Transformation During Crisis | Simon Leslie | 465

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. And you're joining us on this LinkedIn Live version of our podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Simon Leslie. So Simon is the co-founder and CEO at InkGlobal, as well as the author of two books. Number one, There Is No F in Sales, and the latest one, which we're going to spend some time on, Equanimity: The Diary of a CEO in Crisis. So let me just give folks some context here. So Simon and I were fortunate enough to meet in Q1 of 2020. So this was back when you left your homes, back when the dinosaur age, and we were scheduled to meet up in his place, his office in Florida, which is where he is now, to do some work together. And about a couple of weeks before, he said, I don't know what's going on. We got to reschedule this thing. I got the worst flu I've ever had. So this is like January of 2020. So He was clearly on the early adopter side of COVID I think he's the first person I know that had it. And then at that time, Ink Global was, correct me if I'm wrong, Simon, $100 million company in the business of producing primarily airline magazines. Correct. Yeah. And then if you think about, if you had to make up like a storyline of a business you did not want to be in, in say, I don't know, March of 2020 moving forward for quite some time, That would probably be it. So Simon's business blew up, lost a ton of revenue, lost a lot of sleep, lost a lot of stuff, and then built it back up in a more digital, really amazing way. He and I have become friends since, and it's always fun to talk to Simon. So welcome aboard, Simon.

Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to this.

Cool. So when you and I were talking originally, we were focused on There Is No F in Sales, which was the book that you did on sales because you led sales and still do lead sales. At your organization, and we're going to do some stuff with that, et cetera, et cetera. And then you wrote The Diary of a CEO in Crisis, which I'm going to guess is somewhat autobiographical. So give me a sense of what the experience of writing this book was and why.

And you missed the book in between, White Belt Thinking.

Oh, yes.

Which sort of joined the two of them together because it threw all my best thinkings and ideas into a fable. Um, you know, when you write a book called There's No F in Sales and then within 6 months you go from 150 million, really, we're on track to do, to zero, that is what you call, um, the law of attraction. You've got to be very careful what you put down on a bit of paper because we basically attracted it and we had no sales.

And, um, now you don't want to come out with a new book called There Are No Sales. Nobody would buy that, right? That could have been another book.

There are lots of sales. Please bring them back quickly. Yeah, it was, it was the No F in Sales was a, was a sort of a what do you do from startup to, and all the challenges that you, you have running a business and sales being the backbone of any business. You know, you have a lot of time when there's no sales and you've got, you've got to, you've got to reinvent yourself and you've got to keep— I hate this word— you've got to keep pivoting. But I think pivot means go around in a circle. You know, you've got to keep moving forward. And I've been tested. I've had 9/11, I've had 2008, 2012, 2014, where I, I tried to pivot too much and, and fell over. And then this came along in 2020. And if you took all the worst events of the, of the early 2000s, this was 10 times worse than all of them. And I had to use the skill. And sometimes I went back to There's No F in Sales and say, there must be something in here that's going to give me some inspiration as well.

Yeah. But this book came out of your questioning things, right? So everybody had a different COVID project. Some did puzzles and some got pets and some did whatever. But when I read through the book, it was really not just your thoughts, but what was really cool is you had conversations with all sorts of interesting folks, many of them mutual friends of ours. To get a sense of what they're thinking. Because in the No F'in Sales book, your take was, hey, I've been there, done that. Let me share with you what I've learned, what I did correctly, what I did incorrectly, and take from it what you will. In the midst of COVID you didn't have any of the answers. Nobody had any of the answers, right? So you did what we all do is, well, let's just talk to the smart people that we know, admire, and respect and see what they're doing.

