think, well, there's enough stuff here, which is successful to turn it around and to turn it into a success. We had customers for a start. We just didn't have enough customers, but we had customers, which means that you could point to these customers who love the product. In a similar way to they loved it in the UK. Yeah. They loved the product and they thought it was wonderful. And they loved the, the NPD, the new product we bought out. And there's a whole bunch of different things we loved about it, which gives you confidence that this isn't going to be a failure, you just need to find a way to make it commercially work, in other words, find more people like that. And we just ran out of time. And there's a whole bunch of reasons, which you can get into certainly if you want to, but a whole bunch of reasons why that business failed. The question though, is what did I. Personally learn from it and we can talk about, you know, soup in a carton for the U S market, certainly, but, but really that was kind of a whole bunch of circumstances through a business called Glencoe Foods that failed, that delivered first of all, a huge kick in the teeth to me, because don't forget I'm coming out of a success here. Of course, I'm quite young because I come out of university without any real experience of anything and made this up with everybody else, by the way, I As we went along and came out the other end, somehow 10 years later, it was a success. Everybody goes, well done. So I go, that's how you are successful because I don't know any different, right? The problem with success is it's a lousy teacher. You're constantly putting lots of different levers all at the time to be successful. You're never going to be successful and do one thing and then wait until that works. You don't. You don't have the luxury of that. And you kind of figure out, okay, there's five or six things I need to do here. Blitz it and, and do everything really well and success either or not. Right. And then you had to figure out if it doesn't work. So while you pivot or you change, but this was a success. So I now have a recipe for success or so I thought. I certainly have a recipe for success in fresh soup. I mean, crikey, who knows more about fresh soup in the entire world than me? I mean, that's not, that's not a lame claim to make. It's a quite a reasonable claim to make because we invented the whole thing. And I know it was 10 years later and other people were doing fresh soup as well then, but, you know, fresh soup in a carton. Nobody else really, and that was my, you know, claim, which was a quite reasonable claim. So everybody loved that claim to the extent that they invested behind the business in the States. So we had shareholders pick up behind me and we had retailers that believed the idea because we could show what we did in the UK and we had consumers who loved it anyway. And so all those things were there as essential ingredients to make this a success. And when you fail, everybody looks at you going, I thought you knew this stuff. Uh, and I'm going, I thought I knew this stuff too. And you get to a point where maybe everybody isn't looking at you and pointing at you, but you certainly feel like they are. And you certainly think they should be because you're the one who said it would work. Pointing to the U. S. as a case study where it should work. There are always differences. You know, I think, who was it? Mark Twain said the UK and the US are two countries divided by a common language. And if ever there was a case in point, I proved that, but you can't just say, okay, so, you know, we didn't get everything right. We, we didn't get everything right, but we got a lot right. And you know, it was a whole bunch of things that were different about the US market to the UK market, which we didn't really in time get right. And then somebody tried to buy us by the way. Now I was very circumspect about this. I thought. The US is a very litigious country and you gotta be careful. Apologies to any US listeners, but it, it is right. Certainly compared to if you're coming from, from the uk, you kinda just be extra careful about getting into any lawsuits with anybody and you just make sure everything is right. Nothing wrong with making sure everything is right, but these guys came knocking on our door. They were the owners of the brand called Nor or Kor K, which is a powdered bullion base in a, in, in a Sache, which you can buy in the UK by in Europe. I think it started off in Germany. You certainly back in the States. And nor wanted to move into chill and they thought the easiest way, best way to move into chill was go and buy this business called Blanco Foods. We weren't really out of the blocks. We were just about launched. They obviously had looked at us, waited till they launched and came knocking on our door. And I was very anxious about this. I thought, these guys don't want to buy us or we haven't proven anything yet. I wouldn't buy us. Not yet. They probably just wanted to use our technology, get to know us and do it themselves. So that was my initial, which isn't a bad place to start from, except it took us 18 months to get to the point where we recognized they were genuine and we were distracted from running our business for 18 months. The soup season is in winter, which means you've got two winters where you're taking your eye off the ball, which is, you know, in hindsight, lunacy, you wouldn't do it this way, would you? But they really did want to buy us. And roll on very quickly. They actually had a deal done. So we were ready to sell for absolutely for tomorrow's price today. They were willing to pay premium because they could