E068 - Andy Middleton from TYF Group - Part 1

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Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. Andy, thank you so much for joining the Green Element Podcast. Um, today we're going to talk to you about outdoors and mission, purpose, and all things general about how it is that you are helping reduce environmental impacts in organizations and with people. And your business is all about education and adventure and bringing people into the outdoors and helping them understand what it is that we can do to reduce impact. Please just tell us— I've probably got that completely wrong because you've just told me what I should be saying. No, no, no, no, no. Please tell us more.

So I was fortunate enough to be born on the west coast of Wales in Britain's smallest city, St. Davids, which has like 1,480 people on the electoral roll. It's a tiny place that is perched on the western edge of Wales, surrounded on 3 sides by sea, that on days like today as we speak in August, you know, are tranquil and blue and wonderful, and in winter can be pretty bangingly rough and different. So I kind of— I spent my childhood on the cliffs and beaches around where we live and had parents who, although they probably wouldn't have seen themselves as being adventurers, had actually done their time in the outdoors in a kind of— in a gentler way perhaps to what I do. But I do absolutely stand on the shoulders of my parents and grandparents in terms of what they did. And to put that in context, my grandparents on one side of the family were big cavers. in Yorkshire in the 1930s. Um, you know, my dad was a doctor and did loads and loads of really advanced work in rescue, with the rescue services, pushing the boundaries on that. So while I didn't appreciate at the time, I grew up— my childhood was in effect informed by time and nature. My parents gave me loads of space to play and stories that would get told at the dinner table of trying to overcome the inertia of bad thinking about making change happen, and largely in health, which is the world that my grandparents lived in. My grandmother was a chair of a health board in the 1950s in Yorkshire. Being a woman chair of a board is incredible, and certainly my dad. So there's stories of change happening and adventure, and I think those two, as I went through the sort of setting up a business, informed very much what we set out to do. So I essentially— I did a degree in geography, traveled for a couple of years, came back to West Wales and fell in love with it again, realizing that although it didn't have the biggest cliffs or the longest beaches. I had incredible resources like at my fingertips that were as good as anywhere I'd been in the world. And I fell in love with it again, as I had probably done as a child. I made a decision to say, well, if I cut— my start point was to start a business where my heart felt settled. And that was, that was where I'd grown up. And there was, there were no businesses here at the time that was anything like I could do. So I set up a surf school and a windsurfing school, which is a pretty good thing to do when you're in your early 20s. I could, you know, earn really good money teaching when the wind wasn't too strong. When it was too strong, I'd go windsurfing, which is great. I did that for a while and really loved it. And then that business morphed into the business that now became— that became TYF. And in my— when I was 26, I bought a hotel with a mate, turned it into an adventure center. And we were the first to doing what we did pretty much in the UK, where we recognized there was a space between having good food, great adventures great beers, late-night parties, and connecting people through play. And that grew and it thrived. And on the way, we pioneered a new outdoor sport called coasteering, which is a kind of crazy and beautiful pastime of climbing on the cliffs at sea level wearing a wetsuit, dodging the waves, jumping in when you can't climb any further. And we introduced that to the world. It's what every kid at the seaside used to do if you— it's where you grew up.

Mm-hmm.

But we had the right resources to do it. And I got very early days, we had a huge amount of support for the work we were doing, and then started having businesses saying, hey, do you do— can you bring a team down? And we got good at asking why questions and ended up working for 20 years doing some fairly, fairly hefty programs for government and businesses, teaching common sense to corporates. And all the way down that line, I was really aware that the things that we were teaching the business leaders we were only teaching because they hadn't learned it at school.

Right.

Not only had they not learned it in school, but it still wasn't being taught in school. And that was a kind of like the grit in the oyster to an extent. And then like 20 years ago, I spent some time down at Schumacher College and the Cambridge Business Environment Program, which is now the Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership, um, testing my thinking about the relationship between getting people and heart connected to what they do and seeing change happen around sustainability. And that's been my journey for the last 20 years, really. And it's, yeah, it's, as you know, it's an interesting space as we try and break new ground and help people look at things in different ways.

And what sort of businesses and organizations come to you? Is it a real cross-section of different businesses or do you see a particular type?

