Tristan Flint, Founder @ Marna

Welcome back to another episode of The Garage Guy. Today we're joined by Tristan. Tristan, welcome to the podcast, mate.

Thank you, good to be on.

Yeah, um, so you are the co-founder of Mana, which is a very fast growing iced tea brand in the UK, you know, already in Soho House and Fortnum's, which are two not bad clients for your first ones, but this isn't what you always thought you were going to do in your career. And yeah, this episode we're going to sort of tell your story and your journey. I think a good place to start is the beginning. You're at Bath studying management. What did you think your career was going to be at that point? What were you thinking it would turn out to look like back then?

Yeah, I mean, fair question. Not iced tea, yeah, to be honest. I remember I started a 4-year program at Bath where one of the years was a placement year, and I remember sat in my room just before dinner time and just drew up a list of kind of firms and jobs and things that could be interesting to me, and the list was enormous, absolutely enormous, and it was, you know, your marketing jobs, HR jobs, your finance jobs, everything underneath the sun, and somehow ended up doing investment banking in a firm called Lazard. So that was the first and only, I guess, corporate job I've ever had. But it was one actually where I'd applied to it and they rejected me, and I applied again about 10 minutes later. And there's a box that you tick saying, have you applied to this job before? And I ticked it again saying, yes, I've applied to this. And for some reason, the second time around, I got through. And then spent 4 years there. So one of those years was on placement, next 3 years full-time after university. But I had the best time there. It was not an easy role, it's demanding at times, but I had a very, very good time there. I learned so much and I have a lot of friends still left at Lazard. And then, yeah, I mean, from there, about a year ago, year and a month ago now, made the switch and decided to leave that all behind to start a healthy iced tea company. Not planned, not this kind of grand plan from the beginning, it just happened and yeah, here we are today. It's been a crazy adventure, some ups, some huge ups, some really low lows, but it's been so much fun and just very, very different to what I thought I'd be doing a year ago.

Yeah, and I think obviously you say that you loved your role in investment banking, I think for a lot of people it is very desirable to to get into it, you know, it gets put on this pedestal as a brand, you know, as an industry that is the best you can do coming out of university. So once you were in it, what was it about this idea about what you're building that made you want to, you know, stop doing something that everybody would say, oh no, come on, mate, you're making loads of money, you work for this amazing company, what was just so compelling about this company that, yeah, you just had to go and build it?

Yeah, sure. I joined Lazard because I joined that world because I wanted to learn as much as I could as quickly as I possibly could, and that was an avenue to do that. So it was never about the money. I think people— I see, I saw a lot of people think about investment banking, just think purely from a monetary perspective, and that isn't the right way to think about it because if you kind of average out the the hours that you work versus the pay you get, you do the kind of sum and you get the average kind of pay per hour. It's not actually a lucrative career as people think, and they just kind of see the salary and go, yeah, it's going to be a lot of work. It's a demanding job, and anyone tells you otherwise is mistaken. So I went in it from the perspective of I want to learn as much as I possibly could, and investment banking gives you that background to be able to go in and analyse any company that exists and be able to tell, you know, what's the driver of growth, how are they functioning as a business, how do they operate, how do they make money, all that kind of stuff. And that was really interesting to me, and that gave me the opportunity to learn as much as I could. So that was the reason for investment banking. It wasn't the monetary side of things. And then I guess carrying that over into ICT, I wanted— and I've always been at my best, and this is just the way I work, when there is a problem. To solve or when the work is at its most difficult. So I wanted to keep learning and this opportunity to go and start something in a sector that I had no experience in offered me that chance kind of professionally to keep developing a skill set. And then Ice Tea just came from a love of iced tea. It sounds really bizarre to say, but my mum is from Singapore. I grew up in Hong Kong for a bit of my life and then I moved to London and iced tea in Asia is really, really popular. Iced tea in the US is really, really popular. Europe, same. In this country, we drink so much tea, and yet we've not really figured out how to do iced tea all that well. And so it was from that kind of view that I had that, you know, I will go abroad to drink iced tea, but I won't drink it here in the UK. And it was from there the idea was born. And so I ended up in the US, probably the summer of 2021, and just started messing around with making a homemade iced tea for myself. Literally these big buckets, I get lemons and squeeze them by hand. I'd use like black tea bags and put them in overnight. And it started off very, very homemade and it went from there. But it was accidental in the sense that I was just doing something that I loved. And through the power of word of mouth and just seeing that take shape and develop and go from a homemade bucket to starting to share it with more friends and family, it took off on a journey of its own. And it got to the point in June last year where I just wasn't able to do both. And so I had to make the choice, do I stick with a career that I actually really liked at a firm that I really liked, or do I just take a massive, you know, shot to nothing and see what happens?

