Heights: From Burnout to Braincare, how Dan Murray-Serter built a £500k+ MRR business in public

How one entrepreneur turned his struggles into a thriving business.

We speak with serial entrepreneur, co-founder of Heights and host of the Secret Leaders podcast, Dan Murray-Serter. 

Hear how Dan went from struggling with insomnia and anxiety to becoming a successful entrepreneur in the world of nutrition and wellbeing.

Discover Dan's insights on resilience, building a unique brand, and creating your own category. 

Key Takeaways

- Find out how Dan used a newsletter to grow his business and the mistakes he made that we can all learn from

- Dan's investment philosophy, based on investing in over 50+startups and how to invest in people, not businesses

- Taking yourself too seriously as a founder can lead to a loss of enjoyment and fulfilment in the startup journey, so it's essential to maintain the ability to laugh at yourself and find joy in the process.

 Have questions about this episode? Ask our hosts, chat now

Transcript

Unknown: 0:09

Make sure you don't become a boring decade and the meantime enjoy it. Have fun. And if you can laugh at yourself, you'll always find a way to enjoy the realities of the shit that hits the fan. You're listening to founded and grounded with Ollie collard and Laura Rawlings. The podcast brings you the honest realities of startup life. If you're a founder or aspiring entrepreneur, this is for you. We know running a business can be lonely and tough at times, and we want to help you get ahead with simple tips and sound advice. Every fortnight we hear inspiring stories from an early stage business owner who's only a couple of steps ahead of you, talking about what they've learned. And as your hosts, we share our own insights and experiences as founders. So you can apply this to your own business. Hello, welcome to the founded and grounded Podcast. I'm Laura Rawlings co hosting alongside Ollie collard, business startup coach. Hey, Ollie, how are you?

Ollie Collard: 1:18

I'm very well, Laura, how are you doing?

Unknown: 1:20

I'm alright, thank you. It's funny you and I were just mulling over what we're going to talk about in today's podcasts. And I was like, we're gonna keep it short and tight and just let our guests do all the talking. And then we realised that as you asked me one question I had so much to say. So this is going to be interesting how this unfolds, go gnarly, spill the beans. Who have we got?

Ollie Collard: 1:40

So we've got Dan Murray Surtur, who is a serial entrepreneur, and investor and a fellow podcaster. And I'm absolutely delighted to have him on founded and grounded, talking about everything that he does,

Unknown: 1:52

I can imagine you are because you've been pursuing him for quite some time in the best possible in professional fashion.

Ollie Collard: 1:59

Yeah, that's fair to say. I think. Yeah, sending him a few messages on Twitter over a course of about a year and a half. Yeah, slowly, slowly catch the monkey, as they say. Yeah, that Dan eventually said yes.

Unknown: 2:12

Yeah, definitely. Well, there's, there's loads in what he's got to say here. So buckle up, everybody. And let's begin, shall we by jumping straight in and finding out about, you know a bit more about who he is, and in particular, the business that he's focusing on now.

Ollie Collard: 2:31

So some of our listeners will probably know about you and your business, from your podcast, decrypt leaders. But for those who don't, can you tell us a bit about your origin story, why you started heights in the first place, and fundamentally what problem you're solving.

