Misfit Founders
Misfit Founders
AI Takes Sales Teams to NEXT LEVEL - chatting with Uhubs Co-Founder
Unlock the secrets behind building high-performing sales teams with Uhubs' game-changing approach to workforce development. This episode features an engaging conversation with one of Uhubs' founders, Matt Milligan, who takes us through the company's innovative journey. Discover how Uhubs' AI-driven software is empowering chief revenue officers and leaders to cultivate top-tier sales talent, moving beyond traditional methods to focus on skill enhancement and performance. From account executives to customer success teams, you'll learn how Uhubs is transforming the efficacy of revenue teams and exploring its potential across various business functions.
Matt shares captivating personal anecdotes that shaped his entrepreneurial spirit, from early work experiences to navigating cultural nuances in sales. Experience the lessons in chutzpah and courage learned from a mentor named Len, and get a firsthand account of the hustle and cold-calling competitions that laid the groundwork for Uhubs. We also delve into the complexities of the consulting and startup ecosystem in London, highlighting a serendipitous meeting that sparked further collaboration and innovation. This episode paints a vivid picture of the trials and triumphs faced along the way.
In the final segment, we explore the strategic pivots that led to Uhubs' success, including the shift from a B2C model to a B2B consultancy during the pandemic. Learn about the impactful role of executive coaching in overcoming limiting beliefs and the significance of self-awareness for sustainable success. Our guest reflects on the journey of creating Uhubs, emphasizing the value of lean testing, user feedback, and iterative development. Whether you're in sales, entrepreneurship, or personal growth, this episode offers invaluable insights and practical lessons to elevate your professional journey.
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disclaimer I'm an investor in u-hubs, so, uh, let me not um try to butcher your value proposition. Do you want to give me a quick intro for the audience of who u-hub is?
Speaker 2:yeah, thanks for having me on the show. Looking forward to the conversation. Um yeah, great to be at paddles offices as well.
Speaker 1:It's pretty cool yeahiration for your own offices.
Speaker 2:Totally. Yeah, we were just chatting about SaaS stock. My memory of SaaS stock is walking into the main room and seeing the massive Paddle stand. I think they had the biggest one there, maybe. Yeah, they still own the expo floor.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah and thinking one day know like, one day you obviously will be able to have that kind of marketing budget.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, yeah. Well, you know, I'm rooting for you. I have a stake in it. I'm rooting for you. I appreciate that, but you also have a really good, cool product. Do you want to talk a bit about what you do?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, in simple terms, what we do at u-hubs, we've built a software that helps revenue leaders so typically chief revenue officers, vps of revenue and vps of revenue operations build better sales teams, um. So lots of the solutions out there on the market, particularly in the sales tech, rev tech space, are very much focused on automation. I think the revenue profession has been a very early use case for, for gpt and generative ai, um.
Speaker 2:But we're doing something different at u-hubs. So we're we are building some of those technologies into our platform, but we're focusing on the humans rather than the workflow and rather than the automation of the role. So we believe at U-Hubs that the future is going to be won by revenue professionals who are highly skilled, highly competent. We think that the revenue teams of the future are going to have potentially fewer people in them because of that automation and all of these trends are sort of driving us towards an era of higher performance, higher capability when it comes to your people, your talent, your skills, your capabilities. So that's the part that we solve, for we help leaders get smarter about who they hire, who they bring into their teams. We then help them automate the development of those individuals. So reduce the ramp up time to target and just help them build better, better skilled, better capable, highly competent revenue professionals.
Speaker 1:Right, so that is in the revenue sales market. Are some of the learnings that you're experiencing now building this product applicable to other teams, other hiring practices and so on? Is is that kind of like um convertible into potentially some future products or um, some something that you can carry on to additional I don't know services or anything like that? So, basically, are you learning that? Oh, but actually this marketing team also kind of would need this type of onboarding intelligence and such Totally, totally.
Speaker 2:So. You know, when we started the business back in 2019, I think one of the big assumptions or hypotheses we had going in was the workforce development was fundamentally broken. You know. So $67 billion a year is spent on training the workforce. It's a huge market, but if you look at that market, it's really dominated by a bunch of old school training and consulting organizations, some of which have been around for like 50 plus years.
Speaker 2:The reason we started with sales and revenue teams is it's really measurable and revenue teams is really measurable. So you know, we wanted to start in a function where we could prove ROI and we could demonstrate how we were moving the needle as we've gone on that journey. You know we started off with account executive teams. We then built out for sales development teams. We've now got customer success teams using the platform Account management. So we've expanded across the whole sort of modern revenue org we're now looking at. Service teams is a really interesting one. So that kind of evolution is already happening. And all of these learnings that we're gathering from quantifying the impact of making your people more productive, yeah, we're taking into other functions of the business.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, we got, you know, a big, big vision uh, here at u-hubs and revenue is seen as the kind of first stop on on the journey and you mentioned that you know up until now the way you do onboarding and learning and kind of like crafting your um, your skills to do, to be able to do um a job or knowledge, let's call it. Let's call it knowledge was done through um, these organizations and services, businesses and so on. Are there any products out there that do something similar? Do you have competition in that space, be it more traditional software that doesn't really include AI and so on, because you use AI in your tool as well? Is there anything in the product space that's a competitor, or is it like a novel type of approach to onboarding?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would kind of break it down. So there's components of our platform that are very unique and very novel in the way that we're going about them. There's other components of the platform that are fairly commoditized. So you know, if we think about certain aspects of, say, an onboarding process, there's lots of different HR softwares out there that can accommodate, you know, and help you automate onboarding as a use case. But if we think about the core differentiator of the platform that we're building is we're actually taking a process that's been tried and tested by top consulting organizations around the world, which is how do you identify what good looks like?
Speaker 2:So you know, I speak with revenue leaders every day and the common question I get is I've got 10 of my team who are basically carrying the revenue number for the entire organization. What do I do with the other 80 to 90 who are nowhere near? You know that that's a real big concern and a big risk, because then if you're high performing guys, get a better offer or get poached by a competitor, then you've got a real problem on your hands. You know, as a leader, you're way behind you, behind the eight ball, uh, as we say, and as they say in snooker, so? Or paul, rather, um. So you know, we, we see the.
Speaker 2:The unique, unique, unique part of what we're building at u-hubs is helping leaders answer that question. So it's using different data sources to, from the crm system, from call intelligence platforms like gong and jiminy, as well as our own assessments, automated inside of the platform, to create that visual, help leaders visualize what does good look like. You know what are my my a player sales people doing that, that my b, c and d players are and then using that data to make recommendations to help them close the gap.
Speaker 2:So you know, the way you can do that today is you can pay a bunch of really expensive consultants to come in I know because I used to be one of them, um, in my, my ui days and they will do that manually over a period of three, six, nine months. You know, they'll then give the exec team a roadmap and a yeah, 50 page powerpoint deck, um, and we do it through a recurring platform. We call that. Human intelligence is what we're building.