And I'm so glad we did because, you know, today, 15 months on, it's a very, very different proposition and a very different journey in our tiny company's history as it was And I think what's interesting to me there is that you went to investment banking to learn as much as possible, so you were already gearing up to maybe do something for yourself or repurpose those learnings into, you know, something that way you could— it could be more about you and more attuned to your passion. But you knew that you weren't just going to do it for anything that you didn't care about, like, because I think there is this sort of thing at the moment where on social media you see all these people glamorizing entrepreneurship and being able to start at a really young and build these consumer brands and everything, but I bet there are so many learnings that you made in investment banking that actually meant that this process, even though it's not been smooth, it'd be so much smoother than just if you tried to start it when you were 20. Um, yeah, so if we could try and decipher, like, you know, from a student's perspective who may be looking at entrepreneurship and thinking, I want to give that a go, what the benefit of having gone into a corporate career investment banking has given you in building TubeBand? Sure. And what it hasn't?

Yeah, I've got a lot to say on this actually. I see a lot of social media stuff where everyone's glamorizing a life of independence and freedom and kind of quick and immediate wealth through entrepreneurship. Real entrepreneurship, where you want to go and build something, is hard. Is really hard. And I think that a really great example of this is the guys that do the kind of Instagram, come and trade with me and you'll be a gazillionaire.

Yeah, yeah.

All that kind of stuff. The gurus. Yeah. People who, and what I'd say to people and challenge people on this is, if you look at every successful entrepreneur, you think about your Bill Gates or your Steve Jobs of the worlds, the kind of Jeff Bezos of the worlds, these guys what have they gone and done? And they've gone and solved a problem, right? And I think that that separates the really great entrepreneurs from those that think they can like the lifestyle, I think they want that lifestyle, but aren't prepared to put in the work. They are obsessed with what they do, their craft, right? So Steve Jobs wanted to create technology that was just non-existent, right? Bill Gates wanted to make the world more productive. There are so many things, but they're ultimately to their core as people, they never set out to go and do these things for the kind of lifestyle that it would give them. Those individuals set out to go and solve the problems. And because of the way they solve those problems, their lifestyles then followed suit. I think that's the difference between— and people always ask us now for advice on where to start and what to do, and we can't really give it 'cause I'm still— I haven't figured this out yet. I'm far from figuring it out. But what I can say is figure out your why. And if it's because you want a certain lifestyle and it's because you want freedom, that's not the right way It's the guys that see a gap for something and feel so passionately about it that they're willing to give up their life and their time for it. Those are the guys that are worth tracking and seeing through and seeing how they do. It's not a glamorous life. You go from investment banking where the support packages, the pay packages, the health benefits, everything is amazing. You're really well looked after in exchange for your time and your commitment to working hard. Going the entrepreneurship route, we don't pay ourselves salaries, we are losing money every month because that's just what it takes to start a business like this, but we just believe in what we're doing so much that we're willing to give so much to it, and that's the difference, I think. That's what's going to make this work or not work. On the doing a corporate career then making this shift, I could not go and do what I'm doing now without having spent time in that old job.

Is that the process of raising investment or—?

Everything. So we raise investment, we do all of our accounting in-house, we do all of our forecasting, our business plans, we do scenario testing. We've built some— Maros, my co-founder, he laughs— we've built some monstrous Excels that have enabled us to plan for growth and to do it in a really sustainable way, which means that we can survive the next year, 2, 3 years. All of that stuff would not happen without us, and me in particular on the numbers side of things, being in Lazard or being at investment bank. So I think there's no rush to go and do the entrepreneurship stuff. You see on social media these young guys, age 21, giving it a go. There's no rush. And in the perfect world, I should have gone and spent time working for an FMCG firm to learn about this industry that I'm now going into. I didn't, I didn't have the luxury of that pathway, and I made the most of what I've had. But there's no way we could go and do what we're doing now without having spent that time. And I would urge people to just think there's no rush with this stuff. It's, you learn as much as you can, and then when you hit your ceiling for how much you've learned, then think about what you wanna do next. But to go and assume you'll know it all and you can do it just from, you know, leaving school, university, yeah, there'll be some people that could do that. But for the majority of people, building skills that will be foundational for what you do next is really important. And we couldn't do what we do now without that.

