How my role as Spacegoods founder has changed from day one to now, 0 to £20m+ run-rate - Doc Ep 102

Back with another pod with a proper mic for the first time in, I think well over a year since I've been moving around. And yeah, my road mics that used to be on the original pods are long gone. So hopefully this sounds crispy and like a radio. I'm like the little dji. But I want to talk about something that is actually very practical and relevant to probably a lot of people watching and certainly to me. And it's a reflection I've had and thought about a lot recently. I've actually been working with. This might sound silly, but I've been working with like a founder coach as of only like two weeks ago. But you could think of it as like half therapist, half business leadership stuff. It's probably more the latter, but yeah, anyway, it's just made me reflect on a lot of this because a lot of the challenges I'm having or have had primarily over the last year, just like personally relative to the business, have been probably rooted in not knowing where best to spend my time and where best to do my best work and therefore the business get the most out of me, et cetera, et cetera, and get the most out of the team we've now got, which is way bigger and very different to how it was even a year ago, even six months ago, but primarily a year ago, that was at the main switch. So I thought I'd kind of walk through and basically, yeah, I just want to talk about how my role has changed and how probably other founders roles have changed or should changed or should change in a business as it grows. And obviously depending on how big it is, where it's going, what the goals are, how it's structured, capital wise, et cetera, et cetera. But certainly for me, which is obviously the only person I can speak for. So, yeah, really, like first, when the business started, it was literally just me. Right, this is me. I'm gonna try and draw on this iPad while also speaking into this mic. There's a lot of different things going on in this video. It was just me for about. I say just me. Just me for about the first month. Then Flo, he's still in the team, is pretty much. Well, he's like head of operations now. He joined from Twitter. I hired him and he worked for free for like the first month. He's a fucking legend, by the way. He's like a true day one in the team. And yeah, actually just to track back, basically my point is it's changed fucking massively. So it started with just me. Flo joined so I'm not going to draw fucking anyone that's joined the team. But there was like two of us and then a lot of things changed. I'm going to go into different stages after that, but I want to set the scene first. I think like one thing I see, and I'm not preaching at all because I'm very much just documenting the process and you know, there's plenty of people miles ahead of me, et cetera, et cetera, and I do not have the answers. But again, just reflecting because I think it's relevant to a lot of people. But I've seen this in my own network, my own friends and in myself, certainly in stages. I'll get into that in a second. Is when people start. You are grinding, right? And I'm still grinding now. It's different sort of grinding. I'll get to that. You're grinding on the laptop. You almost associate. The longer I'm at my screen, the more effective I'm being. And that is actually true at the start, especially when it's just you or you and co founders or whatever. It's just about getting the stuff done. And that is the best way to be most effective is you basically do everything yourself, hunch over a laptop all day. And like I did this for fucking years, like in my previous business as well. And I probably never escaped that. And honestly, probably in Space Goods for the first two years, I basically did this. And we're now three years and like four months old or something. So still pretty young, but not super young. And I did it for too long. And I see people in general that have really solid businesses, but they often plateau. And this was true for me as well because they keep focusing on just the hours at the computer doing the same things. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you fucking work less, you just work in different ways. And they almost glorify. And this was me as well. You glorify like almost the painful grunt work rather than being effective. And at a certain point, past a certain scale, whether that's 3 million, 10 million, 20 million, whatever it ends up being, it's up for debate. But it stops being as effective as it was because actually the things you need to do are the things you weren't doing previously. That is primarily hiring a team, working on other stuff that is hard in different ways and easier in other ways. I think it's also because people aren't willing to a take the risk on hiring a team in terms of financially and like, you know, the legal obligations you have, especially if you hire like employees and stuff, but also just trusting them to do stuff. B, they're not willing to in another way hand over ownership of certain things because they know better. And that's probably true to a certain extent at the start. But my view now is like something can be done 80% as good, ideally better than you, but 80% is good done by someone else is better than you doing it yourself, at least forever and past a certain scale point. And they're probably also not willing or not humble enough to get help and mentorship around how to do this from people that have built bigger businesses and teams. Because I think there's a bit of a thing in the whole, especially in E. Comm and Twitter scenes, which maybe is just a bubble and it's like an echo chamber of the 1% of people that just say weird shit. But there's definitely a thing of people want to be seen to be flexing. They probably want to keep all the margins themselves. They don't want to reinvest in the team. They don't want to be seen to be running too much of a corporate business. They want to chad scale forever. And that is great. And I'm a massive proponent in