see that we had technology wise, but particularly brand wise and access to the market, they wanted it. And at the 11th hour Unilever came in and bought best foods. And so all M& A froze immediately, any M& A involved with factories, they reckoned that Best Foods had too many factories anyway, and we had a factory. So they put the kibosh on that deal. And that deal was over before it began. And we're all going, hang on, the deal is done. We spent 18 months working it out and you know, we were the ones who delayed it originally. And I mean, the point about it was a lot of things happened, which kind of were outside of our control, but actually in the end of the day, everything is really inside your control because if you're an entrepreneur, you control everything or you influence everything or you have to find a way to make it work. So huge learning curve, but in the day, it doesn't matter. Nobody cared that it was Unilever's fault. It wasn't, but nobody cared that they got in the way of us doing what we wanted to do. I was the one who said I was going to do it. Irrespective of anything, because once you say it, you have to do it. That's what an entrepreneur does. They run with the punches and they find a way to deal with no matter what happens to get through. And all the shareholders are going, I thought you were going to sell the business. We were talking about this for, yeah, well, no, I mean, we need more money now because we're running out of working capital and it all fell apart. The point is though. There are the details. The real issue is what do you learn from that situation? And it's very difficult to learn anything when you're in the middle of the shit, because you're like down in the dumps and you're thinking nothing you're doing is working. And then you think nothing you're doing is working. Everything worked back in the UK. And then you kind of think all sorts of introspective thoughts, like maybe the UK was successful despite me, you know, maybe it would be more successful if I wasn't involved. You think all sorts of weird stuff. And this is where it gets really tricky because it's perfectly natural to have those thoughts, by the way. But you can't afford to be dragged into this kind of long winded post mortem about it. And all I would say is that, and this is with a great deal of hindsight, this wasn't at the time at all, but later, I reckon that, you know, what is the benefit of failure? And I think that failure is a pretty shitty place to be, right? Because it hurts like hell, but it's a really good place to have been because it makes you make sure you never want to be there again, because it hurts like hell. If you allow yourself rather than kind of cover it up and forget about it and avoid it and don't want to face it, that you are the problem and you have caused problems and you do feel bad about it, then you say, okay, okay, right, I do feel bad about it. And there's one thing for sure is I'm never going to feel this bad again. Now, whatever I do, I don't know how it's going to work out. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm not going to feel this bad ever again. And that's the one thing that I took from that experience. And I would go as far as say that the next business they set up little dish. Potentially was only as successful as it was because the business before that was the failure that it was. And there's just no way on earth that I was going to go out in a failure. And that's what I mean earlier when I said, when you start with a success, normally you start with a failure or failure and nobody knows because you're a failure, it doesn't really matter. You're behind yourself. When you have a success, then there's expectations by other people, but by yourself too, and then you have a failure, all expectations come crashing down. And it's really difficult to get out of it, but I'm kind of thinking that the motivation for me to get out of that situation was to prove it to others, but really prove to myself that I could do it again. But ultimately I'm not going to get sucked back into the environment where I have to feel this awful ever again, no matter what happens. And that's a huge motivation. And that's what I would say. My experience is, you know, learn from failure. Don't fear failure. Yes. That's my living case study of how it works for me. I think that's such an inspiring message as well, John, and you've got to write a book about this and get this out there. Because how many entrepreneurs and people who are wanting to set up a business right now, or maybe who've been in business for two or three years, and they feel like they're stuck in a rut and they've made decisions that in hindsight they wouldn't have And hearing your story is so inspiring to those people that you can come from adversity, pick yourself back up after failure and move forward and create a new company that actually, I mean, Little Dish, I know you've sort of been quite humble about it, but was really successful as well. And you sold it in, what was it, 2017 you sold Little Dish? Yeah, it was another 10 year project. You know, all these instant overnight successes are always better than my experience. Garden was 10 years. Yeah. So we set it up in 2006 or so. And we sold it in 2017. Yeah, that was, we sold it to a private equity firm. The other business was a Newcombe Garden. We sold it to the trade. But frankly, from a fairholder point of view, who cares who you sell it to? We got a good return. Everybody was happy again. Um, the one I suggested a little dish was, you know, the absence of adversity. No, it definitely wasn't. Any authorial business is going to have a lot of adversity, but I