There'll be someone sitting there listening to this who is like, okay, this is great advice, you know, it's real, you know, you've shown the glamorous parts, the not so glamorous parts, but I think ultimately you got into investment banking for a top firm, you got into Bath to study management, and I think there will be people that will be really ambitious And, you know, you alluded to the fact you're not necessarily book smart in the beginning, you know, education didn't come necessarily easy, like it wasn't a guarantee you get a first or land a top job at investment bank. So what was it at university, or, you know, even before that, that is driving all this ambition? What's your mindset that you could give back to someone who's, you know, wants to be successful but isn't quite allocating that ambition correctly?

Yeah, I think on the book smart thing, I think about like my sister and I, my sister's unbelievably book smart and she will always get better grades than I always have done. I've not done badly, but I've not done as well as my peers and I think that there's the kind of the book smart piece of people's development and who they are and also just that kind of how good they are in the real world and You know, some of the old-school way of thinking about jobs was you hire from Oxbridge because they're the smartest people in the world. Actually, the people that I worked with, the best brains, they never were from Oxbridge because, I don't know, it's not uniform in this approach, but diversity of thought is massive, and I think that some of the smartest people I've ever worked with at my old job, and even now, never went there. And I think that there is Being book smart is one thing to get you to a certain point, but then applying those skills into the real world where you have to be commercial, think on your feet, think quickly, it's a different type of thinking. I think it's, you know, I was saying to Pete before we came on here, the job that I got straight out of university, I didn't get in, and if that doesn't show you that sometimes it's just a bit of luck to be able to just get onto an internship program or to get onto a graduate program, and then I don't know what else will. You know, the job that I went and was pretty good at for 3 years after, said no to me, right? I don't know why out of all the— I applied to probably 30 jobs and I got rejected from the majority of them. I have no idea why the one job that I ended up doing was the one job I went back to and said, I'm going to apply again. I couldn't tell you what made me do that. Yeah, because it wasn't on my radar. It wasn't something that I was, you know, set on doing, investment banking. My radar was wide. But if that doesn't show anyone listening to this that it's just a bit of luck sometimes, just a bit of perseverance, then I don't know what else will.

Yeah, and I think a lot of people think you have to be very intentional in your career, and although like that ultimately is what you want at the point you want to get to, there's a load of learning that you have to do before you can even do that. Like, you know, you say having your why locked down for building a business, but also having your why locked down for working hard or doing anything related to your career is an important like duck to have an order. Um, so I think if we, um, fast forward to where you're at now, um, and, and looking back at your career and everything you've been doing, what are you most proud of today? I mean, you've got all the glamorous, um, you know, getting into Soho House, etc., but like, which jump or bit of your career are you just really proud of doing? Something where you might not have even had the right to do it, right?

Yeah, what am I most proud of? I think, so our first ever win, ever massive win was Fortnum Mason. And that came about at the beginning of this year, and that came out from a cold approach. We don't know any of the buyers, we don't know any of the people in this space, we are just cold emailing, LinkedIn, everything you said, people say you should go and do, we're going and doing. And I think that that was a massive win for us because it was, you know, they were the most famous tea house in the world, right? Everyone in the world knows what Fortnum Mason is, and for them to take on an external tea product, and our external tea product, was a massive win because it gave us the confidence that we were on to something that was worth sharing. And I think that we We started this company out wanting to share a healthier iced tea with more people, and getting that one over the line was a big stamp of approval for us in the sense that we've got a product that's good enough for this tea house. And if it's good enough for Fortnum Mason, in theory it should be good enough for everyone. And at that point on, you can kind of puff out your chest a bit more, you can walk a bit higher, because every late night you do, all the work you put in is now finally becoming you know, it's now starting to pay off. And I think that that was the first mega win for us. Obviously, there's been loads of other ones, the Soho one, the viral TikTok video, a whole bunch of other things, but that was the first one we just thought, right, we've now got something, we've now got a company and a brand that people want to have on their shelf. And for that, that was insane. Seeing that on the shelf for the first time was emotional because you just, all the work up until that date had kind of gone into that moment.

I can imagine in that pitch to former Masons, or even in your job interview for investment banking, like, you can have all the degrees and have ticked all the boxes and all the adequate skills, but then end of the day it comes down to storytelling. And even that viral TikTok, right, that is the ability to tell a relatable story, all the highs and all the lows, albeit helped out by a good tune in the background. But yeah, I think, what have you seen has been the importance of storytelling? Because I think it's one of these more traditional, in the workspace skills that you're talking about when you say you're not as book smart.

