He blagged his way in to Gymshark's ex-CEO. Steve Hewitt ended up investing | Jack Zambakides

27 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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In this first‑person account, the speaker recounts how he exaggerated his company's revenue to appear as a £10 million‑turnover business in order to get a call with Steve Hewitt, the former CEO of Gymshark. After a brief storytelling pitch, he was invited to a meeting at Gymshark’s Birmingham office. During the meeting, the investor asked for standard performance indicators—profit and loss statements and a North Star metric—which the speaker admitted the company lacked. Despite this gap, the speaker recognized that Hewitt was actively looking to invest in brands, and he leveraged the conversation to negotiate a deal, ultimately securing investment from Hewitt.

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Um, so went on his website and it was sort of like, do you run a business doing over £10 million turnover? We weren't, but I was just like, on the form I was just like, yep, cool. Like, blagged my way in, got on a call with one of his teams, sort of told the story. We're not doing £10 million, but we will be soon. Yeah. Told the— did a bit of storytelling. We'd love to meet you, love to help. Spoke about the employee who he knew, the team knew. Then had a meeting in Birmingham, which is where their, uh, like sort of headquarters slash office was. Like, was in this fancy room. So then we did that. We then started talking to them about the business. Obviously explained we're not 10 million, but we are now. He was running through like, so what's your PNL? Probably the same stuff you do now. What's your North Star? Like all of this, we didn't have any of it. It was literally like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, hang on a minute. We're not there. Like, there's a lot I don't know. So I knew he was getting involved with putting his own money into some brands at the time, which was slightly, you know, vocal. So then I knew that he would put money into brands. And, you know, he said, would you like to be interested? Like, would we be interested? And we managed to come to a bit of a deal.