think it was purely, it is anything with the mindset that. I had a little dish, which I couldn't have had if I hadn't gone through the failure of Glenclough. That's all I'm saying. So coming on to obviously all of your experience. I know now that you also mentor and invest. This plays a huge part in what you do now, as well as speaking across the UK and overseas. Can you sort of share a little bit about brands that you've recently been involved in? All exciting brands that you've seen and what makes them stand out to be able to maybe inspire other brands who want to get investment or get a mentor and you know, who you're working with at the moment. Sure, I anticipated you were going to ask that question. And I do have some brands sitting right here, not people, which I'll show in a minute, let me just explain a little bit too, because it's kind of a bit weird and you wouldn't necessarily do it this way, but having done those three businesses, which were like, you know, the shit sandwich bit, but what I was trying to figure out, what do I do next? And I live in Munich. I'm sitting here in Munich right now, talking to you. And because I met somebody who's German and we moved back from the States when I was the business there to live near Munich and we're still living here 20 years later, all that time at Little Dish, I was flying back and forth between Munich and London, which is a bit crazy. I'm physically based here. Why is that even relevant? Because most of what I do is certainly since lockdown is working remotely. And why is that relevant? Only because I have got involved in various different fingers and various different pies. And I love the variety, by the way. It's completely different than what I used to do before, which is very, very focused on one business. Always is, and set up your own business. What's more variety, but just to explain a bit of what I do is I kind of invest and advise businesses and mentor entrepreneurs from an angel point of view. And I'll talk a little bit about the businesses that I've invested in directly as an angel, but I also invest kind of indirectly through platforms. For example, we have a DC fund, which we set up in Ireland called the Reedsdale food fund, which again is for food, every stage food and drink businesses, pretty much everything happens in food, not surprisingly, because what I've had to do is leverage the experience that I've had in the last, in those, you know, three businesses in other businesses. And it's easier to do that. It's more directly relevant to do that in food and drink startups. So that's my sweet spot and Reedsdale is all about that in Ireland and Mission Ventures. It's sort of similar, although we don't invest. We help businesses who receive investment. We help them spend that money wisely. So it's like an accelerator or an incubator. But going back to the angel bit. So most of the business that I'm going to talk about are business that are based in the UK. After 2017, when I extracted myself from, from Little Dish, you know, I started to get involved in angel investing. And one of the businesses I invested in was called Knicks and Kicks. The Mix and Kicks is a range of soft drinks, healthy soft drinks. All the products have cayenne in them, very small amounts obviously, but cayenne with a little bit of a kick, and that's been going for a few years. Another business is Insane Grain, which is a healthy bag snack, which got set up during lockdown, so that's more recent I suppose. Oh wow. Yeah, absolutely. And I don't have the patch here, but Roshina, who is the entrepreneur behind this has got a deal with Harry Kane. So we're bringing out for the Euros this year, the Euro football championships based in Germany, but obviously Harry Kane, English captain is going to have an insane Kane product, which he's going to be involved with launching as well. Yeah. It's really cool. And there's a business recently who actually exited this last year, a company called Capsicana, which is a kind of South American flavor business, right. Now all these businesses are purpose driven businesses, they're all challenger brands. As an example, Old El Paso is typically kind of like a more established brand in this category and Capsicana would have been the challenger to that brand. And you can think of all the businesses that are out there in bag snacks, like Walkers or Pringles or whatever, and then drinks businesses, there's so many of them. So all these brands are all about challenging the incumbent, challenging the establishment, if you like. Kind of like what we did way back in the beginning. We can cover garden, you know, trying to challenge the conventional ways and do things in a different way. So I try to find businesses that excite me for a whole bunch of different reasons, but particularly where I can add value because they're doing something similar to the kind of we did way back in the day. Now things are different now then than before we didn't have any D then we do now, but, but ultimately you're trying to get products onto a shelf. Like selling it to a retailer and then you can try to get those products off the shelf, like marketing to the consumer. And like I said, with newcomer garden, then you can find a way where your brand really promises something to a target audience. I think, okay, that's for me. And they take it home and it really works for them. And there was a flavor of the quality is really good. Then they'll buy it again. And you just got to continue to do that over and over and over again. It's not simplifying the message there, but ultimately that's what you got to do. Yeah, I love the Knicks and Kicks brand as well, and it tastes