What Got you Here Won't Get you There - Doc the Journey Ep 75

Yo, back with episode 75. I'm in an Airbnb that is a cushion, not a person. I just realized on my little screen looks fucking weird. Not recorded in a while, as always. I need to play a game or something where I say if I don't record, then I'll, like, give up the equity of my business or something to like, one out of however many viewers like the video or some shit. I thought I'd touch on a different topic today. Few different things. Be good to cover. Hat needs to go on. I'm having a bad hair day, as always, and this lens probably needs to come off. Bosh. Yeah, it's been a while. As always. I feel like in this very transitional phase, which is like metaphorically, because I feel like I'm in a transition from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 of Building the business, but also I'm quite literally in transition phase because I was living in Battersea power station for like five years. Left, went to Marbella, maybe a topic for another time. Didn't work out right now for a few reasons. Came back, I'm in a London Airbnb, which is all a bit temporary, not ideal at all for being settled and so on. But also it's metaphorically similar to the stage of business I'm at. I feel like I'm at this stage where chapter one, like zero to 10 million, which in my mind is like zero to one, as Peter Thiel would call it. You know, finding product market fit, going through that super startup, scrappy early phase. And it still is that to a large extent. But I was at this. I actually met Steve Hewitt, the CEO of Gymshark or the former CEO of Gymshark at some event of like 20 founders, as part of one of the recruiters that we're using for this role, which I'll get onto. Got to meet him, spent some time speaking to him directly and he did like his little talk. I thought it would just be kind of fluffy corporate stuff, but I went anyway. But actually it was really fucking good. And he spoke about how they scaled from 5 to 500 million, and I think it was what, six, seven years? And he was the CEO there during that time. And yeah, he basically spoke about 0 to 10 million, which is where we've been. We'll do like 10 million this year, pretty much bang on. Probably could have done more, but that's where we landed. That's like the startup phase. That's product market fit phase. It's the scrappy phase. Founder leads most things, etc. 10 to 50 is professionalized and most brands don't even get there. And then 50 and beyond. He talked about scaling or 50 to 100, then 100 to 500 with that internationalizing and yeah, super true. And I think partly because I've gone down the route of having investors and one of the positive side effects of that has been I've been working with a mentor guy, the founder business called tails.com, he's joined our board. Go and see that it's in the public domain but I won't share any more details on him. But been working with him for like nine months. He invested a bit of money as well. And you don't know what you don't know about how to scale. And I think the one thing that my previous business fucking up did was it made me very humble and very open to listening and not speaking so much in terms of I genuinely try and learn something from everyone around me and I feel like I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, which isn't entirely true. But that mindset is definitely true for the next stage. And I think there's a lot of naivety from founders that probably, you know, they're in that seven low eight figure stage, probably more seven figure stage where they can hustle it to 10 million, don't really build a team, they might live all over the place and it's more like nomadic lifestyle, lifestyle business stuff and there's nothing wrong with it at all. In fact, in many ways that's better and I enjoyed that for a while. But I think there's a lot of naivety. Those founders think and I know a few of them, I'm not going to say them, I know of a few of them. I think you can just spend more on meta and just run it all yourself to go from 10 to 50 and beyond. Potentially not that many brands get there at all, but the ones that do certainly more than just spending money on ads. And I think that's the phase I'm going through now is trying to figure out how to do that, but with really good advice of how to do it from people that have actually done it. Like the guy I'm working with sold a business for multi nine figures. The business itself is doing over 150 million in revenue. You don't know what you don't know. And I've learned so much from him just in terms of even how to think about it. And I think it becomes primarily much more about two things like recognizing how big the TAM is and I suppose the preface to this is my goal is to build a 50 million pound plus revenue business and beyond. And I don't say that naively, I probably used to, but that's really fucking hard to do, especially as a UK European brand. And a big part is, is the TAM big enough? So product expansion is a huge one. Maybe more on that layer. We're doing a lot of new stuff next year that might surprise people to address that, that factor. Like how big is the TAM for what we're doing one product online, UK probably difficult to get to 50. In theory it could be done, but difficult, difficult to do it efficiently. And the other thing is hiring. Like it becomes way more about hiring, right? And this camera's got a screen. I don't know if I should look at the screen or the fucking lens. Usually do myself well, look away. But way more about hiring. I'm spending more of my time on that now. And I think a lot of founders in the early stage, and it depends what your goal is, if you want to build a bigger business, which mine has always been and kind of has to be now, I've got investors. That's a whole other thing. Maybe a video on that another time. If that is your goal, then I think a lot of founders are probably scared to hire and they want to have higher margins that they keep for themselves and just run it more lean and just work 15 hours a day and all that. But it's probably not possible to scale that beyond or to scale it sustainably. And certainly not in a way that one day that you might be able to sell the business. If it's just you and a few freelancers, you can hustle your way to that and in some cases it works. But I think hiring people that are objectively better than you in critical areas, like we just hired a retention manager, which is one we didn't focus on enough in the past, to be honest. We're hiring an MD right now, which is a huge role. Maybe I'll touch on that separately in a second. And yeah, it just becomes more about that. And I'm trying to figure out how to spend my time because people ask me like, how do you spend your time on the business? And it's actually a good point because I haven't been sure in the past few months because it has started to change so much. It was very much a generalist at the start, focused on probably primarily products and growth. Then we hired a head of growth. I'm still involved in growth, but I don't do as much of the admin, day to day managing growth, you know, creative processes, CRO, all that stuff. So more my time has been spent on hiring but also figuring out what we want to do, building the budget and plan for next year, all that sort of shit and then start to think more like broadly