James Watt | What it Took to Create a Unicorn Business with BrewDog Founder

Wouldn't mind.

Please standing up, Please stand up. Please stand up. Please stand up. And welcome to the stage the most disruptive entrepreneur, founder of BrewDog, Mr. James Wall. Did you hear one person shouting brew Dog? Right, take a seat, everyone. Thanks for coming, James. In 20 years, BrewDog have achieved a lot. Could you, like, list the achievements, the disruptive achievements of Brewdog in the last two decades?

I can indeed. First say, hi, everyone. How's it going? Good. Okay. I'm so happy to be here and tell you a little bit more about the business, the journey, what we've done, but I think more importantly, the kind of mindset that kind of underpins how we've approached business and how I look at things going forward as well. So, yeah, the business that I set up was in 2007. I set it up with my best friend, Martin. Before that, we were making beer in Martin's mum's garbage. So we have gone on to hit a peak valuation of 1.8 billion. We sell our beer in 75 countries. We make and sell about 1.2 million cans of beer every single day. We've built the 13th most valuable beer brand on the planet. Planet. We've got 137 hospitality locations all over the planet, including Berlin, Tokyo, Sydney, Las Vegas, some amazing sites in London. We've got some beer hotels, we've got 4,000 fantastic team members. And it was all done a mission to make other people as passionate about fantastic beer as we are. So that's the business in a nutshell.

This.

I'm going.

What a cv. What a cv. Now, I want to come back to the Brewdog story, the disruption later, but I need to ask you, because I know you become a bit more political, are we going through the death of the UK right now?

I am so, so concerned about what's happening and I think people who work in business have been kind of seeing this for months, if not years. And I think we've just got the perfect start of public services becoming worse and worse. Waiting lists at hospitals have never been longer. There's never been more kids in classrooms, in school. Prisons are so full they're putting dangerous criminals back in the street. So we're taxed incredibly highly. But if you look at the services we get for those taxes, it just doesn't stack up. If you look at business, if you look at economy, it's so tough to be an entrepreneur in the uk. The system is stacked against you. We've got more millionaires, more wealth creators, more job creators leaving the UK than at Any point in history, we're getting to see hundreds of thousands, thousands if not millions, lose their job. When the national insurance industry comes in place in April, unemployment figures are ready off the charts. Inflation is spiking. I am incredibly, incredibly concerned about the future of the UK economy at the moment and the UK overall as well.

Right. So thank you for being honest and I think you all know I feel similar. So why are you sticking it out? Why are you staying here? Why are you flying the flag of Britain like I am way sticking out?

I mean, if everyone leaves, like, what. What is the point? Like, I am from the uk, I'm passionate about building a business here. I built my main business here, but I'm building other businesses here. My family live here. It's like where I'm from. And I think now is when the UK needs its best people to step up to the plate and kind of try and make a positive difference to what's happening. So I'm not jumping on a plane like to. To Dubai, like so many other founders I know. I'm here. I'm here for Longdon. I'm very distraught at what's happening in the future of the uk, but I'm determined to do my bit to try and make it better and to try and improve the standard of living for families all over the uk, which is on a severe downward trend at the moment.

Have Labour made it even worse?

Yeah. So Labour took on an incredibly difficult situation and I'm, like, reasonably agnostic between political parties. I think the last Conservative government was massively inept, and I think it was not befitting of conservatism in any way, shape or form, the type of government we had. Labor took on an incredibly difficult situation and the key thing they had to try and do was just not make the situation worse and give the economy a chance to recover, a chance to grow, a chance to create employment, a chance to create wealth, and they somehow managed to make the situation significantly, significantly worse. So I think they've done a terrible job so far. I've been very open in my criticism. I think they don't understand the economy, I don't think they understand the importance of job creation, taxes, how that works and everything they did in the budget. I think it was vindictful, I think it was spiteful, and I think it was massively detrimental to everyone living in the uk.

So let's get positive for a minute.

Let's do it.

What three things would you change about the UK to fire up the economy again?

Oh, good question. So One of the things is something I'm doing myself. Anyway, so inspired by Doge out in the us, I launched something called Shadow Dodge, but we've now changed the name to Corgi, which we thought gave it a bit more of a kind of UK spin. So it's myself. And we've had over 200amazing people volunteer to help with this initiative. We built an amazing team of 12 that's kind of high level civil servants, amazing data scientists and engineers. So we are going to be publishing reports every two months as to what we find in terms of government spending and how we think government can spend their money more efficiently. And we're kind of caught in this vicious cycle of we've got to raise taxes, we've got way more debt than we should have as a country, we're spending hundreds of billions to service that debt. Because we're raising taxes, we're not getting the economic growth that we need, therefore we've got to raise taxes for further. And we just need something to break that vicious cycle. So what we want to do with Corgi is to say, hey, there's another way. If we can take a private sector approach to incentivisation, spend control, cost control to the public sector, maybe we can show that there is a way that we can push forward in the UK without having to hike taxes further and without having to compromise the public services, which is important for everyone. So that's one of the key things I'm doing. I've also suggested.

Can I just ask you about that, then? Yes, absolutely, because it was a question on my list. So you're the UK version of Elon Musk.

I would love that comparison because he's one of my absolute idols. But I think they're kind of an official government organization. So we're like the kind of shadowy, underground, unofficial cousin of what he's doing in the us.

Third cousin.

Yes, yes, third cousin. We'll go with third cousin.

So what you're attempting to do is to create some kind of open source or transparency on basically where the wastage is.

Yes, exactly. So we have got some amazing data scientists, we're taking data from all the sources we can, we're using loads of freedom of Information requests and just publishing. Okay, if we're spending 1.27 trillion this year, how is that spent? How has that changed over 20 years? Which parts of public spend and for instance, health care, have been increasing way higher than inflation, but then service has been taken down. So understanding how that 1.27 trillion is spent and then looking at ways that can be most more efficient. Some of the kind of crazy things that we've found so far, the average pension in the public sector is 26%. If you compare that to private sector, the amount of credit cards that public sector employees have, I think is off the charts. And just firsthand, as an entrepreneur, the easiest way to control spend in your company is not to give your team credit cards, because it's a kind of very slippery slope on there. So we found some really interesting things so far and we want to just keep doing that and just be completely open source, politically agnostic, publish this. And Warren Buffett, who's one of my absolute idols, always comes back to one point, which is making sure you've got the incentives in the right place in the system. And I just don't think the public sector take that approach. So anyone in my view, who's spending money in the public sector should be in a direct cash bonus and they receive a percentage of what they save. And that mentality just doesn't exist at all there. So, yeah, there'll be reports coming every two months, coming soon. We're Cargi Global on Twitter, We're Cargi Global online and we're building an amazing team of volunteers who are helping us. And we're getting completely open source and transparent with everything we do, but trying to find a path forward that doesn't involve raising taxes so much that the growth goes out of the system and the debt just kills everything.

Hallelujah to that. So because you mentioned before, we have to put up taxes and I talk to a lot of politicians and they don't seem to understand basic finance. If you're a company and you have a million a month overhead, you could probably knock that overhead down to 800 grand a month. If you lean up a bit, surely the UK company could spend 20% less and wouldn't have to keep putting taxes up. Surely, surely there's wastage everywhere.

But if we can find out. Exactly. But if we can find a way to spend 10% less, it's like well over 100 billion a year. And that can make us, from this country that's kind of struggling for relevance and growth and its place in the world at the moment, to one of the best countries in the planet, just by finding 10% of cost savings.

And why do you think there's so much wastage in government?

