Personable
Unlocking Success: Nick Wheeler on Building a Billion-Dollar Clothing Empire | Personable Ep 7
Meet Nick Wheeler, the founder of one of the world’s most esteemed menswear brands. In this episode, we discuss his mastermind as we uncover the story behind Charles Tyrwhitt and what led Nick to where he is today.
Personable is a podcast dedicated to helping listeners become the best they can be by learning from the world’s best in their respective fields. This mission is inspired by my mother, Louise, who encouraged me to become the best version of myself before she passed away from cancer in 2023.
Connect with Harvey:
Harvey's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harveybracken-smith/
Harvey's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harveybsmith/
Personable Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harveybsmithpodcast_/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7JOTYDER6m2FDrlhop4api
My dad's startup: https://www.thedraft.io/
Donate to the charity we have founded in memory of my mum: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/LouLouRacefoiundation?utm_term=PvByaxmdn
Meet Nick Wheeler, the founder of one of the world’s most esteemed menswear brands. In this episode, we discuss his mastermind as we uncover the story behind Charles Tyrwhitt and what led Nick to where he is today.
Personable is a podcast dedicated to helping listeners become the best they can be by learning from the world’s best in their respective fields. This mission is inspired by my mother, Louise, who encouraged me to become the best version of myself before she passed away from cancer in 2023.
Connect with Harvey:
Harvey's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harveybracken-smith/
Harvey's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harveybsmith/
Personable Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harveybsmithpodcast_/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7JOTYDER6m2FDrlhop4api
My dad's startup: https://www.thedraft.io/
Donate to the charity we have founded in memory of my mum: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/LouLouRacefoiundation?utm_term=PvByaxmdn
Hello and welcome to episode 7 of Percival. Today I'm hugely honoured to have Nick Wheeler. Nick is an OBE as well as being the founder of Charles Tillett, which is a hugely successful business. He started out in college before going to Bristol and founding this amazing successful business. I'm very honoured to have him on today and very excited for our conversation. So thanks for joining me today, Nick.
Speaker 2:Great. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Very excited, thank you. So I wanted to get started by asking you what made you want to become an entrepreneur.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a good question. People always wonder whether entrepreneurs are sort of bred or made or whatever the saying is. I mean I always wanted to have my own business for as long as I can remember and I remember I was a bit grubby as a small child and I would do anything for a bit of cash which my father totally made or took to his advantage, so he would have. I remember deadheading Daffodils and I think he gave me I think decimalization came in in 1970. He gave me one D which is less than a penny. They're doing a, I think it was at 100 or a thousand Daffodil heads.
Speaker 2:So I thought it was amazing. I thought, you know, I could do this and I get some money. And it was like magic. The magic is sort of creating something out of nothing. And so I always, always wanted to have my own business. So when I was at school I had a photography business and then a Christmas tree business and then I went to university and had a shoe business and they were all a bit of a disaster and then I started my shirt business in my secondary university.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Why didn't the photography or Christmas tree businesses work out and why are we not seeing them today?
Speaker 2:I think I've always felt that it doesn't matter what business you do. The important thing is that you love. You love what you do and if you have a business, it's a product business. You have to love that product. And if you have a service business, you have to love doing what you do. So you might want to be a doctor and you have to loving a doctor. I've always felt that. You know, I like the idea, I've always liked the idea of having a product business rather than a service business, because I think you get it with a product business. I like having a product that is a bit more malleable and it doesn't answer back and it doesn't create the problems that people can create. So all my, all the businesses I've had have been product businesses and I I think you know they all didn't really work for different reasons. I mean, when I say they didn't work, I, I, I suppose some literally didn't work and some just I realized that they were never going to be the greatest, biggest business in the world.
Speaker 2:I always felt that I wanted a really great, I wanted a great business. And so when I did the Christmas trees, I remember saying to my father in January dad, you're not going to believe this, but I've actually made quite a lot of money. You know, I was at school and then university and make a lot of money. I'm going to go into, I'm going to go into this full time. And you know, I was a bit thick and he said to me but Nick, you know, christmas trees it's a seasonal business. You're not going to sell in the Christmas trees in February. And thank God he said that, otherwise I'd still be selling Christmas trees, still be selling Christmas trees now, probably as my main business. So that was, you know, christmas trees was never really, it was a. It was a good thing to do as a student. It was a good thing to do at school. You can make a bit of money, you know, make more, more money than I was, making it as my entire allowance for the year. It was a great business, but it wasn't going to set the world on fire.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, similarly, photography I was doing it all myself. We had this thing. It was, it was, it was. You know, I had this at school and when I was at school we had this. It was a tradition that everybody would take photos of themselves. It sounds rather sort of selfish, narcissistic, I don't know what it sounds, but you take photos of yourself, you put them on a bit of paper and you send them to your hundred friends or 200 friends, or if you're really showing off 300 friends and you write a little message. And you write a message which is sort of like life. You know, it all became rather pompous 18 year olds being a bit pompous and a bit silly, but you sort of write lessons for life and giving people advice, and it was all slightly strange.
Speaker 2:But I basically cornered the market. There were about 250 boys in each year and I managed to get, you know, 250 boys all buying 200 photos of me and I take a few pictures of them. And I found this lab up in London and I would drive up to London and they'd just print off 250 photos, charging back two PH, and I'd go back and sell them for 40 PH. So it was a sort of massive margin of doing 250 boys. You know, you end up making a lot of money, but again, it wasn't something I could ever roll out. So then I thought I wanted a product that was going to really work and I thought, okay, what do I like? You know, I like simple things. You know I'm. You know, unfortunately, I'm not a. You know I'm not a computer wizard. You know I can't do. I can't build software, I can't do tech. I just like simple products.
Speaker 2:And one of the things I always loved was shoes. So I thought, right, I'm going to start a shoe business. And I'd been traveling on my year off. I traveled around India and I had these shoes made and I remember thinking I came back and I thought they were the best shoes I've ever had in my life. You know, they cost me 10 pounds. They were handmade, made to measure, and I thought this is going to be great. You know, people need hundreds of millions of pairs of shoes. I'm going to have a, I'm going to have a great business, and so I I persuaded 50 people to buy a pair of shoes off me. I was charging 50 pounds a pair of shoes. Each pair was costing me 10 quid. So I was going to make 2000 quid back in 1985, 2000 quid a lot, a lot of money at university.
