The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moonpig Founder: How I Built A $150 Million Business WITHOUT Sacrifice: Nick Jenkins

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

Nick Jenkins is the founder and former CEO of Moonpig.com, a company which revolutionised gift cards and is now worth over one and a half billion pounds. Nick knows what it takes to build a business from nothing to change an industry, and today he’s sharing his wisdom with us on what he’s learnt along the way. You’ll also know Nick from Dragons Den, on which he was a dragon for two years. Since leaving the den he’s become a leading investor in e-commerce and green energy, tutoring and giving a leg up to businesses which help to bring the future a little bit closer every day.  Nick is an incredible guy and an astute and proven businessman, but more importantly he’s a grounded and inspirational individual. Nick doesn’t lead a flashy lifestyle or found businesses just to get rich, but instead sees his businesses as attractive solutions to real problems we all face. Before Moonpig, Nick used to tipex out greetings on cards and write his own because no one was offering a personalised service. He doesn’t have to do that anymore, he has a billion pound company to do it for him. Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

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 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. So you do something with greeting cards. Is that something you do from your spare room? Nick Jenkins, former CEO and founder of Moonpig, a company now worth $1.6 billion. My first proper business was Moonpig, which, although it's been a success, of course, it went through various ups and downs, like all overnight successes. It took 11 years.

I got to confess, I probably slightly stumbled on it. I look at it now and think, wow, that accidentally was a really good business model. Unfortunately, too often we measure the things that are easiest to measure. And the easiest thing to measure is how wealthy someone is. I'm reluctant to create this illusion that if you work incredibly hard, you can make a lot of money and that will make you successful. You have to be a successful human being. The most exciting times I ever had in my business were when my back was absolutely against the wall and think, this is going down. Bizarrely, I found that quite invigorating. At one point, my shareholders all said, look, Nick, this is never going to work. It's never going to

make money. By the time I'd got to the end of it, I was pretty much down to zero. Nick Jenkins, former CEO and founder of Moonpig, a company now worth $1.6 billion. Nick's achievements are miraculous. He's incredibly inspiring, and he created a business that's touched many of our lives. But the thing that I found even more intriguing about Nick was he bucks most of the typical entrepreneurship and success narratives. I think we're all sold the belief and the story that in order to be successful in business or any discipline in life,

you have to undergo tremendous sacrifice. You have to work yourself into the ground. Nick and his story and his philosophy disprove all of that. He's got another way of doing it. If listening to this episode does anything outside of just inspiring the hell out of you and giving you very practical business information, it will definitely prove, in my view,

that there is no such thing as a born entrepreneur. And also, once you become an entrepreneur, the path to success isn't the same for everybody. A lot of what you've been told is a lie. Without further ado, I'm Stephen Bartlett, and this is The Dire of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Nick, super intrigued when I meet entrepreneurs because there's a huge sort of narrative and I guess a debate that's happened in the entrepreneurial community about whether

entrepreneurs are made, whether they're born, whether it's something that can be taught. And from listening to you describe your early years and your school years and your upbringing, I wondered what your opinion on that was and also whether you think you were a born entrepreneur. I think there are some traits that are common to all entrepreneurs. Well, one of those is decisiveness. You've got to be able to take decisions. And after I worked in Russia for a bit, went and did an MBA. And when I was there, there were lots of people on that course who were brighter than me.

And they would come up with a beautiful PowerPoint presentation of five different choices of strategic options. But actually sometimes he's just going to say, haven't got the perfect knowledge. Let's go with that one and take a decision. And so I think decisiveness is a very, uh, and an attitude to risk is, is the other thing. I think I was took the view that, you know, I started with nothing. I could end up with nothing. I wasn't that worried about failing. And that's quite important. So I think those sort of things are innate. You can teach someone like that to be a better entrepreneur. And to some extent, I mean, I went off and did the business. I had nothing else to do, to be honest, at the time. I came back from Russia and I had a spare year and I thought, I couldn't think of good cunning business plans. So I thought I'll do an MBA while I'm coming up with a cunning plan. And that, that was, that probably made my

first business a bit better because I, I, it gave me more of an idea of the rounded idea of, of, of business and, um, and so on. So, so I think you can improve on that, but I don't think, but if you're, if you're risk averse, you're not going to do it. Where does, where's, where does decisiveness and that risk appetite come from? Do you think in people and what, I guess, where does the alternative come from? Where does the fear and the lack of willingness to, to make a decision come from in people or in you? Like, where did it, where did that decisiveness come from in you? I don't know. I mean, you have some people who are physically courageous they will

leap in you know rugby players will leap in and do things um and and other people who are who are not and then you have some people who are intellectually courageous who will just um they're just not frightened of saying let's do it um um no i'm not i'm i'm not sure but i think i think it comes from not having a fear of failure. We're all going to make mistakes and things will go wrong, but if you're frightened of ever making a mistake, then you won't do it. Much times, if you ski and you're frightened of falling over, you're never going to be a great skier because you are going to fall over.

Also, you were just talking there about almost that mental assessment you made on what failure meant because you were like, well, if I go to zero, that's okay. That doesn't mean death. No, no, no, no, it doesn't. I mean, it wouldn't be great, you know, but, but, but it's survival. And I, and I've, of all the friends I've seen who've gone through that, and I've had a lot of friends who've gone through, uh, who've gone through business failures, the ones I admire the most are the ones who it's the way they've dealt with that. And some of them have thought, well, I can't change that. I can't. So all I can do is change the way I approach the most are the ones who it's the way they've dealt with that and some of them have thought well I can't change that I can't so all I can do is change the way I approach the next step and move on and if you just dwell on failure what does that mean how does that reflect on me um then uh then you'd never yeah you'd never move on so I think it's our own in

our own attitude to failure that's that's. What was your underlying drive to even start a business versus just going and getting a job at, I don't know, Pizza Hut or something? I suppose I probably looked at that and thought, if that goes well, I'll probably make more money per hour than if I go and work at Pizza Hut. So there's an element of wanting, I mean, maybe there's an element of laziness that comes into this. It was wanting to take that shortcut and think, well, actually, if I start my own business and it goes well, then obviously it's better than an hourly paid job. One of my great philosophies on business is just keep everything as simple as you can possibly make it until you have to make it more complicated. People often start, they start, you know, way too complicated

and over-engineer things. um people often start they start you know way too complicated and and and uh over engineer things that if you read the that book the lean startup it kind of talks talks to some of those values about just trying to find find the simplest way to test the hypothesis as cheaply as you can without using losing years of your life and there's nothing there's nothing quite like not actually having any money to do that so when moon pig when when we we raised money on a very bitty basis you know there was never like a well that occasionally we'd pour something in it and you know you'd you'd usually hear it hitting the bottom but it never actually filled the well up so we never really had much money to experiment with so we had to be uh very lean with what we did and i think think perhaps the one, the one useful thing, the only textbook that I ever went back to from my MBA years was a statistics textbook,

because what I wanted to work out is the least money I could spend to get a statistically significant answer to how much a cost of customer acquisition is for a particular channel. Because why spend two and a half, why spend 25,000 pounds finding out that a particular channel doesn't work for you when you can get the answer for two and a half thousand um and uh i mean you must see this all the time but i i you get people who say we're going to spend a million pounds on our when you've got too much money you just let's throw some money at this and see what works well why waste it when you can get the answer for two and a half grand yeah and then and then and i always look at that and i don't think i don't think i've wasted two and a half grand i've spent two and a half grand

some of that will have been let's say i wasted two and a half grand. I've spent two and a half grand. Some of that will have been, let's say I was aiming for a £10 cost of customer acquisition and actually it was 20. Well then, £1,250 of that was spent on acquiring customers at the right price and £1,250 was spent on finding out that I should never do that again. And that's the way I would look at that. But if I'd spent £25,000 on it, then, you know, it would have been, it would have been a waste. And also if you can, the more you spend money to find out the answers to things and when you've got those answers and you're then putting that in your business plan to raise money, I'm always more impressed when people say, right, I want to raise

money for marketing. This is what we've done so far. This is what it cost us so far. So if we scale this up, that's, that's what we can do. As opposed to just saying, please give us lots of money to spend on marketing. We don't know what we're going to do yet. Yeah, I had this conversation actually with my gym owner the other day. I didn't even know that he was aware of who I was, but I was leaving the gym.