Unknown: 2:48

So heights is my I don't know, six or seven business, it's worth saying it's been an entrepreneur for 10 years, to anyone who's good at math will notice that I've cycled through quite a few and in a short amount of time, goes because I currently currently have three that I'm the founder or co founder of. But I'm CEO heights. I also have kindling media, which makes secret leaders and now a podcast called big spender and a couple of others that are in pilot right now, which is a bootstrap business. There's four of us that kindling media has 20 of us at a height that is a venture backed business and crowdfunded. And then I run a community called founders, which is, I'm the co founder, Rob, it's a nonprofit has its own CEO, I'm on the board. I do very little now. But there's a three businesses and then our four beforehand. And so my origin story with heights is I was having a really hard time and my last business, which was called gravel, which went really, really, really well and then went terribly and just imploded and failed. But for the period of time that it went really well, it was a great learning experience already cut my teeth in the startup world, I had, you know, 10 years worth of experience in a couple of years of startup life. And the downside of this is I had extreme mental health concerns over that time, I suffered badly from burnout, which was very much caused by my own stupidity, to be totally honest, if I tell you the stuff that I was doing, it's pretty obvious burnout material. But I'd also experienced quite deep depression, but it was after my dad died. So that was like, you know, there's a couple of types of there's many types of depression you can get. But situational depression is, in a way in itself quite helpful because it's obviously quite rational to feel depressed after a parent dies. So I've never too concerned about where my depression came from. It was very rational and obvious to me, but it just was my concern was always when is this going to end? Anxiety is something that I still deal with. Now, but rarely, but I had really chronic anxiety. And basically what happened is, I ended up with insomnia one day, I just couldn't sleep And I wasn't sure why that was the case, which is very frustrating to me. Because if I can understand the source of something, I can get to the, you know, the root cause of something, I can get to work on what I can do to change it. But in this case, I just got insomnia, couldn't sleep one night, and then consider the next and this went on for six months. And so I was chronically ill over that time as you would be not sleeping for so long. I tried all the different things I tried, therapy, sleep therapy, calm, sleepio, CBT, you name a thing, I went to a doctor, you know, he gave me sleeping pills, tried anything that you would do if you're really suffering. And in the end, after six months, I went to see a friend for dinner. And she recommended that I get to see a dietitian. And I thought it was super strange, because I was like, I got nothing wrong with my diet, not fat, like why don't I go see a dietitian. And she was like, well, dietitians, they use nutrition to heal sick people. So it's actually diet and food. But if you have an illness, if you have a sickness, and I was just kind of like, unable to connect the dots here as I don't have an illness, I don't have a sickness, I just can't sleep. And she was like, Okay, I have anything wrong with my body. And she was like, well, your brain is in your body, isn't it? And I was like, right. Yeah. I mean, you tried everything else you haven't tried this, like could well be something and I was like, You know what, you're right. I just, I'm so desperate. I've tried everything else. I'll try this. And I went to the dietician. And then she very quickly diagnosed me and said, You know, I think you've got a bunch of deficiencies right now that are causing this, your brain is essentially sending you alarm signals that the house is on fire, I'm going to tell you to take super high quality and therefore unbelievably expensive, but potent Amiga threes to DHA omega threes, because your brain is 60% fat. And 90% of that is the compound DHA. So she's like, you know, your brain needs to be fed what it needs to thrive at this point. So, omega threes, B vitamin complex, because it regulates your energy, and you're having like mad energy spikes, and drops it all the wrong times, which is why you have insomnia. And then antioxidants are in the form of blueberry extract, because it's the most potent form of anti oxygen, which is going to essentially clean out your glymphatic system of your brain, which will basically be like a car wash whilst you go to sleep, your pick your brain. Basically, antioxidants will clean out all the free radicals in your brain. And these things should really help. And I was like, You know what, Lady, I have no idea what we're talking about, but I will just do it. And within like two or three days, I started sleeping. And I was like, unbelievably amazed that this woman had been so right so quickly, and also very annoyed that no one in six months had suggested supplements. And also I'm English, right? So I was massively cynical, that supplements could ever work slash, you know, do anything for me. I've never taken them before, really the occasional vitamin D. So I was really surprised that what, you're not very interested or engaged in this, but these are the moments in life that create real light bulb opportunities for you, right? If you listen, and so I became really interested in this idea of mental health and nutrition. And I was like, you know, I can't be the only person who's had nutrition make an impact on their mental health. I wonder if there's like much evidence based around it. And then I started reading science papers, because I'm quite nerdy. And because I enjoy reading that stuff. And turns out as reams of the staff, like paper after paper evidence after evidence, there the world is full of information and scientific fact about scientific evidence about the role of nutrition in mental health. So depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, anxiety, insomnia, all of these things. Nutrition makes an enormous amount of impact, or the right nutrients feed your brain and help it thrive through a lot of these different things. However, I was told in this space of, well, why don't I know about it? And why does no one know about it? Why does a doctor not know about it? Why did I get the doctor and he didn't suggest I go see a nutritionist or a dietitian or anything. You know, I learned in this experience as well, you know, doctors don't get trained in nutrition at all, it gets seven hours of training over seven years. And so they're the wrong people to go to, you know, they just, they just don't know, there's not a criticism, they literally are not taught it's not on their agenda, not on their curriculum. And so there's this really, really big gap between actual crucial mental health information about longevity about thriving about managing mental health challenges and the role that nutrients which you know, you can have the perfect diet or you can take supplements if you're lazy, which I am. There is the lack of information about how these things are linked. And that just suddenly seemed to me to be a super interesting area. And it was really interesting to me as well, because I think it's really valuable aspect. My business partner Joel and I, you know, we've been running a mobile tech company. So we're massive outsiders to this industry, which was a great opportunity. It meant that we question everything we asked why things are made a certain way. We learned so many things. But basically the whole entire industry bar like a tiny few amount of players, basically just charlatans. There's an enormous gap in the market between what the scientific dosages are of certain nutrients to make an impact on your body. And then the basically NRV, which is essentially the RDA Recommended Daily Balance, these things are miles apart. And so you can make a marketing claim of the things that you expect a supplement to do, which is a fraction of the scientific dosage you need for it to actually do that. Why it's like that, I don't know. But Therefore, most supplements that people buy a cheap and so people have an association of the fact that supplements are cheap. It turns out, they're cheap, and crap, if you want good, they're not cheap. All of this stuff was super fascinating to me, because I have no interest or understanding of this market whatsoever. And, you know, when I suddenly started to understand, you know, this is when the dietician, you know, when she told me to go and take these three supplements or 120 pounds, three supplement bottles at Planet organic, because she was like, you have to go dependent organic or Whole Foods or order these ones from Amazon, because you can't go to boots or Holland and bearer and get the quality that you need. And I was like, what, that doesn't sound right. She was like, I just do what I'm telling you. It's like, you know, stop asking questions is fine. Yeah, exactly. Right. But it's ridiculous. Ridiculous. And so all of these things I found to be profoundly interesting. And I didn't know that I was gonna make a supplement at the time. But I decided I was learning loads about psychology and neuroscience at this point, because I was massively interested in the brain because of my experience with insomnia. And so I came across the saying, and neuroscience, which is if you read something you learn at once, but if you share it, you learn it twice, because you submit new neural pathways. And so I was like, Oh, that's really interesting. And as learning about neuroplasticity, which is the idea that the brain will mould and change itself everyday by the actions that you take. So like, these are really interesting concepts. So basically, why don't I start a newsletter pretty much for myself, because like, that'll force me into a weekly process of reading more about the brain, I'll never be a neuroscientist or a nutritionist. I've never had that kind of expertise. But I will build up a lot of knowledge, a lot of crucial knowledge over a period of time, by getting into a weekly cadence of reading science papers, and then rewriting them in plain English in the form of a newsletter, I'm gonna, like cement these new neural pathways and remember this shit. And I'm going to start to become quite informed about this stuff. And most importantly, the stuff that I'm informed by is going to be from science. So it's not going to be like stupid influencer II crap, it's going to be like I'm, I'm reading credible sources, and then rewriting those and sharing them in a valuable way. And so that was actually four years ago that I started writing a newsletter, it took another year and a half to bring out a product. But that's also because I didn't know what I wanted to make, or what I wanted to do, I just knew that I wanted it to be in the brain space in general, therefore, writing a newsletter about how the brain works, according to science, to me, seems to be a really interesting endeavour. And that is essentially how the company started, we started as a newsletter, and for the best part of a year and a half. That's all we want to

Ollie Collard: 13:07

done, you created your own category called Brain care. How did you come up with that of creating your own lane?

Unknown: 13:15

That's a good question. The answer is and it's still a developing piece of work, but the answer is, it's like I was saying to you, you know, I was really interested in mental health and nutrition but no one else is. Because no one is aware that that's a thing. And so I got into a situation where we were talking about brain health and mental well being but we had this issue the brain health sounds like it's for people with Alzheimer's and cognitive decline, so they don't really want to learn about it because not that interesting. And mental health and mental well being always sounded like something that you either had and understood, but then you were massively sceptical anyway about the role of nutrition or you've never experienced mental health problems. And frankly, you don't really care because you just kind of assume that everyone else is whinging about their problems in life and because you don't suffer from them they're not that relatable. And so we would never landing our message with brain health and mental well being we should really figure out what we were doing and then one day, I mean, but it's worth saying this is like you know, well over a year into having launched the product and launched the smart supplement which is our our key hero products. You know, a year into that we're still trying to find the right thing and we start to have a conversation Joel and I about skincare about haircare about nail care about these industries have done a great job of explaining to people that a little bit every single day makes a big difference. You know, it's the personal care touch, it's self care, it's the moments that two minutes of brushing your teeth in the morning in the evening you know, it's not such a big piece of work that your parents teach you to do and then you teach your kids and you know the net effect of that is people don't have their teeth falling out and decaying and same with a bit of skincare and you know, cream and people have fancy wrinkles stuff and That's really interesting, your brain is your most important organ and there's nothing around brain care, there's actually nothing. What is akin to toothpaste and a toothbrush? What is akin to, you know, like skin cream and your face well, actually nutrition, nutrients, supplements, annual brain, you know, that is actually the art of feeding your brain when it needs to thrive every day, that kind of makes sense for brain care. So this was sort of our approach whether or not it's right or wrong, or it takes off how we want it to be. Because obviously, building a category is pretty bloody hard. But this was totally our approach to how we're trying to communicate, the category we're building and why brain care is important, you know, it's your most important organ. And if you lose it, you are fucked, and there's no getting back from it. So why take that risk? Literally, science says what you need to do the nutrients, you need to feed it every single day. And most people's response to this is cool, well, then I'll just get it in my whole food diet, in which case, they say good luck, go on, try it, try and eat one day of the perfect Mediterranean diet three times a day, you just try that like no one bothers live busy lives. distractions, most of us are, you know, taking cheat mode, sandwich at lunch, all that stuff, that's absolutely fine, do those things. But don't neglect the importance of feeding your brain what it needs to thrive. Because again, it is kind of a case of use it or lose it. At the end of the day. For anyone that's seen people with small brain health stuff, so cognitive decline, etc. But, you know, for anyone that's seen people go on that journey, it's just not worth the risk, you want to give yourself the best chance in life, to wake up every single day, be your best self and do the most that you possibly can and be the best version of yourself you want. And all of that stuff comes down to your brain, it comes down to your energy levels that comes down to your sleep, these are all things that the right nutrients will do to help you thrive. So from our perspective, this is a really important category to build. But if you're building a category, you know, you kind of need to build an ecosystem, which means you do definitely need to have, you know, an army of supporters with you on the journey, right. So our job is, you know, in terms of creating a category is also to make sure that we're inviting other brands into this space to compete with us because actually genuinely feel like we're stronger together. Right? It takes more than just one brand to get this message across. So that's really what we're in the business for.