Speaker 2:And I remember I would trace around people's feet and then fax them off to this place in India. What I didn't realize fax machines now nobody's really heard of. They're dead for a reason. But I traced around their feet and fax them off and what I didn't realize was, on that thermal paper and they'd go in at my end like a size normal, size nine shoe. And what I didn't realize, they kept coming out the other end, like like this or like this.
Speaker 2:And I got these 50 pairs of shoes and they were shoes for pixies and clowns not a single pair fitted the people that were meant to meant to be made for. So I knew, you know, I suddenly thought that's not going to be a business that's going to work. And instead of sort of moping around and giving up I think it's what you've probably now called a pivot and I thought what can I do instead of shoes? And I thought shirts. You know, no real research, I, you know, I just I love shirt, I love shoes, I love shirts. I love that feeling of opening a crisp cotton shirt that smell the wrinkle of the tissue paper, and so I thought I've started a shirt business.
Speaker 1:I'll be went. It's amazing, but how? One thing I'm curious about after having that you know, mistake with the shoes and more coming out the wrong sizes, did you never think the similar thing would happen with the shirts?
Speaker 2:Well, I decided not to do. Major measure Major measure is you know there are no huge major measure businesses. It's sort of dawned on me. There are none. You know the major measure people you know in the UK.
Speaker 2:You know if you want a pair of major measure shoes, you go to Northampton and you spend a lot of money. It's a very expensive process, you know you'll spend three, four, five thousand pounds a pair of shoes and hardly anybody does it. You know it's very expensive and so therefore, the guys in Northampton who are doing major measure shoes are not big businesses. And the same with suits, you know, made proper, a proper bespoke suit. You know a lot of those guys are based on Savile Row, which is where they all come from. Some of them branch off and they go and set up on their own, but they're all. You know you can't build an enormous business doing that, partly because you know the market's not big.
Speaker 2:I think you need to look at your market and I think most markets are in.
Speaker 2:You can cut and dice them any way you like, but I always think of them as being a triangle, and the more expensive you get, the smaller, you know, the smaller, smaller the peak, and if you want to sell five thousand pound shoes or five thousand pounds suits, you're going to be dealing in a very, very small market. If you want to be, you know. If you want to be, if you're ever out of the bottom of the pyramid, you know. If you're selling shoes and shirt or suits, you know suits for 80 quid, you know. Or or shoes for nine pounds, 99, you know that's sort of you go to Matalan or wherever you go, and it's a very big market. And I always I thought, I thought there was a sweet spot somewhere in the middle. So I thought, right, I'm not going to do bespoke anymore, I'm not going to do major measure, I'm going to be in the middle, I'm going to offer great quality, great value for money, great service and I'm going to build a little shirt business.
Speaker 1:But something like like shirts. I think when a lot of people have the ideas of an entrepreneur, they'll look at someone like Mark Zuckerberg or like the film, the social network, and then a Harvard dorm room and some genius that's built this revolutionary idea and I mean the business you've built is incredible. But for the average person thinking I'm going to go and build a socks business or I'm going to go and make some footballs or something like that, how do you do that? How do you draw the line between developing a unique business and then just doing the simple things? Well, and then building? You know, I wouldn't say a business is simple, but it's incredible. Now you know, going with the idea, I'm just going to do shirts, something that a lot of people do how do you balance that line?
Speaker 2:That's a very good question, because a lot of people don't start their own business. This is people who say they want to start their own business and they don't start their own business because they say I can't think of what I'm going to do. They don't know what to do and I think that's because you know when. You're quite right. When you read in the papers about entrepreneurs, you read about Zuckerberg, elon Musk, larry Page, serge Brin. You know Google, these guys who built, you know Jeff Bezos. They built these incredible businesses. And you think, okay, if I'm going to be an entrepreneur, I have to build an incredible business and in a way, you know those guys are exceptional. You know it happens very, very rarely. So I think you can. Either you can look, you can spend your whole life looking for that thing that you think is going to compete with Google or compete with Amazon or compete with Tesla or whatever it is. Or you can say actually, you know there are some huge markets out there. You know there are. You know there are 7 billion people on this world and they're all wearing clothes. Now, that is a huge market. Not very exciting, not very clever, but I think you know what I thought is. I thought, right, if I offer, you know what does? I always try to think from a customer point of view and I say what does the customer want? You know they want good quality, they want good value for money which is really a reflection of its accommodation, price and quality and they want good service. Now, you know there are different markets and some people don't want good quality because they, some people want to buy a piece of clothing that lasts one day and they never want to wear again, but they are.
Speaker 2:My feeling was it in my market for, for, for. For. You know, men who wore shirts to work. They wanted quality, value, service. And there are a hell of a lot of men. I'm not saying there's three and a half billion, I'm not saying every man in the world is going to be wearing my shirts. You know there are guys, you know, who live in hot climates, who don't wear hardly any clothes, they don't wear shirts. But you know there's an awful lot of men in the UK, in Europe, in the Far East, in America, and they wear shirts every day. They have this uniform which is shirt. Well, it was a uniform. It's changed slightly, but it was shirts and ties and suits, and there are hundreds of millions of them.
Speaker 2:So I thought you know, why can't I? I can do this better than anybody else. You only have to do a little bit better. You know, do it a little bit better and you could build a great business. So I've been doing this 36 years. It's slightly embarrassing. I never did look that old, but you know, and every day I think, every day I want to get a little bit better, because I think if you do that, it makes it harder for anybody else to come in into an industry. That you're quite right. Anybody can start a shirt business. Lots of people start a shirt businesses and lots of people few people have succeeded and quite a lot of people fail.