So we cut our teeth, we cut our teeth at the time, you know, Wales was full of like manufacturing and Wales was doing really well. So you had huge, huge businesses like Sony and Panasonic in it. And all these guys were growing and thriving and needing people development stuff. And we did really well working with them, saved them millions and millions of pounds of value by helping people connect what they did to the work they did. And most of those businesses would tolerate me talking about sustainability stuff because they liked me, but it wasn't part of their business. And kind of post-Schumacher and certainly past recession, so 10, 11 years ago, I made the decision that we weren't going to work with any businesses that weren't trying to make the world a better place.

Okay.

And if they weren't trying to do that, they just weren't going to be our customers. And we've been on a process since of kind of reestablishing work with people like the B Corp community and with businesses that care a bit more, to help good businesses get better and grow rather than trying to help bad businesses be just less bad.

And did you find, because you hear about this quite a lot about businesses, and I guess we do as well, there are certain businesses we would never work with. Did you find that sales dropped or actually hasn't made a difference by doing that kind of—

I think no, I think sales fell off a cliff at the time because there are so few, certainly 10 years ago, there are so few businesses that cared. And actually now a lot of the businesses that say they do care, I still think are are just drunk on their own Kool-Aid, you know, producing products that shouldn't be on the supermarket shelves, for instance. But I think by really consolidating our business back to what really mattered to us, it allowed us to grow from a much stronger place. So we're now trying to work out how we as a business, we can become catalysts of place-based change by working with schools and government and businesses around communities so that the schools you work with, or the kids you work with in schools, are as fully prepared as they can be for the changes that we know are certain to come in their lifetimes? But also, how do you then work with government and business to connect those both to education so that the next generation workforce are better prepared, so that their government and business are setting real challenges for schools?

Right.

So kids get to work on real stuff real time. And the push that we're making is for kids to be given the control over their schools for real, from mid-primary school upwards— energy, waste, water, transport— to have their own budgets for their schools run by the kids. Because when they're 18, that's the school you want them to have.

And you think that'll work?

Yeah, I can't see any reason why kids at 14 or 15 shouldn't be running a £200 grand energy budget for a school. With the right training. If they take control and ownership of it, they will learn the skills that you would love them to have if they knocked on the door for a job at 20.

Yeah, yeah, I think that goes with almost everything, doesn't it? It's that profit and loss, isn't it? It's what goes in, what goes out, and I think it is completely lost, completely in schools. We're not taught, and it goes down to It comes into everything. It comes into politics, it comes into business, it comes into running your own finances in your own home. It runs into, you know, absolutely everything. I think that kids aren't taught that, and it's a shame because we should be teaching such simple maths, really.

Yeah, apply. And it's— I mean, ironically, it's kind of a— it's applied learning. Everything we did when you were consulting in business helped people make change by applying theories of learning and theories of change to real things that mattered in their workplace. So you take an idea about a relationship or a view of problem-solving and apply it to real things in the business that they could work on on Monday. If they did that and they applied it on Monday, they'd get to go, oh right, yeah, it's interesting. When I stop describing things like that and look at it like this, the world changes. And kids, generally speaking, don't get the chance to do that. And when our goal broadly is to give young people an unshakable confidence in their ability to make shift happen because they've done it so many times that well-intentioned adults who don't know better lose the ability to take away kids' confidence.

Right.

And so my eldest daughter Alice has done a couple of Ironman races, and when she did her first Ironman and she was training for her running and realized she got to a point of fitness where she said, no one could stand next to me on planet Earth and pointed to somewhere further than I could run to. And that's the confidence that I believe every kid in every school has a right to have about their ability to shape the world so that it's safe for them to live in. And that comes from a little bit of theory, but just a shitload of practice.

Yeah.

And, and so we're, so we're working with a load of businesses from kind of B Corps and the unreasonable impact businesses, taking leaders of those businesses to set really tough challenges for schools. They get to work on for real, with real data, real time, and pitch back to the people who own those challenges. And if every kid did— we think that if every kid did something like 20 days between 13 and 15, you know, in school or around school, they would develop that kind of confidence. And if that's based on real challenge and based on the things that interest them, Mm-hmm. I'm pretty confident, I'm pretty sure that we'd end up with a hugely increased ability to influence parents and others about the things that matter.