actually delicious. I've, I have tasted it. Yeah. I've met founder as well and fantastic brand. On that point, I'll answer that question in a slightly different way, if you ask as well, what do I look for in terms of investment? And Julia who picks and, and Roshina at Insane Grain and others as well. But they're really two good examples. Happen to be Fable Entrepreneurs, which, which is another positive attribute that doesn't have to be, but it works more often than not. Really good at being, I think what I'm going to describe next, which is Sometimes people say to me, and this is mostly in the VC world, like what do investors look for in a proposition, in a business plan? And crikey, you know, any bit, all businesses are different and there's probably 20 things you'd say, right? But over time, and this is more over all of the time, but I was on this side of the fence as well as you are now on the other side of the fence, but like kind of. Poacher turned gamekeeper in a way from being an entrepreneur to now being an investor, I can see both sides of it. But I still think this point is really true that it's not 20 things. Actually, just really three things. There's three things that have to be right. I don't know what right is, but it has to be right. And if they're not right as an investor, you walk away because it's going to be a bag of sorrow if you don't write one way or the other. And those three things are products. Okay. So the product has to deliver what the brand promises. I made that point already, but you come and garden. Yeah. A product really needs to be good. So when the brand resonates with the consumer, they think, Oh, that looks great. I'll buy that. That's for me. And then they buy it and they take it home. Or in this case, it's a snack. They might eat it there. And then they're absolutely enthralled by the product quality. So the product delivers a real consumer need. That's really important. Then the scalability. So. All those consumers, there are lots of them. You can sell them to it. It's FMCG. We're talking about here, fast moving consumer goods. So you have to have lots of consumers, not just a niche brand. It has to have a market appeal or a wide appeal in terms of lots of consumers. And then you have to be able to make money out of that. So every unit you sell, you've got to be able to make a margin. Reinvest in the brand. There are two main points. The third point is people. And I would say that over the last 10 years, having been involved on the investment side more and more and more, that actually those first two points are not the main points. But the third point is the main point and I would just turn around and the first point is people. It's all about people. I would say that no matter how good your idea is, and you do need a good idea, right? But no matter how good your idea is, if you don't have a good entrepreneur to go with it, it's a waste of time having a good idea. You know, the good idea is okay on paper. When you start out, but then you have to implement it. And no matter how good the idea is, if it's implemented poorly, nobody will ever know about it. It won't be a, it won't even be a failure. It'll just literally die before you get anywhere. And at the moment, we've got so much uncertainty in the world. I talk a lot about turning uncertainty into a competitive advantage. I've been talking about for a couple of years now, but I never realized that at this stage, there'd be so much uncertainty, you know, it's like go back five years. Or whatever it is, six years, nobody would have thought we'd have Brexit. We'd have a worldwide pandemic. We'd have a war, a war on our doorstep. A war, like a real war. I say real war, but you know what I mean? A war that is very threatening, could have all sorts of ramifications. You know, talent, people who heard they are gone, cost of living crisis, supply chain disruption. And you know, for any one of those, you might've said five or six years ago. Oh yeah. But you know, they're one in a lifetime things that happen. Well, we've had five or six of them all together. Um, so if, if anything is the case, we've got more uncertainty. The point about that is that all the things are outside your control. So nevermind the things that are inside your control business that you need to do, that you say you will do. But those outside of your control, you need a very good entrepreneur to ride with those waves or ride with those punches. You know, you really do. So the environment and the environment is pretty tough now, right? To sell product, to get investment for businesses, get anything done. It's really tough. So you need a strong entrepreneur. Oh, okay. What does a strong entrepreneur mean? Resilient entrepreneur. It doesn't mean you have to be an expert of maths or an expert of marketing or expert or anything. In fact, you need to be resilient. And I think it comes back to what I said earlier about embracing adversity, all those setbacks and knockbacks and challenges you're going to get. You need to have an entrepreneur that doesn't care, really, and expects it to be tough. And has a plan B or plan C or plan D and gets up off the ground every single time. Tenacious and resilient. And I absolutely think that means. Number one, number two, number three is people. And then you can talk about scale and you can talk about product. I didn't go through all of that. I think it's all about people. So do you have a sort of formula or a way of testing out to see how resilient these people are? Because obviously you're not going to just invest in the first meeting, or maybe you would. But do you sort of have a way that you would? See, or do you like