Speaker 1:At what point did you decide, you know, when you started, comparatively to the photography business and the Christmas tree selling business? At what point did you decide that this is working and I'm going to go all in on this one project and I'm going to try and get a little bit better? Like, this is going to be my baby, this is going to be my thing that I'm going to pursue for the next 36 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a tricky one as well, because and I think this is where I always feel that entrepreneurs are split into two types of people and I call I just call the hares and tortoises after the esophage fable, where you know the tortoise wins in the end. But most entrepreneurs have, you know, they feel, and partly it's driven by, you know, when they come into the business or it comes into the type of business they started. So quite often you know, if you want to start your own business, it's a hell of a commitment and most people come in a little bit later in life and you have all sorts of outgains. You know you might, you might be, you might be married, you might have a mortgage, you might have, you know, you've got a lot of expenses. I mean, I came into the business very early. I started, I was starting businesses when I was 14. And I started the share business when I was 21. So I still had another two years at university. So there was no big. There was no big, there was no huge rush. So I was never. You know a lot of people.
Speaker 2:I feel now that a lot of people they start, they have an idea for a business, they go down the pub, they meet somebody, they talk about the idea. They come out of the pub they've already given away half the equity to the guy in the pub who's given them 50 grand, you know, as a startup, and they feel that that's what they have to do. They have to, they have to get going, they have to raise money, they have to build the business quickly and what tends to happen is that you know, I was fine with with if you raise money, you come easy, come easy go. You know, you, you, you raise a lot of money and you don't realize. Actually, you know, making money is really quite difficult. It is really difficult. Spending it is really easy. So when people start a business, raise money, they tend to spend it on stupid things.
Speaker 2:So, you know, I always felt that, look, and people said to me you know you should go out and raise money for this if you really want to grow this, if you want to scale it. Because you know they said, you've got to make a choice. You can have, you can have a small slice of a large pie or a large slice of a small pie. You know you can fiddle around, doing it yourself, bootstrapping it, and you'll end up. You know you learn the whole thing and it'll always be tiny, or you can go out. You know, raise some capital, build the business fast. You'll have a small slice, but it'll be a big business. Make your, make your choice.
Speaker 2:And I think I don't know whether it's in my DNA, but I always felt that I wanted a large slice of a large pie. I don't know if I'm just greedy, I don't know what it is, but I but I realized that to do that this is a long, it's a long term thing. You know, like a lot of people and again, this is thanks to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Larry Page and so on but you know, they started their businesses five years later. They were well. Maybe Jeff Bezos took a bit longer, but well, he probably was a billionaire in five years. And within five years they're flying. So people assume you have to be flying after five years and they think you're a failure if it's not, if you're not.
Speaker 2:But in reality, I think the Germans have actually got this right. You know they have a lot of businesses that family owned, massive businesses that were started. You know, maybe you know before the, before the Second World War or just after the Second World War. They have been going for, you know, 100 years or 80 years a long time and they've worked out. That I think Warren Buffett has said, and what many people have said, is that compound growth is the seventh wonder of the world. You know, you just, you start a business and you grow and you keep going and you don't give up and one day you wake up and you have a huge business. And I think I was just one of those people. I just thought, you know, I never want to sell this business. I just believe that if I keep getting better every day and we keep on growing, I'll wake up one day and it'll be a big business. I'm still waiting.
Speaker 1:That's incredible. I'm still interested because I know you've got quite a good story about how you actually went and started the business. I wonder if you could elaborate on how you got the funding to initially start the business and what those early days were like when you fully went for the Chasmas.
Speaker 2:Well, right at the beginning, I started in my second year when I was at Bristol University doing geography Geography, one of those great subjects where you do that work. In those days you did basically no work at all. So I had this sort of I had a lot of time, nothing really to do, and it was an opportunity to start businesses. So I had my shoe business there and when that didn't work, I started the show business. And you know, when I first started I it was very haphazard, you know. I said to a friend, I said I'm starting. They said what are you doing now to show business? And they, you know, you've given up the shoes. And I said I'm doing a show business. And they said, I remember them saying they said, well, where are you going to get the shirts? And I said, god, that's a really good question. I haven't really thought about that. I hadn't thought about that. You know I'd start. I decided I was going to do a show business. I hadn't even thought about where I was going to get them. You know it shows how it wasn't about research, it was just you just get up and you do it. And what I did is I had I had 5,000 leaflets printed. For 99 quid I bought an old Amstrad well, a new Amstrad. Amstrad sort of rather disappeared. Now it was Alan Sugar's business. He made this little word. He invented the word processor really mass market word processor an early computer 199 quid. So basically with 290 quid I was off off up and running.
Speaker 2:And I had this business in my second year at university. I did 14,000 pound sales. Didn't really make any money. Wow. Third year I did 14,000 pounds again Didn't really make any money. And then I left university and I said I said right, I'm going to go into the business full-time. And everyone said to me look, go and do a proper job. This is which is what people say to you. It's what people say to entrepreneurs. They sort of they always say most people are very risk averse and they think they're doing you a favor by telling you not not to do it. You know you can always get more training. You can go and learn something. Go and do an MBA, go. They always want you to go and carry on and not actually take the plunge.
Speaker 2:So they said you know, go do a proper job. So I went to, I worked for Bain and Company, which is management consultancy, and I did 14, I carried on doing it while I was there, sort of on the side, which actually was quite hard work, bain. So there wasn't much on the side, but I did 14,000 pounds in the in my first year of Bain, which was third year of the business, and actually I did 14,000 pounds in the second year of Bain, which is the fourth year of the business. So it just looked like this business was going nowhere.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:You know, when people come to me today and they say you know, I'm only growing, I've been doing it for years and I'm only done doing 60,000 and it's not really growing, I say look, after four years I was doing 14,000 and it wasn't growing at all. You know, four years is nothing. You know, come back to me in 20 years and tell me it's not growing. But I got to the point where I thought, okay, I do need. You know, it's hard, it is hard growing a business with nothing, with no cash at all. And so I thought, right, I need, I need some money, I need some money to buy some stock, I need some money to. You know, just get the business going. And I, my great aunt, died and left me 7,000 pounds, which was very kind of her, but it wasn't really enough to enough, to enough to do it properly, to leave Bain and go full time. And I, I decided that the way to to raise money, because I wasn't going to give away the equity. I just didn't want to give away equity and nobody was going to lend me the money because the business was a basket, basket case, not growing, not making any money. They would not let me any money. So I thought the way to make money was to.