I think it's just a very different approach to ownership, to kind of management of that cash. I think it's not their money because it's not their money. I think how the incentives work, there's no incentive at the moment for them to focus like a junkyard drop viler and every single penny they spend, I mean if you guys have all got businesses, like if you don't fight for every single penny, the business dies. It is that black or white. 95% of startup businesses in the UK go out of business. The most common reason they go out of business is the founder isn't focused enough in managing the spend within the organization. So it is.

So they run out of cash.

So you're running out of cash. So everyone in business knows this. Every single penny is the difference between life and death in your business and that's how you run a successful business. And that's just a million miles away from the public sector spend.

Right. So you want to put, you would like to see politicians with incentives. So for example, if they went under budget, they might get a personal commission themselves.

100%. Yeah, yeah. So not so much for politicians but for the people managing that spend within public bodies.

So the civil servants, the kind of.

High level ones who are in control of spend. So anyone, I think who's in control of a pot of cash being spent, if they can make a saving, they should get a tiny percent of that saving back in terms of the ones.

Which is exactly how it would be in a business.

Yeah, exactly. So if I've, if I'm running, let's say my Australian operation and we've got 2 million Australian dollars of overhead in that business, I can sit down and say my CEO, okay, if you can save 20% off of that, I'm going to give you 2% of that back into your annual pay packet and it's incredibly effective to get them to do that. So they're saving their money, they're putting money into their pocket as well.

I want to ask something which seems to be quite controversial, but are politicians paid enough?

No, it's not controversial in any way, shape or form. And I, with what I've done, managed to spend a lot of time with politicians and politicians in Scotland and you get people running the finances for Scotland who I wouldn't give a job as a mid level management accountant. So how can you pay the person who's in charge of finances for Scotland 75,000. It just doesn't work in any way, shape or form. We need to get the biggest, best, the rightest, the most cutting edge person in finance running the finances for the nation because that just impacts everyone in that country. And if you pay £75,000 for a finance minister. You get a mid level management accountant at best who's completely out their depth trying to run the country's finances. So for me, politicians are so important and we need the best, the smartest people there. You don't get that if you pay what we pay at the moment.

So let's say you were running the uk, you, you'd be paying them more and rehiring the best.

100%. Yeah, 100%. But making sure the incentives are in the right place as well. Yeah. Okay.

So I asked you for three things that you would do.

Yes.

To, you know, make Britain great again. You mentioned about Corgi, the UK version of Doge. What other two things would you do?

I think we've got to find a way to have a tax system in place that keeps the people in the UK that we need to be here. This doesn't work at all with the amount of fantastic people that are leaving the UK at the moment. These are the job creators, the wealth creators, the people who pay a disproportionate percentage of taxes. Twice as many millionaires are leaving the UK at any point in time. And it's not just a mil, it's like their future innovation. So the amount of people that I know that have built a business in the UK to escape the tax regime, the regulation, the media climate, all of these things, when they get to selling their business, they sell it, they move to Dubai so they don't have to pay the capital gains tax, but they start their next business in Dubai where they're paying no tax at all. So the UK isn't only losing their taxes, they're losing the job creation, the wealth creation, the innovation that comes in their next business as well. We've got to have a system where we're historically a nation of entrepreneurs, like the innovation from the UK helps shape the modern world. You can't do that if all the best people are leaving because the system is set up to disincentivize them so much. So got to find a way to keep the best people here.

Okay, that's the second thing. What about the third thing you'd do?

Third thing I would do is again, looking at kind of reform for businesses. So for me, for the UK economy to be as strong as it possibly can be, we've got to sell things overseas. So if a business starts in the UK and only sells in the uk, the economic impact of that is positive, but like almost close to zero because you're displacing someone else's business in the uk. So if any of you guys start a business in the UK and you're only selling in the UK if you've got negative economic growth or no economic growth, that doesn't really help the UK economy that much because you're just displacing someone else's business in the uk. So as an island nation, we've got to be so focused on export, we've got to be so focused on international, because then you're not displacing any jobs in the UK and you're adding wealth, jobs, taxes, everything that we want in the uk. In the uk. And as a company, we started exporting so early in the journey just because nobody wanted to buy our beer in the uk, so we had to sell it overseas because otherwise we simply wouldn't have survived. And there's so much things that the government do in terms of economic development agencies and they're just all a complete waste of time. You can look at things like Business Gateway in Scotland. Huge cost, no help to anyone looking to set up a business. So I would take all the money that's spent, spent in the economic develop agencies, I would shut them all down and I would put for any company in its first 10 years a 5% reverse export tax in place. So let's say you're making cheese and you're selling it internationally. Let's say you're making jumpers and you're selling internationally. Let's say you're making wooden chess sets, you're selling them internationally. For every £100 that you sell internationally, you get a 5% kickback for the government. It would be deductible against the other taxes that you pay, but. But it just gives you a heavy incentive to sell overseas. And it's us making things, services, products, ideas, innovation in the UK and selling them internationally. It's ultimately going to help us build the nation that we want.

I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. In fact, I don't know if you remember, but this show used to be called Disruptive Entrepreneur. Interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs here. In fact, most of my friends are entrepreneurs. One of them, who's been a friend for 20 years is, is Daniel Priestley, who's the founder of ScoreApp. So if you want consistent leads and sales and you're an entrepreneur, you need to listen to this because Daniel Priestley has built this amazing tool and it helps entrepreneurs attract leads at scale online. Using interactive assessments and quizzes, ScoreApp turns your traffic into a steady stream of qualified leads. Day and night it's like having a lead generation machine working 24 7, 365 so you can focus on growing your business. So if you go right now to scoreapp.com Rob, you can use a ready made template or an AI on ScoreApp and you can get your first leads attracted within the next 60 minutes. Go right now to scoreapp.com Rob, what do you think about the idea of giving businesses tax breaks for their startup year or increasing their taxes incrementally like 0 corp tax year one, 10% corp tax year two, etc. What do you think of that kind of incentive?

Yeah, I think and there's so many things that can be done. Anything that helps people start up businesses and skill businesses and get businesses kind of past that five year mark is so, so important. Like more than half of the jobs in the UK come from small to medium companies and it's important to cross the spectrum. And it's just like the odds are so stacked against you and like the long term value this gives to our country in terms of jobs and taxes innovations off the chart. So anything that can be done to make it easier for people to start up businesses and to give them a better chance of being in business after five years, I think would be massively net beneficial to the uk.

So this sounds like to me common sense.

You would think?

Yeah. So why don't labor get it and why didn't consumer conservatives get it? Why have entrepreneurs become the enemy if this is common sense?

I think it's so interesting. So I spend so much time in the US and I think the attitude in the US compared to the UK when it comes to success is markedly different. And I think in the US everyone is so inculcated with American dream when they see someone being successful, they think that could be me. Go you. That's amazing. In the UK we don't have that same approach. So when people in the uk, the media, whoever people, social media, see someone being successful, the first response is a bit of cynicism, a bit kind of distrust, a bit of resentment. And I think one of the reasons why so many entrepreneurs are leaving is just how entrepreneurs are kind of portrayed in the media in the UK and just the kind of UK attitude towards success I think makes it difficult as well.

So you think we need a cultural change?

I think that would massively help as well.

Yeah, yeah. So you know they've kind of called you a toxic boss, haven't they?

Yes, so many times, yeah.

Why do they, why have they called you a toxic boss? What's a toxic boss?