He goes, can I just have two minutes? Pulls me into the back room. And he tells me about this idea. And to be fair, I can't say the idea because he, and we're going to talk about this topic as well. He thinks that if you tell the idea, then I'm going to run off with it. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about that. I get that all the time. Yeah, we to talk about this topic as well he thinks that if you tell the idea then i'm going to run off with it we'll talk about that i get that all the time yeah we'll talk about that straight after but um but but so it's this idea for rolling out gyms in the country

he said i need to i need to raise investment to put 10 of them in and i was like you're you're this idea you have is totally contingent on this central hypothesis i'm just going to say he doesn't listen to the podcast that that people that drive long haul want to work out in service stations. You don't need to put 10 in to figure out if that hypothesis is correct. You can put a shipping container in the car park and keep it there for free.

And if anyone picks up the dumbbells, that's an indication that your hypothesis is correct. And then introduce another variable, which is cost. So then charge them to pick up the dumbbells. And if you come back to me in six months' time and say, Steve, they picked up the dumbbells, they worked out, and they gave me £10 a month, then all you need is capital.

And we'll go make 10 of them. We're on the same page. Prove what you can prove on the least amount of money first. And evidence is always so important. And people miss that. But let's talk about that topic then. So this idea of, it really, really, it shows me that the entrepreneur is somewhat naive

when an entrepreneur comes up to you. I'm sure you get this all the time. They pitch you an idea and then they say, well, they sound cagey to tell you the full thing because they think you're going to run off and do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. What I would say to

them look if you get the the day you go live with that the moment you start advertising that idea you're you're opening you're lifting your skirts to the whole world so uh so you're going to have to go live with us at some point otherwise you're not going to sell anything and if you don't sell anything you're not going to raise any money from anybody so at some point you have to uh you you have to tell people what you're doing. With Moonpig, there was no way that I could, I could protect that idea. The only way you can protect it is be the best and, and, and be the biggest. Amen. Yeah. I mean, and then I, we had probably 20 competitors that followed after Moonpig, you know, during, during our time there and they would,

they'd pop up and they'd flare up and then they'd, they'd die off again. Um, and, and even now Moonpig is 65% of the market. When you started Moonpig, was there anyone else doing personalised, sort of, gifting cards online? Yeah, funny enough, there was. There was a very, I came up with a business plan and I developed it. And then I looked, the first thing I always do is I look around, not just at what direct competitors I've got, but how people are trying to solve that problem in other ways. Because, you know, if you're trying to solve a problem, clearly that problem exists already and people are trying to solve it in one way or another. And I did come across a company that was doing personalized greeting cards.

And I approached them and said, I've got a choice. I can either, I've come up with this plan, I can either do it myself or I can invest in your business. And anyway, the terms he offered were ridiculous. And also the other problem was I could see that is we would, we were going to fall out over the content of the cards because I just didn't think he had a very good eye for cards. And with that business, I don't think he ever turned over more than 300,000 a year. And then it died about two years later. And, and Moonpeak went, so I, I went off and did my own thing. And what it taught me actually looking back at it is that it was all about the content.

It was about the quality of the cards, the quality of the design of the cards, because actually the customer doesn't really care how the card was produced. They don't care about the technology at all. What they want is the end product, and we have the best end product. That's so interesting because a lot of entrepreneurs

are put off from starting an idea because when they Google their idea that they have, they find 10 other people that are already doing it and i i really want to touch on this point because i think it's quite liberating for entrepreneurs listening when i started my business in fact every business i've ever started that's been successful had a major incumbent already and we might we became the biggest and it's for exactly what you described it's those there's probably a thousand small details that go into making a successful business more let's just say there's a thousand yeah thousand small details that go into making a business and it's and um you're basically going to war on a thousand details yeah and if you can um you know if you can be better

in just certain ways and sometimes you only need to be better in a few simple ways i think it can i i agree and but then then you if you look at the example of bread um people have been eating bread for thousands of years you know people like bread we know what people are prepared to pay for bread that's half of your market research done already you don't have to say we've got this thing called bread do you do you like it you can you can cut in slices you just ham in the middle and call it a sandwich all that's been done for you so then you've then got to work out right well i, I know that there's a market for this. So how do I just make it a little bit better?

Do I make it, you know, add seeds to it? Do I put cumin in it? Or do I have a shop that is in a location that isn't well served? So you only have to tweak an idea that's already there. So your chance of success, your chance of succeeding, your chance of surviving is considerably greater because you've answered most of the questions already before you've even invested any money. The chance of that multiplying by a factor of 1,000 and suddenly thinking, the guy in Shoreditch has just invented a stuff called bread.

It's amazing. Never had it before. So you don't get that. And I think it's an important thing for entrepreneurs to think about is that you don't have to be unique. I think people always say, what's unique about you? You've just got to be, I agree with you, you've got to be better i think that's you know people always say what's what's unique about you just got to be i agree with you you've got to be better in some respect um and um and people tie themselves in knots trying to think of trying to invent things so i think it's a really hard it's the hardest possible way of making money i mean actually when you i i read a report about the

fact that the the people who've most people who've made money have made money doing something they were previously employed to do. Interesting. Because they've spent 20 years learning how to do something. They know all the contacts and then they start up their own business. It's logical. And often, you know,

when I'm looking at investing in people, I think, well, you know this industry really, really well. You're very convincing. And you know all the pitfalls in advance. So of course you're more likely to succeed. Yeah. But they also know, they also, because they also know they also because they

know the pitfalls they know that where the opportunity to create a better product would be as well yeah yeah you know because so often i will i will come up with a business idea and look at it and it's only after i've gone through this sort of fourth iteration of the business plan that i think and that is why no one has done this before yeah that's very very true um if you'd known how hard it would be um to start a business and to um make it successful do you think you would have started because i'm here i'm asking i want to know a little bit about the like the importance of delusion well funny if that's something i've always believed that an element of self-delusion is very very important and i think that's one of the reasons why actually i'm really when i when i when I finished my MBA, I did have the opportunity to go and join a VC firm. I thought,