Yeah, I think for us the storytelling piece has been everything, and that we have been really authentic with everything we've done. So we don't have a marketing team, we have no marketing budget, it is just the team right now is me, Maro, my co-founder, and my mum. My mum helps out with a bunch of the all of her fulfillment stuff, and she's amazing to have on board, and we'd be very stuffed without her. But it's just 3 of us and our phones and the camera we bought. And so everything people are seeing, everything that people are interacting with, everything from the can design all the way through to every post on Instagram, that's coming from one of us. And I think that in a world where consumers now are smarter than they ever have been before, you've got to find a way to connect with them in a different way. And one thing that I'm struggling a lot with at the moment is just how to deal with the being so front and center with the brand at the moment. If you notice a lot of our stuff on social media, our faces are everywhere, and I think that that allows people to connect with, with us on a human level, which makes them trust the brand a bit more. It makes them want to go and support a small business when you can see that relatability. But I think for us, the kind of core to what we do, what we do well, I think, and how we're always going to be, is be really authentic. Because, you know, people want to be able to— we thought about food and drinks as a competitive space. We thought about designing a product people wanted to have on their table, in their hand, in their shopping bag, they felt proud to have. And part of that is just how we message that across. And we found that being super authentic in everything we do, highlighting the highs and the lows when we get things wrong, because we get a lot of things wrong, people, people remember those things and people want to stick with you, people want to support you, you know. We are competing in an uber-competitive field where the biggest names are enormously big, and it's scary to think about who you're up against sometimes. But we've just found a way to do it our way, and hopefully people resonate with that, because at the end of the day, you'll just see two guys just trying their best. Like, that's, that's what it is. It's just our phones, it's us, and we're just trying our best. We do everything ourselves, and I think that that you know, we are being authentic and showcasing that rather than trying to appear polished in something we're not, you know. That documentation is really key for bringing people on board with our journey.

I just thought of a question, but I think I want to change it slightly because I was going to ask you what's next, but what I'm more interested in is how aware are you of what is next? Like, What are you actually doing day to day at the moment to, like, you know, because there's so many different ways you need to grow this and so many different ideas and avenues you can take it. What are you striving towards at this kind of moment in time? Like, not a superficial goal or anything like that, like, how aware are you of the next steps with what you're building?

So I received a bit of cool advice from a friend of ours a couple of months ago now, and he said, be ready for when the demand is there. So rather than be reactive, be proactive. And so one thing we're trying to do now is get our heads around, as production needs to increase to meet the increased demand we're seeing, how the hell can we be proactive to that as opposed to reactive? So how can we get everything in order to be ready for that demand as opposed to playing catch-up? So a big piece of work that we're doing now is how we think about cash flow, how we think about the type of clients we want to win and who we want to associate ourselves with, and how we kind of allocate budget for production, and can our facility take on new units because we're already their biggest customer, already doing a lot of units every month, can they do even more, how far can we push these things. So production planning and kind of cash flow management is a massive one for us now. And second one to that is just the sales stuff. How do we approach the names that we want to approach to start getting the conversation going. As I said, we don't have a network in the space, we don't know the buyers, so we're doing everything cold. So we've got to go and find the name we want to be in and then go and see what the best way to go and target them is. And it's a lot more thoughtful than just a blanket cold email, right? The amount of cold emails I get a day from marketing agencies— everyone is now a marketing agency expert, apparently. I get about 50 to 75 a day, I'd say, Wow. Right? So can you imagine what the buyers from these big firms are getting every day from drinks brands? Yeah. So we have to find a way to stand out. And so we're trying to give a lot of thought to who is kind of like on our wish list of places and locations and how to go after them. Because ultimately, we started this entire company wanting to share healthy iced tea with more people. And part of sharing that iced tea with more people is giving it more chances to be on shelves. So for us now, it's production planning, but also sales and very, very targeted sales and only going after the accounts that we think are aligned with what we want to do.

And I think that same quote you were given is very applicable to your career in general, to any industry, right? And I think if we use your time in investment banking as a case study, so in order to stand out because it's such a competitive industry to get in, even if there was a bit of luck looking amongst your peers and the other people that were there and having success in that industry, What do you think it was? What do you think makes you stand out in what is a pretty horrible job market that we live in nowadays? Yeah, not easy.