Ollie Collard: 17:26

Love it then. And obviously you said earlier, obviously supplements aren't a new thing. So why are heights different? How do you kind of stand out in the marketplace? Apart from obviously creating this new category?

Unknown: 17:37

Yeah, I think that's a good question. So we've got two products the smart supplement and smart probiotic. And smart supplement which is our launch product has two really important angles to it. The first is it has a special capsule so a clever capsule. That is a capsule inside of capsules to the outside of the capsule is omega threes, so all plant base, but DHA omega three, as we discussed earlier, DHA and EPA V three is all at the scientific dosages as well. Most importantly, there's no caking agents, or synthetic fillers or anything like that. But then there's a capsule injected inside it. And inside that one, just like a two in one each capsule. And inside that one is essentially a multivitamin, but with blueberry extract as well. So you won't find blueberry extract in any product in the market, you have to write that completely separately. We're the only ones that have that as part of the product. So it's really unique, which I think is one of the reasons why so many people talk about the benefits from it. But the other part is the capsule itself. It's a it's a super unique super special capsule that makes sure that the bioavailability of the ingredients that get inside your bloodstream actually reach where they're meant to. And this is the thing that we work on really hard is why we only have two products. You know, we have very special capsule technology that we are obsessed over. And that translates the second product, which is smart probiotic. There's two really key USPS about smart probiotic. The first is that it's the first one that targets the gut brain axis. So the benefits you get from smart probiotic, I've got mental health and immunity. And it's very rare. You know, we're the first in the UK to have a probiotic that focuses on mental health. And we have 380 clinical studies backing there. So it's taken two and a half years to develop this product. We have a strain called Sara biome, which basically targets the gut brain axis through the vagus nerve, which is essentially the people the highway that speaks from the brain to the guts and 90% of the serotonin that you create in your body is created in your gut. So it is the main source of serotonin which means that the benefits you would feel from a probiotic other than better generalised gut health are things like less anxiety, better mood, etc. The things that come with developing more serotonin The second most important part of the probiotic is, other than obviously, the scientific credibility, I talked about the capsule technology. So from an ingredient point of view or nutrient point of view, in probiotic world, you have something called CF us, that is colony forming units, it basically means bacteria. We have 65 billion Cfu is in a single capsule, which makes us pretty much the most potent probiotic in the whole of the UK. But what happens in probiotics is, they're very sensitive, they're live cultures that live bacteria, so they deplete quickly. So we responsibly put our Cfu claim on the label as 20 billion just in case. And we've just done a whole bunch of third party testing, and been able to prove that 33 billion Cfu user 33 bacteria, a billion bacteria make it to your colon. Now why this is so so important. And this is a big USP, most probiotics, your yak oats, your foods, your your cat ears, your your kimchi, etc. Your stomach acid is so potent, so strong, it kills most bacteria, most probiotics that go to your gut anyway. So the journey, the thing that's really important is getting the bacteria to your colon, that is where it is meant to be going. That is the journey. So survivability is the key word in this space. And survivability is exactly the thing that we focused on for our probiotic. So we developed a acid resistance capsule. And the whole point of this acid resistant capsule is how far can we take the bacteria to the colon before it will basically just disintegrates into nothing. And so, third party tests have been showing that our competitors that might have somewhere between 10 and 20 billion Cfu is on their label, actually have about five to 10% of their label claim making it to the colon, we are at 170% because 33 billion of our 20 billion claim, but half of app manufacturers 65 are making it to your colon. So not only have we been really clear on selecting the right strains, but again, the thing that hates focuses on so strongly is encapsulation. And you've seen I'm sure the how the smart supplement looks. That's actually no, it's very unique, you know, you notice that it's different. But it's actually there's a lot more to it than that these are big, big investments to make, but they are worthwhile because in the supplement space isn't just about the quality of the nutrients, it's is it getting to the place it needs to get to to make the impact. And those are the key points for heights, right? That is when we create a product, we want to make sure it is literally the best in the market. And so after three years, we only have two products. We don't have shiny new syndrome, we have let's make the best product. Let's be super specific on the research that goes into it. And then let's make it the absolute best. And that's quite a nice strategy. Right? because not a lot.

Ollie Collard: 23:00

I recently watched your inspiring TED Talk, which is about how laughter can build resilience. And for me, this is one of the most essential traits in a founder. I want to know how confounders build more resilience in themselves. And I also wanted to ask you about your dad's philosophy on life, and how this still lives on inside you today.

Unknown: 23:23

Yeah, good question. So how can people build resilience is a tough one. Most of us try to avoid challenging situations. You know, the honest truth is, you know, if you want to force yourself into resilience, then go do something hard, go do a hike, go do a Tough Mudder go do a marathon like you know, do something you don't believe that you can do. That is an amazing way to build resilience. Because every single day, your body's your mind is telling, you know, but your your body is, you know, telling you, maybe maybe you can. And you know, I was actually at a party on Saturday, and a friend told me a friend of his who's in the Marines. The way that he gets himself to this always is apparently some Marines mantra, which is You're tougher than you think you are. And you always think that you're not that tough. And you always think that you can't do something, but it turns out you can. So you know, it's difficult to build resilience, like on purpose, so to speak. But the reality is that the situation you don't want to get into is having such an easy life. I mean, don't worry about it. If you're a founder, you're not going to have an easier life. But if you're not, then you know, putting yourself into difficult situations on purpose to build your toughness is really important because one day your precious little protected life will hit a small hurdle and you will capitulate, and frankly feel pathetic for it. And so you should because life is hard, hard shit happens, and learning how to deal With this stuff and pick yourself up and try again is an exceptionally important life skill. And if you're an entrepreneur, and you can't handle that stuff, you should not be an entrepreneur. It's as simple as that doesn't mean you shouldn't feel stressed. It doesn't mean you shouldn't feel like it's all too much for you, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't feel these things. But it does mean when you do feel those things, lean into them understand why you're feeling this way. How does that stuff make you feel? What are you going to do about it? Right? These are the questions you need to ask yourself and really hard times rather than just like letting your negative self talk run away from you and convince you that you're worthless and nothing and all the other bits in between. The other part of your question was on my dad. So you know, what does it mindset teach me? Well, there's a thing my dad had really poor health. So I've been blessed with generally good health, I do have pretty mixed mental health occasionally, although currently a lot better. Last couple of days, genuinely, since I started heights, you know, it's been so much better nutrition has made an enormous impact on me. Not perfect, but it is still better. And I, you know, really, really grateful for having a dad that taught me a lot about stoicism. You know, I didn't have to read Marcus Aurelius. Although, ironically, I do actually always have a Marcus Aurelius book next to me, because I love stoicism so much. But that is because my dad, I think this is a audio podcast, not video, right? I just pulled out a book of meditations by Marcus Aurelius, for the listeners. Because I have it in front of me all the time. But my dad was the ultimate stoic, had terribly bad health all the time, he was blind, he had 1,000,001 problems. And he never let it get to him, he ran a business. He's a very inspiring person. He was always cheerful, always tough, always honest, but always tough. And that's really important to have as a role model in your life, right to see how hard life can get how unfair that is. And then to just realise every single day you wake up, if you have your health, you have so much more than other people. You need to shut the fuck up and get on with how lucky your day actually is. There's an amazing quote, which is something along the lines of an a healthy man wants a million things, an unhealthy man wants just one thing. And I think that's like the perfect example. You know, we all want more. But do we ever appreciate that we have enough. And if you have your health, having lived with someone my whole life who had such terrible health, I have enough. Like, I'm so grateful for that every day. It's an amazing lesson. You know, I wish, I wish I didn't have to watch my dad. And as much pain as I did throughout his whole life. It's a horrible experience as a child. But also, I have so much admiration for it. And it taught me to be very grateful for the fact that I can walk that I can see I can live the life that I choose to live and take opportunities as they come. You know, my dad was essentially in a prison. His body, not his mind, but his body was his prison. And for some people with mental health problems, their mind is their prison. If this isn't your reality, you're free in the world. So take that opportunity and do something meaningful with it rather than letting yourself to come to self pity, because you have so much more than so many people.