Speaker 2:This was the late 80s and there was a boom in the classic car market and I remember I found this Aston Martin DB1, I think they were only about 12 or 13 ever made and it was 25,000 quid. So I went to see my bank manager and this is just crazy, it wouldn't happen today. But I went to see the bank manager and said, look, I need some money for my business and I've been left 7,000 pounds for my great aunt. And I found this car that I think is going to be worth a lot more next year than it is now. And bank managers today would just tell you to go away. But this one, she said, yeah, I'll lend you. She let me 18,000 pounds. I bought the car for 25. And I sold it a year later for a hundred. So I made 75 grand plus my seven grand for my great aunt, and off I went.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Do you think it's that Didn't work out? If that investment didn't work out or you suddenly didn't get that growth, that after working at Bain you would continue to try new projects, or you think at some point you would have given up and just pursued a more typical?
Speaker 2:career I would have carried on. I always and again this is it's very hard giving advice to other entrepreneurs because I feel what I feel you can only give advice that you yourself if you have personally experienced it. And I just always felt that the share business would work and I can't explain why I thought it would work and it certainly wasn't particularly logical that I thought it was going to work. You know, I did £14,000 for four years. The following year I got the money. I did £75,000. I actually lost £70,000 on the £75,000. So actually I lost pretty much everything I made on the car in the first year, which I think taught me this sort of easy come, easy go and it put me off raising money even more.
Speaker 2:Because you know I had basically, as soon as I had that, 75 grand, I hopped on an airplane, went out to the Far East, went out to Hong Kong, I bought a container load of shirts. I brought them back If the container load cost was £75,000,. I suddenly got back, realised I'd spent all my money and actually got to spend money on marketing. I should have known better. I spent two years of paying.
Speaker 2:I wasn't that stupid, but I was I turned down, but it was a sort of you know, it was just a you know, it was just a massive mistake, but I still, you know. So I got back. I was back to square one. I'd lost all my money but I still believe the business was going to work. And a lot of people said, look, just give up. You've just you finally got it to grow a bit. You've done £75,000, but you've lost £70,000. Quick, they just give up. It's just never going to work. But I knew, I knew it was going to work and I think you know I'd say to people you've got to look.
Speaker 2:I don't know it's hard, because you know, what I don't want to do is say to people never give up, because some people I've seen people who've never given up well, not never given up, but they, they persevere for a long, long time and it just doesn't work. Now I don't know whether, if they persevere another year or two years or five years or 10 years, it would work. But you know it's a difficult one, because the last thing, the worst thing in the world is being an entrepreneur is just where you're struggling year in, year out, and you do get. You get 60 year, 60 year olds who typically have small businesses. They run them themselves because they don't trust anybody else to do anything. They take everything on themselves and the business never grows and it's been a struggle all their life. And you think those people would have been better off not being an entrepreneur? You're better off not having your own business, just not cut out for it.
Speaker 1:At what point did the business start working? And I want to continue this little story of you know your early career. So at what point did you go from losing 70,000 to actually becoming profitable and it's starting to grow and hiring your first employees?
Speaker 2:It went from so it's 70,000, lost all the money I had. The following year it did 125,000 and sort of broke even. And the following year it did 375,000 and made a bit of money. And then 1.2 million and made a bit more money, making about 10%. So it sort of over the next three years it did start to make money.
Speaker 1:And how are you selling these shirts?
Speaker 2:They were all. I was selling them all by what we called then mail order, which was because there was no internet. For a long time I didn't even have. I couldn't take credit card because the banks now anybody can take a credit card, but the banks almost they don't trust you couldn't take a credit card. I didn't. Actually when I was at Bristol I didn't even have a telephone, so people couldn't even. I just had this leaflet where I printed 5,000 off for 99 quid and I'd post the leaflet out and they'd have to fill in a little order form at the bottom and they'd have to post a check back to me with the order and I'd post the shirts out to them. So for a long time it was literally just post. Then when I left I got a fax machine and I could take credit cards, but it was still very much purely online. I had something God, not online. There was no internet purely post little catalogs, yeah, just post back with forwards very basic.
Speaker 1:So is that you just have a photo of the shirt, send it to a load of people in a targeted area and then hope for the best.
Speaker 2:Exactly, you put together a brochure, and a brochure is anything from a single sheet of A5 printed on one side, which is what I started with, to a. You know you can get a I mean next to a brochure. That's 600 pages as well, you know, and our brochures have also grown over the years and your product range grows. But it, you know, it was still, you know, pre internet. It was all brochures. Pre internet we had no stores. I couldn't open a store, obviously, when I was a university and I couldn't open a store after I didn't have any money. But we had no stores. It was purely sending out brochures or catalogs with photos of shirts in, and people would either could then ring, because I had a telephone by that stage, or post them or fax them.
Speaker 1:If I'm correct, if I'm wrong, but if a lot of your sales are done online, what's even the point of having physical stores? Is it just another avenue to earn more money or is it to credentialize the brand more? Why not focus even more on online sales?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's always. It's a very interesting debate about what is the right balance between store and online, and there is an argument to say don't do stores. You know, amazon effectively didn't do a store. They do have some stores now, but effectively no stores and obviously very successful business. I think there's a. You know our customer.
Speaker 2:I think it's very important that you have a very clear idea of who your customer is. Now, what we have. We have a guy called James Sanderson. James Sanderson is 47 years old. He lives in Chiswick in London. He works in an advertising agency and he wears shirts, suits, open neck shirt to work and he has two kids and he has a wife called this and his wife does that. You know, you build up a very precise picture of that customer. Now, that's not to say that every single one of our customers is 47 and lives in Chiswick, but it means that when we do our marketing and when we think about who we're, who we're targeting, we always say and also what products we're going to introduce we say would James Sanderson like, like this? Would James Sanderson react to this? How would James Sanderson think about this? And actually, you know we have a hell of a lot of customers who are 18, and we have a hell of a lot of customers who are 18.
Speaker 1:Of course, shout out as well.