I asked myself the same question so many times. Like we were famously or infamously hit by this kind of open letter back in 2020 and at that time we had, I think it was like 7,000 former colleagues because so much of our team members work in the hospitality side of our business. Even the best hospitality business that can average 10 years, kind of 12 months. So high staff turnover and kind of what we do, 60 of our former colleagues kind of wrote this open letter saying that we had a culture of fear, that we were too intense, that we were too demanding, that I was a bad boss. Like all of these things, like 60 out of 7,000 former team, it's like way, way less than 1%. And with the best will in the universe, there's no company that can keep all of its employees happy all the time. And we always want to be the best company we can to work for. We always think that our long term destiny is going to be to determined by how we look after the fantastic people in our business. But there's always going to be a tiny amount of people who don't love the experience, who don't love the pace, the intensity. And at that time we were drawing close to 100% year on year. Anyone that's worked in a business doing that, it can get a little bit intense if you're doing that quickly. And some things can fall through tracks and you just can't focus and everything. And some people absolutely love the opportunities for personal growth and career growth and come from that environment for other people, it's not quite right for them. So yeah, we had a bit of a backlash from a tiny number of former employees who didn't love working for us. That just got blown way out of proportion.

And how did you deal with the bad publicity?

I mean, it's such an interesting thing. So for me, there's things that you can control and there's things that you can't control. So for me, any emotional energy that goes on, things that you can't control is wasted energy. So just focus on what you can control. So within 18 months of that open letter, we were back in the Sunday Times, best 100 companies to work for in the UK from an anonymous study from a team. So for us, try and tune out the noise, focus on what we're doing. Everyone who knows our company and knows us, knows what we're about, knows how we do things. So yeah, just don't worry about it too much and focus on being the best that we can be day to.

Day, do you think that anyone who's broadly or vastly successful is going to have to endure that kind of problem, that kind of hate, that kind of jealousy? Is it a rite of passage of the being successful?

I think we're seeing it kind of more and more in the uk. If I just look at kind of other entrepreneurs that have been successful in that kind of approach in the media. And I think we've always kind of had this interesting relationship with the media kind of ever since we started. And I'm not sure, it just kind of blown up into like a big storm over the last last couple of years, but I'm definitely seeing it happen more and more in the uk, which I think is another reason why the people we want to have in the UK are leaving.

Okay, so let's change subject. If you could give us three core elements of growing a billion pound company.

Oh, good question.

No pressure or anything.

Okay. Okay. Three core elements of growing a billion pound company. So we had this test that we always use. So we set up in an industry that was completely dominated by global behemoths that were thousands of times our size, and we were two humans and one dog in a derelict dystopian shed in the northeast of Scotland. Like, how do you compete with that? So we introduced two tests that became fundamental to everything that we did. So test one was, would or could another beer company do this thing? And if the answer was yes, we wouldn't do it. So would or could another beer company sponsor a sports team? Yes. Okay, we're not going to do that. Would or could another beer company spend £200,000 taking out these adverts? Yes, we're not going to do that. Would, or could another beer company do the social media thing? Yes. So we're not going to do that. So we had to find things that our competitors weren't creative, innovative, edgy, bold enough to do. Which has led to us throwing taxidermy cats out of a helicopter over the bank of England. It's led to us driving a tank through the street streets of London. It's led to us making a beer at the bottom of the ocean. It's led to us making a 55% beer and package it in taxidermy and stoats and squirrels. It's led to us being involved in a battle with a German beer business to make the strongest beer on the planet. It's led to us taking a stand passionately for the things that we believe in. And these are things that other beer companies just wouldn't do. So then we're able to close that gap. The second test is, if we spend ten pounds on a thing, can we guarantee that that return is going to be 10 times better than one of our competitors pounds? So if I'm going to spend £1, I need to know that I'm going to get a 10x return versus a Heineken versus a Stella versus a Budweiser versus a Fosters. Because if I get the same return for each pound that I spend, they're going to remain massive and I'm going to remain tiny and I'm never going to be able to close that gap. And that was again, a lens that we used. So like all the activity went through these lenses would or could another beer company do this? And then secondly, can I get a 10x return? So for us, those two things were absolutely, absolutely key. So that's kind of one point. Secondly, we just weren't afraid to take a risk as a business. And like, from day one, I would always joke with Myron and say, like, this business is going to be one or two things, it's going to be a massive global success, or we get crash and burn completely. But that is totally fine because the space in between is completely boarding. And that doesn't interest me at all. Before I set up the business, I was captain of an Earth Atlantic fishing boat. I loved it. All my best buddies are still people I worked with in the fishing boat. So I always thought, hey, if we take a massive gamble, it doesn't work out, I'm back in the fishing boat. Which is amazing because I love being in the fishing boats. All good, happy days. So we were always prepared to double down, to take risk, to take risk, take risk. And a safe strategy is almost too risky. Safe gets lost, safe is boring. You've got to be able to take smart, cut, calculated risks and kind of double down on that. And then the third point is all about community. So I think any business, and I'm amazed at more people don't speak about this. Any business that's a consumer product, you've got one simple metric. Can you engage your community better than your competition? If you can, you can win. If you don't, you can lose. And like so many people as well, confuse audience and customers with community. And they're fundamentally different things. I invest in a lot of businesses and I'll often ask them, tell me about your community. And they're like, oh, we've got 20,000 followers in Instagram. And I feel like shaking them, like, that's not A community that is an audience, like community needs to be two way communication. You need to build things together. So here's some examples of things that we did at Drew Dog to kind of build and engage that community. So we have got a business model called Equity for Punks. So we've got 227,000 thousand tiny shareholders in our business. These are our customers, our fans, our advocates are Paris critics at the time, but like they're so bought in with us in the journey. We do our AGM up in Aberdeen, which is like we kind of do all the business stuff, but we've got amazing music and beers. But we've had up to 20,000 people attend our AGM, which must make it one of the best attended AGMs on the planet. We develop our products in collaboration with our community. So we'd always do something called a prototype challenge. So it's like, hey, community, we're going to launch a new beer next year. Here's four options. So we make those four options, we sell them cheaply to our community, we put them in tap in our bars, but our community vote as to which of those beers goes into our lineup. Anyone that knows our beers, amazing beers like Hazy Jane and Jackhammer, they came out of our prototype challenge. Their community help us with the beers that we make in terms of bar location. So we offered our community £5,000 to help us find a bar location. It's way cheaper than paying an agent, but these are the people who are going to be our customers. So we found an amazing site in Bristol, but it's our community there who get to go to that site. So they're getting to give us a much better objective opinion. Saves me £25,000 because I'm not paying an agent. The community member loves it because they get the money, but they also get the kudos of finding the site. But then I know it's good for the community because the community found it. And for me, I just think any business that touches consumer, you've got one metric. How do I engage my community better than the competition? If I can, not only can I win, I can wipe the floor with him. And if I can't, I'm just going to struggle to stay in business the whole time.

So it sounds like you quite enjoyed being David versus the Goliaths.

Oh, I think being a challenger just gives you such an amazing opportunity if you're kind of bold enough to lead into it. And for me, like In a classic UK challenger, Dan Story was kind of mid-90s when it was Kind of verging against British Airways and just like that approach, that kind of mindset, that kind of devil may care irreverence if you can, like hardwire that in. It's like being a challenger and like so much about business is storytelling, so your storytelling to kind of try and connect with your consumer, connect with your community. And being a challenger just gives you so many amazing stories that you can tell to connect emotionally. Wow.

Right. I just want to take 15 seconds. Silence.

Who's dead? The UK.

Yeah, yeah. RRP, the UK. Purely because, like, I'm sitting here going, that's a bomb. That's a bomb. That's a bomb. That's a bomb, that's a bomb. Harry's sitting there going, that's a clip for TikTok. That's a clip, that's a clip. So I just want that to seep in because there's a lot of information here, but a lot of really cool information. Cool. We've taken about 15 seconds. So how many times going from zero to a billion, do you reckon you were close to going bust?