to sort of maybe mentor the people for a little while to see sort of what the calibers like, or does it just depend on a case by case basis? I don't think there's any, there's any formula for it. If I think about some of the businesses that I've invested in, I won't name names because it wouldn't be fair, but some of the entrepreneurs are very tenacious and they don't say no. I mean, first of all, it's like. I'm not saying I've got all the answers by any means. In fact, I don't have all the answers. And in fact, sometimes I don't have any of the answers. I can help though, by challenging the entrepreneur and go, have you thought of this or that? And between the two of us, we come up with some maybe answers or assumptions we need to be tested. So, so I'm not suggesting any of that. If I don't burn things, I can add value. So why you think you have a conversation and they really listen to you, what you're saying again, I don't have the answers, but you know, let's say half an hour conversation that we listened to you. That's good. So the extent that they want to talk to you, then in a couple of weeks time, I got, well, we already had the conversation. No, no, I want to talk to you. I want to show you what I've done. And they show you a new business plan, which is takes account of some of the things that you've said, you know, what they're registering. And then some of the things you also said, they go, no, that won't work. They push back. And I, I love when people push back. Cause again, I don't have all the answers and I would never claim to have, but I might say something because in my experience, this is what you do. And they say, look, I heard what you said there, but actually let me tell you why that is wrong for us at least now and push right back. We're not going to do that. We're going to do this instead. And they really thought through, really listened to what you said. They really thought through and they really actually figured out there was not right for them. That is an example of a really strong entrepreneur, right? First of all, listen, most people don't, and secondly, just to talk, take everything on board and put it into business. And there you go. I go, well, is it right? How do you know it's right? Well, you said it. Well, I mean, what sort of argument is that? So it's great to find somebody who listens, who takes the bits that they think are right. Somebody who pushes back strongly with a justified argument and stuff that is not right in their view. And then how much more questions, well, and now I'm not just interested in the business anymore. I'm interested in the product anymore. I'm interested in you. Because I think you have something to offer here. That's one thing, and the other thing is pointing to a failure. You know, I can see that in myself. It's like, okay, so what have you done in the past? Well, you know, I've lived at home with my parents and they've paid for everything. And now I think I'll set up a business, but really, that's not a great preparation for what I've, I'm setting up a business because it's cool and I can do some social media and well, it's not cool at all. It's pretty shit actually. And you have to have a much more grounded view than that. And why are you still living with your parents anyway? And you know, that's very judgmental of course. But you're talking, you're asking me, how do I make a decision? Sure. So, so I've gone out and I've done this and I've landed on my ass and I've failed and it was shit. And what did I learn from it? You tell me what you learned from it. And it's kind of like a little bit apprehensive about talking about a failure. But they've had one and they can point to it. I'm hoping you do it differently. Adam, how did it make you feel? It made me feel mad as hell. Great, tell me more about that. And it's, it's stuff like that. So you can't tell for sure. You know, it used to be when I was in Newcomen Garden, I, I used to, um, love hearing about all these, they don't have to be Irish people, but they tended to be Irish people who went off to the States for a summer and worked on some shitty old building site for the summer or walked in a bar for a summer. And it's not so much. They came back with a packet of money. They came back with a packet of experiences, which they never had before. If they had, you know, stayed at home and it's just little things. It's just a little thing. It was all built up. And I'd love to have a conversation with somebody about like, what did you learn in New Jersey in that air conditioning place? I don't want to talk about that. That was awful. I want to talk about that. I couldn't get out of the picture enough. I did this and I did this. And so if somebody is dealing with the real life situations is very applicable to what will happen in business. And most people think, you know, the non business stuff, the stuff I learned when I was a kid or experience that I had when I went to university is completely irrelevant to what I did at business. No, absolutely not. I love hearing about those sorts of things about, especially sports. Events and people that did sports or whatever, and they succeeded great, but mostly they failed. How do you feel about that? And it's very personal. You know, the, the answer, I don't know what the answer is, but it's hearing them give the answer in their own way. It shines a lot of light on how you're going to be able to deal with some real problem in business. I love that. And it's very inspiring to hear that, John. Let's talk about mindset now. I know you've, you've alluded to it as well. And are you fearful of anything? Getting old. No, no. Am I fearful of anything? I mean, well, you