Speaker 2:I'm very pleased with it. Yeah, but you look very smart.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great when you know a lot of entrepreneurs want to be the CEO of their company and they think they're the right fit for the business at the beginning, the middle, when it's massive, when it's small, whatever. But you took a different standpoint and you've put a CEO into the business and you've had multiple CEOs in the business. Why did you do that? Why didn't you? Why I won't need a CEO, why aren't you the CEO? And what's your involvement and how does, how do the two relate?
Speaker 2:I think there's a couple of there's a couple of things there. I think, as an entrepreneur, there's only one thing you have to do. There's one thing you have to get right, and that one thing is to choose the right person to run your business. And for a long time that may well be you as the entrepreneur, but I can almost guarantee there comes a time when you are not the right person to run your business, and I think entrepreneurs generally find it very, very difficult to admit that that day has come. They feel that nobody else cares as much as they do, nobody else. They feel nobody can do things as well as them. They feel that the business would collapse without them.
Speaker 2:And I think I've always been slightly different, because I've always felt I've never really felt that I'm particularly good at anything, and in many ways I'm not. And so what I did as I grew the business is, when I first started, it was literally me. It was me in my room at university. Then, when I moved, when I left, when I left Bain, I rented a little office in where Chelsea Football Grand is now, before my office was knocked down to make room for it. But just so I had a little room, me sitting in the room with a desk and a telephone and surrounded by boxes. So I would do the marketing, the merchandising, the HR not that there was much, because I was the only person. I answered the phones, I took the orders, I packed the orders, I took the orders down to the post office, I did absolutely everything. And then, as the business grows, you get somebody in to maybe answer the phones. And what I found that was a bit of a revelation is that when I got people in to answer the phones who'd maybe done it in another company and they'd had a bit of training, they were actually much better than me. And then I get people to pack boxes and cranky, I mean these guys. When I go to a warehouse now in Milton Keynes we've got guys you almost can't see their hands move. I mean they're sort of almost a blur. I mean they're so damn good at it.
Speaker 2:And then you start saying, well, what about the marketing and the finance and the HR? And you start giving away each of these roles and I found that every time I gave away a role, I had somebody who was much better at it than I was. And the natural progression of that is you get to the point where the only thing you're doing is sort of running the business. You're the MD, you're the chief exec and the natural progression is that you know there's going to be somebody better than you. And I got to that point in 2005. And I brought a chief exec in in 2005, which was actually a bit of a disaster. They lost it two years. It was a disaster. I came back in in 2007 till 2009. But then since 2009, I've had four chief execs and it's a very it's an interesting exercise because you know it's again, it's horses for courses.
Speaker 2:You know I wasn't the right person to run the business and the first chief executive had in. You know you get to a point where you know the business grows, the business evolves, the business changes. Their skills don't necessarily evolve with the business and it comes to a stage when you need somebody else. And that's the really exciting thing about a business that it does change, it's not static. And that's why you know people say to me Krikey, how can you get up every day of your life that that is six years and think, how am I going to sell a few more shirts today? But that's not what I do, because I've realized that if I run the business I would have been, to be honest, I would have been bored. I'd been bored of the business. You can't do something and be fresh and excited and leap out of bed. You can't do the same thing for 36 years and I suppose the fact that the business keeps changing makes it possible that you could do it and some people have done.
Speaker 2:I would say Michael Dell is one of my heroes, I suppose, for want of a better word, but Michael Dell started his business in 1984 with a thousand dollars from his university door and obviously went on to create Dell and he brought a chief exec in and the chief exec built the business up. But actually I think he's now gone back into the business, which is interesting Because it's become, you know, it's a obviously it's now a huge, huge business. But he has gone back in and he's obviously he's a bit like me. We've been doing it with the same amount of time. He's got a slightly bigger business. But you've got to gauge how much involvement is the right involvement and for me it's not too much.
Speaker 1:Sure. What were some of the biggest failures that you had in the business and how did you navigate those?
Speaker 2:My failures have always been. I've had a lot of failures and everybody you ever talk about failure. Whoever you talk to anybody about failures, they say that failures are very important because you learn from them and you do become a better person because of them. And it's an interesting one because you know it's very easy. You know I've had my business 36 years and people come along and they ask for advice and I give them my advice and you see them totally not to ignore it, which is fair enough. You know they've got their own business to run. They will decide that I'm wrong, but then sometimes you see them they ignore it and they go and do something you said that they shouldn't do and it's a disaster.
Speaker 1:Not always, sometimes, you know sometimes I'm wrong, but Like them telling you not to start a share business.
Speaker 2:Like them telling me not to start a share business yes, shouldn't I say it?
Speaker 1:I think one of the coolest things. This sounds like ludicrous and it's not even really money or irritated, but it's like some of your partners with the business Like I was looking at. Is it the New York Jets got the England rugby team? I mean that's pretty awesome. Is how does that feed into the main mission of the business? Is that always just about monetary value of their audiences or, to those individuals and those teams, also aligned with your personal mission or the mission of the business?
Speaker 2:I think it's it comes back to. It comes back to knowing and loving James Sanderson. Whether James Sanderson is the James Sanderson in the UK or James Sanderson in the US, the US is actually a bigger business. A much bigger business core is actually in the UK now.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Or Germany or Australia. Those are our four main markets. But I suppose we sort of think what would James Sanderson like? And I suppose it helps that we're within the business. You know the guys running the business are quite closely aligned with James Sanderson. You know they fit that sort of profile. So we end up it enables you to do things that it's doing, things that we like, you know we like rugby, you know we like NFL, I love the New York Jets and you can do things.
Speaker 2:You know I always say, you know we have a survey every year and in the business and you know we ask lots of questions to everybody. But the question actually that I really care about, the one question that I really care about, is we say, is it fun working at Charles Turing? Because I want it to be fun. I think if it's a fun place to work, then people will do a great job. And so you know, if we all like rugby and like you know NFL or you know we have, I mean other we have a football club for them, you know, which is quite a local club to us in London, and it's just things that we like and that we enjoy and they're things that our customers like and enjoy and they're fun. And it just makes us a little bit different. And it's the same reason, you know, we work with sort of brand ambassadors who are typically at the moment they're quite UK centric. Sure, so we have, you know, people like Joe Root, who's well, he's no longer captain actually the England cricket team, but he was Josh Butler, who's captain of the limited overs Marcus Smith, we hope, is going to win the Rugby World Cup for us. So we have, you know we have those people and again it's. You know they're fun, they're actually, they're great people, they're really nice people, they're damn good at what they do. You know they love Charles Tyrrell, which I think is really important. You know they. You know obviously we do pay them, obviously, sure, but they also they love the stuff. You know they wear the kit. They don't just do it because they have to and I think that's all part of the.
