A Belfast-born e-commerce founder built BestSelf to eight figures, then sold it and hit a wall. In 2020, his business partner embezzled inventory, supply chains collapsed, and he realized he'd chosen a co-founder out of insecurity, not strength. The sale felt anticlimactic—just a click—and left him lost despite the money.
Chapters
I think one of the best gifts of entrepreneurship and plugging into other like-minded people is finding people that you can level up together. And I know things that you don't know and you know things I don't know. And so being able to plug in and share those and help each other just continue to level up, get better, and become the best versions of ourselves really is kind of what makes it worth it because it's a lonely path.
And it's also difficult if you didn't grow up with like entrepreneurs, because if you look around and no one that you hang out with is who you want to be like, then you need to go to another circle. And not in a negative way. It's more of like, like, are you asking advice from someone that you aspire to be like? And if not, then you need to get in a room of people. You're like, oh, this is the career path I could see happening.
I think you make a great point here because I think a lot of times from the outside looking in, people might think entrepreneurs think they're better than other people or think that it's just— it's not better. It's just a different path and it's a much harder path. And yes, there are potential rewards at the end of that. Of that journey. But there are days when I wish that I had a job that I could just punch the clock, forget about it at 5:00 and go home and hang out. Right. But that's not the luxury that we have.
Yeah, it's a lot of jobs. You could actually make more money than a lot of entrepreneurs do, like working at Facebook and just leaving at 5, getting a nap room, you know, go for a walk on campus. I don't know if you saw those TikTok videos, which are hilarious, but I was like, oh, having a W-2 job where I can just clock out and stop thinking about it. I've had one job ever where that was the case. I worked at a stationery shop when I was at university. As soon as I walked out those doors, course, did not think about it until the next shift.
Well, let's, let's back up to, uh, your journey and understanding how you got here and kind of what made you who you are. So tell me, A, where you grew up and how you grew up, and what maybe drove you entrepreneurship in the first place.
So I grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which is very not an entrepreneurial space. You know, you just go to school, then you go to university, and then you get a job. My dad's a doctor, but he works for the National Health Service, same job for like 40 years. The idea of me not going to university was just like, it wasn't even a thought. When I look back, I was very entrepreneurial growing up. I had like, I would sell cupcakes on the playground. I had an e-commerce eBay store when I was like 13, which I wasn't even able to have a PayPal account. So my mom had a PayPal, but I was just like dropshipping like Dawson's Creek DVDs from Canada 'cause they didn't have them in the UK and I'm always selling them. And even at like 13, you look back and you're like, oh, the things I was interested in, I just didn't know you could do it as a job.
If you're gonna learn and grow. Because entrepreneurship, I think, is the greatest school of personal development that there are, that there is. But you've gotta learn and integrate lessons.
Yeah.
And the only way you can do that is take responsibility, understand what part you played in it, and then rapidly iterate and improve. So you knocked it outta the park with BestSelf. You became in, in, in many ways a leader and, you know, inspiration in the e-commerce space. What led you to the decision to sell the company?
So I had been running it, started in 2015, but 2020 was just like a really rough year. It was obviously COVID. I mean, I came into that year where it was going nuclear on the business partnerships, which is a huge distraction. Our factories closed down because of this thing called COVID that we were hearing about. We were almost out of our best-selling products. We didn't have like a bunch of money in the bank. And so I'm kind of going into 2020 and everyone's like, "Batting your hatches like sto—" and I'm like, I have no reserves. I am like feeling really depleted and I'm dealing with this.
No reserves cash-wise, no reserves energy-wise. Yeah.
And I'm dealing with like, in my mind at the time, negotiating with a terrorist. Yeah. Where it's just like, I don't know where this is going to go. And it's funny because the standing up to the business partner thing, when I look back, it was my employees essentially were going to be affected by the things that was doing that I like stood up and was like, no, this is not happening anymore. And it's just like a perfect storm. So because I'm distracted with the business partner stuff and figuring what that looks like, we have an inventory manager that's like embezzling from us, which I discovered in 2020 around the same time. So I'm just like, there's just like multiple wars on each front. And end of 2020, I got the business partner and I was like, okay. And it was great and it's stressful because, well, now, now I don't have this other person to blame. Now it's like totally on me. And so for the next 2 years, essentially. It was like getting us back profitability-wise, product development. And the goal wasn't to sell, but it was like, how do I get into a place where I could sell it if I wanted? Because then it was, I'd always like poured everything back into the business. And then someone came to me with an offer probably in like, and it wasn't a great offer, but I'd read this book and it was just about these like binary decisions. If it's like, oh, do I sell to this person or not sell at all? And I was like, well, let me just start having more conversations with people. So that's kind of, I just started taking calls with people and like putting it out there that I was maybe thinking about it with a goal of like, okay, if a good offer comes along, I could take it, but if it doesn't, like, whatever.