know, the thing about fear is it's a great galvanizing possible emotion. By the way, emotion is great. People say that, you know, emotion, you don't want to bring that into business because business is all about facts and professionalism. There's a lot of facts, a lot of professionalism. And if you're an accountant, it's probably more facts than professionalism and than emotion. But I think emotion, especially if you're in a branded business, it's all about emotion. And also not just about the brand, communicating with a consumer. It's not just about it. It's not just emotion in that context. Thanks. There's emotion in, in, you're trying to convince people to do things, you know, especially in an entrepreneurial way. You're trying to convince them. You're trying to convince shareholders to give you money. And you really shouldn't be giving them money because they haven't done anything yet, but they need money to show you. You can try to convince good quality people to come and work for you, and you can't really pay them because you haven't got any money. You're trying to convince retailers, whatever it is. You're trying to convince consumers. You're constantly selling and trying to convince people. And why wouldn't you let a little bit, at least, of your personality through to demonstrate that? And that's all about emotion. I'm not talking about being crazy, wild emotion, you know, that can't be controlled. So I think emotion, or maybe, maybe a better word is passion. People talk about passion a lot. And I never really sure if, you know, I'm very passionate about saving the world really. Well, how? Well, yeah, I mean, you know, again, that's very judgmental thing to say, but well, tell me about how you would do it. Well, I go to work for a company and I'd write a paper to the UN. Well, there's not a lot of passion in that. I mean, I'm sure you've got to do that too, but what are you going to do? You're going to campaign and turn people's minds and turn people's attitudes around by demonstrating how they're doing the wrong thing and how it's better to do the right thing. And that's just like a business. That's just like, you're trying to do something new and different. Guess what, nobody cares about your idea until you grab them by the scruff of the neck and make sure they hear what you say. So oppression or emotion, whichever it is for you, is really, really, I think important. And I think it's funny, the point I want to make though is, is that we all have passion and emotion in our home life, in our outside life, in our school life and our university life. But we kind of think, and I made this mistake myself, we kind of think we have to be suited and booted in a certain professional regimented way before we can operate in business. I spent ages doing that, and then thought, what have I done? Why am I doing this? I'm, I'm over layering on top of me, somebody who isn't me. So it's difficult enough being me. Nevermind trying to be somebody else to do this. Right. I try to find a way to be appropriately passionate or appropriately my personality through. So I say is, you know, allow your personality to shine through in how you conduct your business. And I, I talk a lot about authenticity and people say, well, why do you talk about authenticity? Why don't you just be authentic? And I said, well, I tried to be authentic as well, but I talk about it because people are afraid to talk about it. They're kind of being authentic is like what I do when I'm down the pub. Let me tell you how it is. And I'll tell you a story. Well, why don't you do a bit of that in, when you're in the office? Oh, that's not how we operate here. That's not the culture. It doesn't allow that. Well. Okay. It's your own business. If it's an entrepreneurial business, why don't you develop your own culture to make sure that you get the best set of people and they will have those communication, they will have those contributions. And the great thing about authenticity is just very quickly on this is that people listen to you when you're authentic, right? And then people do stuff for you when you're authentic and then people become more authentic themselves. When you're authentic, it's almost like you're giving them permission to be authentic, to be themselves, which is a crazy situation. Why wouldn't everybody just. Be authentic, but that's actually not the case. And I just found the more authentic you are yourself, the more of a culture you generate where people are authentic. It doesn't mean to say you won't have problems, but you'll have a better way to deal with problems, right? You know, you'll be told by people who walk around you if they don't like it. And if they like it, they'll be authentic themselves. And they'll listen and they'll follow you, especially in an entrepreneurial environment. I think that's such a huge amount of benefit. You can have, and it's so crazy to leave it outside the room just because you think it doesn't belong in the room. It's like, why would you do that? But we do it all the time. So the authenticity piece is something I talk about quite a bit, purely because I've realized over time that we don't do it. And therefore, if we can try and bring that into your business life in the way that you're comfortable with, and it feels, feels appropriate to do so, then. I can't do it. And who's going to argue with you? And if they do, you'll have an argument back. Yeah. I love that. I think that I talk about authenticity as well in my work. And as you know, you came to the book launch of the Momentum Mindset last year in London, and thank you for your support there. Jonathan and I really appreciated that. And. You