Ollie Collard: 28:31

We were talking or fair briefly about having young children. So I've got two young children under the age of four, and you became a dad for the last year. So I just want to know a bit more about talk to me about running a business and being a parent. And specifically I want to know about one thing that's changed about Dan since being a dad

Unknown: 28:54

one thing that's changed about dancing as being a dad is timekeeping. That's the main thing very relevant for our interview, obviously, because I you know, I was late, so that it actually even being late is very on me, I was always on time. But as I explained to you my day started late because I ended up having to take my daughter's nursery, which I wasn't the parent responsible for doing this morning. So that changed my days outlook a little bit about time is still bath time. So you know, it's unusual for me because I would start work and get on my emails and just get on it. The second night had a spare minute and I wouldn't really know when to finish work either. And ever since I had my daughter it bought time, part time and still bath time I do it with pride. I love doing it. I wouldn't trade it for the world. And there's very little work in a very occasionally like secret leaders, for example, very occasionally, you know, I need to interview someone in LA I'm like, Okay, fine. Maybe it'll go over into bath time. It's so rare. And otherwise, just say no. It's very simple. I just say no. So that's, that's new for me. I mean, it's been a year now so it feels more comfortable. But you know, that's after 10 years, right? So that's building a new habit. And really it's like, is understanding priorities. So it's having a priority that's greater for what recruited than work is also weird to me. But it does show me that, you know, people, I think people need passion and people need purpose. It's very easy. You can see why if some people's purposes their children, I don't want. Personally, I don't understand, I don't make sound too judgmental or anything. I don't want my purpose ever to be my kids, or my own purpose. I want my kids to have their own purpose. And that's why I always feel very lucky for doing the work that I do, because I find a lot of purpose in my work. But I can understand, I can understand why because a lot of people who don't do purposeful work, and don't do it, therefore care about it, and looking for something to plug that hole in their life they can get obsessed about. And I totally understand how kids can fulfil that need, like 100% Because it's an awesome. It's an awesome growth journey is the answer. You know, it's a tiring and awesome growth journey. And there's no intelligence, or book, or anything that you can read for that journey. It's all really individual to you and your child and all of these things. And you just got to fucking suck it up and learn what you can at the pace that you possibly can on a journey. And it's an amazing opportunity for a human being to go through to be honest. Yeah, exactly.

Ollie Collard: 31:20

There's definitely no manual. And as you say, it makes you so much better with utilising your time more effectively and setting those boundaries and having those bedtime routines at the end of your day to look forward to. And yeah, I greatly respect all parents who are running a business. Now, given that you're an angel investor who's invested in over 5050 businesses, I'm keen to know what's one skill that makes you a great founder, but bad angel investor or vice versa.

Unknown: 31:50

Easy, great founder, I visionary I'm excited, excited, excitable, I come across passionate, I can get other people to believe, you know, in my dream and support me and all of these things that is so essential for a good founder. And that stuff makes me a terrible angel investor, because I believe in other people too. I didn't really, I didn't really do due diligence, ultimately, like, you know, I'm sophisticated enough to know that, like, no one fucking has any idea how well their business is gonna go. It's all bullshit. And so you might as well just trust in the founder. And, you know, that's not going to make me a really successful angel investor realistically, like a great angel investors more likely to look at the numbers, the market opportunity and all that shit. But I don't have time for that I can't be bothered for it, I invest in people, not businesses. And that's the truth. I mean, I do only invest in like, you know, like scalable 100, or zero type businesses, because I think that risk is worth it to me. And that's actually my intention, my intention is to get to 150. It sounds so ridiculous. But the risk of doing 50 is you don't have a single hit like the power law and theories, you get one in 100. And so when you get to 100, in theory, assuming that 99 Don't make it, I need one, at least by power law to make it and 50 I'm quite at risk. So that is a great question, by the way, but like absolutely where my entrepreneurial nature meets me about an investor for sure. But it makes me a great investor, though, is massively supportive. Never ever grill any of my investees I give them advice, say, this is how I do things. This is some stuff that I've done wrong, that I would advise you don't do. But I don't really give a fuck, I don't really care. I mean, if they if they're assholes, I wouldn't invest in them again, and it does happen. But I don't really come up at the time to grill people, or treat them like I've sort of low tolerance for people acting badly. So they do it, I'm not going to bother. You know, there's plenty of investors that you know, get a bee in their bonnet and really make sure they you know, spend time with the founders grilling them and telling them what they should be doing or should be doing all that side give a shit if I find out that I don't think someone's ethical, or a good person, or any little thing in between them could be like, whatever what I would deem to be a bad person that I shouldn't have invested in and I just suck it up. I'm like, Well, I made a bad choice. Cool, what have I learned from it, I can't be fucked to give them the airtime or bother. And I would never get in the way of anything that they're doing. I just wouldn't support them actively. So I think this stuff is, is important. And the other thing that is, you know, a thing is time, I'm so bad at managing my time. You know, with 50 angel investments I underestimated as you would that people want to ask you questions and they want help and can't really do that. And I did take on an advisory position for one of my investments as well and I'm really good at it. I love it. But I couldn't do to for example, like a really like a pick one. I do it properly. I don't want to base I wouldn't want to like take shares in someone's company and I'm not doing fucking great job. So And I've learned a lesson from that as well, I probably shouldn't have done it. But as I've done it, I feel like I've got a, you know, a responsibility to do a great job of it. And so I'm always on WhatsApp with that person. I'm always helping them I'm always doing above and beyond stuff. But it is a good reminder to me that I couldn't do a handful of these, like I can do a handful of investments. And I'm also super clear to my investors, I might, you know, I do always say like a founder is quite possibly not a good investor. Like if you want time, which sometimes people do. Don't get founders current founders, obviously attitude is fine, but don't get a current founder like currently CEO. Useless The only thing I can't give you as much time so I can't do that. But I'm good with like network or intros or things that are like, you know, can I help introduce them to the right person, I think I'm as good as anyone in the UK for that. A word about our sponsors. As a founder, cybersecurity isn't top of your priorities. Yet Alliance has identified cyber threats as one of the top three risks facing business globally. This is where Nova blue comes in. Its founder Steve Mason was technical director with GCHQ he was in charge of keeping the nation safe from cyber threats. He set up Nova blue to help keep businesses safe. Nova blue are offering founded and grounded listeners, a free cybersecurity health check, simply go to Nova hyphen blue.co.uk forward slash podcast offer. Right then Ali, we're gonna rattle through as much as we can in a short space of time, so we can give more time to hear from Dan, one of the first things that struck me was Dan talking about how he has, you know, experience burnout started educating himself reading, learning about the brain, neuroscience, gut brain access, it is fascinating. It's a journey I have been on myself. And so he started writing a newsletter and sharing what he was learning with other people. I just read more and more of it, and used it in my one to one therapy sessions. But for him, after a year and a half of sharing his knowledge, he then created products and his launched his business, I just want to say from the outset, there's, we can all read the same stuff, but it comes down to what you do with it. And so fascinating hearing from an entrepreneur coming into this space, parts of which I am in, but coming in with a mindset that can see how to grow this much bigger business where he can reach many more people and and a product. And I just found that it's really made me reflect on what I am doing, because there are people who will have known what he was talking about and who know and many nutritionists will be thinking, Well, I do this in my work all the time. But he's an entrepreneur, and the difference in entrepreneur makes with that knowledge and information as we're seeing and the birth of heights is pretty big.