Speaker 1:And it was the. Were the services expensive for companies? When you know I mean there still are, because they still exist. This consultancy, let me structure your onboarding and this, and that were there expensive services usually.
Speaker 2:Extortionate. Yeah, I mean you're looking for at the bigger end of the spectrum. You know like minimum six-figure pieces of work to come in in these sales transformation projects. I think that the bigger problem that we've observed is the sort of one-off nature of lots of those projects. So you know they'll come in, they'll tell you what your problems are. We used to call it stealing your watch and then telling you the time Right, but then there's no reinforcement, there's no ongoing improvement once the project ends.
Speaker 1:And there is iteration with these things. I suppose a company would not just have the same onboarding process. And as the company evolves, as more people get on, things change. Progressed organization progresses, their products, their services, that they're so um progress as well, so does the onboarding.
Speaker 2:That's what you're saying yeah, and not only onboarding. You know the hiring profile needs to evolve. You know we're working with a sas customer at the moment um, public company, um, they went through massive growth in the the 20 or should we call it the 2018 to 2022 era. Uh, I kind of think of it as uh, but they went product bottom up, so their product-led growth was their main route to market. Um, so they they hired, you know, thousands of salespeople who were high volume, quite transactional, could sell low deal sizes, and lots of them.
Speaker 2:They've now reached that. You know, their kind of growth curves capped out and they need to break through to the enterprise. So now, all of a sudden, they're having to flip. Um, because they've now reached that. You know, their kind of growth curves capped out and they need to break through to the enterprise. So now, all of a sudden, they're having to flip because they've realized that their transactional, high volume salespeople aren't capable of selling big enterprise deals. Oh yeah, so there's a big problem, big challenge. They've got on hand. So what we've helped them do through our technology is understand what does that ideal rep profile need to look like and how can they start now hiring towards that? And then, as you said, onboarding.
Speaker 1:And is that when you say they're not capable? Is it they don't want the? So these reps usually don't want to switch to selling something else or sending to a different customer. Or do they not have the skills? And is it a learning thing or is it just well? This is a different type of employee that we need to search for it can be a combination of both in our experience.
Speaker 2:So I think mindset is a massive challenge that we see in the market at the moment. A lot of organizations today, in 2024, are realizing that inbound is much harder, so they're trying to make the switch to outbound. Now you try and get the amount of conversations I've had with chief revenue officers who are literally pulling their hair out because they've got a team of account executives who are used to being handed inbound leads on a plate and now all of a sudden they're expected to go out to market and build their own pipeline. It's a it's a big mindset shift that, and lots of companies are struggling with that at the moment. So I think part of it is a resistance, it's a mindset uh challenge. Part of it is, of course, is, as you say, skills as well. You know it's a different challenge. Part of it, of course, is, as you say, skills as well.
Speaker 1:You know it's a different skill set required. You mentioned something interesting earlier, which was that leaders come to you with this challenge, which is 10% of our revenue. Workforce are the top that generate whatever percentage percentage, the largest percentage of our revenue, the rest not so much. We need to change that. I mean, that's common, probably for you when you have these leads coming in and talking to you about the solution and so on. But traditionally in sales that wasn't that big of a problem, because if you wouldn't have a, let's say, mindful and focused towards optimization type of leader, they would just continue to throw money at that 10%. Well, you're getting all the bonuses. Oh, if, if you guys want the, the big fat bonuses, you better, um, be more effective, sell harder, do this harder and so on. And it has been usually. Sales is notorious as a as an industry for, you know, just for just splurging the super talented and effective people, salespeople with money and the rest are struggling.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. It's changing is our perspective and what we're seeing in the market. I think sales is one of the should we say one of the later functions to professionalize. I think it's come a long way in the last five years. You know my experience of building this current company, even when we started. Versus where I think the industry is now. It's come a hell of a long way and obviously the pandemic accelerated so many of these trends.
Speaker 2:You know you think about the impact it had on virtual selling and the days of that kind of used car sales person. Yeah, you know, like you say, that I think, from a leadership perspective, that mindset of we're just going to have a revolving door of mid to low performers and we're just going to keep hiring and firing and we're just going to double down and make sure that our high performers are bringing in the bacon In those days that are behind us. Obviously we still see leaders in the market like that you know, in the industry who are still following that old playbook. But as an executive, like that is nuts, you know. You think about that like you're. You're investing in, let's say, 10, you know.
Speaker 2:Well, let's beef the numbers up a little bit. Let's say you've got 50 quota carriers in your revenue team and let's say maybe only 10 of those tops are really at the level that you need them. But it's okay, because you've got one or two who are doing maybe 150, 200 plus of their target. They're literally carrying the other 40. Yeah, they're carrying them on their back. Um, and you think about the cost implications of hiring for these low performers and firing. So you've got the whole hr costs of. You know the fully loaded cost of a a bad sales hire is about 300 000 a year. It's a massive cost to the business and then also from a risk perspective we talked about attrition you know, all it takes is you've only got 10 out of those 50 that are performing or well.
Speaker 2:Two or three of those start to leave and all of a sudden you've got a massive hole in your revenue forecast that you've got to figure out how to plug it's. It's a very inefficient way of building a go-to-market revenue function. I think in today's world with you know, 2024 and 2023, we obviously saw the shift focus on efficiency, capital efficiency, unit economics. I think there's a lot of exec teams now who are looking at their teams and thinking we can't continue like this. We have to raise that performance bar.
Speaker 1:That's good. I think that's a good shift, although you know it looks at performance and so on. A lot of people are quite sensitive when it comes to anything that's around performance and improving, because you know people are getting judged and workforce that is underperforming is a sign and it's a suggestion of something. It's very difficult for me to put it in not sounding in one way or the other in a sense, but I think people need to be helped in a positive, really good way, and if we have more tools, more practices to help leaders help their team, um, then we're in a good place. I would say um yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I mean just to share a quick anecdote. Yeah, on that that point, I sat down with a chief revenue officer of a 35 million arr company yeah, they're trying to make that leap from 30 to 100 million arr and he's got this performance problem 85 of his quota carriers aren't where they need to be. They, they're underperforming, and we were talking about some of the reasons why. And, like you say, the underperformers, it's not always their fault.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it can very well be, and most of the time is the lack of support systems to get them there. Support systems to get them there, be it tooling, be it coaching, be it a lot of things.
Speaker 2:Having a sales manager who actually is A competent in the role and can manage and develop and improve the individuals in their team. Most sales managers are only incentivized on the team target, so if that's the only thing that they're incentivized on, they're just going to continue to uplift that 10% in their team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. How did you get into this, I'm curious. So you said something about ey. Used to work at ey. Um, tell me a bit about your coming to, coming of age, in a sense, and becoming the founder and uh trying a few hubs and and co-founder right, because you have a co-founder and taking upon yourself this massive mission of um of improving uh revenue teams performance. So where, where does where did your story start?