And guess what? Not many of them knew what to do either. There was no previous. We'd never been locked down before. We'd never been in this place of, I don't know what to do, what to tell somebody. We're getting questions fired at us from every angle. So from our teams, from our investors, from our clients, from our advertisers, they all wanna know, what are you gonna do about this? There's a mess here, you've gotta sort it out. And I'm like, okay. And it's prioritizing who, which fire you put out first, and it was just fire after fire after fire. And, uh, the only thing that I could do when I stopped and I thought about it, the only thing I can do is let me look after this team. Let me make sure that Tim remains as strong as possible because I reckon this will be 6 to 12 weeks and we'll be done. You know, if I'd known it was going to be 102 weeks, I probably would have hung up my bag. I mean, someone asked me this yesterday, 'Would you have sold PPE?' And I said, 'Probably,' because at the time I said, 'There is no way in God's earth I'm going to sell PPE because this will be gone and done. I'm not getting involved in that. I'm not going down that route.' And so I started phoning some of our mutual friends and said, 'Look, can you help me please? Can you come in and inspire the team?' And what transpired was that they weren't just helping the team, they were actually giving me ideas and insights And that's why I was never going to write a book. This was the intention. You know, it was sort of as we got towards the end of it, I thought, you know what, there's so many wonderful messages in what these guys have shared. And I've learned so much that if I don't share this, it's criminal that, you know, it's all up there. And they're going to be people, especially as we enter into, you know, what they're ordering us into this next recession very quickly. There's going to be lots of companies in crisis.

And let me ask—

there's one really important point. Not many companies failed during COVID because the government's propped up so many companies. Yeah, I think that, that was a challenge because you didn't get rid of the chaff. This time you're going to lose a lot of rubbish, and I think that they'll— I think it'll be a different experiment as well.

Yeah, I think that's probably so. So I want to go down this path with you for a little bit. So your primary focus, time, et cetera, you're a CEO of a company, you're CEO of a company that was in crisis that is now stable and back on track and doing digital things. And we can talk about that in a bit, but you spend a fair amount of your time on thought leadership, right? From the 3 different books, talking to people, interviewing people. One is, I know personally you're a lifelong learner. You love to consume stuff and get your head wrapped around stuff, et cetera. What is the benefit to the business of having a CEO that's become a bit of a personality? Not that you didn't have a personality before this. Is it about talent attraction? Is it a different story to tell customers? How does the business benefit from all this energy and effort that you put into various projects on the thought leadership front?

It's a great question. I certainly don't see myself as a—

And Michael's listening, so you got to have a good answer.

Exactly. Michael's listening. Michael's a celebrity, not me. I'll tell you one of the reasons I wrote the first book was I realized it was getting very hard for anybody to take us seriously or give us enough— give us some PR and some exposure. We were doing these amazing things, you know, we were dominating in a space. And, you know, I wanted it. I won a Queen's Award, I wanted an MBE, I wanted a knighthood, and nobody was taking us seriously as a business.— and I thought, well, if you write a book, then people are going to talk to you. And that sort of— that was one of the main drivers for writing that first book. And then I realized it was quite cathartic. And then I started getting more invited on more shows, on more interviews in newspapers. And I realized how much that gave me an opportunity to sell the story of the business, to PR the business. And that's why it's important, not because it's about me. It's about— you get to be on a stage where you can talk about your business from a position of strength. Right.

No, exactly. And I, and I think that being someone that's worked with you, number one, on the talent attraction side, you've got an amazing team, right? Not just the, from the frontline sales folks to everybody around you. And I think there's this connection to the brand that you represent and the books represent as well, is when you come on Boarded Inc, it says something, it represents something. There's a promise there as any brand would. But I'm talking about the internal brand in a time where selling print is not easy. Selling any sort of advertising is not easy in COVID, in a recession, in any time. But you've got this really fantastic team and give them great opportunities to better themselves.

Because I've got a great story to tell. The differentiator between our media and our audience COVID killed that, right? Because no other recession had killed it, because even though you might be in recession, people don't sacrifice their holidays. People have to go out and find business, so they're still doing their business trips. So it didn't slow down our business. So that's why I'm not worried about a recession coming, because that's not going to affect us the same way as a lockdown does.

Yep.

If you have a great audience, if you have a great product, then it's easy for your team to sell it. But sometimes, you know, what I believe is a great product, they might not, you know, unless I'm shouting about it from the rooftops and, and out in the market and saying, look, this is, this is the people you want to reach. This is the people who've got multiple homes. This is the people who are spending multiple thousands of dollars on holidays, on gifts, on cars. This is, this is the— this is your consumer. We've got your consumer. And if you're not If you want to reach them, look, whatever you're doing at home is not good now because they're not there. And I know they're going somewhere else and I know how long they're going to spend there. And I think that's why it's so powerful. So it gave me an opportunity to really talk to my customers, new customers, old customers, current customers, future customers, and tell them what I'm doing. Yeah. From a position of strength and confidence as opposed to, oh, here's another email, here's another phone call, here's something else. So people are already aware of our product through that thought leadership. And I think, you know, you helped me position that a lot in, you know, at the end of '19.