around products, which definitely takes way, way longer than it sounds like on the face of it sounds like you could do it in like 10 minutes a day, you just very much can't. We h NPD manager as well. But when I say product I mean like coming up with what we want to do, the strategy, etc. So yeah, that's a weird one. I'm trying to figure out where to spend my time, where's the highest leverage. Because a lot of things I was really bad at delegating right from the start and I've gradually got better. It was so much easier at the stuff I didn't want to do, but it was really hard for me to delegate in areas that I quite enjoyed doing but also thought I was maybe better than the people that were doing it, which very much isn't true and definitely isn't true now with the team we've got. So yeah, that's a weird one. I did hire an MD into the business previously, but it's too soon. Very, very different situation, wasn't quite the right fit and it didn't work out and whatever they went off to do their own thing and good luck to them, decided a few months ago to appoint a headhunter to find a very commercial, focused, organized and practically a good fit with me. Md, which is managing director might sound like a weird one at this stage because we're still in my mind a small business and we are, but it's more about. Well, it's two things. Firstly, it allows me to not do the stuff I don't like doing, which is a lot of just the running the business, running the team, all that sort of stuff and focus more on products and brands. I think we're really lacking in that area to be honest, which is what I want to do. I'm naturally more of a creative that became a generalist operator and a semi competent one in a few areas but really I'd like to spend more of my time leaning towards product brand because I think there's way more we can be doing. It's all in my head, I just don't have time to fucking execute it properly. And then the other thing is just setting the foundations to be able to be a 20, 30, 50 million pound business as the next steps. And yeah, I think the advice I've had and the sort of founder I am and I definitely agree, having met candidates, we're like late into the process now. We did final rounds the other day with four people. It's definitely the right fit for me because I've never wanted to be like a CEO type. That's not my character. I don't give a shit about that title. I don't think I'm particularly good at that. Rather focus on the stuff that I'm good at, which I think is more broadly like zero to one ideation of new stuff, broadly being products and brand and maybe a new country, all that sort of stuff, new channels. I like doing new stuff and that's what I'm best at and enjoy most. So yeah, running that process and I suppose, yeah, like I said before, I am fortunate and people have different opinions on this. There's definitely pros and cons to having investors, but I think having the genuinely good, incredible ones that I have that have a solid track record, it's definitely helped me think about how do you grow a legitimately big category leading brand, not just a big bloated, outsized bedroom brand, which is where I think a lot of brands are and certainly where I am or feel like I am and have been the past two years. And it really comes down to team and strategy and a lot of other things. And it definitely gets exponentially harder. It's not as simple as just spend three times as much on Meta to triple the business. It's probably not simple as that for most people. If it was, everyone would be running 50 million pound a year brands that spit out loads of profit and super chill. Right. Whereas there's actually very few of them, especially in the UK and Europe. Even in America, it's not that many of them. So yeah, I don't know what I'm saying really. I mean, I guess the point of this is what got you here won't get you there. And I'm in this transition phase where I'm having to force myself to professionalize the business. But also I'm still very much in the trenches and a lot of things, but I'm hiring and onboarding people and planning a bit more and trying to take the jump from being so involved in everything to being more high level involved in a lot of things. I'm still very much founder Mo. I'm conscious there is a very slim line and it's obviously only 11 people now still, it's still small, but yeah, it's just probably 30% of my time is doing stuff myself. 30% of the time is managing the work and working with team members and so on. Maybe 30% of it now feels like planning, hiring, more strategy. And I'm conscious that strategy is often just a different word for procrastination. I think Peter Thiel said that on the Rogan podcast and it is fucking true. I would default to that. But at the same time, how are you going to build a big business if you don't know where you're going, don't know what the plan is and you can't communicate that to the team? So I'm spending a bit more time on that, which I definitely enjoy more because I spent like seven years in the trenches doing everything to some extent at least at some point. So yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at. I didn't say at the start I'm wearing a coat because Airbnb is freezing. Bit of a strange situation. You'll notice the the wallpaper behind me is also very niche, but it's a temporary solution. Yeah, just locking in for the next few months. Need to lose some weight. I was 15. Body fat. I did a DEXA scan the other week. Need to fix that. And yeah, no travel plans anytime soon, unfortunately, but also fortunately because I need to lock in for the next key two months. Obviously Black Friday is tomorrow. Maybe I'll touch on that once we finish the period, what were the plans, what were the targets, what did we do, etc. But yeah, apologies. My last video was I feel like I have a habit of putting shit on the Internet when I look like shit, sound like shit and look like I'm mentally unstable, which is sometimes true, but probably the majority of time is not actually true. And I paint myself this picture of being this completely loose don, isn't it? But yeah, also the podcast I did on D.C. diaries got quite a lot of views, but I looked fucking terrible in that. I think I was. I had man flu. It was like pre haircut, pre blonde, just not a good look. So yeah, getting after it, back to the gym, locking in big time and cracking on with probably the start of chapter two in my mind. We've done the startup phase now it's, you know, starting the scale up phase in many ways. So lots to come on the channel. As always, subscribe. Yeah, this is a random video. Apologies, but keep watching the pod. I'm going to keep it up. I know plenty of people get some sort of value from it. I'm just a little bitch. Sometimes I talk about doing more with the pod, and then you look back at my posting schedule over the past year or so and it's been very, very erratic to say the least. But yeah, 2025 weekly videos back on it and I said that I'm a huge hypocrite, but you gotta try. So cheers for watching. Subscribe to the pod. Let me know if there's anything I should do that's different, like change the format, Q and A. Then I would do a vlog on an interesting day. Like a day in the life, any of that shit. I just think it'll be cool to watch back in years to come. So yeah, catch you the next one. Cheers for watching. Peace. Sam.