Speaker 2:it's a good question. I'll try not to try to keep it brief as best I can. Um, I think a lot of it stems back to my early experience with work. I started working at the age of 13. So the first job that I had was caddying for wealthy members of a golf club in Sunningdale in Surrey called Sunningdale, so I would rock up there school holidays. I'd be there every day and I'd get £30 for carrying a member's golf clubs for 18 holes. That was like their junior rate and if there weren't any jobs going on the course, we'd walk the members dogs and they would give us five pounds was the going rate for a dog walk you learned how to play golf while doing that.
Speaker 1:Did you like it?
Speaker 2:yeah, I did actually. Yeah, uh, I was. I was golf obsessed, uh, at one point. So it okay, it really it aligned nicely to what I cared about, what in my my teenage years, uh, spent a lot of time on the golf course, but but that was, I guess, a knock-on impact of that was it was almost like, um, an early business education, because I was spending five hours, you know, four to five hours with these guys on the course at a young age, most of whom were successful business people, and what did they tend to talk about on the course? Business, business. Yeah, so you know, I was caddying for CEOs of multi-million pound companies and I was hearing them talk about negotiations and business deals and and I no doubt learned more about how to you know business doing that at the age of 13 than than all of my education and school and and the rest of it so that must have been.
Speaker 1:It must have been fascinating and interesting to you to hear those conversations, because there's probably a lot of caddy teens that would just zone out completely to any discussions and carry on doing their job and so on. But you, picking up all of those conversations, you must must have been fascinated, but by what they were talking about yeah, I've always been super curious as a kid.
Speaker 2:Uh, we'd always just ask ridiculous amount of questions like drive, drive. My parents crazy asking questions. And I think it just came from a family of entrepreneurs, so parents are originally from south africa okay um.
Speaker 2:So both my parents grew up in like apartheid south africa. Um, they left in the 80s, emigrated to the uk um to escape what was a pretty uncertain political situation there at the time. But you know, you look at, my dad has his own business growing up. His father ran his own property company for 25, 30 years, whatever in in South Africa. So I've always sort of grown up around entrepreneurs as well and sort of felt like it was always a calling um. It's only actually I know that feeling yeah, yeah, um, I was a I can't swear on the podcast, but no, you can, it's. I was a shit employee. Uh, like really, really bad. So you know, even when I did odd jobs like working behind bars and waiting tables and stuff, I was horrendous and I hated being there and, just you know, being told what to do. Um, I had a tough time with um. And then, even when I was at EY, I built the. I lasted a few months or whatever, but then came up with an idea within EY to build out their startup program.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I ended up kind of carving out a sort of role, of my own, kind of like an entrepreneur inside the organization taking on this initiative and yeah, running with it exactly.
Speaker 2:And, and you know, I ended up going out to some of the partners at ey and saying you know I've got this idea. Will you sort of back it and support it? And um, there's a partner at the firm who's no longer there, but I'm sure you won't mind me name dropping in, mark hutchinson. He's a great guy. He was leading the technology business at the time and he was one of the early supporters of that um and um, he's also now an investor in uhubs oh okay.
Speaker 2:So I always remember we did a, an investor uh call which will get you in on the next one, and um better, um, they're good fun because there's, you know, an interesting group of investors. Now we've got um, but we asked all the investors to do an introduction to themselves. You know, mark introduced himself and he said you know, I've known matt for some time. We used to work together at ey. He said, but but matt never worked for ey, he's always, he's always worked, done his own thing. You know, like um. So I I think you know a lot of it. A recent realization I've had is that a lot of it, I think, comes back down to like autonomy and really um being ambitious, to to be in control of my own destiny and build my own thing rather than have to play by other people's people's rules and it small jobs while you were growing up and then into EY, and then you started your entrepreneurship journey after EY.
Speaker 2:I probably have had maybe 20 side projects, if not more, always tinkering and trying stuff, everything from complete disasters, like I tried to launch this like Valentine's themed ball when we were at school, okay, so we had like a ticketing.
Speaker 2:Funnily enough, it's a really small world, but I was working on that project selling tickets for the guy who is now ceo of a really big business.
Speaker 2:Okay, he was like a few years older than me, he was going to reading university at the time, um, and he was originally from leeds and I remember him picking he'd pick me up from school in his car and I'd have cash and tickets and he it was my first sales job, and he would you know, he'd basically say up from school in his car and I'd have cash and tickets, and he'd it was my first sales job, and he, would you know, he'd basically say, okay, how many tickets, how much, how much you got for me, how many tickets have you sold? And tickets just weren't, they weren't selling. So I remember having all of these like bad drop-offs. You know he dropped me home, uh, my mom's house, and I'd have to basically, you know, make all these excuses about just haven't been able to sell as many tickets, as I thought, and so um kind of sounds a little bit like a drug. Just a lot to think about I promise it was.
Speaker 2:It was tickets.
Speaker 1:It wasn't tickets um, but I mean, and I remember the time in a story where you know you might be, I've never been the salesperson and when I was young, when I was a teenager, I took this very odd, dodgy job where we were supposed to sell these QVC-like products on. You know, go door to door and sell so we would discount and so on. Like after a day of going, like knocking at people's doors to try to sell them stuff, I'm like I can't do this. This doesn't feel right to me and this company culture is terrible. They keep you on the field to to sell and you have to do a certain quota to even get paid. So if you don't do that quota, you don't get paid for the sales that you had and it was horrendous and at that point I'm like no, that's, this is not for me yeah, there's a lot of sales jobs out there like that, for sure.
Speaker 2:It sounds quite similar to my my ticket selling days, yeah, uh, but I I think that that's the big, yeah, the big misconception with with sales, and this is something that I think a lot of sales people who are early in their career struggle to get their head around as well is people don't, particularly in europe, people don't like being sold to.
Speaker 2:You know, even the concept of words like pitch, like. I always have a problem with words like that in sales because I think if you're having to pitch to people, then you're kind of going about it the wrong way. I think the big kind of secret to sales and where I've had success in sales in my career is you just got to really understand people and understand their problems, and if you can't help them solve their problems, then they're not a fit for you and then you you wish them, in the most respectful way you know, good luck. But it's about finding people that have a specific problem that you can help solve and then having real conviction that you can solve that problem and then finding the best solution to help them solve it.