Ollie Collard: 37:55

Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? I think we as humans often learn better when we teach information that we've absorbed. So I think Dan has done really well there in terms of right, I've learned this, this is the impact it's had on my personal life. I want to share this with others. And he's built up this newsletter, which is classic 101 startup book.

Unknown: 38:16

Well, it's one on one when you know, but for me, I just thought, why is someone gonna just want to know what I've just been reading. But now I'm realising it's 101 business.

Ollie Collard: 38:25

Yeah, you build the audience, don't you get people interested? You build up that community that trust, which is so important in the world of business. And then once you've got that trust, if there's a solution, or an offer, or something that you've got potentially to give to that audience, then they're potentially going to be interested in buying it.

Unknown: 38:43

Which, which we should say as well, at the start, he didn't have something did he know, he just was doing it genuinely from I've just had this bad experience in my life of being burnt out. And I'm on the route route to getting myself sorted. And I'm realising this is what the brains like and how it's connected to nutrition. And how amazing is that? And yeah, it's great to hear. So he's created him and the team are creating their own category. And it was so interesting saying alongside skincare haircare brain care, I mean, absolutely right. And this new category and wanting to invite others to be a part of it.

Ollie Collard: 39:19

I think this is really intelligent, a obviously creating your own category. So you can differentiate yourself and stand out in the marketplace, but be actually trying to create this ecosystem is vitally important because if you are creating a new category, obviously you have to spend lots of marketing power on educating your consumers about why they need the products. But what he's saying here is actually inviting everybody in creates a bigger, better category. To give you a kind of, I suppose, a real world example of this. Let's say you're a hairdresser, and there's a cluster of hairdressers on the high street. Giving my local example here in Bristol East Street, there's about 13 different bars. arbours. If you are a new barber, would you be based on the high street or maybe somewhere different? Now, in economics, the actual better answer is to be based amongst the competition, which you might not think is necessarily the right thing to do. But the reason for that is that it creates that extra competition, the businesses start trying to innovate and outdo one another. So they might be offering things like Dad and son sessions, or beard and hair options together and bundling products and enticing customers in and, you know, offering a drink with their service and, you know, a discount or loyalty cards. So if everybody is based together, actually, competition is better for the businesses, but also better for the consumers. To give an example of that as well, this morning, I was on my way to my normal co working space, the door was jammed, I was locked out. They couldn't get in there to call a locksmith, we had our podcasts going on. So I was like, quick, let's go to or not. So quick, and then podcast must go on or so yeah, quickly, just booked another one on my phone. Within five minutes, I was in a different co working space and the show was going on. So I think the competition is so good, in the sense of is better for the consumer, and innovates more in terms of the businesses as well.

Unknown: 41:20

Yes, such good examples actually really, really good examples. Just touching on on resilience. And just I feel this is a reminder, because we've we've mentioned this in previous podcasts, and maybe I'm just underlining the bit that I need to notice. But getting yourself building your resilience, get out your comfort zone, just keep putting yourself in those tricky scenarios and kind of actively look for them. If you realise you are sitting in a comfort zone, challenge yourself. And this is how you learn and grow. And just get used to that slightly uncomfortable feeling. But this is what you need. This is what you need to do. So I suppose I'm highlighting this just as a for anyone who needs to hear that. It's alright, it is gonna feel a bit uncomfortable setting up your new business, but he's so right on that.

Ollie Collard: 42:04

Yeah. And I think if you do push yourself, like I remember doing the Paris marathon back in 2014 never done a marathon. I was like, right, I'm gonna do one had two months of training. And you know, it didn't do terribly well. But I completed it, I did it. Amazing that that kind of, you know, self belief and pushing yourself through barriers, you don't know until in it that what is possible. And so what I'd encourage everyone to do is Yeah, push themselves outside of that comfort zone. You know, of course, it's going to feel unnatural, unnerving. And you often look at people on social media, I think how have they achieved so much, but that doesn't mean that they don't get that feeling. They've just learned to carry on doing that consistently to achieve their goals. And what I would say is, if you are setting yourself a goal or doing something outside of your normal comfort zone, try and plan your next challenge after that, because often once you've achieved that big goal, yeah, you kind of crash and burn slightly. So it's always good. Having a secondary goal on Horizon after that initial challenge.

Unknown: 43:06

That's really good. A really good tip there. You're right, it's easy just to sit back again and get did that. So what are you doing after the Paris marathon? Ali? What has been your what is your next thing?

Ollie Collard: 43:17

Well, you know, setting up a business, having kids, those have been big, big milestones in my life. Well,

Unknown: 43:24

you mentioned kids, actually, because Dan did as well. And I think there are quite a few business podcasts out there, where I'm gonna say it, we're often in a very successful or mindset runs, and you know all about the brain and how to optimise your performance and all this kind of stuff. And it's all done by people who are not necessarily taking the full or equal share of looking after children, they might not have them. I'm not critical of them. But I think it's very different as anyone who has who becomes that person. If you are responsible for looking after other people, then it changes how much you can give to your business. And so I was interested to observe how Dan has changed, realising that there are other things now in his life, he has a priority that's bigger than work. And it it felt kind of good to hear that and also hearing how he has adjusted on the two of you chatting, actually, because it's not something that often gets talked about, especially perhaps not, you know, with fathers as much dare I say, I don't want to annoy anyone by saying this. But I think it's a fair thing to perhaps say,

Ollie Collard: 44:28

Yeah, and it completely changes your outlook on life when you have kids and like you say your, your world is bigger than yourself. And you've got to look after these little people, which are your number one priority. And I like what Dan says about obviously, protecting that bed and bath time routine and ensuring that he goes to that every day. That's the non negotiable that he's putting in as a father and I think yeah, for me, I think, you know, I was kind of blessed with COVID when I had our first child, because I was basically home every day, and I was working half a day then spending half day for our son And that time men that a decision later on when we had our second, my wife went back to work. And I was like, well, actually, I want that time, I really do value it. Like, I don't want to go back to, you know, working five days a week. And, you know, actually working four days a week, and having that day with them every single week has been one of the best decisions that I've ever personally made.