that, even now. And sometimes I think we've gone too far the other way, which is a whole other thing. But you can't chad scale your way to a 100 million pound revenue business. And it's a successful exit, in my opinion. And that's based on people that have done it. That's not just my opinion from trust me bros, like, actual input I've had from people that have done that. And they're not usually the guys talking shit on Twitter, by the way, posting screenshots, but that's a whole other thing. So that's kind of setting the scene. But yeah, to walk through the stages. And again, this is just how I've done it. And I'm not saying this is how you should do it, but it's been a reflection for me and I'll talk through kind of the benefits and the pros and cons of each stage. From my perspective, stage one was do everything. And excuse my horrible handwriting, because I'm kind of known for having probably borderline dyslexia and writing at the start, you do everything right, Literally everything. And I think a lot of art founders don't understand how literal that is. You do everything. Customer service, running ads, make the product, go to meat factories to test things, you know, make the website everything. And way beyond that and that's just fucking how it should be. It's a grind, it's not that fun. But you learn a lot and it's the best way to go. And I think it's a rite of passage for anyone starting anything because you understand things even if you're not good at them. And B, you should, you just should do that grant work probably seven days a week at the start. So yeah, that was me. And I guess Flow came in and we kind of did everything right. I still consider that like stage one, stage two was kind of like do most things with some freelance and agency help. And by this I mean you should delegate and eliminate these things first, in my opinion, which is like customer support, cx, customer experience, get rid of that. I delegated to Flo because he's a fucking G. And it's hard to find people like this. Basically ops, to be honest. Not all of it, excuse my handwriting, but like running the back end, I guess, which allowed me to focus on product and marketing and basically the front end. And what this actually included was he ran cx. We had one person at the time, that was him, then it was someone else and he ran them, he organized stock and he did a lot of the kind of back end logistical things on website like send them new products, SKUs, et cetera, et cetera. Kind of just like an all rounder and someone that was better at that than me because he's more systems driven, so on. And then you know, I had like an ads agency which I think is a good one to invest in, you know, media buying and creative. Originally I did the media buying, then I delegated pretty quick, which maybe did it too soon. But I certainly think creative is a great one to delegate or bring in support on asap. And that's what we did. It was actually an ads agency and one of my favorite people that's ever worked with me, a girl called Lucy who may or may not watch this. I found her on Twitter as well. There's definitely a theme, you can find great people on Twitter. But the problem is they usually then go and start their own thing, which isn't a problem, but it means they leave the business. Right? And she's gone and done that. But she helped me. I think it was her first client. She basically ran our content systems and that was another thing. So ads and a girl or a lady, she definitely not. I don't know what age you have to officially call a woman rather than a girl. But anyway, the point is Lucy came in, ran that. So that Was good. And I think that's probably similar to a lot of brands. They get to that stage. The next stage for me at least was do most things still. And by most things in my case I meant, you know, still doing all products, still doing most of the website stuff, still overseeing all the media buying. So we had a media buyer from the agency. But I was still like, you know, doing all the budgets, larger leading creative that was being ran by someone else. But I still had input on all of it with some employees. This is when I started to hire employees. And still the agencies and freelancers. Whether you should hire employees or agencies freelancers is a whole fucking different video. I can't really see what I'm writing here because I've got a microphone in my face. But anyway, so basically the setup for me was I was still leading everything, not leading everything, leading most things and still doing myself a lot of things. I hired a few employees. First two were, I'm not saying this is the best way around, but like we hired a social media manager in house who's still with us in a different role and we hired a customer experience manager as an employee to manage a lot of the other stuff. I think for the sake of this thing it's not that relevant whether employee or freelance, but I guess like in house full time is kind of the point I'm making. But in my case there were pay employees which has pros and cons and that's a whole separate video. And they basically managed well, not managed, but were involved in leading the agencies and the freelancers. And then shortly after, more relevant to this is I hired a head of growth who's still with us now, guy called Charlie. So he was a great just systems person in the way that I wasn't less of a Chad scaler. But I think that's kind of what we needed. And I kind of work with him still now to lead on growth basically. So I was at the third stage and I'll maybe come back to a timeline on this after because I'm not really thinking out loud on that. And then the fourth stage, which is probably what happened within the last six months primarily actually time flies for nine months is basically employees for everything or each like key in house role. What I mean by that is like everything could now execute without me being there. You know, obviously I still have valuable input at this point and I still do now beyond this point, which I'll get to, but this was the first time where we had like