That's so interesting. We, um, my other half and I were talking about pretty much exactly that and what we can do to our children. And to be completely personal, I went to private school. My dad left school at 12, and his whole idea was, I didn't have an education, I want my children to have the best education I could possibly get. He ended up moving to London, pavements filled with gold or whatever and sent us to private school. And one thing I've learned now in my adult life is most privately educated children who are adults have got an air of confidence over state school education as a rule of thumb. And Laura and I are not going to send our children to private school because we don't necessarily agree with the system, although my mum was saying the other day, it's actually our society that's the problem. In Italy, they don't have the different systems and it works really well. And she said that she wouldn't have sent her children to private school in Italy because she wouldn't have wanted to, but she wouldn't have needed to.

Wow.

Because she was against it but wanted to give her children the best opportunity and knew that that was the way. So there's something fundamentally wrong with our system to have the 2 different systems in place. But what I'm trying to get to is we were trying to work out that confidence and how we could instill the confidence into our children, because— and we didn't know, and I didn't know. And it's so interesting to listen to you and to understand that it is possible.

And I think, you know what, and in some ways, you know, we were talking to family who are down at the moment, and one of them was saying that their their daughter's helping out in a language school in Bristol. Yeah. And the kids who are coming in from Spain or France or wherever to these schools would rather take an Uber for 10 minutes than walk.

Right.

Not only walking, not only does that not give you the health, but actually not walking for 10 minutes in an unfamiliar city takes a whole load of other skills.

Yeah.

Around route finding, about risk management, about time management, etc. And I think there's a— the The potential downside of this is that we're just taking away so many of the skills that come from, like, playing in nature, learning how to light fires on the beach, cooking outdoors, be outdoors, that without that you just can't start— you can't start a lot of these processes.

Yeah.

So the kind of the big wild project I'm working on at the minute is kind of taking that idea of unshakable confidence and saying, well, what would that look like if we're serious? And this comes from a model I developed a few years ago with a couple of biomimicry colleagues, looking at how we measure success in business or society, I guess, and recognizing that if you have a 0 to 10 scale of performance, then there's a whole load of businesses that are legal and play by the rules and do things within the law, but they are allowed to make things in the law that are really, really bad for people and nature.

Yeah.

It's legal. So being 10 out of 10 as a business, so really good at shipping stuff, doesn't make you a good business. You know, Walkers crisps would be a great example of making billions of packets of non-recyclable crisps every year, regardless of the content. But the product they make should not be on the shelves in a sustainable world. It's quite legal to make it. So in some ways, we end up with this crazy scale where the businesses that are lauded as being the best are the best within a broken system.

Yeah.

And government within that system was never designed for delivery. So on a scale of 1 to 10, might only be 2 or 3 out of 10 anyway, which is why it's still got so many people unemployed or a broken economy because they can't— it's not designed for fixing it. It's the best of a bad system. And on the other side of the frame where people get the idea of a shared reality, you might understand what quality looks like, including the view of the river. or, you know, the Aldo Leopold, the wolf, but also people who have less money or whatever else. You end up with a bunch of people who've got really good insight into what needs to happen but never did the courses, never got the insights themselves allowed to make scale happen.

Hmm.

In the opposite corner of the box to the corporates, there's loads of community activist groups, loads of environmental groups, people who are great at saying the right thing But don't know how to make change happen.

Yeah.

And then the top side, the 10 out of 10 bit on that side, is what we call R10, which is where reality meets 10 out of 10 performance. So when I ask politicians, so how many kids— for argument's sake, how many kids do you think it would be good to be able to cook tasty, nutritious, healthy food by the time they reach adulthood? Their answer will tend to be, we've got some great projects, Will. Which is the right answer to a different question.

Yeah.

Rather than saying, wouldn't it be amazing if all kids could cook proper food before they leave school?

Yeah.

And yet, yet those big goals can never ever be delivered by single organizations. So single organizations can never take all of the glory or have all of the control. The government could deliver that by Christmas this year if it was prepared to work with business and charities and community groups, but they never ever asked the question about what could we do if we couldn't fail. So for me, the question is about saying, if we couldn't fail and you took reality at face value, where would we try to get to? So the big project which I mentioned earlier that we ended up playing with is to say, well, what would that look like if every 15-year-old— if we were working with 15-year-olds, so we now have huge impact on influencing behavior. Um, what would it look like if they took a bunch of actions in a year around climate, nature, and sustainability? And I put this proposition to, to the Welsh Rugby Union, who own the Principality Stadium. And a really good guy called Martin Phillips, who's the chief exec, said, okay, I'll give you the stadium for free. I've got a 60,000-seat stadium.