Unknown: 45:23

Yeah. Let's move on then to the second part of your conversation. This is where we ask Dan about some of his favourite failures. Well, I mean, there's quite a few. But I would say, at grabble, we basically tried to develop culture by doing presentations and having posters. And, you know, I don't massively blame myself, but I certainly learned from the mistake. So developing culture having values, you know, this is like, this is hard work, it's a lot of work, it is CO work, it kind of is the work. But I didn't put enough prevalence on it. And as a reality, culture was really good at gravel, because we were growing so fast, and we're doing so well. And everyone loved us, and we're doing PR, and when you're hot, everyone loves you. And so you think you've got really good culture. But what happens if you haven't really developed values and worked out your interview process around those values, and who we letting into the company, and all of these things that take it really seriously. The downstream of that is when things start to not go? Well, everyone just leaves back to off. And culture is really shifting and toxic. So I learned that the hard way, and it's been a massive, massive fuckup. For me, I think that's the biggest mistake, we did it Grabel there were loads, you know, fundraising from the wrong people and all sorts of things, giving away too many shares to advisors that did Farkle loads and loads, loads of things. But like, the biggest thing by such a mile is that like, honestly, I, you know, developing a bad culture. That's the founders fault. not spending enough time and energy and thought on hiring, that is the founders fault. And I did those things. So I learned from those mistakes.

Ollie Collard: 47:17

And how do you embed culture in your new company, since you've taken that learning on board?

Unknown: 47:24

Yeah, so we're remote heights, fully remote, not on purpose, but you know, pandemic happened. And then we just decided to lean into it and learn about it. We develop values with. So first of all, first and foremost values come from founders initially. So Joel, and I and my business partner, and I worked on our values together by doing interview questions together. And then, as in like, with with a psychologist, and like understanding where our values that and then we created interview questions for the types of people that we wanted to hire in the future. And we never did that for a year. We never hired anyone for a year, but we had the questions and the interview process all nailed out based on values of the people that we wanted to hire, so far in advance. So when the company started to like, desperately need people, we didn't have to backtrack and think about these things. We've given ourselves the time and space upfront, to work this stuff out properly. When a team gets about 12 people, we then reinvestigate our values together, and we did values exercises for a couple of weeks, we spent like couple of weeks on this process of does this value actually show up in our day to day, it's basically when you work out what your values are, you then have to figure out how we're going to do behaviours. So you know, we have values champions, like different people working on different things, but everyone, you know, every meeting, every meeting, every team meeting a whole bunch of different things, you know, we have our one of our four values embedded within that thing. And we do coaching for everyone at heights, you know, it's all around which value are you showing at the moment? Which one are you most likely to grant you know, the stuff that's comes up like 15 times a day, and then on performance management as well. So, you know, we performance managed people based on how well they're doing the job, and we performance, manage people for how much they're living the values and if you aren't living the values, but you're doing a great job, you get a warning and the next quarter, if you haven't lived up to your values, then we sack it. Because this is a company built built on values and culture and it's really important and we have a lot of we literally just let someone go for this reason had been with us for three years. Great guy really like him really valuable was one of our first employees, our third employee, but it was compromising our values didn't used to, but it did. And this is the reality. And so, you know, we make this stuff really clear, really fair, really transparent. As you know, my building public we speak about a lot of stuff really transparently a lot. But in reality, living our values means a lot to us. And values are the kinds of things as his culture, where if you're not willing to risk stuff for it doesn't mean anything. So you have to be willing to fight good people, for not living them you have to otherwise they don't mean anything. They're meaningless if they only work when they're good, blind people start They'll lose faith in them, you have to have consequences around values, they have to have risk attached to them.

Ollie Collard: 50:04

And in terms of when things aren't going to plan, which you know, is quite often as a founder, who do you call apart from your co founder, Joel? Well,

Unknown: 50:14

my best mates are Joel and also a guy called Rob O'Donovan, who's the founder of charliehr. Amongst other things, he now does a syndicate called ventures together. So he speaks to loads of VCs loads of startups have been best friends for about 10 years. And he's probably my go to guy. Anyone with a lot of humility is really helpful. I'm very lucky because the secret leaders you know, like, very important times, I've called Michael Jackson Smith from calm. I've called Graham Hopson from Photobox, Nick Jenkins, Moonpig Rene from Planet organic and Marie hoobie, from just giving. I speak to these people a lot, actually. And I ask them for advice a lot. You know, when things are hard, when things are bad, and ask them for generalised advice, because you know, you can get that from like a lot of people, but it's important as well, like, you know, with advice, like, advice is useless. You want people to share experience. So, you know, I don't really want advice from just your general person that may or may not have gone through stuff, I want to like literally find out who has been through an experience similar to this. Can I speak to about your experience? What can I learn from your experience? What would you have done years later if the experience was changed? And that is very different to advice, if you really careful with advice, like most advices, absolute utter garbage, and everyone wants to give it to you all the time, they've got no fucking clue, and they've never lived the experience. So the you know, the art of getting good advice is asking the right question, which is, you know, not everyone will have had your experience that you're having right now. But what is the feeling that you're trying to mitigate? What is the challenge? What is the emotion or difficulty is it that you want one thing and someone else wants another? Because sometimes you don't even need to get business advice for that, you know, sometimes that's just in a relationship. So I speak to people who I think have great marriages, you know, how do you get a compromise from a great partner, there's so many different ways you can find these things out, but you need to figure out what the right lesson and insight you're trying to learn is rather than the specifics of your very niche problem in the world. And then the second part, of course, is making sure you're not wasting people's time. So you know, going to the right person with the right experience, share is also super valuable. People love to help. So you come to someone with the right question, and they have the right experience, you have a really productive conversation together. And that's really valuable.

Ollie Collard: 52:33

Great answers. And can you tell me about a specific time on your startup journey with heights when you've kind of said, you know, nearly thrown in the towel, or you kind of fought enough is enough? Has there any been any of those moments on your journey? I

Unknown: 52:48

can't say that habit heights, to be honest. But you know, I've thrown the towel in before I threw the towel and on gravel. But, you know, I can't pretend to you that I have like a really deep and insightful question. Because as even as I belong to here, because I used to start up, we've we've grown, we've had to shrink, we've grown again, this is always a challenge, especially in a consumer space, where you have physical products in those big stresses on your, on your balance sheet for stock. There's definitely mistakes made and like hubris of boardroom because things are going so well. And they have to pull back, you know, these are challenges of Harper's certainly been no moment where I've even been close to throw the towel. And I'm pretty happy and fulfilled doing this right now. So a big discussion about culture here. And a really interesting one is Dan kind of looks back and sees the things that didn't work out and what he needed to do differently in his latest business in heights, but just on on culture. I don't think we have talked a lot about this in the podcast. So worth highlighting. Now, I think we've mentioned it from time to time, we've certainly mentioned, you know, companies and their values, their ideas, and you know, their sort of driving force, but perhaps not so much about workplace culture and what makes a good workplace culture, perhaps the things that we're looking forward because I know there's not one ideal is there. And there's not one way of achieving it either.