an actual team that was fully self sustaining which is great, but it's also quite weird for me and it still is kind of now with I'm not going to write these things every time with agencies and freelancers still on the side doing like execution. But like the core team at this point, this was about nine months ago, was basically all employees, largely uk, not all uk, sort of half in London, half outside London, hybrid set up with agencies and freelancers still doing a lot of execution. So actually when I say I could leave at this point for not true, but like they were doing everything right. But if I left at this point there wouldn't really be anyone leading it. And then that brings me on to stage five in my case, which happened, fuck even about eight months ago, is I hired an md, a managing director, which is a big one to be fair. You know, MD is kind of another way of saying coo, slash sort of junior CEO. But in my case I'm still the CEO in the sense that I still lead the business and he reports into me technically. But I hired him, we hired him as basically someone's run a lot of the day to day that I just wasn't enjoying. So right now he's responsible for primarily retail supply chain managing the team performance and then working on the bigger stuff like managing the P and L fundamentally with me and sort of like a late stage co founder capacity. So that's been really, really good. It's freed up a lot of time. And this I would say is when had the MD who it doesn't replace me but like functionally replaced a lot of what I had to do and wasn't necessarily enjoying and then had the core team, which he's obviously part of. But I just mean like he, he leads with me a lot of the core team and that's probably a separate video in itself in terms of like how roles and reporting lines change all this shit. But again, I don't want to be too corporate anyway, so I don't overthink that shit team and then I'm not going to fucking draw these again. But agencies and freelancers. So I basically think of it as like kind of thinking out loud but like, you know, David or MD leads a lot of this team, execute the call stuff and then agencies and freelancers execute a lot of the fringe stuff. Still some things I think could be replaced eventually with a in house team, whereas other things, I don't think we ever need an in house team, honestly. Am I still recording on here? Yes, I am. So yeah, that's kind of where we got to And I guess just going back briefly to talk on kind of timelines and I might get this wrong, so don't fucking quote me, but this first bit, including flow and super early teams, probably like the first six months roughly. So the whole of 2022 for me. So launch mid 2022, this second stage is probably 18 months, honestly, or a year basically 2023 before we raised any real money, which did change things. And that's a separate video and I kind of touched on that in my previous long form. One about raising money and so on, pressure to hire and so on this stage three is probably mainly, I'm going to say 2024 early employees still leading on agencies, me still leading things. Stage four was actually, yeah, stage four happened pretty quick to be honest. This was like, I'm going to say October 2024 to March 2025, it's about six months ago. This stage I guess completed. Obviously this isn't black and white, but you get the idea. It's illustrative of the point, David. DMD came in in the end of January, but I would say it was fully settled in by March. So the past six months has been this and this has presented lots of great things but also challenges for me like personally where to spend my time, et cetera. It's coming on to the next point in the video is basically just trying to find how do you balance doing and adding value, which is not always doing in executional sense with delegating and fucking ignore my severely horrendous handwriting. But also more importantly, I think delegating is like low level shit, it needs to be done. But actually ownership and what I mean by that is like, you know, you give it to someone in full confidence obviously after they've got up to speed and onboarded, etc. And you know, understood your vision. I think delegating is to tell someone what to do and they do it. Giving someone ownership and autonomy is you set the target and then you let them run with it and they come to you. Obviously you have check ins with key people, like three direct reports now, which again sounds all fucking corporate and fancy, but it's just a useful way of running a team. Maybe that's a separate video. So yeah, I think this is important and getting this balance right has been a huge challenge for me because the other challenge of all this is how do you set standards? And I don't just mean like quality of work. So I'm not saying I can do things better than anyone in the team, you know, certain areas I think I can and they're the things I'm still leading on. But most of the people we've hired are better at that specific thing than me. Right. And that's of course the case and we do have a great team, so that is very true. But I mean more like mentality and speed which often I do think has to come from a founder. I think we're pretty quick as a team but I think in certain areas as the team has grown it has inevitably slowed down and that's not always bad. That's because things are more managed and less chaotic than when I was managing it myself. Like, for example MPD. But at the same time I want to keep charging forward like a day one startup because we very much are that in my mind even though technically we're a three and a bit year old scale up now really. But I want to keep that mentality of day one startup because I think you have to be paranoid in a good way, in a productive way. So how do you keep the standards and also being hands on enough myself to A fucking enjoy my job and feel useful but B, do the stuff I'm good at. And I think this is something I've struggled with and has been easier in certain areas like supply chain I don't fucking want to touch. And David and Flo run that, you know, CX