Hmm.

Every 15-year-old in the country this time next year and take them on a journey of sustainability that lasts from September to July. During which time, if each of them take 40 significant actions on nature, climate, and well-being, between them they'd have knocked 2 million things off the to-do list on sustainability and learnt a bunch of the skills that were good for them, good for their homes, communities, and potential employers. So if that all comes together as we think it will, that's going to keep me quite busy over the next few months.

That's brilliant, it's brilliant. So you don't do things by halves, do you?

But I think in some ways it's It comes back to this adventure stuff about going— knowing the scale of challenge we have around climate and nature, what would an appropriate response look like?

Hmm.

Is it that some kids have done some stuff, none of which is relevant, which is pretty much where we're at at the moment? Or kids have a base understanding of how the relationship between their choices impact their future? And so in some ways, I don't see it as being a big project. It's just like, it's just the only appropriate project. they can never be delivered individually. And so my main job has just been the catalyst that allows other people to work together and build a shared jigsaw puzzle front picture where they can go, okay, Will, can you do the green bits? Can you do the blue? Can you do the houses?

Yeah.

And if we have a shared vision that's detailed enough to be able to get on, realize where we connect to others, I think we can do something remarkable. And being in Wales where we have really good sustainability legislation is a good place for that to start.

What would you say your business superpower was?

My personal business superpower is having no power and connecting people. And because I have no power, I'm not a threat. I'm not trying to grind, I'm not trying to make a deal out of this, I'm not trying to make business out of it. And connecting people across unlikely boundaries is the thing, is my superpower thing.

You've got a clear mission and purpose at TYF. How do you engage your staff, suppliers, and customers with that mission and purpose?

That's a great question and one that we've spent a long time doing. So as a business, you know, we're 32 years old as a business, and from day one we made a decision that we would never ever fly people on holiday to go on kayaking adventures in other places or whatever else. And so wanted to make sure that what we talked about was the way that we worked. So a few years back when he had— we had a couple of hotels in St. Davids that we're using as residential training centers. One of them we turned into the first certified organic hotel in Wales.

Right.

Because we wanted to know what it was like to walk the talk when, you know, about this stuff. So you can't go talking to people about the importance of ethical supply and everything else if you're not prepared to practice it yourself. And we ended up with a retail business, which is an amazing ethical outdoor retail business in St. David's. And for a long time, it was just a really good outdoor clothing shop. But we realized that actually, if we want to be telling this, if we want the right to tell the story to businesses and to kids, what we sell in our shop needs to be in line with all of that stuff.

Yeah.

Switched our entire supply base to businesses that could demonstrate that they cared. We have a really high proportion of businesses now whose suppliers are B Corps and/or 1% for the Planet businesses and are encouraging others to go in that direction. So next year our suppliers will include kind of new suppliers, a brand called 10 Trees who plant 10 trees for every product you buy.

Right.

Great, so we can count that on the wall. Sherpa, who are a clothing brand, will give an hour of— will give a day of learning to a Sherpa school kid. for every product you buy. We can help our customers make the connection between the way that they shop and the value of the pound in their pocket with the consequence that action has. And so the more we get that bit right, the easier it is for us to tell our story about this is not the back end of the world living in St David's, but the front edge. It just depends where you stand. And I think with our— in terms of getting the staff engaged, for us, I think, is finding staff who care And then teaching them who have the values that align with us, and then teach them how to do what we do, rather than people who have the technical skills to be an outdoor instructor. Because I don't think you can teach people to care in the same way. It's been a journey, but we have some amazing people who've come to join us now from activist organizations who are just— who are stunning.

Right, brilliant. And when it comes to running an ethical and sustainable business, what would you say your biggest struggle so far has been, and can you tell us a bit about how you've overcome it?