Speaker 2:You know, when I look at my role in the business now, I say you know, because I don't run it. You know, as I said, I've had a chief exec for a while and my role in the business now I see my role as being pretty simple. It's about making sure quality value, quality value, service are right and are up there, and so I'm always looking for anywhere where the business is falling short on quality, value or service. But more important, I want and this comes back to the fun thing in the survey but I want the people who work in the business to love working for Charles Tyrrell. I want the customers to love Charles Tyrrell and I want the suppliers to love Charles Tyrrell, and I think a lot of companies will say that, but they don't really mean it and I hope that we really mean it.
Speaker 2:You know, and I want so I want the people in the business to absolutely love it and I want to do things that make it fun. I want to work with England Rugby, I want to work with the NFL. I want to do all those things and equally, I want the customers to love the business and so I'll do things that will make the customers love the business, not just because I hope they sell great products, but because we get them. You know, we've got a pub. There's a pub in London that is now called the Tyrrell Arms for the Rugby World Cup for a month. It's decked out. You know they're pulling Pines and Charles Tyrrell to it. It's just fun. You know it's about doing fun things, it's amazing.
Speaker 1:I think there's actually one thing I read in a few articles about you that you wanted people working in the business to feel like the business is their own. How do you create that sort of environment where people actually feel invested in the business so a lot of people that you know they go to work, they just want to get their money, go home and just forget about it or they just mind nothing to get through the day. But how do you create this environment of fun and motivation and making people think this is also my baby, that I want to improve, that I want to grow?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's very, it's a very easy thing to say to people. You can say to people right, come on everybody, I want you all to have fun. You know that doesn't obviously doesn't work. It's thousands of little things. Sure, I think one of the things actually that does make a difference is having, you know, a founder, the founder of the business, still around. And so you know, I mean it's lots and lots and lots of small things and this is just one of those many, many small things.
Speaker 2:But you know, when people start in the business, I sit them down. So I'll do them in groups, in groups of maybe six, eight, 10 people, so small groups, and I sit them down and we have a session for about an hour, half an hour to an hour. They can ask any questions they like, but I tell them a little bit about the story of Charles Turrett and also what I want Charles Turrett to look like. And this idea that I want people to think of this business as their own comes from. You know, it comes from my own experience. You know I had a job working for Harrods. You know, on my between school, when I left school, before I went to university, I had a year out and I went to work for Harrods to make a bit of money and they put me in the golf ward apartment and I don't know why, because I hate golf, I've always hated golf, but they put me at golf where.
Speaker 2:And the guy running the golf ward apartment had been running that apartment for 20 years. Because he kept telling me in my first day it's quite small up on the fifth floor of Harrods, it was just me and him and he kept saying I've been running the department for 20 years, go and do that, you know, go and do this. And at the end of the first day I said to him look, I know you've been running this department for 20 years, but I have made a list of 10 things that I think you could do that would make this department a better department. And I don't know. Obviously I was a bit naive, but I thought he was going to think wow, this guy's amazing. I thought maybe I could even get promoted on day two. So when I came in the next day and found myself in luggage, he'd got rid of me. Not only he didn't just ignore me, he got rid of me, he packed me off to luggage.
Speaker 2:I thought, cracky, you know I was 18, I knew I wanted my own business. And I remember thinking that I think when I have my own business, if people come into me, it doesn't matter whether they're a school leaver or whether they've been working in the industry for 30 years. If they come in and they say why'd you do something like this? If this was my business, I wouldn't do this. I'd do it like this. I will never, ever do what that guy did to me, just completely ignore me and boot me out. I will say to them that's a really interesting idea, let's have a chat about that. And so it's this culture that I've tried to build in the business, where anybody it doesn't matter and literally it doesn't matter whether you just left school, you might have no experience at all, you've just left school and you come in and you say why the hell is this company doing it like that? And there's quite a good chance we're doing it like that because we've always done it like that. Nobody really thinks about it. And so what happens is that I won't.
Speaker 2:I say to them you've got to. You know, you're the only person who's going to make that change. So you've got to say something to somebody. And what we then do is we have a conversation. So we say we do it like this because of this. They say well, we think it's stupid because of this. And you come to an agreement and sometimes they'll say, yeah, you're right, I can see now why the company does it like that. But sometimes the company will say, actually, you're right, somebody got a deal, we'll change it, and it's just. You know, having that sort of a culture of the business I think is really important, especially as you grow. You know it gets bigger and bigger and you can lose that and people become. You know, I don't want anybody ever to feel that they are a little cog in a big wheel. You know they have to feel like big cog in a little wheel, doesn't matter how big or small we are, I want them to feel like a big cog in a little wheel.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Another thing I've read is about your phrase of don't be a fat gladiator. What does that mean and how do you avoid becoming a fat gladiator?
Speaker 2:A fat gladiator is a. It basically happens to all businesses. Business goes in cycles. Every business goes in cycles. You have good times and bad times. What tends to happen? Everyone has the cycles at different lengths Depending on how long the cycle is. It depends on how many people who are in the business remember the last bad cycle. Generally, cycles might be 10 years. You get to a point and a lot of businesses have an average 10-year of 2 years. People work for 2 years now and then they leave. More new people come in and then they leave. Then suddenly you get a bad cycle. You have to go back 4 generations to people to remember the last bad cycle. When things are going really well, people start feeling that it's going really well because they're just damn good at what they do. It's like what happens to a gladiator A gladiator.