Speaker 1:I think that really is what sales is so basically turning that on his on its head and positioning it as a and not generally positioning, because that's a reality as well but, um, vocalizing it as you have a problem and I have a solution for your problem, rather than, hey, let me show you this shiny thing, um here and you mentioned pitch and pitching and the connotation um that it currently has. And do you think that this is just in europe? Because I feel that pitch, at least in america, in america, and I don't know, I'm not american. So our fellow american, the listeners of the show yeah, listeners can, can, um approve or disapprove of what I'm saying, but it feels pitch feels more like hey, let me pitch you, like, kind of like pitch yeah, that word is a bit more used as an opportunity.
Speaker 1:Let me pitch you this right I have an opportunity for you. I don't know if that's the case, but most of the time the context that I had with people in US has been as a positive as in. I'm giving you an opportunity more than hey, I'm pitching you because I'm like trying to get something out of you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's fair culture.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's been so well documented, right, but culturally is so different two sides of the pond.
Speaker 2:You know we're doing a lot of business in the us now, a percentage of our overall revenue and it's um, I think there's a lot less friction to doing business in North America.
Speaker 2:In my experience and I haven't had like decades and decades of experience selling into the North America but just based on our experience in this business alone, I'd say so the cultural nuances in Europe are, of you know, very, very severe, like you know the very, very severe, like you know the the difference between working with, uh, nordic customer versus a customer in Germany. There's a lot to wrap your head around and I think it's very difficult if you haven't got local boots on the ground in in those regions in Europe to to do business, whereas I feel like in North America, the. Yeah, I've got a North American customer we've been working with recently who puts on an English accent every time I join a call and makes jokes about British humor and it's funny. So we're talking about Monty Python and British comedy. It almost I think it can actually help with sales in North America. That's my experience anyway.
Speaker 1:I see I want to get back to your failed mini projects and so on. That's where the juicy parts are. Tell me more. What else did you try to to um start and uh, it crashed and burned. We've done all sorts?
Speaker 2:um, I've done, I did cds was it was a big one, so the the sort of era of limewire, and if you remember the music streaming days, it was like Napster, but LimeWire was the one I used and then we would like burn CDs. Um, so I go to Woolworths, buy the blank CD covers and then I'll go to Google Images and download the album art. Of course, you know, um the CD business was, uh, a very low margin business. Definitely you have to sell a lot of cds to make it worthwhile. Um, we had, when I was at university I did did quite a lot on um e-commerce, so flipping, you know, buying and selling. Um what were you flipping? A lot of golf equipment, so golf balls were a good biggest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you already knew.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you already knew that market, yeah, so storing stock was always a problem. Also remember, umbrellas was a random one, but I lived with a guy who became the campus ambassador for one of the big enterprise organizations probably shouldn't name, and he got hold of like a thousand umbrellas and he was obviously supposed to hand them out around. He was selling them, yeah, and I got got hold of them. And then I remember one I had a girlfriend at the time and I managed to convince her that it was a good idea. We were steam ironing off the branding from the umbrellas. So I put a detail down, you know, steaming off the branding.
Speaker 1:Another one, wrap it back up, put it in no wonder none of these stuck, because they're all either illegal or wrong lessons. Yeah, maybe another way but this is this is really good hustle to start getting yourself into business and learning certain traits and getting certain skills around running your business and figuring out ways of making things happen right yeah, totally, totally um.
Speaker 2:When, when I go back to south africa because that's where mom and dad originally from there's um quite a few mentors that I've got out there. You know sort of grew up around um. One of them is a really interesting guy called len um len tunison, who's now well into his 90s and he's been very ill recently. Len is an absolute legend, so I digress a little bit here, but he's the seventh son of a seventh son.
Speaker 1:Seventh son of a seventh son. What are the odds?
Speaker 2:of that and supposedly there's something in the Bible about the seventh son of a seventh son being being blessed.
Speaker 1:So he might be something to do.
Speaker 2:Seven, seven, seven, there's another seven, and might we might be have the end of the world, something like that yeah, just tell him not to have more than six kids but uh, but len is he's one of these very unique characters.
Speaker 2:He's lived his whole life believing he was blessed and he's run a number of very successful businesses and he's got amazing stories and stuff. But I remember just talking to him about lots of the lessons that you learn along the way and these stupid examples that I've given of trying to build, uh, entrepreneurial stuff. But one of the lessons that I remember from len is he taught me a word called um chutzpah, which is like a yiddish uh term, which basically means like, cheeky, like, and he basically would always say to me like you know, you got to remember like when, when you run your own businesses one day, you've got to remember you've got to have a bit of chutzpah, so you've got to be a bit cheeky, you know you've got to, you've got to ask for business, you've got to um. I think that's that's quite an important um important lesson that he taught me and is that what got you into?
Speaker 1:you've done sales right. So you, since the age of 13 yeah, that sounds like something that kind of stuck with you and got you into this sales type of mentality and approach right, have a bit of cheek, um, because you have to have to. You have to, if you, if you're going to go out there and start cold calling and chatting up people, um, and selling a variety of things, you have to have a bit of cheek right to be courageous and step forward and yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2:you know, in the early days of you hubs, my co-founder ash and I because it was just the two of us we would go. We didn't have an office so we'd go to the net in bank the club and they've got the downstairs bits open to the public and we would go to the NED and do cold calling blitz together in the NED Probably the most expensive cup of tea you could order in London.
Speaker 1:But wait, would they have booths or something like?
Speaker 2:that We'd sit up either on the round tables in the corner there's like a little cafe bit or they've got these like marble high tables that are like restaurants in the evenings but in the day they're like empty. So we'd the two of us would sort of sit up there with our laptops and just we'd be cold calling so it must have been very smooth and quiet.
Speaker 1:salespeople not very loud Imagine being super loud.
Speaker 2:I remember the one that. So we'd have competitions. So my co-founder and I were very competitive, so we'd have, you know, just set a challenge two of us, who can book the most meetings, who can make the most calls, and we'd literally have, like you know, a tally. So a dial is a mark and a meeting is a mark. Yeah and um, we were obviously drawing a lot of attention because a guy walked over to me after I booked a meeting and um gave me his business card and I forget what you know. He was a big finance guy, like a v VP of one of these big banks or whatever, and he said I haven't heard cold calling like that in years. He said take my card. So those were good times. Cool, cool, cool.
Speaker 1:So you, kind of like, told your own story and sung your own tune. But who won? Was it you or Ash, that's.
Speaker 2:Uh, there were, there were, there was more than one occasion. So, yeah, if you, you know, if ash was in the room, we'd, we'd say, uh, you know, I won one, then ash one, but uh, there was only one winner okay, I'll make sure that I'll clip this and send it to ash.
Speaker 1:Yeah, put a bit of beef between you. Maybe it just starts the flame again and you start doing a little competition about selling uHubs. Pipeline will go like that, yeah. So you talked about early days and starting. How did you get to this? How did you decide you want to start u-hubs?
Speaker 2:so the the journey at ui was really, really interesting, um, because came up with that idea, went to mark, got a bunch of money um to do my own thing and then basically worked with some of the partners in the business to hide from what they call resourcing.
