WHOOP Podcast - Ben Francis MBE: The Mission to Create a 100 Year Brand

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

On this week’s episode, WHOOP Founder & CEO Will Ahmed interviews Gymshark Founder & CEO Ben Francis MBE. Will and Ben discuss Ben’s background (2:01) the road to creating Gymshark (2:32), Gymshark’s first sale (11:00), designing the Gymshark brand (17:59), and Ben’s journey and growth as a CEO and Founder (29:20). Will and Ben give their insights as Founder/CEOs and the mentality needed to develop a successful brand (36:18), dive into Ben’s experience on WHOOP (44:52),  and how to learn from mistakes to create business opportunities (47:35).Resources:Gymshark WebsiteBen's InstagramBen's YouTubeFollow WHOOPwww.whoop.comTrial WHOOP for FreeInstagramTikTokXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will AhmedInstagramXLinkedInSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

You need to develop and grow at least at the same rate of the business. Otherwise, by definition, you'll be slowing the business down. If the business grows more quickly than you, then that's a really dangerous place to be. But it's that ability to be self-aware enough to recognize and understand that. Combined with your aspirations for your business to be bigger than your aspirations for yourself, I think is really important. What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO, and we're on a mission to unlock human performance.

We have a unique and talented guest of an entrepreneur today. But if you're thinking about joining Woop, a reminder, you can visit Woop.com, and you can sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. You get the Woop Strap, you get the membership, all free for 30 days. All right, on this week's episode, I am joined by Jim Shark CEO and founder Ben Francis. Ben founded Jim Shark when he was just 19 years old and has grown the business from an operation in his garage to one of the most recognized fitness. Apparel brands in the world. In 2016, Jim Shark was confirmed as one of UK's fastest growing companies. It was valued over a billion dollars in 2020 and is probably worth well more than that today. Ben and I discuss fostering his creative passions and the earliest inclinations of building

Jim Shark. He went to university and was able to work on his design skills there. Starting Jim Shark at the age of 19, he literally shares a story of the company making $250 a day. to then go into $30,000 a day. How he has shifted his mindset as an entrepreneur, shifting roles throughout the growth of Jim Shark. We talk a little bit about what it's like being young CEOs and building companies, how Ben uses Whoop in his daily life,

and Ben's advice to young entrepreneurs out there. If you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Whoop.com. Call us 508-443-9552. Here is my conversation with the talented Jim Shark CEO and founder, Ben Francis. Ben, welcome to the Woof podcast. Thank you for having me.

Visiting Boston. First time. First impressions, I think it's a beautiful city. It's really, really nice. We had to run this morning. We walked to the offices here. Yeah, it's lovely. And it feels very English, which is quite nice for me.

I sort of feel like I'm not too far away from home. Where did you grow up? I grew up in a town called Bromsgrove, which is sort of a little bit south of Birmingham, which is the second biggest city in the UK. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a footballer. That was my dream, right? I wanted to play for Ashton Villa, which is our local team, just a fairly normal upbringing, really. When you look at the success you've had with Jim Shark, is there anything that is obvious now looking back on your upbringing that led you to being an entrepreneur?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It wasn't obvious in the moment. So the first job I ever did, I actually worked with my grandfather. So he ran, he was on his own. It was sort of a one-man band. But I worked for him. I think I was about 14 when I first started with that. And we worked in the West Midlands. And we would line furnaces with either brick or. or ceramic fiber. So it was very much in a factory environment, which actually I quite enjoyed right, because it was quite a nice environment to work in, even though it was incredibly hard work and it was very manual and it was tough. But I really enjoyed it. And also the fact that I got to work with him was amazing. And because he'd ran his own business, albeit a small business for such a long time, when we were working, he would, you know, talk to me about some of the risks that he took. He took far bigger risks in starting his business than I ever did. And I think by listening and learning to him, it taught me work ethic. I think there's no better

way to build a good work ethic than working with your hands in a manual environment. Secondly, he also taught me about the risks that he took and the way that he thinks about his business. It's a great point about building a work ethic from some kind of manual job. I remember as a kid caddying for like eight hours or nine hours a day. And then all of a sudden, when you get in an office environment. It doesn't quite feel as hard in a sense. Air conditioning. Yeah, right?