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Yeah.

No, thank you. So I, I want to talk a little bit about, and I hate the pivot word also, and I think what you did was not a pivot. I think what you did was a radical business transformation. Under times of tremendous stress. Pivot is a little bit to the left, a little bit to the right, whatever. But the story as I know it, and correct me, is print organization, print media, selling print media into the airlines, really good business, growing, growing, growing, growing. And then literally because of COVID whatever, 98% of the business gets vaporized. Planes get shut down, no planes, no airline magazines, no planes, et cetera. So you had a lot of time to sit around and think and talk about the transformation, the pivot, and where Ink is now largely, although not exclusively, a digital company now?

What we created was this marketplace. I think that's the best way to describe it. I think about 5 million people will travel today. We've seen the last week more travelers than ever. You know, when they say, you know, it's up on 2019, that means it's a record day. There's never been any more travelers on that day. And we've had about 10 days now where we are in record territory. And bear in mind that you're matching that with caps at the airports. Limited in inventory on some routes just because the capacity is just full. So this has got a way to go in terms of growth, and it's in a good place, and it's about to explode.

Right. So you went from magazines to talk about the digital, the screens and all that. So the magazines are back, obviously.

So we created this marketplace and the marketplace is magazines. We still got 3 magazines left and we started with 36. And some people said to me, oh, you've gone off magazines. I haven't gone off magazines at all. I bought a magazine called Business Traveller 6 months ago and we just got Dwyane Wade on the COVID and he just tweeted it to his 19 million fans. So I'm really excited about that. Dwyane has got so much to do. But being on the COVID of a magazine is such a powerful thing for him that he wants to put that out to his, to his audience, right? People forget how powerful that is. Oh yeah, great, you saw a picture of me on Instagram. Being on a magazine is still really powerful. So we've got 4 magazines with Business Traveller and one more coming back in the fall. We, we have Reach TV, and I am in the Reach TV studio. I'll move that the way so you can see it.

Yep.

Which is a beautiful studio in Miami. Um, we built this during COVID you know, we really invested in this. Reach TV, we've been partners in Reach TV since 2019. It was a small network and we got— I don't like to use that word lucky, but we saw an opportunity on January 12th, 2021, when CNN decided during COVID they wanted to close their airport network and we managed to secure quite a big chunk of it. And now Reach TV is at multiple gate screens as well as the bars, the restaurants, the luggage racks. We are really We are the biggest airport network. So in some ways we've gone from the biggest in-flight magazine producer to now having the biggest airport TV network.

So it's a logical connection from the standpoint of your business was connecting the advertiser to the traveler, be they business traveler, family traveler, whatever. The primary way to do that used to be print. Now the primary way to do that is through digital consumption of content, whether you're sitting at a gate or at the bar or at the the Admiral's Club or whatever. And it was logical that the infrastructure came to have, but it took guts and courage to acquire something that CNN, a company 100, 1,000 times your size, was ultimately pulling the plug on and throwing in the trash and saying, get this off my balance sheet.

Right? When you saw what they did with CNN Plus, how does that even—

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Right. Right. Yeah. We've had this for 25 years. That was the first question my investor said to me is, how are you going to make a success out of this when CNN couldn't. And I said, that's why you don't pay me enough money. As the comments are flashing across the screen. But we also bought some technology. And there was a product which worked with a couple of the airlines in Asia that allowed us to retarget the airlines' audiences. So we know that somebody is going from Dallas to New York today, they're staying 3 days, what class of cabin they're in. And we managed to take that technology. It was really raw when we acquired it and we spent a lot of time and money developing it and growing it. And now we've signed up 13 of 15 major airlines around the world where we work with them and it allows us to give them content in a completely different way. So the content, instead of arriving in a print form or an email form, comes in social media. You know, we can target them in their Facebook and their Instagram, in their Google searches. So if you're going to New York, instead of me saying, oh, Macy's, here we go, I could do the best shopping to New York brought to you by XYZ. So it allows us to produce content. For me, a magazine is just delivering content and adverts together. So yeah, we've got a brilliant digital platform combined with print to the airport, combined with relationships that we've created with the Wi-Fi partners. Now we bring sponsors to the Wi-Fi partners. You can get free Wi-Fi on planes because we're generating revenue for sponsors to pay for that Wi-Fi. These little things which are all part of the passenger journey is now sitting within our stable.