Sure. I think finding— in the past, finding staff who really care has been hard, and I think that's to an extent that's compounded for us ironically about being in a beautiful place on the edge of Wales, because it's not for everyone to live here. But if people lived in big cities, the idea of coming and living in a tiny place doesn't necessarily appeal, so attracting people to live on the edge has been quite hard. And we found that if people don't live here, generally speaking, it's pretty hard for them to stay engaged in the business. So being on the edge has got many, many benefits, but there are downsides in terms of some of the stuff. Because with a population of only 400 in total, you've got a very big pool to go fishing in. That is significantly shifting now, which is a really positive thing. And ironically, I think one of the things that stops a lot of the environmental movement moving forward is the lack of people having commercial skills, you know, knowing how to influence, knowing how to sell, knowing how to pitch. Because certainly a lot of the pushback we've come across in the past was a perception that those kind of skills are only practiced by shiny-suited sales folks, rather than the fact that actually, if we've got good product to sell that makes a difference, everyone should be unashamedly confident in telling stories about what we're doing.

Personally, I'm seeing more and more, I guess, shiny suited people coming into the sustainability market environment. For example, funnily enough, I'm looking over at our house. We've got a lady that's— she's on mat leave at the moment. She used to work for one of the large banks, was made redundant at the same time as going on mat leave, and has already decided she's not want to go back into corporate risk, but is working on a micro level in her own area. And she actually lives in London but is from Glasgow. She's on environmental matters and has gone, actually, I can use my skills in the sustainability world, and actually I'm really enjoying myself doing what I'm doing. It's all voluntary work that she's doing at the moment, but she's working with Sustrans on cycle routes through the area that she lives in. She's working with local council on environmental matters, on rerouting cars and making sure there are less people driving less. And it's really interesting listening to her, but the skills that she has from that corporate world is phenomenal. It's way better than what I could do. I've never, you know, because she would have been on loads of courses as well.

Completely. And I think if you look at that, compare that with that kind of model I described earlier, talking about the R10 stuff. There's loads of people in really, really worthy, well-intentioned environmental organizations who still think that business is a bad thing. Who still think marketing is the work of the devil and stuff, and kind of don't understand that actually, if you have no— if you can't tell a story about what you're trying to do, you can't get other people on board.

Yeah.

I think so. Having people who come from the corporate world who excel at getting stuff done to do good things is how we make that shift. Because the corporates know the how, the community groups know the why. And if you can put those 2 skill sets together, I think that's when you get to more exciting goals where people don't get scared about the idea of going, okay, could we get 50,000 kids together for a training workshop? And then I know I can't do it by myself, but if other people come on board, we can. And I think— and it's now, I think, when you see people, as you say, coming from that corporate world who reconnect to their heart and decide that they want to use it and use their time and their spirit in a different way gets really exciting.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think it's accelerating as I started to see a shift probably about 10 years ago with friends coming to me saying, I'd like to change careers, I'm starting to think that— and it was a kind of— there was only one or two every couple of months that were asking me, and that definitely over time started to build up with more and more people from that world going, actually, I want to change. I want to do something different. And it is really exciting. And I agree with you absolutely with the fact that one of the reasons why I used to wear a suit to work 15+ years ago and walk into organizations, and I actually bought an Armani suit. I wanted to dress like a management consultant, and I didn't want to have sandals and wear jeans and a shirt, which some of my competitors were wearing. I wanted to be— is he from Ernst& Young, or is he an environmental consultancy? We don't really know, because that was a way to shift people's mentality.

Completely. I mean, I was in exactly the same space, and I didn't— you know, it's hard enough to communicate what you and I do anyway. without making the way that you dress back in those days another reason for not engaging. And the, you know, the advance— and it's kind of interesting when I reflect on some of these things about, you know, when I certainly— when I started the business and for quite a few years afterwards, people would kind of gone down the London route would say, yeah, but don't you miss the real world? And no one says that anymore. But the advantage is now I have, you know, I can't remember, I've had like 4 days in the last week or so I've been on long walking meetings out from my house. You know, I had a 6-hour meeting with a government director a couple of days ago walking around the cliffs talking about the future of education. It doesn't really, really, really doesn't get better than being immersed in nature whilst talking about stuff that really matters, but in an unhurried way without pens and paper.

Yeah.

And then just take a few notes at the end of the day. So I think, yeah, getting people to different spaces To help understand what that change feels like is, I think, so important. And I'm hopeful that as the world gets more digital, that more people will be able to go and work in nice places where their heart can be more connected to nature, but still be, still be able to get online and do the day's work if that's what you need to, but be with your kids near a beach or something in summer.

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Thank you.