Yeah, it was really nice. And it was that, but it was also the sort of camaraderie, the relationships, the friendships that you build when you're sat eating in your lunch. So the thing that really stuck with me, and there's lots that I learned. So he told me that when he started his business, he built it to a point. And he had a really big job basically. And he had to build a furnace pretty much from scratch, right? And this furnace was to be built for a journey.

own company. But in order to fund the building of that furnace, he basically had to borrow more money than he could afford to borrow. He had to take a massive, massive risk. And as he was building this furnace, he thought he would essentially lose the house. And at the time, my mom was young. Her sister was a little bit younger than her. She's got learning difficulties and disabilities. So she has a level of care that needs obviously funding. Obviously, my nan was living there as well. And he was telling me, I'm at 14 right at this point. He was telling me about that risk and how nervous and scared he was whilst building that. Fortunately for him, he took that risk and it paid off and he then obviously could keep his house, so he could then continue to build his

business. But then when you're told stories like that when you're 14, fast forward four years, five years to when I'm in my late teen starting Jim Shar, and I was a little bit nervous because I was taking lots of different risks. We were risking every penny we had two, three, four times. But it was nothing compared to the risks that he had because I didn't have kids, right? I didn't have a wife or a house or anything like that. I I was earning about four pounds, something, an hour at pizza hurt. So I had no risk in a sense. So it really helped put risk in perspective for me from a really young age.

And it gave me the confidence to take some fairly big leaps, I would say, in the early days of gym shop. It's a great example of how I think when you get older, when you're thinking about starting a company later in life, you have a lot of adults, so to speak, telling you that it's very risky. and the funny thing in the early days of building a business if you're a young person i mean i started when i was 22 it sounds like you started jim sharp when you were what 19 18 19 being broke at that age kind of feels normal like you know like all these start again quite easily yeah and so all these things that are perceived as risks actually don't feel quite uh quite the same correct and it's because

of that i have so much admiration for people that actually start businesses later in life regardless of how big they grow or I guess the quantitative size of the risk because it's a very, very different ballgame taking a risk that only impacts yourself versus a risk that impacts your entire family. Totally. And I think that's why I was so lucky and I'm so pleased that I was doing that job with him when I was younger because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have had that perspective and I probably wouldn't have taken many of the risks that I was quite happy to take later on.

Now, when you're 16, 17, 18, what are you doing that is going to inspire you to start gym shark so when i was 17 17 i started working at pizza hook which i actually quite enjoyed i had some really i love like the people that i worked with are great they were lovely i had a free pizza every time you do a shift more than five or six hours so like free food and you get paid and i was going to the gym and i was trying to balk up and build muscle so free food free drinks pain and gym is like that's perfect right when you're a teenager i was in i was in my last year at school. So I stayed on at school after 16 and did what we call sixth form. You could leave school at 16 in the UK and it was optional to stay on. I chose to stay on. I was actually quite lucky with that

because my grades were only marginally good enough to get me back into school and they had a free spot and they accepted me. And so I was very much into the gym. I'd be in the gym every single day because I was quite skinny as a kid and I was quite self-conscious of that. So I really wanted to build muscle. I did three subjects. I did English literature. I did IT or computing and I did business studies. And I really enjoyed IT in business. I didn't enjoy English to be honest, but that was a sort of a compulsory subject

that I had to do for them to let me back into school. And in IT I had a really good teacher. So I went from having basically very, very poor grades to very, very good grades. And I really liked it because the subject wasn't exam-based. I was never particularly great with exams. It was very practical. So as an example, they would say, go off

we go on a website and the gate was access to the Adobe Creative Suite, which I'd never heard up, right? And it was like, you could have Dreamweaver and you can go off and make a website with that, or it was build graphics and you'd have to learn how to use Illustrator or Photoshop and things like that. So at that point, I just fell in love with the subject. And I guess I found my passion for learning and actually started to enjoy school, which was quite fun. And that was where you got introduced to creative. Yeah, that was it. Before that, it was my life was sport, it was sport and gym. There was nothing else. So you didn't even really know you were creative.

No, no, not all. Because everything was sport. Our family are massive fans of Aston Villa. We had season tickets growing up. We'd be there every other weekend. I'd play football every weekend. We were just sports through and through. And the Premier League and football, particularly in our part of the country in the UK,

it's almost like a religion. It's so massive. I think it was then when I got to 1718 and I was at school, I then found I was really enjoying building graphics. I was really enjoying building websites. And there was parts that I didn't enjoy databases and things like that. But yeah, I think it was through school and through that moment of fortune that I found my creativity. And did you find that you were gifted at moving the pixels around yourself?