Oh, every single day for five years. It's like. And I couldn't pay myself at all for the first five years of the business. Myself and Martin both moved back in with their parents. I was staying in my dad's tiny spare room until I was 31 years old. Martin was sleeping his mum's sofa. And like, every month there was so much pressure just to be able to pay our teams. And we just kind of danced along this kind of knife edge of financial oblivion every single month. But that was also. And it was like high stress, but it was so intentional. Again, I worked with so many founders, so many startup businesses, there's constraints. Like, if you've got a startup, if you've got a skill at business, your day job is managing constraint after constraint after constraint. That is the nature of the game that you play. And one of the biggest constraints is resources, namely cash. And for me, if we weren't teetering on the edge of financial oblivion, I wasn't working every single penny of cash that I had hard enough because I had to open new markets, I had to try and find a way to employ new salespeople, I had to find a way to open new locations. And it was just like, how close can I take this to the edge? And we've had to do so many things, like the amount of phone calls I had to make to distribution partners at the end of the month to say, okay, we've sent you two containers of Beer to Sweden. I know you're not due to pay us for six days. I'll give you a 10% discount, but you just need to pay that cash to me tomorrow because I need to be able to pay my team because they need to pay their rent the next day. And like, that was our existence for kind of five, six, seven years. But I wouldn't have had it any other way because by being that close to the edge, and it's not for the faint of heart at all, but being that close to the edge meant that I knew I was getting every percentage point of growth possible from that amount of cash that I had.

Are you a sado masochist?

I don't even know what that is.

No, I don't really. I just thought it sounded good.

I'm going to go. No. But the biggest story that we had of kind of almost going out of business, it was back in 2009, and we got an order to send a whole shipping container of beer to America. So for the first five years in the business, I was also still working part time as a captain of a fishing boat just to get some type of income. And most of that income went into the beer business. But, like, massive deal for us. It was 25,000 pound order and we were launching in America. So we sent the beer in the container and then I flew out a few weeks later to meet the distributor in Los Angeles and do some tasting and events to launch our business in America. I got there, tasted the beer and just wanted to curl up and die. It was the first container we'd sent internationally, so we didn't realize how hot it was going to get in the journey. And it went through Panama Canal, past the equator, up to Los Angeles, and this amazing, delicious beer that we made just sat cooking in this hot steel box for two and a half months. And it got there and the beer was completely destroyed. The distributor was like, well, James, I can't pay you for the beer because nobody's going to buy this beer. And like, I had to cancel all the events, all the tastings, all the media things that I had lined up. I flew back and then the distributor's like, well, we can't pay you. So, like, with £10,000 in the bank account at that time, and it was actually on the flight back, I was like, what the hell am I going to do? And I came up with this idea. Equity, equity for punks was like, okay, we've got no money at all. If we could somehow find a way to shorten the Distance between, between ourselves and the people who enjoy the beer that we make. If we can find a way to take them on this journey with us and they can invest and get an equity stake in this business. So this was equity crowdfunding before equity crowdfunding even existed. I spoke to five different legal companies. They all told me what I'm trying to do was illegal and impossible and I just couldn't do it undeterred. And like, I think as an entrepreneur, every time you hear no, you just need. It's not no, it's just like, try again, but up your level a little bit. So. And I went to see a six legal company. I was like, well, James, very, very difficult. It's going to cost £100,000. We're going to need this audit and this certification and this verification, this partner. But if you want to do it, we'll give it a go with you. So signed a contract to do it with this legal company to launch equity for punks. I didn't tell them that we'd only £10,000 in the bank at the time. So we gambled the entire future of our business and making this completely unknown, untried, untested business model work. Nobody'd ever done it before. Back then, if it didn't work, I was 100% back in the fishing boat. Luckily we raised the first time 570,000 pounds. So we paid legal fees, we got some money in the business and that's been a key part of our business going forward. But like we heard five nos from legal advisors, we kept going and we gambled everything in this crazy idea that no one had done before.

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The other story that's similar so back is this was back in 2008, the year before, and we were selling no beer at all. And everyone was telling us, make your beer cheaper, make your beer with less hops, don't call it stupid names. And I was determined. I'm doing something that I'm insanely passionate about. If I'm going to fail, I want to fail in my own terms. I don't want to make someone else's mistakes. But we were selling 10 to 20 cases a week. We were filling bottles by hand. I was spending half of my week at farmers markets and we were just going nowhere as a business at that time. We entered some beer into Tesco beer competition and I kind of forgot about it, but eight weeks later, I got a phone call from Tesco whilst I was actually at a farmer's market saying it would finish first, second, third and fourth in this Tesco beer competition. So I said, okay, that's kind of cool. So I flew down to Chesunt, which is where the Tesco headquarters were. I met the Tesco team, Ian Target, who I still know was the head beer buyer at that time. And he was like, james, your beers are amazing. First, second, third and fourth in the beer competition. Never seen anything like it. We want to take these four beers, put them in 400 Tesco stores nationwide and we can sell 2,000 cases a week. I sat there with my best poker face and didn't mention anything at all about the fact this was two guys and one dog filling bottles by hand. I signed a contract that was due to start in four months time, but when I signed it, I knew full well that we'd no idea how we were going to be able to make that much beer because we just couldn't make that much beer. So I got back and I sat down with Myerson and I was like, okay, some good news and some bad news. We've got this amazing contract With Tesco. But how the hell are we going to make this beer? We just can't fill that many bottles by hand. So we put a plan together 2008, where we needed £100,000 for a small bottling line and £50,000 for some new fermentation tanks. But with no money at all at this time. So we went to the bank, bank of Scotland. Those of you guys who are old enough to know 2008 may be the worst year in the history of time it to go and ask the bank for anything. And I sat down with the guys at bank of Scotland. Like we've got this amazing deal with Tesco. We're a young up and coming company, but we need £150,000 for equipment. And the bank just laughed at me. They were like, James, you're not paying your existing loan back. You're technically insolvent, looking at your accounts, there's no way we can give you this money. Undeterred, I went to the bank across the street, which was hsbc, and said to hsbc, look, we've got this fantastic contract with Tesco and our bank, bank of Scotland have just offered us an amazing finance package and a bottling line and fermentation tanks. But if you can match this package, we are going to shift 100% of our bank into you. We're a young up and coming company, we're going places. Heard great things about hsbc. So match this package and you've got all of our banking and all of our business. And for some reason HSBC gave us. So business plan for the first two years was make hoppy beers and tell lies to banks. Maybe it's still the business plan today, who knows?

So do you get a kick out of being close to the edge? I think that's what I meant by say don't masochist. It sounds like you love being on the edge.

I think if you're starting to build something of skill, impact. I always think like risk is proportional to ambition. So the more ambitious you are, the more risk you've, you've got to be willing to undertake. And for me I just love the feeling that you get where you've put everything on the line for something you believe in. When you've taken a massive gamble, I think it sharpens you and I think like if you've got no option but to make it work, you find a way to make it work. And like the history of our company is just that tight time and time again. Another great example is the facility we built in America. So We've got a 52 acre campus in Columbus, Ohio. Time magazine put it as one of their best 100 places in the planet a couple years ago. We've got an amazing beer hotel, we've got lakes, we've got dog parks, we've got beer museums. It's absolutely gorgeous there. But it was back in 2016, we decided we should build something in America. Myself and Martin were hosting a TV show about beer over there. The funniest thing about the beer TV show was we had to argue with the TV producers from Los Angeles for two months because they wanted to use subtitles because they thought Americans wouldn't understand our Scottish accent. But we managed to avoid English. People don't understand just like empty faces. I decided, okay, let's take advantage of this. Let's build something in America. So I spent seven days visiting seven different cities in America. I went to Cleveland, I went to Charleston, I went to Boston, I went to Chicago, I went to Columbus, I went to Richmond in Virginia. And I just really like Columbus. The mayor came out and had dinner with me and I was there for less than 24 hours, but I got a really good vibe. So I got back and sat down with Neil, who was my cfo, and Martin, who was my co founder, and I was like, okay, I know you guys have never been to Columbus, Ohio. I know I've spent less than 24 hours there. I know we've done no feasibility or diligence whatsoever. I know this is going to cost us $40 million that we don't have, and we've got no idea how we're going to get. But we, we should definitely build this thing. And they were like, okay, why not? So phoned up, bought the land, found a way to make it work. And our us has been a fantastic business for us since then.