if I can work for a VC firm for three or four years, I'll get more experience before I start my own business. Anyway, I went for a job interview, shock horror, they turned me down. So I had to go and start my own business. And I realise now that if I had gone through several years of investing in other people's businesses, I probably would have developed that kind of, uh, that hard skin of, of this is actually incredibly hard, but this is why this won't work. And I see that. I see that a lot now in me now that I look at as an investor, I look at a lot of things and I'm, I'm, I'm less wide eyed than I was when I started Moonpig and I can see the reasons why something won't work and you become, you can become too cynical about it. Um, whereas when I started Moonpig, And I can see the reasons why something won't work. And you become, you can become too cynical about it. Whereas when I started Moonpig, if I'd known all of the problems

that I was going to come up against, I may not have started. And believe me, there were plenty of times in the middle of that when I would have happily given it up. I mean, people often say, was there a difficult period? And there was just one, but it lasted from 2000 to 2005. And it was, you know, that was difficult. It was tough. And I was wondering how to pay the salaries. And I, this is going to work. Talk to me about the detail of that difficult period. Well, as you know better than anybody,

starting a business is one thing. And coming up with a product that people might want is one thing. Getting customers is probably the single most difficult thing about setting up any online business. And I think most people underestimate that. And we tried all sorts of permutations. And bear in mind, this was 2000. So this was well before social media. So a lot of stuff was very manual. You know, you will laugh at this. But when I was doing affiliate deals, I would phone up a company and say, we'll put an advert on your thing. And if you send any traffic to us, we'll give you a bit of commission on this. And I'll send you a spreadsheet every

week to tell you how much I owe you. Literally, it was that manual. And I would write up a contract for each separate contract for each individual company. I had a big filing cabinet of them. I mean, that sounds like very dinosaurish, but that's how it was. And now it's much, much easier. But we were struggling to find ways that we could throw money at driving traffic because everything that we threw money at was too expensive. And the only thing that was really working in all of this was the viral effect that we knew that we got very, very good at measuring everything. And we could see that if we brought 100 customers in, and those 100 customers, we knew exactly how many of them would buy cards we knew how many of them wouldn't come back again but of the ones that bought cards we knew that

they would attract about for every customer that that we had they'd attract a third of a customer just because i send you a birthday card you think it's funny you look on the back of it moon pig.com and so that viral effect was the thing that kept us going for five years and it was only really because i understood the statistics behind that and I could understand the model and think, right, although everything else appears to be failing, although this online campaign doesn't appear to be too expensive,

that appears to be too expensive. And we can't, I couldn't tell you, if someone had given me 10 million pounds, I couldn't have told you what we could have thrown it at to make it work. I could see that just the customers alone were driving the sales growth. And if only we could survive that long

that we'd make it through. But I was the only person who believed that. All of my shareholders, I mean, at one point, my shareholders all said, look, Nick, you know, it's not going to work. This is never going to work. It's never going to make money. And you, you know, we're not going to put any more money in. And we really recommend that you don't put any more money in too, because when this all goes wrong, you're going to have to have some money to pay the rent. And, and it was, it was that bad. Um, how much did you, had you bet on this personally? Well, I mean, I put in, I was, I'd, I'd gone off and worked in Russia for a while and I'd, I'd probably made about a million. And, and, and by the time, uh, by the time I put about

150,000 pounds into Mubik at the beginning to get the idea off the ground. By the time I'd got to the end of it, I was pretty much down to zero. I think I'd taken all the equity out of the flat, which previously had no mortgage. I'd taken all my savings and all that. So I'd pretty much got down to zero. So at the point when people are trying to discourage you to... I was pretty much already at zero anyway. So, so that's when it's, that's when it finally, it started to turn and, um, you know, but I could, I could see, I could see the stats. I could see where it was going. Um, it's just that, you know, after four years of three or four different business plans, we go, I know the last business plan wasn't, you know,

inaccurate, but this one, this one's better. Oh, and I know the previous two weren't that accurate, but this one, this one, this one works. It's tough. That's that delusion. Did you ever genuinely consider quitting? No, no, I can know because I, because I, because I could see where the numbers were going. And I, I had, I did have a firm belief that the repeat rate was there. The viral effect was there. And I could see how, I could see how we weren't spending, we went through a year, we spent no money on marketing whatsoever, no money on customer acquisition. And we, and our sales grew by 30%. You know, so that's now I appreciate having invested in lots of other e-commerce businesses. I appreciate how unusual that is. It was my first

business. I didn't know quite how unusual it was, but, but I knew that actually, look, it's not as if there's so many businesses I see now that the moment you turn the marketing tap off, it just goes to zero. And that's one of the things I'm always really wary of now when I'm investing is I say, well, what's going to happen when you turn that tap off? Because when we did turn that tap off, it just kept on growing. And that's what I see as the real quality of a business is when you're adding layer upon layer of customers. Now, you know, not all businesses are as good at repeat business as Moonpig was, but that was the thing that I recognised that kept me going through all of that and stopped me from throwing the towel in. And that's thankfully because you had a great product underpinning the business. Yeah, the main focus was, do people like what we're selling?

And we knew that. We knew it was a very, very popular product. We could see that in the viral effect with people, not only the people who bought it liked it, but the people who received it liked it. So the main focus was always on create a really, really good product. And then, of course, on top of that, you've then got to make sure that you've got your production right

so that your gross margins are right and tweaking all of those little knobs within that engine. And the key thing also is understanding every metric. And we looked at it like it's like a luge run that you're polishing. Every day you're looking at, is there anywhere where anyone's getting stuck along this journey? And are they not understanding what we're, you know, the button that they're supposed to press next? Are they getting confused? Polish that one out. So there was a constant process. That time when we weren't spending any money on customer acquisition, we were spending all of our

money on customer retention and just polishing that luge run of the customer coming in through the front door and going into the shopping basket. When you reflect on that and the fact that Moonpig ultimately succeeded in the market where many others failed, you talked about, you know, the guy whose business you tried to buy and you say, what was it about what we did that made us succeed? Or what was it about me, Nick, that made this business succeed? What is your well i i think i think i probably did have a good understanding of what people wanted in a card and and the if you get down to the the simplest version of that is that is that a card is about showing someone that you've uh you want to show them that you've that it's relevant you've thought about them so you've chosen something which is relevant to them that they're interested in well that's that's something you both find

funny and you can weave their name into that as well to show that you've made an effort. And then the double whammy, I would always personalise Moon Pig card, have it sent back to me and write on the inside. So that's like a double personalisation. And it basically is about showing you've really thought about them.

And it's amusing as well. And the great thing is quirky British sense of humour that we love slightly mildly offending each other and then we stick the cards up on our fridge. Yeah. Find it funny. So if you focus on that, focus on the product, everything else follows in behind that. Focus on the product and then make it very, very efficient, and everything else should follow. Whereas if you don't focus on the product and you're just constantly selling something that people don't really want, it's incredibly hard work.