Speaker 1:So in the consulting world, if you've ever worked to, you've pretty much always done startups right uh, yes, but I also worked for a company that, um, I was in the product team but they had a consultancy services business, then they were working with financial institutions and so on. So I kind of got a bit of the hints of how things work cool, so you know it's.
Speaker 2:You know, in the consulting or agency game it's all about chargeability and how much time you bill the customer, so so pack more features and more offers on top yeah, and just you know, stay chargeable as much as you can is really like the the objective break things and have yourself fix them, yeah the problem I had was that I was building this, this startup program, internally but I wasn't chargeable, so I wasn't billing my time to clients, and that became a real problem for the, for the well, for my, my role and my future prospects.
Speaker 2:So, you know, we built this thing, we'd sort of built like a part-time team around it and we I'd gone out and started building all these relationships with startup founders, um, but I needed the support of the other partners in the organization to basically shield me so that resourcing didn't keep coming after me saying who the hell does this guy think he is like? He hasn't billed any time to any clients for three months or whatever. Um. So you know, in the end I ended up seconding to a business that um ey just acquired, which was a design and um a venture studio and service design agency called seren.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that was an interesting transition because then I was sort of moving over there and a venture studio and service design agency called Seren.
Speaker 2:So that was an interesting transition because then I was sort of moving over there and ended up in a pretty unique role, sort of building out the startup program, but then also working in a sales role, reporting into the CEO. I actually had two bosses at the time. Both got fired, so I reported to the CEO for a bit. New boss came in. He also got fired, so I ended up reporting back to the ceo wait, did they got fired after the acquisition?
Speaker 1:or was it a like a deal? Or was it like, okay, you're not a fit, you're out? Of here so you got to work with them, basically got to work with them, uh, but for numerous reasons.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but two, two bosses went, uh, got dismissed. So, um, great learnings during that period, like, got to work with some really awesome clients, um, but networked the the hell out of the london startup scene. So you know, I was going to like three to four networking events a week. I was also living at home at the time to save money, um, so I was living with my mom and I was commuting back and forth, so it was, those were like crazy long days because I was going to networking events till like 10 or however, you know, you know, with the beers, the pizza come out two to three times a week and this is kind of like a mini going out as well, because you know you have a couple of beers, eat pizza, whatever.
Speaker 2:It's like a evening out like two or three times a week. I must have taken off so many years of my life, like the diet and lack of sleep was like horrendous at that time. Yeah, um, but long story short, I got to build an awesome network. So I met incredible founders who are still very good friends of mine today uh, some of them. And then I also got to um work commercially with these companies. So you know the the value proposition was we can provide value add services to you. So if it's like r&d tax credit grants or um, we had a investment banking division at u-hub. So if you wanted to look at selling your company, you know ey could help um, so we, we put together like a menu menu of services. And then I was going out networking with founders and bringing them into the ey ecosystem and then helping plug them into ey customers as well to help them grow their revenue. And it was that part that gave us the inspiration because it was working with the scale-up businesses. You know, got a front row seat working with some awesome founders, um, that built amazing companies.
Speaker 2:Um, but go to market was always the problem. You know. There was hiring and firing in the sales teams. Uh, there was lots of turnover, um, and the the key barrier to raising the next funding round or exiting the business was was always typically around revenue, right. So we lent into that and we're like well, what's going on there? You know, why is that such a big problem for businesses?
Speaker 2:Um, and then the enterprises I was working with on the other side also had this shift that was emerging, which is like people want more out of a career than just a paycheck. They want to feel like they're growing, they want to feel like they're developing, they want to realize their potential. So it was these two, you know, scale up businesses struggling with go-to-market enterprises, struggling with workforce development. I was like there's something here, there's like there must be a better way, a new, you know, a unique way, um, and then that was really like the the start point, uh. And then I met ash during that period of building the startup network and we met in a toilet, uh, at a bc event nice, classic. Yeah, I got chatting, you know like washing our hands, got chatting, ended up walking to old Street Station and we bumped into each other three more times and I'm a believer that if something happens, three times you've got to act on it.
Speaker 1:But were you working kind of in the same area? But anyways, how big London is and it's quite. I thought when I Pretty random, yeah, I thought when I parked here that I saw someone that I knew, that I used to work with. I'm like, surely not. I don't even think they're in this city anymore. They could have. Might have well been. I could have just get out of the car and kind of like call their name and potentially, oh what the? But because I was like so shocked that I was seeing that person there, I'm like, nah, that's not, that's not them.
Speaker 2:so, yeah, it's meeting up really, yeah, yeah, and it was in pretty quick succession as well, um, you know, and he and I with me, maybe he was talking could have been yeah he knew what he wanted.
Speaker 1:maybe this entire partnership is premeditated by him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's all part of a grand plan.
Speaker 1:Now you got me thinking how did you well, let's segue from that, they never said that, so you knew that there was this miss. Right, there's something that was missing. And did you meet ash where you're at that point? Or did you already figure out what you wanted to do and brought ash, like, sold the idea to ash and you guys started? Or did you both kind of discover, no, well, okay, so you have this feeling about you know we need to hit this segment of the market and then figure it out. How did that work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I, ash and I were talking about the problem and I was like there's a real opportunity here. You know it's big, there's, you know, huge industry, massive TAM, and there's no products. You know it's like there's no leading product brands in this space. You know it's all just this kind of like nice to have one-off training and consulting um, and I said, in the scale-ups we've got massive networks there between you and I, because you know ash's background first marketing director at justy and he's done five startups now and he's got a big network as well. So like be a great market to go after because we know they've got a pain point and go to market and it's a. It's a skills and competence problem.
Speaker 2:What if we could build, you know, a bit more of a productized thing that's more scalable? And um, and ash ash had an idea. So he he pitched me the idea. We met in and um in a co-working space in north london. I still remember it and he pitched me this idea for up skill hubs uh, which is where the name u hubs comes from. Yeah, so he pitched me the idea and he said I've got this idea.
Speaker 2:I think the way that we could solve this and this was 2019, so, like just before the pandemic, he said we've got massive networks of amazing experts in sales marketing go to market. He said what if we created a micro campus idea, which is, you know membership you book through a platform and we'll bring together teams from different businesses into a micro campus? Basically a we work right and then we'll beam the experts from our network from anywhere around the world onto the screen and then we'll do collaborative learning on different topics to plug the skills gaps. Um, that was the first idea for you, pretty different to very different where we are today, right, um, but he pitched me that idea and I was like I don't know if it's gonna work, but it's an interesting idea. Um, and then he had a a team slide was his only other slide. Okay, it had him as co-founder, and then he put my face in it.
Speaker 1:In what so him co-founder and me co-founder and he was like.