I don't want to touch. Probably the main areas I don't touch, you know, basic finance stuff. I'm not saying I'm not involved in finance, I definitely am but I mean like I'm not doing payments and you know, payroll stuff anymore. We have a bookkeeper and David that does that basically. But I'm still obviously involved high level. The stuff I am trying to focus on entirely now sounds a bit fluffy but it's kind of just the stuff I did at the start anyway. But it's like product, brand, you know, part of the same thing. Growth of course, but not, not, not like managing the agency. More just like high level growth stuff and then I guess newness and what I mean by that is like yes, new products and so on but actually more like what is next. So is that a certain product that we're launching in retail in January which is very exciting and haven't mentioned, I'm trying to keep that one slightly on the download but it might be semi obvious to people that pay attention. Is it doing America? Is it opening a fucking retail store of our own? For example, you know, newness like net newness that is like day one mentality and what a founder should be doing, in my opinion is what I'm trying to focus on. So yeah, that's basically the way I've been doing it. I think all of the above depends on one, what your goals are. Can't fucking type what your goals are. You know, if you want to build a lifestyle business, maybe a lot of this is less relevant. If you want to just build like a fucking hustle, make money, keep it super lean, not bothered about an exit. Maybe this is, maybe that's different if you want to go for a big exit. Not saying that's better or worse or I'm indifferent on this point in terms of, I mean I want to go for a big exit, but I'm not saying it's better than anyone else. And it's also hard to achieve. Right, but that is the goal. So that depends on your goals, it depends on the path you've taken, like what's the structure of the business. Obviously I've raised venture money, so that does affect like A, what the goal can be, but B what is expected of you to build a business that is ultimately acquirable. Some of those things are obviously what you do anyway, but others are things you might do sooner rather than later. Ie, build the team, which I touched on in a previous video. And then the final thing is your skill set and just your fucking personal preference. I've got terrible handwriting, which for me I realized I want to be involved enough in the things that I'm good at. And I think the mistake I made just kind of final point to reflect is maybe around sort of stage between stage three and four and certainly between stage four and five, I kind of got to a point where I was just being like a busy manager and I wasn't really doing anything. And that's great in a way because the team were doing it all. But I felt like I got too far removed from the core things as a result of never having managed a proper team before, if I'm completely honest. Yes, I've managed agencies and freelancers, but I hadn't managed a team in person, proper skilled, higher level employees. So that was definitely a learning curve. And now the right balance for me has been giving ownership to everyone in the team, but also giving ownership of key areas to my key hires, like my MD, my head of growth, etc. I mean everyone's important, right? But it's me and like my more senior hires that manage more people in the business and then me being involved in leading on the things that I'm good at and leading on them doesn't necessarily mean executing every tiny bit, but it does mean being in the details. It's a fine balance between micromanaging and actually being fucking involved. So I'm trying to figure that one out. But yeah, that's basically what this video is about. It's been a fucking journey and it's been, you know, ups, downs, in betweens, like a roller coaster. And I'm still figuring out, but the one thing I will say is no matter what happens in this business, and of course I want to grow it and, you know, get IT to minimum 50 million plus in revenue and beyond that is like my goal over, like the next sort of two years. The very least I'll have learned a fuckload. And I'm learning a fuckload now. And usually learning stuff comes with some sort of pain, whether mentally or emotionally or like financially in the business, sometimes you make mistakes and all these things. And yeah, if anything, I'll be much fucking wiser in a year's time than I was a year ago because I think in the last year alone, I've already learned more about this side of business than I ever have before. And yeah, I'm just, just winging it, figuring out, taking a day at time, but also recognizing what I'm good at and should keep doing. And don't delegate everything, don't step back too much. And I think that's a mistake I made. I think maybe it's an inevitable arc you go through when you're doing this shit for the first time. So, yeah, anyway, hopefully that's interesting. Subscribe to the pod, as always. I keep making these pretty much back on weekly, to be honest, which I don't know if anyone's noticed, but yeah, and I appreciate you all, as always. There's a few new links in the description below if you want to check those out. And yeah, potentially going to do something in person again. I used to do those events and I've had a lot of people ask me about those either when they bump into me at something in the street or elsewhere or just online. And I'm keen to potentially put a few more of those on again. So if anyone's keen on that, drop me a DM or something with some suggestions or I'll put something out and see who comes. Other than that, it's Q4 in 11 days, which is fucking crazy because it comes around super quick. And yeah, I hope everyone's ready for that. Scaling, preparing, and ultimately, hopefully enjoying the process to some degree, which I think I'm starting to do more. And maybe there's a video on that as well. Separately. So, yeah. Anyway, I'm rambling. Good to chat. Appreciate you all, as always. And we'll catch you the next one. Bosh. Sam.