On the product, a lot of people have this idea, I think when they start businesses that you have to have your hypothesis, your idea of what this business is going to become the product you want to sell perfectly nailed before you, before you launch. And then, you know, I made the mistake of when I started my business kind of being too romantic about that initial idea. So I was trying to force the idea into the world as opposed to listening. If we go back before you started Moonpig, what was your hypothesis? Like what, in terms of like personalization, what, you know, how did you arrive at a card? It was, it was very simple, actually. I thought through the different ideas and I realized, right, this internet thing is going to happen. So I don't know much about it, but no one else knows anything about it either. But I did at least understand how to build a team? And digital products were all being given away for free. So everyone had this idea that if you could

download it, it ought to be free. Well, that's a hard one to make money in. The advertising business back in those days was incredibly tough because there wasn't much of a market. Not much spend was going online and you were spending more money to get people to come to your site to look at the adverts and people are going to pay you for the adverts. That was tough too. Then I looked at physical goods. And if you take, say, a digital camera, one of those things I looked at, if I took my sort of Satsuma Fujitsu 32DB, I figured that somebody at some point would write an algorithm that would merely compare the price of my Fujitsu 32DD with someone else's, and then they'd buy the cheapest one. And that ultimately would end up squeezing all the margin out of that game. So you'd end up with a lot of physical stock stuff sitting in warehouses

and minimal margins. So I looked at what are the things that I can sell on the internet where I can actually improve the product and make it better. And personalization is one of those things. It's very difficult to do personalization in store because it takes up floor space and equipment and so on. Um, and, um, and I thought of a number of different things, including a personalized CDs. Well, I'm really, really glad I didn't do that one. And cards occurred to me because I used to, um, I used to tip my cards and tip X out the caption and write something a bit funnier, um, more relevant, um, and more relevant on the front. And, and, and, and equally journalist friends of mine would,

uh, whenever anyone left the office, they'd be given a spoof magazine front cover, which would take a day and a half of graphic design time to put together. And I figured, well, we've got digital, digital printing was beginning to develop at the time, and you've got the internet, and it made it possible to combine those two to make it possible for someone to order a single personalised greeting card, which is hands down got to be better than the unpersonalized thing. And then I could charge more for the product online than for the product in the shop. But more to the point, there's no stock. So all we've got is a pile of cardboard in the corner of the room and a pile of envelopes. That's the only stock, which I think represented about a

quarter of a percent of turnover. So compared to the digital camera business, where you might have a whole load of digital cameras on the water coming in from wherever you buy them from loading the warehouse and so on um it's it was um it was a very efficient business model i mean i i gotta confess i probably slightly stumbled on it rather than you know it it being i look at it now and think wow that that accidentally was a really good business model um you get paid up front you pay supplies in 60 days there's no stock i mean it's it's uh it was great so um but but fundamentally it was a better product and on day one right from the very beginning my the the business plan i came up with when i was doing my mba was i want to make it possible for

a customer to buy a single personalized birthday card which technology has suddenly made possible whereas previously that would have been 200 quids worth of graphic design time a bit of litho i mean just not possible but core to that is that the person who's receiving it has got to think that's a really cool card and there's a point where you made the decision to sort of step back from operations i i've always tried to, my general approach to this is, is try to focus on the things that only you can do. And when you really narrow it down, and as you become a bigger company, you realise that actually, that really does narrow it down a lot. Because I always try to hire people, replace the things that I was doing with people who could do it better than I could do it. And then once they're doing it better than I could do it, you think, gosh, well,

I'm not going to interfere with that anymore. So leave them to it. And then it eventually then comes down to a role. My role eventually became that of executive chairman. So I brought in a CEO and I became executive chairman. And I suppose then my role was that strategic role of making sure that we're pointing in the right direction And also that we take those big decisions. What are you bad at? I'm, I'm... Or not good, not as good as someone else at, shall we say? I think I'm, I'm a, I'm good at short term detail. I can, I can sprint on real fine detail. So I can,

I can sit on a spreadsheet for six hours overnight and come up with a beautiful bit of financial modeling, but I've got a million and one things going on. And so, so, so I don't know that I'm necessarily a complete a finisher. And there are people who are good at that. So interesting when I'm looking at hiring people, I, I will often, although I, academic results aren't everything, that you always need someone who has got straight A's at A-level because they're very good at understanding the question and delivering it, delivering the answer.

So they understand what's expected of them and they deliver it in a very predictable way. Whereas CEOs can often be quite maverick and you ask them one question and they will answer something else completely different but much more interesting. And that's fine. You can afford to have one or two of those Mavericks,

but somebody in the company has to be a good completer finisher. They understand the question and they deliver it. Have you, this is interesting. So there's certain people in my, in my, in my previous business where I knew they were like useless at organization and process. And they were, they were just dread, they could, they were like unreliable but they had one skill which was genius yeah and so it would almost be like making an exception for them within the company where okay they might take a long time to reply to emails and stuff like that but that one point of like creative genius that they brought to the

company was worth it yeah did you ever have that very definitely you've got you've got some people i think creative genius always comes at a price yeah uh and and it becomes because someone has focused on one thing at the expense of something else generally um and and and so you just have to work with it um and and say right okay well let's recognize person doesn't do that and actually those skills can easily be dealt with by something else. Get them a good PA, someone who can get a good completed finisher behind them, who picks up after them, and then they will come up with the ideas that nobody else would have come up with. I think that works.

You were talking about that struggle you had for the first five years at Moonsig. I heard you talk in some interviews about year three, four, five, et cetera, being particularly hard. But what was the personal sacrifice of that? I'm thinking now about how easy it was to maintain, like, relationships and friendships when, you know, in your head, you probably have that red, read those red numbers from the management accounts sort of etched into your mind at all times. Can't be honest. Never really got in the way. Never got in the way? No, I, I'm, a lot of people confuse, um, there's, oh, we're running your own business. You're

working all the hours that God sends. Um, I never did. If something needed to be done, I could, I, and only I could do it, then I would do it. And there were times, you know, there's the odd time when, uh, I remember once when our entire printing team were off ill, and I came back from a business trip from Australia to discover that we were three days behind on our printing schedule, and I simply got in the printing room. I was the only other person qualified to use the printer. So I just sat in the printing room, and I worked 24 hours a day for three days, I think, to get it all done. So yes, there were times, but, but I had a great social life. I've always been a great believer also that, that I need to,

I like to manage a business, you know, during reasonable hours. I don't, I don't think it's important that people need to sacrifice themselves on the altar of my business. And I don't like them doing that. One, because it makes me feel guilty about skiving off. You know, if you've got all of your, all of your people in the office and they're, they're working 24 hours a day and you're sort of, you know, taking half the day off to go and do something fun, you feel awful. So I try to make sure the same standards apply and that people should work a proper day's work in the hours that they would like to work within reason. But I do expect them to go off and go and do something different and recharge their batteries in the evening and the weekends and

you know, because otherwise you just run out of steam. And particularly it was a creative business. You know, we're trying to make people laugh. If you're exhausted and miserable, that's tough. It goes against a lot of the sort of typical narrative, doesn't it, in entrepreneurship? Like the hustle porn star entrepreneur

who just like fucking doesn't sleep and just caffeine and just, you know, they're like crying in the street and they're like, you know, eating ramen noodles and stuff like that. What does that, what does that narrative make you, make you think? Well, I think that's true. If you start a business with, a lot of people start a business with nothing and a lot of businesses fail. And as those businesses are failing, clearly, obviously you're're down to your last pennies. And that's tough. And so I think that the thing that they're describing is that is the last sort of death throes of a business. And I, you know, I've seen lots of businesses that I've invested in go through the same thing, where there is no money left, you can't pay salaries. And the founders are down to, you know, they're living in the office under the desk and eating noodles.