Wow. Do you have to be do or die to be a successful entrepreneur? Or could you just do it a bit more slowly?

Oh, there's so many different styles of fantastically successful entrepreneurs. Like, I've got a style that has worked for me, and that's kind of based on my personality and how I think and how I like to do things. But I'm fortunate enough to be able to meet so many amazingly successful people, and they're all so, so different. So I don't think there's like one profile, one way of thinking. And I think it's so important you decide what you listen to as a founder, because everyone, even if they've got zero experience, is all of a sudden going to be an expert and tell you what to do. So you've got to tune out enough of the noise. But you've also got to find a way of doing and this works for you. And like, building any business is like such a slog. It's so intense. You get so many knockbacks, you get so many kicks, you've got so many problems to solve and you can only sustain that over a period of time if you do it in a way that is authentic to you. So if you've got a style that's not your own, or you're trying to copy someone else's style, I think that just kind of sets you up to feel. How can you take your style, your approach and just sharpen it and make as effective as it can be? But what I love about the successful entrepreneurs that I know, a lot of them think and do things very differently in their approach.

So you don't have to try and spend every penny and stay on that knife edge for five years. You could build a bit more slow, for example.

Oh, yeah. And there's so many fantastic businesses and everyone's got a different reason for setting up a business, and I think everyone's got a different objective as to what they want to do. It's like, from day one, we didn't tell anyone because it just sounded completely delusional. Like, we wanted to build a unicorn. That was like our thing. We wanted to build a unicorn and build an amazing international beer business. Now, if our goal had been to build a fantastic 100 or 200 million business, would we have been on the edge all that time? No. Would we have taken those massive gambles? No. Could we have still built a fantastic business? Absolutely. So just depends so much on the objectives and what you're trying to do and how your appetite for risk is and kind of where you want to get to and how you want to plot that course together.

I know they said you're a toxic boss and look, I. I know you, James, and I don't believe it, but I do imagine you're demanding and at times hard to work for. Would that be fair?

I think anyone, if you're trying to build something, there's got to be an insistence on standards and I make no apology for that at all. And I think there's a say in the military. As soon as you see something that's below standard and you don't say anything, you've set a new standard. And, like, what people don't understand is business is insanely competitive. All your competitors want to trust you and want you to be out of business. And for me, business is like a sports team. So if you think of Alex Ferguson, he said all the best managers have always got to insist on a certain level of performance. Now I believe in paying people incredibly well for delivering fantastic performance. I believe in giving all my team members equity and I've given them some of my own equity. I believe in putting place an amazing incentive and bonus packages. But anything that is quick move and that is trying to disrupt, that's taken on bigger competition at scale. You've got to have certain standards within the business. And some people love a business that works like that and has that pace and intensity and it gives so much opportunity for development and other people don't like it, but that's okay. Not every single person's got to like every single business.

Would you say you're ruthless?

Not more than I think I have to be, but again, being a CEO, your day is non stop decisions and the better quality decisions you make, the better your business is going to do. And like sometimes, and I don't think I'm any more ruthless than any other good CEO, but sometimes you've got to make tough decisions. And we would always say, okay, let's make tough decisions, but execute them as compassionately as we can because we know, okay, so we want to get kind of good notice periods and references and all of these things. But unless you're sometimes let people go, you're never going to have an excellent business. And not every person is going to be right for each business. But am I more ruthless than any other CEO that's built a business of scale? I don't think so.

I wasn't going to do this, but.

Sounds ominous.

I think I'm going to allow maybe three questions at the end of this interview. Not now at the end. So I want to give you a chance to. And I didn't tell James this either. And if you work for the BBC, you can go fuck off. Yeah, I wasn't but I just thought it might be nice that you might have an opportunity.

I think we should allow five.

Okay, five.

It's the weekend. Fuck it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll have the VAT on. Okay. So. So James.

Yes.

I'm getting this overwhelming feeling that you have a different relationship with fear and failure to most mere mortals. Now let me expand. I just saw this guy, there's actually a Netflix documentary about him. Who does that? Free climbing, you know, who literally has no support on a vertical rock going up thousands of feet and he's just using his fingers on the edge of death. No fear of failure. I'm just not getting any fear of failure from you. And I think many people live in a state of fear of failure. Do you fear failure?

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Because. And I think anyone, like, so many people I know that have built fantastic businesses, like, everyone's, like, compensating for some type of inadequacy. They've got some type of demon kind of driving them on. They've got some, like, voice from their childhood telling them they're not good enough. They're never getting anything, they're never going to achieve anything. And, like, the only reason I feel failure is nothing externally, but I know it gives that voice in my head a bit more power than it should have. But for me, there's a few things that I think when it comes to risk, A, it's always proportional to ambition. So if you're going to be insanely ambitious, you need to find a way to get comfortable with risk. And we've taken risk after risk after risk, but I think it sharpens you. It focuses you. It gives you a bit of kind of intensity. It gives you a bit of an edge. It gives you a better dive. If you've got no option but to make something work, I think you'll find a way. Whereas if. If it. If it's not life or death for the business, then I think it's kind of easy not to kind of do what you have to do to kind of kind of make that work. And for me, it was always like, if this doesn't work and I'm back in the fishing boat, amazing, because I loved being back in the fishing boat, but I just don't want to not be ambitious enough and not take enough risks because I want to build something remarkable and something of skill.

So it sounds like you went all in on the business. Go big or go home. But you actually did have your peaceful backup plan.

Yeah, I mean, I loved being in the fishing boat, and, yeah, I'm glad the business worked out, but I was equally happy catching Max in the North Atlantic.

But we all just need to work our new plan B. All right, make sure you're preparing your questions. We will Take five. Right, Brewdog, what's your current role? Because when I first met you, I don't think you could really speak about it.

No.

Can you now?

Yes. So I set up the business with my best friend Martin in 2007. I ran that business as CEO for 17 and a half years. Now my role is Kind of. I'm still the largest shareholder in the business. It's captain and I'm an advisor to the business and I love that business. It's my absolute baby. The mission, the people, the beer, the locations. Like I spent last night in Drew Dog Waterloo, which is our flagship London location. But at the same time, I never wanted to do one single thing for 17 and a half years or do kind of one single thing forever. And like all my idols are fantastic entrepreneurs. And for me, the hallmark of a truly fantastic entrepreneur is somebody that's not just built one remarkable business, but two or three remarkable businesses. And after 17 and a half years I got to the point of unless I give myself the opportunity to do something, I might just be I could do this forever, which I would have loved as well. But I wanted to challenge myself and I wanted to still be involved in Drudog. It's my baby and I love it. But I wanted to give myself the kind of opportunity and the challenge to like. Okay, James, if you think you're a good business person, let's see what you've got. Let's put everything in line again and let's see if you can build one or two more fantastic businesses and hopefully one or two more unicorns.