Speaker 2:You come out of a gladiator college and you are bloody fit as a fiddle. You are a lean, mean fighting machine. You walk out to the middle and you slaughter the poor chap you're up against. You think God, this is fantastic and sees it gives you big thumbs up. Next week you have to go in again and you slaughter them. You start feeling I'm invincible. You go back after that one and you have maybe a large pork pie. Actually, this is easy. I deserve a pork pie and a pint of Guinness. Gradually you just become batter of batter until one day you walk out there and somebody skewers you, I think, every bit. Very, very hard for a business to stay lean. We've been through this. We've become fact gladiators. When we were talking about the mistakes I made sorry, which I didn't really explain. I've made many mistakes, but my two biggest mistakes were the same thing that was losing focus.
Speaker 2:When I started this business I was a men's mail order share business. Back in 1995, 1994, we were doing 2.5 million pounds sales, making 250,000 pounds profit. I thought I was God's gift. I thought this is easy, I've got this absolutely nailed. We're going to just grow like Billy-O. This is easy. I became a fact gladiator. What I did is I thought, okay, it was time when there was a guy called Lord Hanson and a guy called Lord White who were big swatch-buckling pioneers going around the world buying up duracell batteries and ICI paints and ICI chemicals. It was buying this huge business. I thought I'll go and buy a business. I went and bought a children's business that had five stores in London. I was a men's mail order share business. I bought a children's retail business. At the time we had no shops in Charles-Tierre. They were completely and utterly different. I lost more money in three months than I made in the last three years and we went bust.
Speaker 2:That was a big lesson. I think that lesson is focus. That's what I say to people is my general advice is just focus. Be the best in the world at what you do. I think the best example of that is probably Coca-Cola. Coca-cola now actually have quite a lot of other brands, but for a long time they just made Coca-Cola and they built one hell of a business with a basic single product.
Speaker 2:My biggest mistake that was losing focus and going bust. Slightly embarrassingly, what I did 11 years later in 2005 is I basically did the same thing. I brought in this new chief exec. He came from Ralph Lauren Together. It's my fault, not his. He said why don't we go after the women's and children's market? We can be like Ralph Lauren. He said why can't we be like Ralph Lauren? Which is what he would say. I brought him in from Ralph Lauren. He thought I was bringing him in to make us like Ralph Lauren. I'd love to be like Ralph Lauren, but we're not Ralph Lauren.
Speaker 2:We started doing women's and children's and two years later we were basically pretty much bust. We had 9 million quids worth of women's stock where we couldn't sell. The bank came down and it was like a tonne of bricks. It was absolute hell. That was exactly the same mistake. What the hell was I thinking? I did children's clothes 10 years earlier. I did it 10 years later. I say to people in the talk when they're new starters, I say look, this is a business where do not be afraid of failure, do not be afraid of making a mistake. Actually, more than that, you can make the mistake once. But actually here you can make the mistake again because I made it again. I'm that stupid. Do not be afraid of making a mistake Again. That all feeds into the culture of the business. You want to be damn good at what you do. What we do is we sell very good quality clothes at great value for money to men, for work, for after work for weekends you mentioned about earlier in the podcast about how having the CEO and help to avoid boredom.
Speaker 1:I'm curious even not becoming a fact editor because you've made money or you're getting lazy how do you actually stay motivated and just as motivated as you were from day one when you're becoming more successful, you've got more money, you've got a family, how do you keep that motivation as spark to keep going, keep digging, when you are doing well?
Speaker 2:I think that comes again. It comes from somewhere sort of deep inside, I don't know, probably some dreadful insecurity, but because a lot of people say, wow, you've done really well and I feel like I haven't done well. I feel like I've got so much further to go. Some people they'll open a shop and they're happy, as Larry, what they wanted. They wanted a shop and they've got a shop and it's a good shop and it works well. Or they wanted a restaurant and it works well.
Speaker 2:But I suppose I want those three and a half billion men around the world to be clothed. I want them to be wearing my Charles, two of my middle names. I want them to be wearing my middle names in their collar or in their breast pocket. I don't know what it is. I just, you know, I love.
Speaker 2:I suppose it comes down to what I like about what makes me happy about the business, and it's not to do with top line growth or profitability or anything like that. There are two things that make me happy. One is if I go out to a store or if I'm in the call center or if I'm in the warehouse, somebody comes up to me and says this is the best job I've ever had. I love working here. That really makes me happy. Or if I see a customer, if I'm in a store and a customer and they see me and they sometimes they recognize me because I'm sort of my name is sometimes in the brochures or whatever and they'll come up and they just say I absolutely love Charles Turrick. I've been a customer for 20 years. It's amazing what you do. I love the quality and that's what makes me really happy and I think it probably sounds a bit strange but you know I want that to happen a lot. I want that to happen the whole time. I want people to come to me in the street saying I love your shirts.
Speaker 2:You know that's sort of, and I think to do that you need to be, you need to grow, and I think it's more exciting. It's exciting growth, growth is exciting and I think you know for people to enjoy working in the business I've always said you can. It's very, very hard to make a business, to make a business that is static or a business that's not growing to be an exciting place to work, because good people will always relish new challenges. They want to do new things, they want to have new responsibilities and if you've got the same business doing the same thing year in, year out, no one's doing anything new. You know to get promoted you have to wait for somebody to retire or to die or to move on. You know there's no, there's no growth, there's no excitement. You know just doing the same things. So I think it's you know to make, to make, to have a great place to work. It makes it a hell of a lot easier if you're pushing, growing and building a great business.
Speaker 1:So what I mean? You've had lots of different stages through growth and you know doing badly and then doing extremely, extremely well, and you mentioned that you want you know every man, or lots of men in the world, to wear your shirts. What's the plan for the next five years for Charles Tiro and how do you plan to get there?