Ollie Collard: 54:17

Certainly not on I think, as a leader and a CEO and Managing Director obviously, Dan is building that culture at heights. Culture is ultimately built by the founder and the CEO. But everybody has to build culture collectively as an organisation. And I think the best organisations do this very well by integrating their values into the every day. So to give an example of this, I used to work at a an organisation called the Prince's Trust, and basically every annual appraisal we would have, we would review the values based on performance. So values became an integrated part of the culture there, and that was something that you fought about. First and foremost, I think that's what great organisations do is they build a culture, and they build values and everything is embedded into the organisation.

Unknown: 55:10

It's so true, if you're in the leadership team is so important that you're actually following the values that you've set for everybody else, you know, you can, as done discovered, no amount of all staff, emails or posters on the back of the toilet door are going to make up for the fact that if you're not doing it and displaying it, then it just creates that disconnect, you can have a really nice, friendly team. And they all get on really nicely. But it doesn't it does not, you'll not be on a good path if you're not displaying what you want to see from your, from the people and businesses just about people. So you've got to get it right and do it. Just one other quick point on this. And again, this is the opposite of how I have done anything, but I'm learning. And that's when Dan said that his approach is very much to build in public.

Ollie Collard: 56:01

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a ballsy approach to doing business. But I think it's so transparent, I love it, because he doesn't just share what's going well, which is often what you see on social media is like what isn't going well. And he publicly puts this out in a forum on LinkedIn on Twitter. Obviously, his investors are aware of it, everyone is aware of it, I think it's incredible. And just to share a brief anecdote that he shared recently was about the collapse of the SBB. And he was saying that the Silicon Valley Bank, so there were rumours before the collapse. And Dan put together a curation of founders in the space to try and come up with a response and lobby government. And he talked about, you know, the fact that all of his money was in this one bank, and he managed to get about 10% of it out. But the other 90% was in an account where it's got a 30 day hold on the funds to withdraw him. And his co founder, Joel was away on holiday. And a couple of weeks prior, he got locked out. So Joe was the only one with the the access to the accounts. So he was scrambling around trying to get ahold of Joel and, you know, pull out this money. Luckily, obviously, the UK Government and HSBC stepped in to save SBB in the UK, but there was a lot of founders that are very concerned about it. And obviously, Dan made all of this public. I think what he did really well was using his network, so founders that he built, so putting together lots of founders in the tech space, also utilising other groups like ice, and actually coordinating response between them at a time of need and desperation for everyone, when a lot of lot of businesses could have gone bankrupt overnight, and lots of people could have lost their jobs.

Unknown: 57:51

Wow. I didn't know that. Thank you for sharing that. You know, it also makes me think I can't help casting my mind back to how we educate people. And I went to school a long time ago. So I'm early 40s. And you literally the ones who were doing well, you got the praise, if you were the brainy ones, you know, you'd learn the information. And it was just the outcome, you ticked it off? Because you got it right. You remembered it all. And that was it. And that is success. Whereas actually, I realised that business is so very different. Because if actually, it was more education, and maybe it is now and I really hope it is because we've both got children who are, you know, primary schools about to start primary school, if it was more about working together as a team. And it isn't just about how Oh, good, you got the right outcome. Well done. Two plus two is four. But actually, it was like, Well, how are we going to make this? You know, add up to that, and oh, that doesn't quite work. But look, we could do this. So team working collaboration, it not all being about the end result, but kind of how you get there. I think it's just fundamental, isn't it? I just can't help thinking how well, wonderful on one level, but woefully, we're not going to create as many entrepreneurs as we could do, or give people the skills to create their own businesses, if that is just how we focus education. Anyway, it's just my own mind a light bulb moment, but it's I'm sure it will resonate with other people, especially if my kind of generation

Ollie Collard: 59:24

definitely and I think there's, you know, talk of like trying to embed entrepreneurship and financial literacy into stores because these skills aren't taught. And it's a different way of thinking usually, as you say, it's not being taught what to do. It's being taught to be able to think creatively, a different skill fundamentally,

Unknown: 59:43

and with other and with other people, you know, loads of lessons in dance conversation, as you can tell, right? The final part of it is where he talks a little bit of future gazing looking at what he is hoping for over the next five years or so. So let's jump into that. Ah next five years for me, definitely heights, definitely focused on growing heights. That's my number one priority. Number two. This is professionally, obviously my number two priority. I hope I'm still doing secretly, there's a really enjoy it, I went through a period of really not enjoying it. And I started to feel like work. And when it started for like work, I was like, oh, but I'm really lucky I've hired so well in that company. So well, it's made a massive difference. And my workload is miniscule, my output is enormous, which is very rewarding feeling. That's why saying and secret leaders, you know, that's been a bootstrap company started in 2017, as the end of 2020, we're going to be releases changes, again, started in 2017. And releasing it started in 2017. And you know, it's now 2023. So that's six years of building a bootstrap company to get to that point. So I'm very proud of my patients there as well. But I hope to be doing that. So in five years, talking to awesome people and really enjoying the process. But I think the thing that I am going to try and work more on this year is consistent social media presence, I have a love hate relationship with it, I don't really enjoy it, but it's needed in my business. And I do reach people and it does help them. I just don't massively enjoy a lot of the creation process because it feels like work. And I'm trying hard to work on my mindset around that, like, Why do I feel that way? How can I make it work for me in a more motivating way? Then this is the challenge. I'm trying to work. And I haven't quite nailed it yet. But this is I hope in five years, I've nailed this, and I'm enjoying the art of being online creator, more so than I currently am

Ollie Collard: 1:01:51

loving to animate, you've definitely built up a great personal brand. So you're doing something right. And in terms of there's an opportunity for you to ask our listeners to question.

Unknown: 1:02:01

I think the question that I would ask you is like, who? If you really think about it, who's the last person that you helped? And did you actually pay them attention? Did you actually give them the help that they needed? And the reason that's an important question is a couple of things. But one, you know, we are increasingly living in a lonely society and loneliness is a massive epidemic in the mental health space and mental health problems are declared by the World Health Organisation the greatest challenge to humankind full stop over sustainability or anything else. It's actually mental health. So the data is there, the downstream of this as you know, mental health, such a big problem with loneliness is such a big problem. And quite often, we assume that people are fine, everyone's fine, especially in the UK, everyone's fine, I'm fine. But if you actually ask someone and you give them the attention, you pay them attention, you really go out of your way to be in service to help someone else. I found that to be the most rewarding thing. You know, there's one of the reasons I like investing, right, I really enjoy being able to support others on the journey one way or another. The reality about help is when you obsess I only speak from my own experience, you know, I have an ego. And whenever I spend too much time thinking about myself and obsessing over myself, I ended up getting myself really unhappy, moody, anxious, all these things. When I focused on other people, and how I can help them, those feelings are lifted, I feel much better. So actually, to me being in service and helping others is not that altruistic act at all, and makes me feel better and hopefully help someone to it's really important thing to ask yourself. I tried to ask myself this regularly.

Ollie Collard: 1:03:41

Marking question then. And moving on to one of the key parts now of the founder of ungrounded. podcast is essentially asking featured founders for just one piece of advice that they'd pass on to somebody either thinking of starting a business or running an early stage startup. So I'm going to put you on the spot here. Dan, what would that one piece of advice be?