Very, very cool. And that's really the cool part of the company is you're way more of a digital technology company than a print company. Again, print probably will never go to zero, but I imagine there's going to be exponential growth in some of the things that you talked about today versus unlikely we'll be sitting here in a year where you'll be telling me you have 200 magazines, right? Interesting.

Hundreds of airlines will still have hundreds of millions of travelers. Yeah. Content in a different format, but we still have that. As far as I'm concerned, we still got a magazine format. We have magazine format shows on Reach that we create. It's exciting.

Yep. So give me in the last couple of minutes here, the 3 biggest things or the biggest takeaways that you've learned from the interviews that you did for Equanimity for the book.

The first one is, if you've got a company that's physically bankrupt that you can turn around and get it back in this year, 2022 will be the best year that INCA's ever had. Amazing. In terms of profitability. So if it's not worth paying the $14 for that, I don't know what else it will be. But the conversations, you know, Alison Levine, who I know you know, you know, one foot in front of the other. Just, that's all it is. It's one step first. Take the next step before you go crazy. Tim Grover, Tim Storey, Jordan Belfort was, you know, Jordan Belfort, and as aggressive as anything. And there were just, there were just amazing insights in gratitude. Chester Elton just gave us so many, uh, softer skills, softer ideas of what we should be doing during the day. Then we had negotiation and brain power. We had Chris Voss, you know, Chris was like this late night DJ just coming in and inspiring us. The people in here have given their time and the information so gracefully. And I, and I hope I've done them justice by just telling, telling those stories. And I think it will, it will be a playbook for anybody who's running a business because remember, Peter, we are probably 2 deals away from failure and 1.5 deals away from success. You know, it's a fine line to stay in business. And I think if the insights in this book don't help somebody, whatever, you know, whatever stage you are in the business. Because I have people saying to me, yeah, but I'm doing all right. You're one deal away, one deal away from— so be prepared, have a think and have a look at your business.

So that all right mentality though, so it's— I want to just touch on that because entrepreneurs that have earned their gray hair and beaten up, have been beaten up a little bit, never feel all right even when things are awesome. Not that you want to be insecure, But complacency is dangerous. Thinking you're invincible is dangerous. Resting on your laurels and focusing on the golf game is dangerous. Not that I think the one deal away, maybe that's dramatic, but I think it's a great question for everyone to ask themselves. What are 2 or 3 things that if they happen to the next week, 2 months, would be game-changing in a negative way? How many people have 30% of their revenue with one client or based on a technology or a contract that expires or something like that? And I think a little bit of that fear is healthy.

I think there's lots of questions in the book. They're going to challenge you about what you're doing, you know, what are you using your time for, how are you using your time, how much time are you spending setting yourself on fire to keep everybody else warm, how many things are you doing that you don't need to be doing, you know, that should be delegated to somebody else. You know, a lot of people— I find it fascinating how quickly you can grow a business if you have a completely different mindset. If your vision and your dreams and your goals and your team are all positioned in a far more aggressive way, things can change so quickly. In an instant, you can go from, I don't know how I'm going to survive, to, oh my God, we're thriving again. And that whole year, probably from January 12th, January '21 to December '21, was unbelievable. We were, by September '21, we were still millions and millions of dollars in the black, in the red. And by the end of the year, that final quarter, we just, we figured it out, we got the switch right, we got our momentum, we got our belief, and we just, we were back in profit. And that was just a, that was testament to an amazing team that we have here at England. You talked about it, You know, people who believe what I believe came on that journey with me, and yeah, now they're starting to benefit, to see the benefits of it. We're back doing trips again, we're back going on adventures. Yeah, everything that we were, that we were famous for, I guess, is now starting to happen again, and I'm super proud of what we've, what we've achieved.

Excellent. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I always enjoy our time together, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to share your story, which is an amazing story of overcoming everything and courage and a lifelong learner and not being afraid to put it all out there. So I appreciate you and appreciate your time today, Simon. Thank you.

Can I give you a plug?

Sure. So anybody who says no to that, right? You can give me two.

Wherever you are in business, find somebody like Peter who's going to sit there, who's going to challenge you, is going to ask you difficult questions, going to look at your processes, going to really look under the bonnet and really put your business through the spinner, because if you hadn't done that at the end of '19, I don't think I would have been able to do a lot of the things that I did. So I appreciate you and I thank you very much.

Thank you. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.