So you weren't happy with a unicorn, by definition is like only one by definition. So you are another unicorn.

Hope so.

You're not tired after 17 years of being on the edge?

No, but I think it's a really important thing. Again, something I don't speak about is I think anyone who's running a business, you've got to think of yourself as a professional sports person or professional athlete. The quality of your energy, your focus, your mental attuity, your physical health, your mental well being is massively, massively important. Everyone gets the same amount of hours in a day. You're young, old, rich, poor, successful, unsuccessful. The better you can use your hours, the more successful you're going to be and the better you look after yourself, the better you're going to be able to use those hours. So I do so many slightly unusual, connect easy things over the course of a day to make sure that when I'm working, which is a lot of hours, I'm taking the best version of myself to work and performing at my absolute best. And I think of it as like in terms of my focus, my energy, my mental attuity, I need to think of myself the same way that a football team would think of their star asset in terms of a kind of match fitness for what they do. So I do ice baths every single day. I do infrared saunas. I do breathing exercises every single day. I do a lot of health and fitness stuff. I go in hyperbaric chambers a few times a week.

You've done zooms in them, haven't you?

I've done zooms in them, but I try and do a lot of kind of my meetings, walking meetings. Like all the. My colleagues are very used to going for a walk, so we can do the business things, but we're moving, we're outside, we're getting fresh air. So I think just looking after yourself, your energy levels. I think there's this myth among entrepreneurs that, okay, three or four or five hours worth of sleep is a badge of honor. And there's been periods where I've had to do that over the course of years, but those are not the periods where I'm performing at my best. The better you can look after yourself, I think the better quality of decisions you can make. I think it's something everyone in a business absolutely needs to do.

And what about managing stress? Because, you know, fast growth is very stressful and stress can be a debilitator, even a killer. So how have you learned to manage higher levels of stress?

I think it's being so focused on how I use my own time. So, like, how many hours you work in a day is one thing. The quality of that work is another thing. And I think so many people, it's my bugbear with so many of the founders I work with just now, they work in such a distracted, unfocused, unproductive way. So they do, let's say eight or nine hours of work, but it's probably only equivalent to two and a half hours. Here's a great example. Who has flown to America in a day flight in the last couple of years? Okay, so a few years. So day flight to America, I take them quite often. Eight, nine, ten hours. And I love working on that flight. And you can do it with no distractions. The amount of work that you can do, if you set yourself up to work in a focused way, as opposed to distracted, distracted ways off the chart. So I'm like so militant about how I use my time. So firstly, I love batching tasks. If you switch between anything, you'll lose like 13, 14 minutes of focus. And so many people, they'll have a zoom meeting, they'll send a few emails or do a call, they'll have another meeting, they'll dip in a few emails, they'll put together together a presentation. They're just losing so much momentum each time in terms of deep focus that they switch tasks. So I batch tasks. If I'm doing meetings, I'm doing up to eight or 10 meetings back to back. There's no meeting in my calendar that's ever more than 30 minutes because it's just unnecessary. If I'm answering emails, I'm answering emails for at least two hours. And I've usually got an autoresponder on saying I'm only getting reply to emails only every second day because an email inbox is essentially a to do list where anyone on the planet can add an item. And I also my favorite thing to do twice a week I do two, three and a half hour deep focus strategy blocks. So all of my devices go off. I've got a do not disturb until the zombie sign that goes in my door. I've got noise canceling headphones and I've got big notepads. And like anyone who's running a business, you're trying to build the future. You can't build and imagine the future if you're so concerned with day to day. And if you're constantly available on your devices, all you're doing is managing little bits and pieces day to day. You don't have that strategic vision. All my best ideas, all the things that add the value, are the things that I do when I've got that kind of three and a half hour strategy block. And it requires a bit of discipline because if you're hopping about between different things, usually the first hour, my head isn't in that deep thinking phase and I've just got to like sit with that uncomfortableness, I've got to get a little bit bored. And then the head starts working. Once it's been disconnected from the WhatsApp group and the Slack channel and the emails and a meeting and this and that, it's like an impossible way to be creative. So I would encourage all of you to do that exercise and maybe start off doing it once a week, Start off with three hours, no distractions, no devices, no meetings, no people. And just focus on the future of your business. And the founders that I work with, the kind of question that I give them to kind of think about in that first session was if you had to double the size of your business in 12 months, tell me how you would do that. So blue sky thinking, blank sheet of paper. But if it was, if you don't, somebody's going to kidnap you or shoot you or you've got to go back to your day job or something like, for your business to survive, it's got to be twice the size in 12 months. What would you do but give yourself enough time to think about that deeply, differently from different angles. And it's amazing what can come out of your head if you just give it the time and space to think. I think so many people guilty at the moment of just not giving themselves that time space to think.

Amen. We need another one of those 15 seconds. I'm sitting here, I'm so desperate to take notes and I can't because I'm the interviewer. Okay, so we'll take another sort of five seconds. Remember, we're going to take five questions at the end. It'll kind of be in order. First come, first serve. Okay. So, James, so how many hours a week now are you in Brewdog?

I would say between 15 and 20.

Okay. What are you doing with the rest of your time? What's your next unicorn?

So I'm doing a few things. Firstly, I'm setting up an investment fund called Jetpack, which I haven't announced yet, but it's coming soon. So I've got a portfolio of 20 fantastic consumer goods companies where I've invested in, where I've helped the founders, some of those companies that have done amazingly well. And it's like my hobby and I'm just obsessed with business. So if I'm listening to a podcast, it's a business podcast. If I'm reading a book, it's a business book. If I'm watching a movie, it's probably one that's got some kind of link to business in there. And then I've also set up a new business called called Social Tip. So I often kind of joke with my fiance that I've set up a business that, if successful, is going to put her out of a job because she's an influencer. So Social Tip is kind of based at the intersection of where I think the future of marketing lies and everything I've done with building community over the last two decades. So Social Tip exists to help a company turn its team members and its customers into its influencers. And we think it's far better off, rather than to give a convexity, let's say a UK influencer with 1 million followers, you give them 5 to 10,000 pounds, they do one post for you, and today it's a toothpaste, and then the next day it's your product, and the day after that it's a skincare, then. And, like, it's become Transactional, it's kind of lost that kind of magic and authenticity that once had our perspective is rather than give one influencer £5,000 to post, a company significantly better off if they give 500 of their actual genuine customers £10 each to post, your customers are going to be delighted. But it's a genuine recommendation. And this is not an influencer influencing followers, this is friends influencing friends and it democratizes influence. So anyone, regardless of how many followers you've got, regardless if your account is public or private, if you buy something, if you like it, if you post about it, you can earn money. So over the course of a month, by posting about a coffee you love, a fitness thing you'll have, a couple clothing company you love, a hospitality experience you love, you can earn up to £100, which is amazing. But also the company is in a much better position because all their research shows that the authenticity of a genuine recommendation, the engagement of an everyday person versus an influencer, is much higher through Rata. So that is SocialTip. We've had 400 fantastic brand partners sign up to use the service. So far. We're launching in about four weeks, but we've got Asos, Tala, Wagamamas, Drux, Pure Gym, Huel, Virgin, some amazing companies signed up. If any of you guys think it would be fantastic for your business, it's just socialtip IO, check it out. But yes, Social Tip is the next business I'm building.

All right. Wow.

And if it doesn't work out, I'm back in the Fisher boat.

Right. I've got a quote from you here. Oh, it's all right. We've done the tricky stuff. The UK is one of the world's least work orientated countries. Why did you say that? Why do you believe that?