And so that happens. But it isn't an essential part of the journey. But generally the death throes. And occasionally you survive. I mean, you know, had I not had that last bit of cash that I put in, I may well have been one of those cases. What about focus? A lot of entrepreneurs, you know, have, I get a lot of messages from entrepreneurs that have multiple businesses, three or four startups they're doing at the same time. Well, I wouldn't invest in anybody that had multiple startups. You know, because if I'd had three businesses going at the same time as Moonbeak and Moonbeak was going badly, you focus on the one that's going well, because it makes you feel better. So, and then the person, then they turn around to the investors who put money into the third one,

and they say, yeah, no, I've given up with that one. I'm off to it. So there is no way. I mean, when I invest in a business, I would make sure that there is a clause that says that the founder shareholders have to be 100% focused on that. They're not allowed to have more than a 5% stake in another unlimited company. I'm pretty strict about that. I mean, I just think it's laughable. Absolutely laughable that people come along and they go, yeah, I've got three ideas

and I'd like you to invest in this one. But I've got those just in case that one doesn't work. For me as well, I tend to think all three will fail because you're giving like 30, in the way that I view, even if you're not prioritizing, you're giving 33% of your time and energy to, and all your competitors are giving 101%

and a lot of them might be sleeping under the desk. So if you're giving 30%, it's already hard enough to succeed giving 100%. So you're really setting yourself up to failure. But I think there's this weird thing where entrepreneurs find it impressive to some entrepreneurs find it impressive to list multiple businesses that they're doing. And I swear swear if i hear an entrepreneur come to me with an idea and they've

also got another thing they're doing i'm immediately deeply unimpressed by them because i think they've got this focus problem um uh and maybe they're you know like maybe they sat down and tried to think of a business idea and for me like when business ideas don't come from some type of inspiration, when they're literally just contrived from, I'm going to try and think of a business idea. I think that it's typically more difficult. I think like some form of inspiration, even if it's a small thing of inspiration as a,

it's integral to success and creating something unique. But yeah, that's another thing that irritates me a lot. I get just as irritated by that. There are times when you have to push on through that barrier. And if you've got three things going, and one of them is an easier journey, that's where you're going to focus yourself. When in fact, that is the absolute time that you need to be completely focused on crashing through that wall that you've come up against. And that's where the best inspiration I ever had, and sometimes actually looking back,

the most exciting times I ever had in my business were when my back was absolutely against the wall and think, this is going down. This is going down. And bizarrely, I found that quite invigorating. When everything is going incredibly well, there were times when I think everything's going very well. Everyone's doing their job. Frankly, I could be here or not be here. It doesn't make much difference. In terms of skills as well as an entrepreneur, I heard you talk about public speaking being integral to, you did public speaking at university. I did a lot of public speaking at university and a lot of debating. And the skill I think that's important is the ability to be able to persuade people of your ideas.

Not necessarily public speaking, but in every meeting that you go to, you need to be able to look people in the eye and convince them that your idea is right. And that could be in a sales role. It could be sitting around a table with a bunch of developers and one of them saying, I think this is the right way forward. If you can't articulate yourself properly, then you're never going to be listened to. And that's a skill I think is being recognised in schools. I do a lot in education now.

So I see now more and more they recognise that that's a skill that is really important, that people should be able to look someone in the eye and be able to explain yourself very coherently. I tend to actually believe, I'd go one step further and think, I can't think of a more important skill in life and business than I refer to it as sales because, and we would think of sales, we think of trying to get cash out of someone else's pocket by giving them something. But I think of it as like meet a girl in a nightclub, you know,

try and communicate your idea to your team, investors, employees, everyone you encounter, I think is to some degree, you're trying to sell something and it's usually yourself. Yeah. But those that are, you think about how that compounds over 70 years of your life, being good or bad at that one skill. Yeah. Will anything change the trajectory of your life more than being like a good salesperson? And that comes from, as you say, from being able to articulate yourself and speak and...

Yeah. And just think coherently and put down a logical argument that people think, yes, okay, I get that. I understand it. How does one get better at that? I think a lot of that's practice. And I think, you know, people make this sort of binary thing between public speaking, standing on a stage and speaking to a crowd of people versus not doing anything at all. And actually in between there's a whole load of stuff, which is working within a team and being able to, and that's where most people come up against it, is that they'll be sitting in a meeting

with four or five other people and they've got something they want to say and if they're too nervous about saying something, they just don't say anything at all and then their ideas are never listened to. Yeah, and then they're devalued in that context. And similarly, it may not necessarily be spoken word. You've also got to be able to write well and convincingly.

Then there's another side of it, which is the numeracy side. And I find that the most convincing is when I, I love a good spreadsheet, but when you can express ideas in numbers and you say, look, this is the model that works and you can prove it in numbers, it is a very convincing thing, particularly for an investor. If we do this, this is the evidence we've got that's what will happen yeah that's very convincing um so there's there's there's also being numerate and being able to explain things in numbers which is persuasively yeah yeah it's so true yeah you can be like orally persuasive which is you know anecdotal persuasion i guess and then you can be persuasive with numbers which is is a... Or graphics, and that's the other thing. I do see the quality of decks in the last 15 years

has dramatically improved. And in that, oh, they're much, much more engaging. And there's some real creative genius behind some of this stuff. I mean, occasionally they don't talk about the numbers, which is quite important. And you have to email. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful presentation.

And, you know, big sort of, you know, you go through this doc's end and, oh, fantastic, looks lovely, beautiful graphics. And then you think you have kind of missed out the point about how you're going to make any money. But so there's a lot more. So again, but that comes down to how you persuade people and how you present ideas.

Not all of us understand things by listening. Some people understand by seeing. I see patterns in numbers, but not everyone does. And I realise that now that just because I happen to see something one it doesn't mean to say that everybody else sees it in that way. And you have to understand how people, how people communicate. One of the, on that point about, you know, persuasion and communication. One of the most amazing things that happened to me inadvertently was, well, one of them's right here. I started doing a podcast and I, from, I never, the unintended consequence of me being forced to speak on stage because I was

running around the world talking about marketing and being forced to write out on, I do quotes on Instagram, write these quotes every single day at 7pm on Instagram. And then write, I used to write this podcast. I used to just be on my own, was that I was able to develop my ideas better.

So if you ask me any question on marketing, well, I've already written it out. I've written, written an essay on it because I had to do a blog because I able to develop my ideas better. So if you ask me any question on marketing, well, I've already written it out. I've written an essay on it because I had to do a blog because I had to run my personal brand. Or if you ask me something else about my life, I've already spent, you know, a thousand hours talking on this podcast about it,

was I became much, I'd say 10X better at communicating. And the impact that had on my life was just profound. So my conclusive point here is, I really think for young people that there are ways to force yourself to accelerate that learning. One of them is like, keep a blog, start a podcast, even if no one's listening to it.

And people will start podcasts because they're trying to make money or because they want to be famous or have loads of followers. But I think the more beneficial thing is the skill, the skills you'll learn from doing it. And oh my God, sales is just everything to me. You're right. When you have to write a blog, actually write the words down, it really forces you to think about how to express things coherently.

In a way that verbally you can get away with a lot less discipline. Dragon's Den, something we share in common. Yes, indeed. Yeah. I've just started on the show. It was a, yeah, I mean, the first pitch, everything, walking in behind the set. I mean, I first watched it when I was 12 years old and it was all so surreal. How was your experience on Dragon's Den?