Speaker 2:Well, the plan is limited by the fact that I've learned twice that focus is important. So the plan is to sell more clothes to more men. That is the plan, sure, and the plan is to grow as fast as we possibly can, which is an interesting one, because often I look at you know, I know a number of entrepreneurs, a lot of entrepreneurs have, and I've had this the whole time myself as well you speak to people outside the business, especially people who might be in private equity or in banking, or, and the first question they always have is what's the exit, what's the exit strategy? And I say what do you mean? The exit strategy? There is no exit strategy, no exit strategy. You have to have it. You have to have an exit strategy. You can't just do it forever and I say, well, give me one good reason to exit. If you can give me one good reason to exit, then I'll think about having an exit strategy. And the only reason they can ever give you is that you get some money.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And this is not about money. Sure, I sort of you know I'm not that stupid and I've worked. You know, I've seen a number of people who have built businesses and they've built them for quite a long time maybe not 36 years, but 20 years and suddenly after 20 years they go bust and sometimes they haven't taken a penny out of the business. And I think that's foolish, because I think you know you need to make sure that you do take something out of your business. You need to make sure that if the business went bust tomorrow, it wouldn't, it would matter, but it wouldn't, it wouldn't change my life, sort of me. So you know. So it means I'm in a position where you know, I just you know the plan is. The plan is to is to keep growing. It's to do, it's to work out ways to sell products to men in a more efficient, more interesting, more exciting way that makes them keener to buy. I mean, it sounds rather it sounds a bit dull, but it's. I find it rather interesting.
Speaker 1:Something I've mentioned this is very, very late in the podcast is your wife is actually the founder of the white company as well. Yeah, I mean, just what you've done is incredibly rare, but let alone you both be able to do that and still liking each other. At the end of the day, Did you do that feat? You think independently, both had your own ideas, your own path, or did you find a lot of crossovers between building your business and building her business, and then you have to balance off each other with ideas, how to grow, your failures, etc.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it is interesting because there aren't many husband and wives who both have separate businesses but quite similar businesses in many ways. I mean, they're both retail, online retail split businesses. She sells sheets and bed linen and clothing and household products and I always sell products for men and it has been. It's been a very interesting journey actually and it was, and I think I mean I just I have huge admiration. I always wanted my own business and I think Chrissy probably did as well, but I Remember she was. She probably has different, different memories of how we started, but she started.
Speaker 2:I'll have to ask her you'll have to ask you do pop to look after with her. But I Remember we went on holiday together and I started my little shop business. I Think she was 22. I was probably about 25 or 6. We hadn't heard each other very long and I spent the whole. We went to me, orca, and I spent the whole week Saying, look, no offense, but I really want to get back to my business. I love my business. She said you're mad. I'm a normal person in Verde commas and I, like you, know, when you go on holiday, holiday is a great. You know, it's fun to be on holiday, you know, and I'm not looking forward to going back to work.
Speaker 2:She was working at National Macnabre's, harpers and Queen and, and when we got back she walked into my office and she said actually, I've been thinking about it, I want to start my own business. And I said, well, that's great. I said, well, I do mail order and I've made loads of mistakes already. So you know why do you do mail order? If I can do it, you know anybody can do it, it's. It's quite easy. You just do a little brochure off, you go and, and I mean she is. I mean I think what she has created is quite extraordinary. You know the white company is. I would say it's a much better business than Charles Terry. You walk into a white company store, it is just. They're absolutely amazing, you know. They just look, feel, smell absolutely incredible. But she started, you know, with nothing I do, was actually the best investment ever made. I gave the 5000 quid for 25% Right at the beginning and she just started. She never raised me money, never had any debt, never borrowed any money, just did exactly what I did, just bootstruck it and slowly, slowly built it up. We actually had a bit of a about about five years later. I talk about that was the best investment ever made. It was actually Also Turned into the worst decision I ever made, which was about four or five years later.
Speaker 2:We went on holiday again and I just turned 30. It was over Valentine's Day and we've been going out for five years or six years, whatever. And I she thought it's Valentine's Day, he's just turned 30. We've been going up six years. He's going to propose. I sort of thought we're going to be going out five or six years, I'm only 30 and I completely forgotten about Valentine's Day, so the thought hadn't crossed my mind. So she spent. We went to Thailand. She spent the whole time thinking he's going to propose. I didn't. So when we got back she marched into my office and she was renting this state. She was renting a little room at the back of our the back of our office with 5000 pounds in cash, saying I want my shares back and I never want to see you again. That was the end of my investment in in in the white company. But we did. Actually, we got married about Four months later and she is a wedding present. She gave me 1%.
Speaker 1:So I.
Speaker 2:I I ended up being a 1% shareholder in the white company, but it's been very, very interesting and useful having us both grow the businesses.
Speaker 2:We keep them completely separate, but there have been times when I've had tough times and she's had not such tough times, and times when she said slightly tough times and I've had better times. And it's quite nice having two businesses because it's a you're sort of hedging your bets and it's always we've always had that you can take. Maybe you can take a bit more risk, because you always feel that if you do get bust, there's still the other business. And you know, and we do, we have talked about the business and we do, you know, we, we, we, you know, we, we, we do talk about things and it it's, it's useful and we still get on pretty well and it's been great and it's amazing. I mean they're almost identical Size businesses. You know, I think they both do Fiddle, really quit. I mean they're just identical size businesses and and and they've had very similar Sort of paths, but I still think hers is probably better.
Speaker 1:Do you ever get competitive?
Speaker 2:I'm a very competitive person, but I don't really get competitive. Actually, I think it's sort of it's just too close to home, I think. I just think I, you know, I think it's just an amazing business. We, we, we joke around a bit about, about being competitive. Maybe there is a little bit of there's a little bit of truth in it, but not really I think it depends who's, who's winning.
Speaker 1:I mean, if you're, if you're doing better, you can't, you can't say anything.
Speaker 2:I know that's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you so much. I feel like I could talk to you for eight more hours and still be learning new information. Um, I finally enjoyed, enjoyed learning from you, initially about how to actually pronounce Charles Tirrett, and I hope that everyone else can learn that as well. Um, I was particularly interested in learning about your culture. Um, because there's a saying for you know, someone just making pot and pan or a microphone or a pen, whereas what you've been able to do with your shirt business is develop a real message and culture behind it, not only with the people that work there, but also through the brand ambassadors and what that truly represents. And I think it says a lot for someone to still be working in a business 36 years later and how much they really care about it, which I think then relates to the customers. So then, then, when, then, when they are wearing it, they feel a part of that message and that, that, uh, that journey as well. So, thank you so much for joining me today and, um, yeah, great.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for having me. I've enjoyed it.