I've now been on the other side of the table, so I know exactly what I look out for, and I can see it in some of the best colleagues that I— ex-colleagues now— that I ever worked with. It's two things. One, a willingness to learn, right? I remember being sat at the back of the training room on my first day there, and they're going through a balance sheet and I had no idea what the hell they were on about, but I was willing to sit there and figure out what it was and willing to put in the effort to go and learn. So I was willing to be open to learning. And the amount of people that come in thinking they know it all, you're not going to know more than the guys already at these firms, right? They live and breathe this every day. So be humble enough to know that you've got to be willing to learn and you don't know it all walking into an interview room or walking into any setting. And then two, coming across as someone that people want to work with. You know, in investment banking specifically, you do very long hours sometimes—not every day, but some days it's long. So you want to be able to identify people that you would be happy to be sat next to because they'd have your back, they would share the workload, they would help you out. And coming across as someone that people want to be around is key because you spend so much time in the office, right, and in the working. And this applies to every working environment where you spend most of your life working, right? So you want to be able to be around people that you can see yourself being able to rely on, being able to get on with, being able to trust, and I think those two things are key. So willingness to learn and then being someone people want to work with.

And for somebody who's at university right now and they're going out drinking, they're having loads of fun, they're playing sport all the time, and they're thinking, oh, this, this whole career stuff is pretty daunting, like, you know, 'Is my life going to change completely? Can I even land a job?' All these kind of unknowns. Having, you know, now been in the working world and being in the startup world now, what would you, what would you say back to a student to actually reinstall some faith in careers? Actually, why should they be excited for their career? Because as you said, a lot of your life is work, and yeah, and you don't really get told that. It's always like postpone, postpone, postpone. But I think the more you can prepare for it and then actually try and be as happy as possible within it, You know, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah, I gave my sister the same piece of advice that I'm going to say now, is that you don't have to have it figured out right off the bat. Very few people do. It's very rare that you're going to find a grad program or grad role or any role where, right, that's it, this is me for the next 50 years, this is where I want to be. None of my friends think like that, none of my— I think like that, it's You know, I think that just trust the process a bit and know that, you know, whatever you go into next, whatever the next thing is, it's not going to be the be-all and end-all. You've got chances to pivot and change. I think what you should be doing is, what gives me the best chance to learn as much as I possibly can? And when you go after those kind of opportunities, you end up becoming a better individual because you become more hireable because your skill set gets broader. So I think that It's okay to not have it figured out. You know, I don't even know whether the company we run today will be around in 2 years' time. I really hope it will, but it's okay to know that it's not gonna be the next 50 years. And when I was at Lazada, when I joined, I took it day by day, right? I took it day by day into the point at which I was like, there's something else that I want to go and do. But don't think 50 years ahead. Don't even think 30 years ahead about what you want to go and do, because more likely you're gonna change, right? The people that you come across, the teams you end up getting assigned to, the countries you might get posted to, it's all outta your control. Some of it is in your control, but the majority of it is out of your control. I think that relaxing a bit with it and just trusting the process that it will all be fine is, is the way to go about it. I think that those that I see get very, very stressed are the ones that are laser focused on one career path and one career path only, and investment banking attracts a lot of those types of people. But generally, the, the people that I find the most talented that I've worked with have been the people that have done degrees that have no relation to finance, that didn't think about investment banking as a be-all end-all, but were just willing to go and put themselves in an uncomfortable environment to go and learn. So trust the process, it will be fine, and know that if it's not your dream job now, that's also fine, and you'll figure it out. It's like jumping from lily pad to lily pad, you'll figure it out along the way. But by all means, don't have it figured out right now, because you won't. Very few people do.

And my final question to you, which I ask every single one of my guests, is when you first started out in your career journey, you would have had a certain idea what a successful career would look like to you. Fast forward to where you are now with all that you've learned and the space that you're in, what is your definition of success in a career?

Getting up every morning and looking forward to starting the day. And I say that because I remember towards the latter end of my old job just not looking forward to going to work. I didn't dread it per se, it wasn't something that I was worried about or anything like that, I just wasn't looking forward to it. And now I can't wait to get an email, I can't wait to spend time with Mara, my co-founder, and it could be going to the factory to pack boxes, it could be packing up orders here in London, it could be going to meet a client. I look forward to absolutely everything. So if you can find something where you genuinely wake up every morning and you can't wait to get started, forget the salary, forget the seniority, Forget title, just get up knowing that you are loving what you're going about, you're about to go and do. That's it. And when you found that, everything gets a hell of a lot easier.

Tristan, it's been great. Thanks for having me on, mate. Appreciate it. No worries.