know, right in the book, you talk about authenticity. When I was writing the book, I wanted it to be very much a framework around what my journey was through coaching and teaching and giving people a framework to be able to take action in their lives and not just talk about something, actually do something. I wanted it to be real authentic. So I shared a bit about my own personal journey, not much, but I wanted it to be, it didn't have to be sort of, you know, long words and sound very academic. I wanted it to be real and relatable. And a lot of people said that as well. So I can totally relate to where you're coming from with the authenticity piece for sure. Did you enjoy the book? I'm curious, John, did you read it? Absolutely. Yeah, I know. I dipped in and out of it. So I might've read chapters out of it. Yeah, that's, that's, that was what it was useful. I don't have time to sit down, but if I live in Munich and I'm in London and Dublin quite a bit, I have lots of playing time. So I do dip out of it. Yeah. I mean, I really enjoyed it. And it's great. I think the point about authenticity or being yourself and personality is that maybe the older you get, the more comfortable you feel in your skin. So it's quite difficult in your twenties and thirties to feel, cause a lot of questions marks. And you know, all I would say was, if in doubt, do it. If it's inappropriate, you're either working in the wrong place or you're in the right place. And somebody will tell you in an inappropriate way that you overset the mark there. Oh, fine. Re adjust, but be more yourself than less yourself is all I'd say. So I know in the book, the premise around, you know, getting out of your own inertia and leading your best life on your terms, I'm curious, what would you say and what would your advice be to people, be it entrepreneurs or people in careers who want to do something different, perhaps, what advice would you give them to get over their own inertia and do something different or change things? What would a big piece of advice be for them from your perspective and all your experience? I think, I think the two pieces of advice that I've already kind of thrown out there, I, I, I, I revisit them and then go on to something else, but it's like embracing adversity. It's such an easy thing to say, and it's such a difficult thing to do. So I don't want to be glib about embrace adversity. It's a really tough thing to do, but yeah, it wouldn't be worthwhile doing if it wasn't tough. Right. So embrace adversity is just get to a point where. Realizing that the world is not out to get you whenever something bad happens. Yeah. You know, something bad happens all the time. And it might seem that like three or four things happen to you in quick succession. Nobody's manipulating the strings here. That would be the case. Nobody gives a shit. Nobody cares. It's not like as if you're, you're important. You're clearly important to you. It's only a bad experience because you feel bad about it. It's like, it's inside it. Nobody else knows, cares. It's completely irrelevant. Right? So, so it's not like the world is out to get you. The world couldn't care less. And this bad stuff will happen. It probably had nothing to do with you at all. Right? You are now only making, it's the aftermath of the bad thing happening that makes you feel shit about it. You know, you're, you're feeling really down and you're constantly reliving it and over and you should have, could have, would have, don't get me wrong. We all do this, right? I'll just do it like for 10 minutes and then move on. Right? Because. You can't undo it. Okay, maybe you have made a mistake. Well, you've made it now. It's out there, right? So figure out what to do next. They're always only, and it's not going to happen. So don't dwell on the past. Don't do this. Well, as I said earlier, post tracted, post mortem about what could have been different. Yeah. You have to figure out maybe a little bit about it. I'm coming out of a failure like Glencoe Fields took me a good few months. So yes. And you know, I'm not saying 10 minutes applies there. But you do need to move on. So find a way where you can embrace adversity and you don't have to take it personally and you move on from failure. And I think the thing about failure is that it's meant to hurt like hell, right? How could it be any way different? Because we've called it failure and we've called it success. And with success, it's okay to feel good. But with failure, it's not okay to feel bad. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. So let it sink in and then resolve to kind of try not to make the same mistakes again. And with the Glencoe food experience for me, it was, I'm just, I'm guaranteed. I don't care what happens. I'm not going to feel that bad ever again. And, and of course I, you do feel bad about certain things because you make some mistakes or certain things happen, but these are going to happen to you, whether you like it or not. And if you're in an entrepreneurial environment, Then the chances are going to be an awful lot more though. So to take it for granted, no matter what you do is worthwhile in the next six months, you're going to feel bad about some of those things. And the issue is that it's not fearing failure. It's not feeling bad. It's not caring so much that you feel bad. It's kind of like expecting to have some bad stuff happen to you. I think that's the mindset. And the thing I want to add it was, if we have a moment is that entrepreneurs, I talked about ego earlier on. I think to a certain extent, you do have to be Have a certain amount of arrogance and have a certain amount of ego to overcome