And what advice would you have for me? Let's do the first question first. Okay, well, so I love the experience. I mean, partly because it's very forgiving television to make in the sense that you arrive on set, and apart from the fact that there are seven cameras, which was distracting for about the first hour or two. Other than that, it's people walking in through the door

and they're saying, this is who I am, this is my business. And it's one of those things that I think if you're thinking about that as a potential career, it's about as realistic as you can get while still being entertaining. These are real businesses that people have spent sometimes several years developing, put their life and soul into it.

It's not some concocted thing that, you know, here's £100, go and see how much cheese you can sell on the market uh the type of thing that you see in the apprentice these are real businesses and i think it's been very inspiring i've seen a ground a real shift in the time that i've been around in people's attitudes to becoming an entrepreneur um because of yeah partly but you know partly because i think there's also been a shift in attitude generally and a lot of a lot of young people aspire to the idea that actually when you're young and you've got nothing to lose, you can afford to make more mistakes. So you can just go straight into it after school, start something and crash and burn, start again.

And you can do it all now from your phone as well. You can set up a shop using Shopify on your phone in a couple of minutes and sell. You can even drop ship things so you don't need a warehouse or anything like that. So it's very incredibly accessible now. Um, more people, young people want to be entrepreneurs than ever before. But, uh, but I, but I, I think it's, I'm, I'm really looking forward to seeing, uh, seeing this new series. Cause I think you will add a, uh, kind of a different, a different dimension to it in terms of thinking, particularly the way that business is now, you know, the way that,

particularly tech businesses and the way that they're funded is very different from 20 years ago. Yeah. One of the things I didn't expect as well was how useful the other dragons are when it comes to analysing the business. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because they all come from different disciplines.

So Debra's going to help me with the numbers over here and Peter's got his background in tech and, you know, logistics and all the amazing things he does and tuka's going to be able to really sort of interrogate the supply chain and sarah understands the craft industry and business generally and um so it was it's really uh they said sometimes you just gotta let them interrogate the business from all of their angles i i learned a lot i learned a very very important lesson from deborah about um the food business and going to supermarkets. She was interrogating somebody and, and they will allow you to be on their shelves.

So there's a pyramid of products, and they allow you, these little innovative little companies, to add interest to their shelves. The moment that it looks interesting and you want to sell more of it, the supermarket goes, aha, now let's talk about the price. Because they know how to make that stuff even better than you do. They know how to squeeze you down to a barely acceptable margin. And so your margin, which looked okay at the beginning, they'll say, well, you can sell a lot more, but we're going to have to have a different price. And that was a lesson I learned from Deborah. So sitting back and listening sometimes,

and, you know, like, you know, Tuca's knowledge of supply chain, and in textiles in particular, it's quite fascinating. So jumping back to your business then, Moonpeg, so eventually you sell the business. Yeah. Fully or in part? Well, I sold most of it in 2011

and I rolled over into the venture capital investment in the new company. We basically merged two companies. We merged Photobox and Moonpig together with a lot of venture capital money. And so I reinvested in that. And then we sold it all out in 2016. So there's a couple of things here.

That was the first point where you became really rich? Well, moving started making a lot of money before we sold. Oh, really? So we were probably making about 10 million a year in dividends. So because it was making money faster than we could spend it on advertising. So we just paid it out as dividends. I think we could spend it on advertising so so so we just paid it out as dividends i think i think we paid out about 30 million pounds in dividends before we sold oh wow so um quite literally printing money so so by the time i'd sold actually it

wasn't as if it was transformational because um i hadn't spent the money i'd still got all the money that i'd taken out as dividends so when when you so if you you'd already built enough wealth to take care of all of your sort of basic basic Maslowian needs clearly you know yeah so when you when you sell how how does that feel well it was funny I I was I I was interviewed afterwards and um on sky I think and they said well you know what are you gonna buy uh what are you gonna do now and I was like what did you do immediately afterwards and I thought well I cycled home and I made a peanut butter and jam sandwich. I mean, that was because there was a, it's slightly, it's a bit of a weird anti-climax selling.

I don't know how it was for you, but I went into a large room and I had to sign about 200 documents on my own. And then I sort of done it now. And they go, oh, great. Well, money will be banked later on. Off, back on the bike, cycle home. That was it. Oh, there was no sort of you know no trumpets you know no signings shaking hands it was it was um um quite a non-event really

so the money arrives the same day when you've sold um yes yeah well not all of it because it was done in it was done in stages but most of it arrived on the same day yeah yeah and so you sold the company over a hundred million at the time yeah you rolled shares into shares into the holding company as well to keep a sort of vested interest in the business. Yeah. I mean, that's a, that's a shit ton of money. Was there sort of a loss in, because you've given up your, your business here. You've given up your focus, your baby. Was there a bit of a lot, like a loss of orientation?

Like, what do I do now with my life? Yes. baby, was there a bit of a lot like a loss of orientation? Like, what do I do now with my life? Yes, though, at the same time, I think I'd got to a point where I delegated everything within the company. And I had been largely focused on the sale process for a year or so. So after that sales process was over, you think, well, now the day to day running of this business has been left to the team. They're all doing a fantastic job. They're all bright, and they're probably better than I am. So me sticking around in that company, if I decided to carry on running the business for profit, I could have done, but I felt as though I'd run my course. I felt as though I'd done, I'd added everything I could add to that business. And there were lots of other things I wanted to do

in life. So in a way, it was a challenge to sort of create an identity outside of that, you know, because for a long time i'd been mr russia i'd gone to russia and everyone knew me as the person who went to russia and did things in russia and then i did as i started moon pig i fell into obscurity again people think oh poor nicky does something with greeting cards um and i go home at christmas back to shropshire and my parents friends would, so you do something with greeting cards. Is that something you do from your spare room? And it was very, very, very, I mean, because I'd run quite a big business in Russia.

And then, of course, it started, it turned into something serious. So it was an interesting challenge, which is how do you sort of reinvent yourself after that? And I actually stopped and I went into the charity sector full time. And I became a CEO of a children's charity for a year full-time. And then I became a trustee of that for another four years.

Why? Well, partly because I think I'd, I think I sort of satisfied, felt as I'd satisfied everything that I needed to, you know, I didn't want any more stuff. So I wasn't, it was, it was going to be hard to get motivated just by making more money. Um, so, so I wanted to have, I wanted to make sure that whatever I did after that was useful, socially useful in some respect, but for that, you've got to kind of do the work. You've got

to understand how to make a, how to make a difference. And, um, and that first year really made me realize how complicated it is and how difficult it is to make a, to make a real difference, um, in the world. Um, uh, so it was fascinating. Um, and, and I wouldn't have been able to do that if I hadn't, if I hadn't sold the company, I wouldn't have had the freedom to go off and, and, and do that. Isn't that interesting that people, they typically it's, this is a super like generalization and it's not necessarily the truth, but it appears that we all start quite selfish in life. It's like, let me get rich and free first. And then you see that transition when people do make money

is their joy comes from philanthropy and helping others. I think, but I think, you know, in that very privileged position of having seen what it's like afterwards, because of course, for most people, they want more things. I think money, a lack of financial problems can bring you happiness, not having financial problems. Financial problems brings you misery. When you're beyond financial