So I didn't say that. So that was. Well, I did say that, but it was actually from a study. So there was a study at Imperial College. It kind of showed the UK was one of the least work orientated countries out the 20 countries it studied. And we often joke about productivity. They were significantly more productive than UK in America, significantly more by a distance. Distance as well. And as a country, the kind of biggest indicator of how well our economy is doing is kind of productivity per head. And a business. Every business knows that you can spend within your means. Pretty much every family knows that you can spend within your means. So if you want X, Y and Z, then you need to work hard enough and be creative enough to earn income to get X, Y and Z. And I think just As a country, we've fallen at the strap of we want things like reduced working hours and four day work week and work from home and all these fantastic things. But it's got a knock on impact of productivity per head and with how low productivity per head is in the UK at the moment, it just means that we can't invest the levels we want in the services that we need. We can't have the economic growth that drives prosperity for every single family in the UK and that you just can't have it both ways. So if we're going to have that approach to work, that's going to have consequences with where the UK sits globally and all these other things. And like all the data showing that we've got a big problem with productivity in the UK at the moment.

And what do you think about Elon Musk coming in and saying half the government buildings are empty, so you've all got to come back to work. Oh, and by the way, we'll offer you a few months severance. Just reply saying, I resign because that's what they did. What do you think of that?

I'm a massive Elon fan. I think he's got some, some amazing ideas. I just think what he's built with SpaceX and I've been an investor since the early days in SpaceX with Tesla. I've been a huge Tesla fan, a huge Tesla customer for ages. And he's kind of probably way more savage and kind of doodle in his approach than I am. He probably makes me look like a kind of pussycat in comparison with kind of how extreme he is in certain things. But I think he's got a valid point and I think if the US is successful in taking fat and waste out their government, other countries are going to be forced to follow suit, which can't be a bad thing.

And as someone in the beer industry, are you worried about how Labour may be damaging pubs and the leisure industry?

I just think hospitality at the moment is especially, especially tough with costs. I mean, more pubs closed in the UK last year than at any point in history. The amount of pubs that are closing and I'm biased because I've got a heap of pubs in the uk, but I think they play such an important role in our communities as well, like getting people to. There's like a loneliness epidemic with more and more people from working from home. You don't have that human connection, like what is the value of getting people together, having that face to face connection, having those conversations. And if we've got Less and less places.

Social club, isn't it?

Yeah. They're such an important part of the fabric of our society and the cost base for pubs has just gone up exponentially. At the same time people have got less money to spend so they're kind of caught between do I open the doors, do I put the heating on, do I put my prices up so much that people can't come in? And I'm very concerned about the future of pubs in the UK and like we've now got a bit of scale and we're internationally, it's like our business. Okay. But it's like the kind of independent owner operated pubs that I think are just so, so important and the odds are definitely stacked against them at the moment. I think it's got such an adverse impact on society or site in the UK if they keep closing at the rate there at the moment.

So this show, this podcast is called Disruptors and as I said, it used to be called Disruption Disruptive Entrepreneur. So can you give us three top tips to be disruptive to be David that beats Goliath.

Okay. So I think you've got to have a very clear sense of purpose. So like our business was always to make other people's passionate about fantastic beer as we are. Like we absolutely love beer. We hated how the big companies had demonized and bastardized and commoditized this amazing, magical, mythical liquid and we want to put the taste, the flavor, the passion, the artisan craftsmanship back into people's beer glasses. So being destructive is amazing. But that's got to come from a start and foundation point. You've got to be so clear about what you do and why that is different to your competition. And like people need to hear something seven times before it got before it's got to sink in so massively clear about what you do. Secondly, and like a lot of people who hear this for the first time think it's a little bit kind counterintuitive. Building a fantastic, grander business is mind numbingly boring. And like the entrepreneur always gets bored first. If you're building a brand, you've got to be mind numbingly consistent over an extended period of time. If you chop and change how you look, what you stand for, what you do. Like it's so difficult to take people on that journey with you in the mind of entrepreneurs and founders that I'm going to change this, I'm going to launch this and I'm going to launch this product and that's coming in and this extension is coming in it's like, whoa, wait a second. Your business takes up 110% of your mental bandwidth. It takes up maximum 0.1 or 0.2 of your customer's bandwidth. They don't need all this new noise, they don't need all this other things. The power of our brand is always inversely proportional to its scope. It's like everyone thinks being disruptive is fun and sexy and cool and exciting. High octane, it's some of those things. But more importantly that it is mind numbingly consistency, mind numbing consistency and focus over an extended period of time and not launching too many different crazy things. And so like that consistency people can buy into. And once they buy into that, you can take them on the journey, but you need to be consistent enough to take them on the journey with you. And then the final point is one that we've spoken about again, risk is always proportional to ambition. So if you've got big ambitions and you need to be so calculated and so focused how you take them, but you're going to have to be prepared to take a few risks.

How do you sell anything to anyone?

I think, and I'm going to be a bit objectionable here, I think that is completely the wrong question. And I think the best businesses don't focus that much on sales. And like the first 10 years for business, we weren't focused that much on sales. Like, okay, if we make something that is absolutely fantastic, if we offer it at a reasonable price for what it is, if we've got a great time to back it up, those sales are going to happen. And the other question that I always get asked and often get asked by journalists in the journey is like, well, what size is Rudog going to be in 5, 10 years time? Where are you going? And I would always answer in exactly the same way. It's like, I absolutely do not care. But I'll tell you what I do care about. What I care about with the business in 5 or 10 years time is how do we look after the fantastic people, people that work in the organization? How do we continue to care and over index on the best ingredients, the best processes? How do we live or die by what's in every single bottle? How do we keep our edge, our attitude, our spikiness? How do we kind of retain what's made us like build this business so far? Because I know if we do those things well, our sales number is going to be as good as it possibly can be. Because for me, sales is a byproduct of doing all these other things and amazingly well. So I don't care what my sales number is in five years. I care about how well we do this core key things which are fundamental to everything we believe in. And if we do them well, we're going to be happy with sales number. And if we don't, we're not.

I didn't feel you were being objectionable. I think you answered the question in a very good way and I think it was a very good question.

So go fuck yourself.

Alright then, so let's do the disruptive round. We do on most of the episodes we have the disruptors round, we ask the same sort of five or six questions. Obviously the questions before were all curated for James and this live event. But we the five or six questions are always the same in the disruptors round. And then we're going to open up to you. What is the single biggest risk you've ever taken?

I would say the one I spoke about starting equity for Punks when it had never been done before. When it comes to cost us £100,000 when we had £10,000 in our bank account.

What is your most brutal life lesson.

Most savage life lesson? Nobody is going to care remotely as much as you do. And if you're CEO and if you're a founder, this is a hell of a lonely thing. And like it's going to be your strength of will, your strength of character, your resolve that gets you there. So if you get a good outcome, your team and everyone round about you, okay, they're going to help to a certain point, but it's on you and just that realization. One of my favorite business books is called the Hard Thing about Hired Things by Ben Horowitz. And I gift this book to so many founders. And there's one quote in that book that completely changed my approach to managing people. And I read it in 2014 and at that time I just found myself getting so frustrated. Like somebody in Australia would mess up the Canon line and the beer would be bad. Somebody in America would not open allocation in time or give bad customer experience. Somebody in the UK would mess up labels and beer that was supposed to be in Finland and we couldn't sell it. And I was getting so frustrated about all of these things. And the quote in the Ben Horowitz book was at a certain point in time your company is going to do things that are so stupid you'd never thought you'd be associated with such incompetence. But to make matters worse, if you're CEO, it's all your fault. And their realization was just complete ownership. Okay, if somebody messes up in Berlin or London or Australia, Australia or America, like, that person has been hired by someone I've hired. That person is operating a culture which I've set the tone for. That person's operating a system where I've set what the standards are. So anyone that does anything anywhere in the organization is a direct consequence of what I have done as a leader. So if something goes wrong anywhere, I can't be frustrated at any of my team. I can only be frustrated at myself. And just that tall ownership led me to kind of to lead the company in a very different way. And with some amazing years after, I had that insight. But, like, brutal insight. Nobody's going to care as much as you do. And anything that happens in your organization, regardless what it is, regardless who did it, it's 100% your fault.