Speaker 2:He was like I think you're the right person to help me build this business. He was like what do you think of the idea? I was like I'm not sure on the idea. There's something here, let me think on it. And then I went to visit my sister in indonesia for three weeks. I just did loads of reading and loads of reflecting and it's like there's something here we've got to go to market that we've got to test it.
Speaker 1:So then we, you know, signed the co-founder agreement and started cold calling in the net so how did that wild idea of putting this kind of like shared microspace together converting to what you're doing now?
Speaker 2:I think we might need another episode Birof.
Speaker 1:It's certainly crazy stories. Did you build, did you prototype stuff with the previous idea? It's certainly crazy stories. Did you build, did you prototype stuff with the previous idea? And maybe tell me, at one point you were like nah, Pivot yeah yeah, so this was late 2019.
Speaker 2:I'd done a bit of hustling. I had a contact at WeWork. I said, okay, for this micro campus idea of work, we've got to test it in a really lean way. Let's get some meeting rooms at we work. Yeah, we works got cool space. They had screens. It was like you know we were was flying at the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah 2019 it was still free free beer and and you know, so we could create this kind of social learning concept through it. And, um, yeah, and then we we just basically would would build up a. We build up a mailing list and we were cold calling companies, we were getting their team members to come, and that process was incredible for gathering data, because we built up a data set of potential users. We then ran a number of different experiments to get them to pay. So we started off charging a consumer subscription, which I think was about £18.99 a month. What's a?
Speaker 1:consumer subscription.
Speaker 2:So they would pay themselves. So they would pay U-Hubs £18, £19 a month and they'd get access to our platform, which was an MVP that we built on Webflow with a third party.
Speaker 1:I mean Webflow is pretty cool nowadays.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great, great, great product 2019, not so sure. So you know costs. Ash and I put like a bit of money into the business each to begin with, but the cost to get it off the ground was literally less than a thousand pounds yeah you know, we hacked the website together ourselves.
Speaker 2:We put in a third party plugin booking system so you could click. I mean, the ux was awful, but you could book a class with an expert, reserve your seat and then our back end was eventbrite. So it's eventbrite would confirm the guest list and send details of the venue and where.
Speaker 1:It was nice and stuff, but that's how it's supposed to be, at least in the right. You shouldn't be spending more than two grand on launching your MVP with no code and all of these things If you don't have money. If you have money, if you go and say, hey, I have this great idea, no revenue, no beta, no proof of concept, nothing. I just have the idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you're lucky enough to get funded or if you can, if you have a ton of money in the bank account, then you can definitely invest. But it doesn't really make sense to launch something and then put tens of thousands of dollars into building the mvp um you should validate the MVP before you launch and have some confidence in what you're launching.
Speaker 1:But I mean, I feel that if you have money to spend, it's worth spending in other ways you know what I mean Like sales and getting leads and so on rather than building something bespoke. We have so many options nowadays. I think in 2019, it wasn't that much. Webflow was something that was just coming up.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I mean you should be proud of that.
Speaker 1:Okay, they started it with two grand.
Speaker 2:If you came to one of our micro campuses, you might have a different opinion.
Speaker 1:But it wasn't about. Also, it wasn't about the potentially, about like the tool. It was about these campuses that you're creating. At the end of the day, if I see value in what you're proposing as the membership and so on, I might not look at the oh, this button is like that or this UI is like that. If you're selling something that appeals to me, it was really really to you.
Speaker 2:It was really really lean and it was just Ash and I and we got I'm trying to remember what level of traction we got to. I think we got close to 50 people paying us, okay. So we got to about how much were you charging? £1000 a month. So, yeah, we were charging like, yeah, call it £20 a month. Okay, that's not bad how fast. We were charging like, yeah, call it 20 quid a month, okay.
Speaker 1:That's not bad. How fast were you able to generate those subscriptions?
Speaker 2:Within like two or three months. But then it stopped and then people would come and love the uniqueness Because, bear in mind, this is pre-COVID, right? So Zoom wasn't like massively adopted yet. You know, like everyone was still working in an office. The idea of coming to a communal space with people you didn't know, networking and then having an expert from Cape Town or Australia sharing their wisdom with you about how to run a sales playbook or how to do X, that was pretty unique. So, yeah, we were making some noise.
Speaker 2:I think the reality is that that business was never going to work. The unit economics sucked and the offline aspect of that business was a shambles, like the, the amount of things you'd have to do behind the scenes to get it live. I'll tell you a quick story. Um, go for it. That comes to mind. We had one time where the expert got stuck in traffic, so we had we did multiple campuses, so we had one. We even did one in Stockholm once as a test. So we did one in we worked Stockholm, we did one in London. Two campuses beamed up to one expert who's joining via zoom and he's in the back of a taxi wow, so did he do the.
Speaker 1:It was a nightmare those the session from the cab.
Speaker 2:He did it from the cab and then everyone in the campus was like we're watching a guy travel in the back of a taxi. And then he's like arguing with a taxi driver and he forgets to mute himself and we're like in the room being like, oh my god, this is horrendous experience and it's especially if you know, if you had, uh, members that already participated in some of the other campuses and they're great, this is like a bit cringy, you know.
Speaker 1:It's like, oh well, it just happened. But if you have a lot of people that are coming for the first time and that's what they see for the first time, now cancel and give me my money back exactly, yeah, exactly, and there's a learning in there, right?
Speaker 2:because when it comes to like training, if, if you deliver training for the first time to somebody and they have a bad experience, you're done like, that reputation is gone. Yeah, they think you suck, true? So, um, we had all of these learnings. I mean, that was an absolute shit show trying to run that business, and then, obviously, you know. What is funny about that, though, is there was an israeli competitor who raised a two and a half. I can't remember that, maybe it was more. They raised a big and a half. I can't even remember the name, maybe it was more. They raised a big seed round from a UK VC, who I can't remember who it was, but they were doing exactly the same thing. It was called Jolt. I still remember the name of it Jolt J-O-L-T.
Speaker 2:They raised money and the other companies there are called Jolt there's another SaaS business called Jolt, but it wasn't that one, it was a. If you look hard enough, I'm sure you'll find it. Now I'm curious. They went out of business.
Speaker 1:The business model would never, it just didn't work yeah, but that also tells you that VCs and investors just put money in anything. It was wild times then. Anything that walks and talks. I mean, I've seen so many Like even you're talking about WeWork, like that entire thing like how could you not see that this is not going to go anywhere just by someone saying, yeah, this fancy technology and so on should have some? It's great when people can talk the talk, but you'd also have to have some sort of walk the walk to to to prove that there's a lot of debate at the moment is across the investor community.
Speaker 2:I, I follow, you know some uh sure a lot of the same guys and and girls that you follow and vc's talking about, you know, a tech enabled business versus a true tech business. Well, you know, yeah, you know, we work's a great example, right real estate business that was invested in and valued as a tech business, but there's no tech.
