In this interview, Speaker B reflects on a nine‑year journey from idea to a seven‑figure business and shares the key lessons they wish they had known earlier. The core advice is to “get bigger faster” by scaling aggressively: outsource fulfillment early, invest heavily in world‑class Facebook‑ads training when the platform was cheap, and borrow money sooner to stock inventory. They emphasize that early focus should be on acquiring customers rather than profit, noting that over half of their total earnings came in the last twelve months. The speaker also mentions the value of finding reliable manufacturers and team members early, suggesting that many of these steps could have compressed a 9‑year growth timeline into roughly two years.
Chapters
What sort of lessons, you know, 5, 6 years ago would you have said, by the way, you know, make sure you do this or don't do this? Is there anything you can think of?
If only I'd have known everything then that I know now. I think the main thing I would tell myself is to get bigger faster, as quickly as possible. And there's no question on that list would have been outsource fulfillment quicker. Spend a lot of money on training myself up on how to use Facebook ads. If I could have spent, back in 2012 or whenever it was I discovered Facebook ads, if I could have spent £10,000 then on getting myself world-class training, I don't know if I had to pay an individual that knew what they were talking about, if I had to go and work for free for an agency and use £10,000 worth of my time, whatever it would have taken, we would have earned that back. So much, multiple times over the year. What's really frustrating for me is that Facebook ads were so much cheaper back then, and that we could have scaled so much quicker and for so much less money than it's now taking us. That would have been money well spent, spending more money on training myself, my own knowledge on that. We would have borrowed money sooner, I think, because now we know that we had potential. I think we kept on telling ourselves that we were so niche, that we'd probably reached the maximum number of people who'd be interested in us, but actually that's just growing. And we, knowing now how much bigger we could have been, we would have borrowed money in the early days to get more stock. And then obviously there's other small things as well, like finding the manufacturers that we now work with, and, you know, and the people who now work with us as well, that could have saved us time. But the truth is that every, you know, it's been a, well, a 9-year journey from idea to crossing the 7-figure mark. But the truth is that all of that could have been done probably within 2 years, 24 months I would give myself to get from nothing to where we are now. I think it could be the scale it could have been. The other interesting thing is that— and I would say this to any entrepreneurs starting out— is that we came up with this idea 9 years ago, but I would say at least 50%, if not more, of the money that we personally have ever made from this business has been made in the last 12 months. And that's something that happens that just, you know, with the scale of things, is it just, you know, in the early days, you just don't expect to make any money in the early days, but focus on getting bigger as quickly as you can, getting more customers through the door. If you're making sales, that's the most important thing, and the profits and the, you know, and the money coming in will come a lot later. You've got to be patient for that.