problems, you're neutral. And then there's financial freedom, which is I'm now free. I don't have to do the nine to five job. I have the option if I want to, to do other things. Beyond that, I'd say it's pretty diminishing marginal returns. I mean, I think for some people, the more money they make, it's not about the money itself, it's more about their position. If you're very competitive and there's a hierarchy of people and there's someone up there who's made Jeff Bezos up there and they see themselves on that trajectory, they'll never quite be happy until they're up there

and they'll never get there. So I realised very early on that trajectory, they'll never quite be happy until they're up there and they'll never get there. So, um, I, I realized very early on that if you, if that I wanted to avoid getting into that, uh, into that sort of competitive mindset of thinking that I have to be somewhere on that trajectory, I've kind of satisfied what I, what I need in terms of, in terms of, you know, stuff, housing and whatever. Um, and then thereafter, it's about being free to explore other things. One of the things that I noticed noticed about you that's like very different to the other um successful people that i've talked to and we've touched on that a little bit was you and we've talked about a little bit earlier but my questions i'm slightly unrelated um is there seems to be a lot of like

neurotic obsession with people's businesses hobbies i mean i remember sitting with eddie hearn here and him telling me how like how i mean his book is called relentless like how relentless he is and to the point where he will sacrifice his family to for the business and he'll tell them he'll speak to have the conversation with his wife and say my business is everything if i you know don't make the date if i don't make this then it is what it is i am obsessed yeah um you don't make the date, if I don't make this, then it is what it is. I am obsessed. You don't seem to be like that. And that makes one would therefore assume that the problem that sometimes comes with being like that, which is a severe cost to sort of relationships, wouldn't be present in you. I think you can be driven by two things. You can be driven by demons or driven by passion. And it's much better to be driven by passion than demons yeah some people are some

some people were offended at the age of 11 by a comment that somebody made to them that they'll never amount to anything and they and they have struggled ever since to prove to that person a teacher said something bad to them and then finally they go back sort of 35 years ago they go back to school and and and they find this old teacher who says well i always thought you'd make something of yourself and they think fuck i was hoping it's going to be more gratifying yeah it was it was um you know the teacher might just say i just felt you needed a bit of a kick um to get yourself off and it worked didn't it um so um some people are driven by and the people who driven by demons are often it doesn't make them happy like an itch

they're scratching and and it just makes it makes it worse amen eddie hans basically like that and he he was quite honest about that his dad basically he was always trying to live up to his dad's expectations of him and i remember saying to him i remember saying to eddie i was you know what's what's the goal then eddie well you know we're gonna sell it for five billion yeah and then what and then he's like well you know then i you know i'll have my cigar and i'll go to the beach i'll go do you actually think you'd go to the beach with a guy you just told me you're obsessive and he goes probably not probably probably no and actually the difficult

thing is then what do you do afterwards i think because i think it's one thing that a lot of people it um they think a business is starting a business is about you start a business and then you're working towards an exit and happiness comes an exit it doesn't happiness comes from the process of building a business and working with people and pulling together bright people watching the work and creating this thing i love the learning process i think that's perhaps one of the other things that i learned out of all of this is that i really really enjoy learning and it doesn't matter how much money you've got you can't learn japanese any quicker but you can learn a little bit quicker if you've got some really good but basically you've got to put the work in doesn't matter how rich you are you can't buy that you've actually got

to put the work in that drives you so do you think you're a balanced person i'm trying to get i'll be honest what i'm trying to understand here is a lot of the entrepreneurs that i that i meet that the reason why they're successful is because of as you say you described it perfectly because of demons or something yeah and then that costs them somewhere else yeah you seem to be as was the case with the um the ceo of deliveroo who sat here a couple of weeks ago fairly balanced person so i'm assuming then you have really well balanced relationships i think so i've got great friends and great friends and great relationships and a lovely family and um um but but that's partly comes down to, partly comes down to standing back at it and thinking, you know, what is success?

And I look at success, that more rounded thing, what makes you a successful human being? And if you look at that, then you're constantly looking, you're constantly measuring yourself by, well, actually, what do my friends think of me? Do they think I'm a good person? Am I a good person?

Do I think I'm a good person? Am I going to look back on my life and be embarrassed at the way that I've trodden on people on the way up? And in which case, you know, don't tread on people on the way up. So it depends on what you regard as success, what you define as success in the beginning. I think, unfortunately, too often we measure the things that are easiest to measure. And the easiest thing to measure is how wealthy someone is. So when I go back to talk at schools about, or my old school about,

and you're invited along presumably because everyone's heard of a business that you created. I'm reluctant to create this illusion that, you know, if you work incredibly hard, you can make a lot of money and that will make you successful. You have to be a successful human being. What is a successful human being?

Well, I think it's all those things. One, you've got to be a good citizen. You've got to make a good contribution to society. Now, if you're good at business, you are, of course, helping to pay a lot of the bills, which is a great thing if you pay your taxes properly. But equally, it's about the way that you treat your employees. It's about the way that you treat the people around you.

And all of those things, I think, are the things that you look back on your own life and you think, did I lead a good life um was i was i was i a good person um or do i regret look back and think you know i was a bit harsh as you look ahead and you know the next chapter of your life yeah we talked you talked there about how the journey is actually the role of fun and fulfillment lives yeah um and you kind of like because i think we all kind of like mentally map out what the next phase of our life will look like. We don't necessarily know the details. I have a business plan, but we understand like the, the fundamentals of that phase. What, what are you, what are you hoping will be part of that phase? Um, at the stage of life you're at where

money isn't, you know, money isn't going to mean that you can count or can't eat. Um, what are you trying to put into that chapter of your life? Well, the other thing I've realized, and I listened to something Bill Gates said, which is that if Bill Gates had become a doctor, he could have affected quite a few people's lives. But by going into business, he affected millions of people's lives. And he was very good at making money. And so I don't see anything wrong with pursuing. I mean, now I'm actively pursuing the businesses that I'm involved with, and I would love to make more money,

but then that gives me the freedom to do something useful with that money. It adds a whole other dimension to why are you doing it? I mean, I'm chasing it because I need another Lamborghini because I've got a very old, battered Discovery, and Lamborghini, it's just not what I... I was going to say, I can imagine you in a Lamborghini. No, no, I'm just a very, very tired old Discovery,

which I'm driving into the ground before I buy an electric car. But there's got to be a reason for doing it. And, you know, the reason for creating a company is partly because it is good fun. I mean, I thoroughly enjoy, you have an idea and you're creating something. And if seeing your idea come play out and you think, yeah, I was right, that hypothesis was right. So we pull together some good people and it starts to work. And then 10 years later, absolutely, that worked. And we've got a whole lot of people in employment, they're enjoying

themselves. And the great thing also is when you step back from that and you think that thing, Moonbing has a life of its own. I mean, I was in the car the other day and there was a Moonbing advert came on the radio. I thought, I've been out of that for a long time now um i haven't been involved you know haven't worked there for 10 years and and yet that's it sort of carried on without me um there's a huge sense of pride in that when you see that it must be surely yeah and actually but you know when you sell a business it's also a sense of pride that it worked for them as well i think the very best deals are deals where both parties came away happy will Will you ever be a CEO again? I don't know that I will because I enjoy the sort of being,

having the freedom to do different things. And there are plus and minuses to have this plural life. I've realised that doing 10% of 10 things is twice as much work as doing 100% of one thing. Twice as much work? Definitely twice as much work as doing 100% of one thing. Twice as much work. Definitely twice as much work. I mean, partly from a very simple perspective is the, I mean, not so now post-COVID, but before that,

actually simply the getting from one place to the other, you know, and that gets in the way of things. But also it's the constant juggling in your head. And then suddenly you think, Oh, I haven't focused on that for a bit. And it's, it's more work. Um, so I would like to be more focused. I want to get interested at a level where I feel as I'm able to make a positive difference to it. Um, and that means, that means actually a smaller number of, a smaller number of things.