The ruthless self-reliance, your superpower, starts to become a limitation because now you're so used to this being all just figure it out, and it becomes really difficult to rely on other people. You brought on a business partner, didn't go great. To make a very long story short, what did you learn from that experience?
I learned a lot of things about myself. One of the things, when you don't have boundaries for a long time, people will start to treat you however they like.
We train people how we want to be treated.
Yeah. And I had trained where I was just letting things go and not having hard conversations. That's probably one of the biggest learnings is like, if you delay a hard conversation, it's just going to get harder and harder and harder. And often in a business context, it'll become more expensive. Not only just like in my case, like legal bills, but also just energy. And it's like a weight that you're carrying. And so if I could go back, it's like have hard conversations early and learn how to set boundaries and talk about things that are difficult, because I think I grew up— I'm like the peacekeeper. How come when people do something negative or treat you badly, like, you'll be tripping over yourself to make it okay? As in, like, God forbid there's like any tension. I'm like, even though you did the bad thing, I will try to make it okay. I will try to smooth everything out, even though I'm not the one that made it rough in the first place.
Yeah, we thrust into these roles that we don't ask for, and If we don't have awareness and insight as to where they came from, they're going to run rampant until they force us to look at them. Right. Which just sounds like essentially is what, what happened here. Your experience with your business partner actually led to me coining a term that is outsourcing your confidence. You actually had everything that you needed to run that business and had run businesses before, but you already mentioned just a little bit ago that you weren't confident about business. So you went out and you and you outsource your confidence to bring on a partner. This is a recurring theme I see time and time again with people, is they go find a 50/50 co-founder. There's just a little part of them that isn't confident that they can do it on, on their own.
It's like partnering out of insecurity.
Yeah. Here's, here's what I love, right, is that hindsight being 20/20, yes, maybe there was some outsourcing of confidence. And what I hear is you taking responsibility for your part and how you showed up to the relationship, and giving credit for what you learned. And I, I think all of that is so important. And if you're going to learn and grow, because entrepreneurship I think is the greatest school of personal development that there, that there is. I remember you called me to ask about my opinion, and I told you something one of my original mentors told me, which is you'll never regret selling your first business. So you get the check, you get the wire. How did it feel exiting that company?
Um, it's kind of an anticlimactic event, mainly because you build all this, spend so much time building up this thing and then it's a DocuSign, you like click two things and then it's, oh, okay, I guess it's done. And so it's definitely like not as exciting. And then you go into scarcity mindset, which is where I went, where I was just like, oh my God, I went from like having a cash flowing business and an asset I could someday sell to like no cash flow because it wasn't enough that I was not gonna work again. And so then I'm like, okay, what am I gonna do next? Even though I had plenty of time resources to figure it out. Suddenly I was like, oh my God, I don't know like what I'm going to do next. And all this time where I'm like, I can take time off and I'm like, I wanted to learn how to code and do all this stuff, which I did do, but I didn't enjoy it because I felt like I had to— It was pressure. Figure out what the next thing was because I've always, since I was 14, always knew what the next, like working every summer. When I graduated my architecture job, I actually started a job like 2 days after graduation. Everyone else taking the summer off. I'm like, no, I'm going to work at this architecture firm because God forbid I would waste 2 months of my life. But it actually worked out because it was 2008 and the people that waited 2 months to try to get jobs in architecture didn't really— didn't make it.
So it had been a very successful strategy. I think exiting a company is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves.
I mean, just the idea that you're like, I created something out of nothing that someone wanted to buy is pretty cool. It's amazing. I would always tie things back to the architecture job, like How long would I have to work to be able to make this amount of money? It's just— Long time. Or like if I had to stay in that job, like I hired a bunch of people and they all made like way more than I made, which I was able to do, which is just wild.
Yeah, it's amazing to kind of have that sense of completion. But you touched on something I think really important for other people thinking about selling their business or maybe they've recently sold their business, which is you go from cash flowing business and an asset you can sell to— now I've got a lump sum and I get to decide what to do with this. And if it's not enough to never work again, what the hell am I going to do in between?