the constant bombardment of your wrong and to still kind of get on and do it. It's like managing risk is the other thing that entrepreneurs need to be comfortable with. If you're scared of risk, it would be a terrible life. You will just constantly be in fear of the next thing that's going to happen and not in control of anything because you think it is far too risky. Well, it is far too risky for you. And number two, it is very risky. And number three, it can be very risky. I still feel comfortable about it because you're not risk averse. I think that risk point is often overlooked. And I would say that if you are okay with risk, and if you've got an ego that you can kind of manage most of the time, but you just kind of don't mind being told no all of the time, then Then that is a great thing, but only up to a point. What I mean by that is at a certain point in your business that you've set up yourself, you can quite legitimately look back and go, I've done all this. If it wasn't for me, none of this would have happened. And that's very real. Okay. You might be in a co founder, I've set up my three businesses with co founders each time. So I kind of share the benefits and the blame of things going wrong. But you know what I mean? It's kind of like, okay, between the two of us, It's our fault, but ultimately an entrepreneur can feel quite legitimately justified by the fact that they've got to that point. And if they hadn't done all those things, they would never got. So that's all you, the mistake you make easily make, because it's all you and you're egotistical about it, you wouldn't have happened. You wouldn't have got that far. If you weren't, is the thing that now from now on forward, it's going to be all about me as well. And where is that point? I don't know where that point is. You have to figure that point out for yourself and your business. It'd be different for different businesses. Uh, for different categories and different industries and all the rest. But there is a point at which you got to say, it's all me. And I'm now going to have a wherewithal to figure out that it can't be me anymore. And I think entrepreneurs, because they have that ego to get things done and crash through walls and not take no for an answer, they kind of think I better keep going this way now. And that the problem at that stage is from that point onwards, they are a liability to their business growth. They have been the entire asset to get to that stage. And then they're, then they're going to get in their way all the time, in their own way all the time. Right. And I think that is a real problem and that I see a lot of entrepreneurs, but it's very difficult to explain that for entrepreneurs because they've got to go, yeah, but I get that. I can't, I absolutely get that. But now you're going to try to do everything again throughout the year. For another two years, so you really now need to stop doing so much and have to direct more, bring people into your business, delegate, allow them to do things, bring people into your business that are better at certain things that you are, because you can't be good at everything, or there's only 360 days in the year, or whatever, you know, you're limiting to one person, even if you're wonderful, which you probably think you are, but there are other people who are wonderful at those things that you now need, and then you have to direct that team. And you have to get out of your own way. You have to stop doing so much. And that's a real struggle for somebody who's got the business to that stage in the first place. So I would say, how do you figure that out? I really don't know. You have to recognize it, that it's a point that comes in your business, that you have to get out of your own way and find a way to manage your business differently, to be successful in the future, otherwise you're going to be the bottleneck to success from whatever that point onward is. And it might be just six months or it might be a couple of years. Yeah, John, it's fascinating listening, hearing your stories and we could chat, I could chat all day and listen and hear your stories more so. Thank you so much for being on the show. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch? Thanks for that, Vicky. I really, I really enjoyed it. I've wandered and meandered. Problem is when you ask an Irishman to answer a question for 10 minutes, you'd probably end up at 15 or 20 minutes on garble. So apologies for that. If that's what your listeners are trying to work their way through. In terms of getting ahold of me really easy, you get me on LinkedIn, look me up in terms of what I do. I do a lot of speaking as well. So I have a website, which you can find out more about my keynotes. I've mentioned some of the themes here, which have come out of all the experience that I've gathered over the last 35 years or whatever, very simply my name. www. johnstapleton. eu and that will find me as well. So you can see there about the types of topics I speak about. I do keynotes at events and conferences and it's really a question of kind of like using these stories and anecdotes that I've talked about today to bring to life some of the messages I think that are relevant and they're not relevant to everybody, but I hope they're relevant to most people. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, John. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you today and I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next and all the businesses you help and support. Thanks. Likewise, Vicky, you're going to roll yourself for lots of things right now. So I, I'm sure our paths will cross many times. Thank you, John.