What's the most disruptive thing anyone has ever said or done to you, inviting.

Me on this podcast and to come here today? The clue is in the title.

Oh, this is a straw in the book.

No, no. So I love challenging conventional wisdom. I love challenging status quo, and I love finding ways to create businesses which is not the same as business as usual. And I think you find there's so many things that you think you should do, you're supposed to have as a business, which just don't add value. They add cost, they add complexity, they add bureaucracy. I'm really good friends with Greg Jackson. Absolute genius. He found founded Octopus Energy, and I was like, hanging out with him and he was like, yeah, James, I don't have a HR department. I was like, dude, you've got 8,000 people. Yeah, well, do I need an HR department for? They just get in the way. They slow us down, they make things clunky, and they take ownership away from the managers. I want that manager to have that difficult conversation. I don't want something in the way. If you've got an HR department, they help a recruitment department. That just gives you way more overhead than you actually need. So he's got 8,000 people. No HR director, no chief people, people officer, no people department. Loved it.

So decentralizing HR and making the managers responsible for their recruitment and looking after the staff. Yeah, yeah.

But just like every insight, every, like, every way something's supposed to be done. Like, if you can challenge that, you can find a competitive advantage. And like anyone got business, you're always looking for a competitive advantage. And if you can follow the conventional wisdom, you're only ever going to get a conventional outcome. It's like all of our best innovations, ideas, initiatives have been when we've gone against conventional wisdom and we've got an unconventional outcome. And there's a quote that I love. I think it's, if 90% or 95% of people think you're wrong, you're either gravely mistaken or about to make history.

What's your biggest failure or regret?

I think so many. And everyone makes loads of mistakes when they're building a business, but I think there's different ways to make mistakes. And I hate it when people try and glorify mistakes and say, oh, well, it's a mistake, but you can learn from it. For me, the only thing you learn from a mistake or failure is you're not good enough and you need to up your game. And as savage that is, I think that's the case. And for me, the key thing is when you make a mistake, you've got to fix it incredibly quickly. And you've got a window of opportunity where you can fix it, but if you don't fix it, it's just going to hurt you more and more and more. And Sir Tom Hunter, who one of the most successful ever Scottish entrepreneurs, once said to me, I was debating whether I should fix a mistake that I'd made at that point in time or wait six months, and looked at me quite sternly and with his kind of very Glaswegian accent, said to me, james, if you were running a marathon, you wouldn't wait until the 22nd mile to take that stone out your shoe. So you realize you're going to make mistakes. Everyone does fix them incredibly quickly.

What's a secret you've never shared or a story you've never told? Yeah, that one. When I ask that question, you see one go through their mind and they're like, well, not telling that one. That's the one we want. Please.

I think you asked me that when I was in the podcast as well, and I gave an equally disappointing answer. And I think we're just like such an open book. We focus so much on transparency that we've. I should have kept some good stories back for my autobiography or something, but kind of most of them are out there. And that is the most disappointing answer today. I'm sorry. It was going well up until then. I think we've gone from like a 7 out of 10 down to like 4 or 5. Maybe save up the questions. Let's see.

Okay, so this isn't on my script, and I hope you don't mind me asking this. It's a bit more of a personal one, but I think it could be important. So right now, my dad is not good. And I know you recently had the passing of your dad, and I remember sitting with Andrew Tate and he said to me, you never fully become a man until your father passes away. And I remember feeling really triggered by that thinking. And I feel like I'm doing a decent job as a man. I'm quite scared right now with what could happen with my dad. And obviously you went through it and you openly shared about it on your social media. Did that change? You did that. Was that the final missing piece in becoming a man?

I'm not sure. It was, like, the toughest thing I've gone through. So I don't speak to my mom, and I've just been. Been, like, so close to my dad, like, all the way through my life. And my dad was a North Atlantic fisherman, so I spent a lot of time in the boat with him, and he still was working incredibly hard as a lobster fisherman. So he was catching lobsters every single day. And he went from healthy and catching lobsters to no longer with us in the case of. In space of seven weeks with pancreatic cancer. And that was last year in the summer. But I also lost one of my best friends, Dan, to pancreatic cancer in January last year. So that was. That was two to them. And just, like, so sudden and so much of who I am is kind of came to my dad. So growing up in the. In the fishing boats, that kind of work ethic, that discipline, that insistent on standards, that kind of was just inculcated into me from, like, such a young age. And, yeah, it was incredibly difficult. And it's like, if somebody's had so much of an influence on you, like, who are you when that person's no longer there? And, like, it's a sad thing to say, I'm now less excited about achieving something successful because I can't share it with my dad. I'm less excited about doing an amazing thing because I can't share it with my dad. And it was so funny because he was, like, so old school and Scottish and kind of down to earth and just, like, focusing his lobsters so I could, like, tell him we've done, like, a 200 million investment round and he wouldn't even acknowledge it and just tell me how many lobsters he caught the next day. But just being able to share it with my dad was amazing. And here's the kind of insight that that came from that. I'm sure everyone here has lost somebody that's incredibly close to them. I'm sure everyone here has lost somebody very suddenly through cancer as well. It just kind of shows the kind of fragility of this life and the kind of briefness of our time on the planet. But just the odds of anyone being here is 400 billion to one, which is this incomprehensible number. But you're far more likely to win the lottery every single week between now than you die than just be alive for the first place. So just the opportunity to be part of this, to be on this planet, to love and be loved, to make connections, to build things, to have rapport, to kind of have a family, to experience life on this planet is this incredibly precious thing. And I just wonder by seeing this kind of epidemic of kind of people struggling with kind of various different mental health issues, if people can have truly understood that in the overall scheme of the cosmos, we're on this planet for the briefest blink of an eye. And just the odds of us being here, like 400 billion to 1, more likely to win the lottery every single week between now and when you die than just to be born. So the chances of you being here, all the things that needed to happen 4,000 years ago in your lineage just for you to be here, the planet to be here. So miss my dad. Incredibly, so grateful to have had someone in my life who was so remarkable. I thought we'd have him for another 20 years. But just all of us, just being here in this planet, being together, having friends, having family, doing things that you love, is just such a privilege. And just to make sure that we don't take any of that and any of that time for granted, I think is such an important lesson.

This show is called Disruptors.

You've mentioned. Get the redundant in there.

Well, this is going to be on the fucking podcast.

What is this show called again?

All right, all right. How many Unicorn. You're the guest. You're the guest. You're the guest.

Just one, sadly. I'm working on it.

What does the word disruptive mean to you?

Oh, I love. I love that word. And I'm quite sad your podcast is called that because if I did ever start a podcast, that would be my favorite word to do it. And like, for me, disruption is innovation. It's progress, it's excitement. It's like fighting to create something better than exists. And all the best businesses, all the best leaders, they've got that mission and they want to create something better. And you do that through disruption. You do that from rejecting the status quo, finding new and fantastic ways to do things. And I think that's been my kind of modus operandi as a leader. And it's a part of business and life that I found find most exciting.

Ladies and gentlemen, James Watts. This episode was brought to you by Disruptive Media, helping bold entrepreneurs stand out through podcasting, video and social content. Visit disruptive media.co.uk to learn more.