Speaker 1:So what a membership portal. That sounds more towards what you're doing Campus, yeah, but clearly that didn't work out for you and I'm curious how was that? You said it's a long story, but at what point you had that aha moment about you, hobbs, because you're clearly now on the right path and you've had an amazing progress and so on. So you had, at that point, an aha moment. Was it also an aha moment? Because some people don't. They just gradually transition to something else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the sexy answer would be there was one light bulb moment that changed everything. But the reality is is not that you?
Speaker 2:know, startups are ugly, yeah, and I think anyone that tells you otherwise is lying. They're scrappy, they're not pretty, it's just constant pushing the boulder up the hill and iterating as fast as you can. And we iterate pretty quickly away from that campus model, and the pandemic obviously put a final end to that. But the big switch for us was the move for our. You know, we did that b2c thing. We got some subscribers paying us there, but it it was Unique Economics didn't look good. You know, high churn, very low LTV.
Speaker 2:And then one of the companies reached out to us and they said hey, you hubs, I've got training budget for my sales team. I haven't seen anyone doing anything different in the market to improve the productivity of my guys. Come in and if you can improve the productivity of my team I'll pay you. And off the back of that we did a deal to do like virtual on demand. So we had a kind of on demand. We were like upload into our evolving platform some on demand. So we have a kind of on demand. We like upload into our evolving platform some on-demand content and we'll do a bit of live stream sessions as well.
Speaker 1:And um, and we signed like a 10k deal okay, so basically you pivoted into a services consultancy business. Yeah, and for like, for how long you had to do that?
Speaker 2:so I would say that was pandemic. That was us for the next six to twelve months, building virtually from my mom's kitchen, couldn't leave the house, weird time. But the validation and the experiments we'd run and just the honesty that we had with investors at the time, that was enough to get us like a family and friends round.
Speaker 1:So 2020, we raised 150,000 pounds to enable us to, you know, go full-time and actually hire our first hire for the for the consultancy stuff, consultancy, but we're building the product in the back, building the product and I suppose that was your, your knowledge, that you had and that you were helping companies through the consultancy bit you started packing that into a product proposition, exactly okay, yeah, I.
Speaker 2:There were loads of aha moments along the way. I think one of the big ones was taking the assessment approach that we'd used in the consulting world and trying to productize that. So I built an MVP of an assessment survey where we would ask a bunch of questions and then we would score sellers on different competencies. So we'd have competencies like negotiation, communication skills, and we would get the managers to score them and we get the rep to score themselves, and then we'd analyze the difference between the two data points. And then the third thing is we'd ask them for their latest performance data manually, because we didn't have an integration with CRM.
Speaker 2:And I built that on Excel as the MVP. And then we piloted it with a sas business who eventually became a customer, and playing back the data in a visual way, you know, showing them what good looked like and where their high performers were strong and where their weak performers weren't there. The customer turned around and said, if you build that, I'll pay for it, and I was like, ah, there's something here, there's a product here. And that's then when we hired our first developer and Brody, who's now our product leader, and we were really off to the races on the product side.
Speaker 1:That's a very I would say obviously I've heard that quite often common story. I'm not saying that you're not special, I'm not saying that, but this is it's a very effective way to get into product Consult, provide services, knowledge, services, Work for a bunch of companies, Solve problems for them. You'll start seeing patterns. You can start asking your customers would you pay for this product? If they're like that's a lifesaver, you have something of value there. So kudos to you that you were able to have that aha moment and see that, because there are also consultancies and services teams that just carry on implementing every single bespoke stuff and every single project looks completely different and never they don't have that sense of patterns. Seeing patterns and putting something together that helps you, even if it's internal, and it just helps you not have to do all the groundwork all the time, but actually helps you get rid of some of those repetitive things that you put together, that's a great attitude to have, I would say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair and providing services is just a great way, as you say, to validate. Yeah, what are people willing to pay for? We found as well that there's a ton of education. We feel that needs to happen in the space you know, you've got organizations spending hundreds of thousands on training, but it's like like how can you even think about training before you actually know what the problems are? Where are the gaps.
Speaker 1:What are they training for? Because, like you're not performing, so let me put you on a course. Maybe that'll help that. That feels like shooting in the dark.
Speaker 2:Everyone feels good about themselves for the day, you know, and then they go back to their day jobs. And how much of it do they actually put into practice? Yeah, like 87 percent of what a salesperson learns in formal training. They forget in the first 30 days. It's not.
Speaker 1:There's really bad roi on on that spend I'm sure you've had a lot of tough pills to swallow in your journey, sounds like since you're 12, as an entrepreneur, as a hustler and so on. Have you ever thought of retrospectively, of what was that one moment where you had the biggest tough pill to swallow, in a sense moment over your career so far? A realization or? A revelation of this and I realize I've always thought that things were different and I'm not happy.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 1:We're getting deep now, appreciate it. Door is the end.
Speaker 2:You know, I did the last year I did. I did executive coaching for the first time, which was new to me, never done that kind of thing before so did a sort of structured program that's I'm still finishing up at the moment actually um, and that has been very transformational in terms of sort of holding up a mirror and shining a light on limiting beliefs and, um, there's been so, so many challenges. Yeah, I mean, you know the journey, right, you lived it. So every day there's fires to put out. Some are just bigger than others. It's quite hard to pick one moment. I think if I was to choose one thing, it would be coming to the realization that doing more doesn't always get you further. So I'll break that down. My mentality has always been push harder, never give up, just never say die, keep going. And leading founder-led sales. In recent years, the way that I've programmed myself to think about growth is that the more customer calls I'm having, the more we're growing if I'm having.
Speaker 2:You know, I had second week of this year. I slipped. I went back into the bad limiting belief. I had 32 uh customer calls in a week. So you know, sometimes doing between five to ten demos a day, that's intense and what it does is I.
Speaker 2:I learned last year and the year before you can sustain that for only so long and what actually happens is on a, on a micro level your energy. You sleep if you go to the gym, you eat good breakfast and you feel good again, and then your energy, just gradually. You know there's only so much energy you can bring to those calls Right. So the quality of the last call was nowhere near the quality of the first call, of course, because the batteries were just like dead and it was the first time last year.
Speaker 2:One of my team members said to me take a holiday. And I went home and it was like a, an aha moment and it was like shit, do I look that tired? But in an early stage company you're working so closely? It's like your team know, yeah, they know when you're about to drop off, yeah, and when the energy levels aren't what they were, yeah. So for one of my junior team members to say take a holiday, shit, I do, yeah. So I've been on this journey, the last nine months or so of trying to improve as a founder, to recognize that more, doing more, doesn't always result in achieving more, growing more, yeah, um, and it's a work in progress.
