The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 5 - Ben Francis On How To Respond When Things Go Wrong

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this episode I look back on a conversation I had back in 2017 with the Founder of Gymshark, Ben Francis. Together we look into how Ben’s resilience and composure under pressure has helped make Gymshark one of the biggest sportswear brands in the UK, and the insane story of when Ben wrote 1000s of handwritten letters to customers in order to uphold customer satisfaction. Ben: https://www.instagram.com/benfrancis/ https://twitter.com/benfrancis1992 

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I was reading about your story online before I came here and I've watched a couple of videos and stuff. And I remember a day on this point of like resilience, which you touched on.

I remember a day early on where I thought we were done because some shit had happened. We'd been hacked. All of our clients had been emailed this abusive, horrible, specific email. And I thought we were fucking done. And it was the day when we were on our way to our team building day. So everyone's on their way to like fucking paintballing or something. 6am in the morning, all of our clients start emailing me like abuse, like cancel everything.

And having to turn the team around on a day which was meant to be happy and bring them all back to the office and say, listen, all your clients are gone. Maybe we're all gone. It was a tough day. There was dark days in your story. Yeah. I mean, we had a few. Yeah, I mean, I don't find it the end of the world. Like I said, everyone's pretty understanding that we're going to take big, big risks.

I mean, we've had lots of issues. So when we were a small business, someone tried to steal our trademark and we had to spend every penny to get that back. We spent, again, every penny we had to get the domain name. There was a point where we genuinely couldn't afford stock, so I was begging suppliers to get a stock in and we'll pay you once we've sold it sort of thing.

But to me, that wasn't a huge issue. I found that pretty fun, actually. The first issue, the first time you had something big happen like that, did it feel... I guess I know the answer to the question, but did it feel different when those issues happened today? I'm trying to understand how resilience is created. And from my perspective, it's like you get past that first piece of bullshit. And then bullshit piece number two, you've got the hindsight of...

Yeah, there is that thing when you first start out and you think everyone's a really good person and everything's going to go okay. And then by the time you sort of, I guess, while you're a few years in, you realise that nothing ever goes okay and there's always going to be people that want to knock you down a peg or two so you just have to sort of be aware of that and and you know and just make sure that you're sort of bulletproof and everything that you're doing is for the right reasons what was the day

where you thought you thought fuck we're fucked was there a day I read about a story on Black Friday where oh god that was a fucking nightmare that was yeah Mag Yeah. Magento messed up, absolutely. The whole website crashed. On Black Friday. On Black Friday. We were down for hours, literally completely messed up everything. Orders were coming in and the system was just, like, vomiting nothing out. Orders were delayed. And the whole, yeah, that was an absolute nightmare.

And to me, genuinely, there was no issues with me personally. I had no problems, like problems with me dealing with that. The frustrating thing for me was that customers had come on, and obviously Black Friday, there's tons of new people coming on, and they wanted the kit, and they couldn't get it, and they were being messed around. And for me, every single thing I took really personally, and it did really upset me.

But we, from that, next Black Friday was the best Black Friday that we could ever imagine. Because of that, I'm so well well versed with making sure that nothing goes wrong going forward again you know touch wood hopefully nothing does go wrong and at some point things probably will but every time we do something big every time we do a launch a sale or Black Friday we've got plan a plan B plan C plan D like we're making sure that you know all possible issues are covered way before and then I think that was just naivety.

I think going into that Black Friday, we were very naive. We were a very young business and we just sort of assumed everything would be okay. And in hindsight, I imagine that's been... Because it's the same as when we got hacked. We didn't think about fucking cybersecurity until that day. And now we're like... And it's a shame, but you do have to think about those things.

In a weird way, although it mightn't be the best use of word, has that been a bit of a blessing? Yeah, there's tons of things like that. Blessings in way, although it mightn't be the best use of word, has that been a bit of a blessing? Yeah, there's tons of things like that, blessings in disguise, like you say, it's, because however else would you learn, you just wouldn't learn those things, so I think everyone has to sort of encounter some sort of issues like that before they learn. And I read that you sent out like thousands of handwritten letters. Oh my god, my hand, and then I was writing every single person that had an issue. I made sure I wrote them all birthday cards.

So every week, at the start of the week, I'd have to sit there and write for hours. Like I'm talking like all day, birthday cards to every single person with a discount to make sure that, you know, we're sorry. Because again, I take it really personally. My hand would kill by the end of those days. Isn't that part of the reason though,

why you've, going back to the start point about like authenticity and having these values and stuff like that isn't that the, on that day a lot of people would have been like oh fuck. You literally, so you, on Black Friday just to be clear problem with your website, the website was down for eight hours, people tried to order they got messed around a little bit. Yeah. After following that you spent days writing thousands of handwritten letters to those people apologising. All the staff here, because it was a much smaller team, were working. There was one

guy that did a 38 hour shift or something like that. Their work ethic that I saw of everyone here was absolutely incredible. It was genuinely brilliant. That's part of your values though. Most people wouldn't write fucking 2,000 handwritten letters. So for me that's also part of the reason you're here and why you're staying where you are is because you care like a lot of people see it we'll see it as a business or like the numbers etc but you you're looking at it from a standpoint of what Jim Shark's values are right oh I really care again like if I get a DM on my Instagram which I will you know inevitably we're shipping thousands and thousands of orders a day

now inevitably something will go wrong somewhere, and someone will message me saying, I've got an issue. That really hurts me. I go absolutely mental. The first thing I'm doing is I'm running up to customer experience and saying, how the hell can we fix this? You know, how can we make this better? Because to me, and again, the problem with online is it's all numbers on a screen.

It's very easy to get lost in those numbers, and it's very easy to become desensitized desensitized to the fact that each one of those numbers is a human being somewhere in the world so to me it's really important to make sure that everyone has a brilliant experience even do you know what even if the other thing that i'll say to everyone is even if no one ever buys a gymshark product i want to put on gymshark events so that these people can go and be inspired and motivated and you know in some way hopefully improve their lives so if no one ever buys a gymshark product to me that's not the end of the world

because I want people to be inspired and sort of be affected positively by what we do in some way. And what I take from that is that that authenticity and that really fucking caring, over time will send your business in a completely different direction because if you imagine that care and that authenticity applied 10 times a day for five years on little touch points that

will come like in my mind that completely changes the trajectory of your business so in the moment it might those letters might not have moved the bottom line at all but long term would make Jim shark who they like who you are today which is really inspiring to me actually because I think customer experience is something that's often the first thing that's easy to forget. If anyone gives me a bad experience, I just straight up don't ever order from them again. I think it's just carelessness.