Unknown: 1:04:03

I think my one piece of advice is not to take yourself too seriously. It sounds like a bit random advice, to be honest. But I think over a 10 year journey and don't kid yourself over what's likely to be a 10 plus year journey. If you just take everything so seriously all the time and are able to laugh, you're not able to find moments of joy and have fun with it. Kind of fucking hate yourself. You're gonna hate the journey, you're gonna hate the star star, you're going to build resentment, then you're going to get sloppy, you're not going to enjoy the work, you're going to put ship product out, you're going to behave like a wanker to your, your colleagues. And you're going to just end up being a miserable person that no one likes. What is the fucking point like you get one life. You're here on earth to have fun. You know, we work in a pretty serious space. We have mental health, like comments and challenges come up from our customers and from our colleagues all the time, and we still managed to find a way to have like a really great time doing it, including when things are hard startup journeys are really rewarding, but they can consume you. And that's to be expected. But make sure you don't become a boring decade. In the meantime, enjoy it Have fun, the journey is absolutely awesome and worthwhile. And if you can laugh at yourself, you'll always find a way to enjoy the realities of the shit that hits the fan, which it's inevitably going to do over and over again,

Ollie Collard: 1:05:26

if I knew you better, what's one question that I would have asked you?

Unknown: 1:05:31

You'd have asked me? What are my personal beliefs in spirituality and mental health?

Ollie Collard: 1:05:38

What is the answer to that, then,

Unknown: 1:05:40

I believe it's important to work on your mental health, for sure. But you could only solve those things at a biological or a mind level. And I actually truly think that the greatest soul for figuring out all Mental Health Perspectives is to understand the self and therefore consciousness better. However, that is a level up. You know, in my own experience, I had to start to understand my own mental health and my own limiting self beliefs and other things like that before I could really approach the deep question of who am I. But ever since I have been doing that, ever since I've taken a really keen interest in consciousness and spirituality, I've just found? Well, firstly, most importantly, I found a million more questions than I have answers. And if you're curious, you're constantly asking questions, then I feel like you're on the right path. Love

Ollie Collard: 1:06:32

it, then. And lastly, where can people find out a bit more about yourself? Might secret leaders and all all of your other ventures that you've got going on at the moment? So I'm at

Unknown: 1:06:43

Dan Morris data on all social platforms, I've also got my own personal website that I never share. But you know, I've done my research to.com. And, you know, heights is your heights.com Secret leaders, any podcast player.

Ollie Collard: 1:06:57

Amazing. Dan, thank you so much for your time, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks, me. Now, if you enjoyed listening, and you're curious to try heights, we've got a fantastic offer for you simply enter the code grounded, all in lowercase for 15% off your first month, for a subscription to either of heights, two products. So again, that's 15% off your first month, with the code grounded all in lowercase.

Unknown: 1:07:31

Here's the question. And it's the one that I have all the time. How do you make social media less like work? So what Dan wants to know? Or his his dilemma is very much my own to any ideas on how we make it less like work? I've had some thoughts on it, actually, shall I tell you? Yeah, go for it. I was thinking one of the reasons it feels like work is it is partly my work is one part of what I get paid to do. So that's why it feels like work. Another part is about having the skills and feeling like I actually do or don't know what to do. And therefore if I don't know what to do, I'm kind of keeping it small, keeping it very simple. But seeing what other people are doing really well and thinking, why can't I be 20 and automatically know this stuff. Whereas actually what I should do, and this is what I take away, is that I perhaps need to learn so that I'm more comfortable doing the things that I think other people are doing on there that could work for my business. And then it would feel less like work because I actually know what I'm doing. Does that make sense? It

Ollie Collard: 1:08:30

does. So I think if you're being kind of more authentic and not worried about doing something that is absolutely perfect. I think that's the best way to be consistent with social media. And also the people that are fantastic with social media, obviously, repurpose a lot of content, because you know, somebody's seen it on one channel doesn't mean that they're going to see it on another, and you just have to tweak it for each specific channel. And a quote that I love is that one actually our podcast editor told us a shout out to James here was every day there's a new person that's born who hasn't heard of the Flintstones. And it's so true that, you know, you have to consistently promote things because otherwise people aren't gonna know about it.

Unknown: 1:09:16

Yeah. And you don't have to be like I know all of that stuff. But I think it's easy to especially with social media, see people who are doing it super amazingly. And just think well I can't do that. I can't come up with that sort of funny thing how they lip synced that I came up with that kind of joke. It's like no just you just need to be you quite consistently on there. It's as simple as that there are loads of different things you can do. But for goodness sake just start by doing something master the bit you can do well first then learn the next skill. Don't make those comparisons because otherwise you might end up doing nothing. Because you're not a comedian, so you're not about to turn that anyway and it might not even be appropriate for goodness sake, but you can disappear down that rabbit hole Can't you? Dance question for listening Is that speedy recap? So who was the last person you helped? Did you pay them attention and give them the help they needed? I really liked this because actually, I can say, Yes, that was quite simple. That is one bit I have been getting right? Certainly, in the therapy space that I'm in, but on the subject of social, so we would like you to share your your answers to this question, share, share it with us, on our social media platforms, you can find us all over the place, as you know, and frequently do so please do that. But whilst we're there, let's just go to our community leads Samantha and hear what you've been saying, in response to our previous episode, where our featured entrepreneur as his tradition, asked the questions. So let's get a little recap on that from Sam. Last episode, we spoke to the co founder of angel investing school, Andy, who is aiming to level the playing field in the world of angel investing, he spoke about what keeps moving him forward with confidence, and how someone becomes a trusted adviser. So it was a fantastic episode, for those of you interested in the world of angel investing, but don't know where to begin. Now, of course, like all of our guests, Andy had a question for you are listeners. And his question was, how are you doubling down on serving your customers, rather than your investors? And it was lovely to see how many of you really resonated with this and spoke in the answers about how important client is to your business, we had a lot of conversations about how the success of client businesses is at the core of your business is that it should be at the front of every single business. And that meeting those customer needs is so important that we can't deliver good service without focusing on the end user experience. So it seemed like a lot of you are on the same idea as Andy and really want to make sure that customers stay at the front, even when taking on investors and starting to grow those businesses. So that's fantastic to hear. And it'd be lovely to see if those of you who go and listen to Andy story about angel investing, have any ideas about how to make sure that stays the case. Once you start taking on investors, please do come and let us know. We'd love to hear your thoughts at any time. Okay, only so much that we've covered I feel like there's been a lot of ground discussed today. But Who have we got in next in the next episode?

Ollie Collard: 1:12:28

Really excited for our next one, Laura. I'm speaking to Varun, who is founder of a company called Magic. They're utilising AI and a mirror to transform the world of Personal Training and Fitness. What exactly

Unknown: 1:12:45

does this mean that something else is gonna do it for me, I don't actually have to do any leg raises at any point because I'm now paying real attention to this.

Ollie Collard: 1:12:53

It's not quite that good, but it is a great solution.

Unknown: 1:12:56

Wow. Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to that because I don't understand it. So it's going to be good. Thank you so much for listening to us today. Until the next time. Thank you for listening to founded and grounded with Ollie collard and Laura Rawlings. If you've enjoyed this free podcast, we'd love you to recommend it someone else. You can leave a review on Apple podcasts regardless of where you get your podcasts from. And join our online community and share your comments with us. We're on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. It's always good to hear from you