Speaker 1:It's very hard to because it's also, let me say, we have this tendency, especially founders, to to think like that, to think volumes is what you need to succeed. If you grind harder, if you sleep less, if you do more calls, then you're going to win. And it's a very tough pill to swallow to realize that there's a lot of things that are out of your control, a lot and especially for someone that's quite like for me, add and have FOMO and can't stand still. Fomo and Khan stand still, and as soon as I feel like things are going like this that I panic and I need to push it. It's very hard to realize Sometimes you just can't be the master and the driver and you just need to let things to take course and it's a bit of luck, it's a lot of work, it's a bit of luck and it's also being self aware.
Speaker 1:And actually I was having a conversation with Ifti here before you and we were talking about what some founders, the reason why some founders succeed is that they know when to give up a certain activity or task and pivot, do something else, try something else, move into a different direction. And it's very hard because you think of the sunken cost, right, when you reach a point it's like but I put way too many hours in these calls, I can't give up now. I can't do something else, I can't do less, because look how much effort I put. If I slow down, all of that might be for nothing, right? So you sink even more effort and time into it. So some cost fallacy is you know some people think when they think of that term, they think project management and budgeting of projects and so on. No, it's pretty much you as a, as an individual, um, your time, your money, yes, but also your mental, physical well-being and so on. And I've been also in a moment where I I just destroyed my physical health because I wanted to build the next thing and I was like but I already, I'm already terrible at sleeping, I'm extremely skinny, I'm I'm very tired. That already happened. I can't back down now. It's like carry on or and and achieve that and succeed, or vanish in thin air after not being said, and that's, and that's the thing, that that I was going down the wrong path and you have to know when you know you might need to just pivot or rethink your approach, especially if you work that long, 10 demos and calls a day and so on.
Speaker 1:Another thing that was just a lot of volume. There's another thing that I was just talking here with. If these like the, the decompression period, when do you decompress, like if you on, you're always on on with with your day stuff and with just grinding, when do you have time to step back? Because you just go home, collapse, wake up the next day and do the same thing? And if you don't decompress, how would you even know that you might need to slightly adjust this and pivot here and doing that because you don't have that kind of like. Well, I'm glad that that you, you got to that realization. I think that is a very big um, you know, tough cookie to to really understand and and and be happy with not happy but like um, um content.
Speaker 2:It's realizing that you know, volume is not always the best thing totally and I think, just to give a personal experience, um, an example from my experience, the the outcome can be what is often worse when you try to force it. Yeah, right, so last year I was trying to close a deal. It's ridiculous. It sounds like a ridiculous story as I'm saying it to you. Right, I was going with my girlfriend to glastonbury festival first time. Uh, you know I've been trying to get tickets for 10 years or whatever. She was excited.
Speaker 2:You know, I was excited just thinking about this deal and was trying to get the deal closed, thought, thought I could get the deal closed Just before Glastonbury Ended up. So stupid, ended up taking a laptop with me To Glastonbury, getting on the train. That was it. The call got pushed. So I thought in my head I can do the call from the station, then put the laptop away, get on the train, go to Glastonbury and take a few days off. The call got pushed.
Speaker 2:Now, you know, like an idiot I agreed to doing the call later, but I was just so in this mindset of got to do it now, got to get the deal done, got to do more, more, more, more if we want to grow, and um, ended up having to jump off the train uh, not literally when it was moving, but get off at an earlier stop, go into some random village in the middle of nowhere in england and find a pub that had horrendous wi-fi and buy like a beer that I didn't really want, that was like warm and flat, um, to use the wi-fi. And we were the only people in there and my girlfriend was like this is ridiculous. And I was moving around the pub trying to get the wi-fi to work because of the bad wi-fi and because the pub landlord got fed up of my shout because I talk loudly as it is when I want a video called really loud got so fed up he went and turned the jukebox on so the prospect couldn't hear me and couldn't. The call was horrendous because the wi-fi was bad background noise. Um, we didn't win the deal, but I obviously only would you know find that out weeks later.
Speaker 2:But I look back at that as like if I know, if I don't learn from that like that was so stupid I didn't have to cram that call in, then I could have just rescheduled it for the following week, like what's the big deal? And we might have won the deal. I would have been in a much better shape to do it. When you're trying to force something and you want it that bad, you know, when you're really trying to do something, yeah, it doesn't always come off. You know. I think it's like there's the law of attraction, you know you, you need to actually just kind of step up, step back, like you say, and let the universe run its course um, very valid and and I completely agree, and it sometimes it sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you feel like you're super prepared and it doesn't Like at the end of the day, that's the thing that was mentioned. We can't control absolutely everything and be the drivers of everything, because otherwise we would have to be the masters of everything Right, if we would of our customers, the bosses of our customers, the bosses of our relatives, the bosses of our relatives, the bosses in order to be able to control everything. And then you become what a tyrant of the world. Right, you can't really control everything, so we just have to be okay with it, and sometimes those no answers is just because context, that's nothing to do with us, yeah, and you might not know that. And you just have to accept that things happen and not beat yourself up. I think that's why I'm not a good salesperson, because I beat myself up every single time I get a no or a rejection. So I'll stay, I'll keep to my other dealings and not get into sales. Quick, I know we're running out of time. Quick flash three questions before we go.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:You can answer me quickly whatever comes first into your head. So number one quote that you live by I gave the chutzpah one earlier.
Speaker 2:I think that's quite a good one. There is another one, though, by a guy, another mentor in my life, a guy called Peter Frame. He's no longer with us. He was also a great, great businessman and met him briefly before he passed. He had a phrase which was we'll make a plan, and he lived his whole life with this concept of don't worry, we'll make a plan.
Speaker 1:I always think that's like a really great philosophy for life yeah, it is book that you really enjoyed, so many good ones there's a book by Mark Cuban, the US entrepreneur yeah cool.
Speaker 2:It's a small book, really easy to read, called Winning at the Sport of Business. Winning at the Sport of Business Winning at the Sport of Business.
Speaker 1:Game changer Changed my life. I haven't read it. I'll give it a read, especially if you're short. My attention span is very short, me too. And third, a good habit that you advocate for.
Speaker 2:If you say you're going to do something, do it, or at least make your best efforts to make sure it happens. Yeah. So if you say you're going to send the email tomorrow, send it. If you say you're going to you commit something to your team, your investors, your partner, your mom, yeah, just do it.
Speaker 1:'re gonna what you say you're gonna do, and if that doesn't work, just promise yourself that you will reward yourself with a box of Krispy Kreme after you've done it. That works for me. There you go, awesome. Thank you so much. This is a lovely conversation. We had a shorter time but I'm sure quite close. In this journey. I'm following you and we'll have you back here. We also need to have Ash on the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'll get him down. We'll get him down and we'll get you some merchandise as well. Thank you, Cheers bro.
Speaker 1:Cheers © transcript.
Speaker 2:Emily.
Speaker 1:Beynon.