I had a job when I was at university and the most boring job ever. It was a, it was transcribing license details. It was working for a Ford dealership, transcribing license details from one ledger to another. And I'd get to about 10 o'clock in the morning physically. It was, it was so boring. It was physically painful. And I would, I would, I would think, surely it must be five o'clock. It's not, it's still 10 o'clock in the morning. It was horrible, absolutely horrible. And, and the one thing I look back at my life, but it's one the the greatest things is i've never i've always got to five o'clock wishing it was two o'clock um and uh and that's that's i think a sign that that you're not bored um and there's the stuff i'd like to be doing like i

look for i wake up on monday morning i think fantastic i can get stuck in and i can do stuff and so but that that idea of that idea of of there not being enough hours to do to to get the stuff done is is a sign that it's enjoyable the ones that don't like what they do you know because i've worked jobs that suck call center night shifts for you know just pick up the phone book the hotel for them because they couldn't figure out how to use the computer yeah yeah you know for dorothy and she just doesn't know where she wants to stay she wants to stay in manchester doesn't know where manchester you know night shifts of doing stuff like that i've had worse jobs as well where I had to open the yellow pages and just call someone and try

and sell them something um which was awful um but what is that what liberates people from that place I mean I would maybe guess that it's information and maybe skills so maybe they could the other thing is is when you've got one of those jobs you take the view look I've got an opportunity to learn how this to learn how this works. If I learn how this works well, take it seriously and do it well, then actually I might know what it takes to become a supervisor. If I become a supervisor, I might have then what it takes to go one notch higher. And suddenly I'm actually then managing people. And that's a little bit more interesting than what I was doing. So to some extent, you have the control to be able to assign how much

time and effort and enthusiasm you put into it. And there are some jobs that will not be that interesting. But then say to yourself, right, what can I learn about doing this that's going to enable me just to do my boss's job? And actually what your employers will be looking for is someone who's applied, who's interested. And they'll look amongst the 10 people who are doing that job and think, nine out of 10 of those people are just doing this because they want to pay the bills. This one is genuinely trying to work out how to do the job better. I've got one last question for you. Never asked this question before, but I, but it feels like I should. You're, you know, you're, you know, several years ahead of me in

business, right? So you've experienced a lot more than me. You've had a child, you've gone through, you know, even Dragon's Den, you've been through that experience as well and had a taste of all of that, you know, um, attention and, um and um uh press and all that stuff what would be the one piece of advice you'd give to me it can be relating to anything if just you you know maybe what's something that you think i need to learn or know based on me being i'm 20 you know 28 29 now i think i've just left my book companies just sold my shares a little bit yeah um as you go as you go through through time you you can get to a point where you think right I've had a huge success uh and I look at moon pig and think will I ever have a success as big as moon pig I don't

know I don't know but I've got to be okay with that and in order to be happy I have to be I have to be okay with the idea that I may never I may never better that um because if if you're always constantly thinking right I've done that I therefore have better that. Because if you're always constantly thinking, right, I've done that, I therefore have to do that, it can be a recipe for misery. And you look at pop stars who have a huge career and they're kind of done by 25. And actually, you know that they're not going to quite come back.

And then a couple of years later, you sort of see. And so I look at it and I think, well, I don't have to better what I did in terms of, I'm not going to judge myself by having a business that was worth more than Moonpig, because actually that's setting myself on almost impossible tasks. What I'm going to do is make sure that whatever I do, I feel as though I was being, I feel as though it was useful. And some of those might not be as obvious or as prominent as setting up Moonpig, because sometimes you catch a wave. And I think And I look at Moonpig and I think,

did I just catch a wave? I was in the right place at the right time. I had a good idea and I managed it well, but actually I just caught that wave perfectly. And sometimes that can be hard to recreate. So I think managing your own expectations is an important part of human happiness. Um, and, and thinking, okay, I may never better that, but actually I'm going

to do something different now. And that will be just as interesting. And that'll be just as rewarding as, as, as, as, uh, as what I did before. Do you ever regret? So like with, with my company, um, I think I left in 2019 when the valuation was maybe 200 million. I think now it's 500 yeah and it's probably going to go i shouldn't i don't know i'm guessing here okay i'm not involved in the company anymore i'm probably going to go to a billion i reckon yeah um do you ever regret moon pig is now worth what one point something one point one point six well i i for for a long time i so eight years after i sold the when i sold the business it was making about 11, 12 million pounds profit.

Not, not EBITDA, proper profit, like money you could spend. And, and eight years later, it was making about 18 million. So I think,

yeah, it was an improvement on where, on, on where it was, but it wasn't so spectacular that it was, so that they're happy with their deal. And I'm happy that I've got the chance to go off and do something else. And then I looked at floating and think, well, of course the thing about floating happy that I've got the chance to go off and do something else.

And then I looked at floating and think, well, of course, the thing about floating is that nobody knew we were going to have COVID and that obviously massively boosted the business and I think probably has permanently put more people online. So that was a fairly unpredictable part of it. Then there's the other question, which is if I had stayed in running that business,

would it have done as well as it has? And I don't know that it would have done, to be, if I'm really honest, because the guys who came after me, there's a guy called Stan Leron, who came into Moonbig after me, who was awesome. I mean, he was, you know, brilliant. And then, and then, and then Nick Rathatha, who's running it now, is, has taken it to another level. So, and take, and he's just... So I'm not sure that I would have done... I'm not sure, had I stayed in, there's no guarantee that it would have done what it did. In fact, I'm not sure it would have done.

So, you know, and actually I've done some really interesting things. So if you're asking me the question, would I rather have had sort of 36% of 1.6 billion? Yes. What I'm questioning is whether we would have got there if i'd remained at the helm well listen nick thank you so much for your time it's been an incredibly interesting diverse conversation and yeah um thank you as well for uh you sent a text message i think to our mutual friend before i went on the show just giving me a piece of advice and he passed that over to me and i i yeah i kept that in mind i won't show what that advice was I kept that in mind and um yeah I mean your story is super inspiring and there's you know

there's a British success story and someone that's so I'm so fascinated by you because you're so unorthodox in so many ways and you also don't bullshit so a lot of people it's tempting to portray yourself even with the last example there you could have said well you know you basically said that you're you're unsure whether the business would have performed better or worse without you. I think that takes great humility and self-awareness

to admit that. And that's the reason why I started this podcast because, you know, to share some of that honesty with the world. So thank you for coming on. Thank you for being

an inspiration to me. Thank you for being one of my favourite ever dragons as well. You were just very real and funny. It was good to have a real sense of humour. Well, it's been a real,

it's been a real pleasure meeting you in person. So brilliant, superb. And yeah, hopefully we'll get you back again once uh to talk more about your charity in particular which i wish we had more time to yeah to talk about because that's that was super inspiring to read about as well um but yeah thank you thanks great Thanks for watching!