Or did you find that you were, you became a very good critic? I think I just really enjoyed it. And I just think I put the hours in. And it wasn't me sort of like working really hard to put the hours in. I just really enjoyed it. The other thing as well that completely changed is when we were 17 at school, we actually had our own laptop so we could have a computer that we could take home as well so having a computer that you could take home was amazing and i did end up just sort of tapping away on the screen or playing with it and yeah i just found it really enjoyable when I was in high school I remember taking like intro to art classes and I was never that

good at doing the art myself but I remember developing a fairly critical eye of other people's work and it's a funny thing like at the time that just sort of seemed like a normal thing to me yeah but one of the strengths I think I've had in building whoop has been having a critical eye for feedback of the people's work yeah a lot of the designs that we've developed over time but it's one of things that's sort of funny to look back on and realize that you were actually very good at I guess observing the work and the areas that it could be improved yeah because I think it's interesting when when entrepreneurs look back on the years before starting something what were the or the things that pulled and pushed at them no I think I was I was really lucky like I said

I think working with my granddad was amazing was amazing for me I think falling on the subjects that I did at school was brilliant as well and like I said nothing ever felt like work and there's a point that it feels a bit like that today. And I feel so lucky to be able to do something that I really enjoy it. I just have them for so long. And the thing is with actually starting Jim Shark, it's a weird one. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. I never, I wasn't 16 years old going, I want to start an apparel brand. I wasn't even 16 years old saying I want to be involved in fitness. I knew when I started doing that computing course, I wanted to build something. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if it would be software or web development or an agency or

marketing or a product i didn't know any of that i sort of fell upon it because because what i did is i'd fallen in love with the gym and the the thing that i really loved about the gym this was at 1617 is that it was the first thing in my life that i knew that i would get out of it what i put in and i mean it's quite cool actually but i think we is really really good at actually demonstrating this on a daily level to to consumers right is you know full well that if you go to the gym three four, five days a week for a year, you will be fitter by the end of that year than you were at the start. That was the thing that really resonated with me when I fell in love with the gym. I knew I wanted to do something in the gym. It was the schooling that really then got me

into web development and graphics and so on. And then it was those things that came together that made me know that I wanted to do something in the online space, also in fitness, specifically weightlifting. And then it just sort of naturally came from there. And at any point, did you say, oh, I want to go work for Nike or Adidas or, you know, fill in the blank, another apparel brand that works in that space? No, no, I didn't. And I really admire those brands. I think they're absolutely brilliant brands.

It was quite the opposite because as I was coming into my late teens, it was more evident that they weren't making the product that I wanted to wear. So because I was so sports focused as a kid, I obviously wore Adi and Nike and so on growing up. Then when I really started to fall in love with weightlifting, it was quite evident that they didn't make the product that I wanted to wear. and as a Brit growing up, it was, I think they were very focused on the states and rightly so, right, it's the biggest market in the world.

But they didn't make product that resonated with me. They didn't make product that fit in the way that I wanted it to, and they didn't make product that really taught to me as a lifter. So it was at that point that, well, I was actually, I was at my nan's house, right? She was fixing some of her curtains, and she had an old brother sewing machine on a dining table. I thought, oh, maybe we could make our own clothes here,

and we could just make something. And it wasn't actually to sell. It was, I just wanted to make it just for me and my mates to wear. So at that point, it was saved up, bought a screen printer, bought a sewing machine. And it was then that we then started to make clothing and really started to find what gym shark would eventually be. And who's we at this time? That's me and Lewis, who was the co-founder of the business.

There was a load of mates around us. It was my brother and mates that we went to the gym with. Friends of yours. Yeah, yeah. And we would just chat with what would you like to see in a string of tank or a tea or a hoodie? What would you like? But yeah, it was just us. Did you guys have roles in responsibility?

at that point was it even a company no no it wasn't a company then the one thing that we did do so and it was more just it was more just because we were interested it was prior to that because i was trying to learn about different things that i could build particularly online i just started making different websites i made a few iPhone app so i i bought the it was called the apple SDK i think it was i did all the basic things like build a basic web browser and whatnot then i made a couple of fitness apps and the fitness apps were all around how to get into shape how to to get fit or how to lose weight and things like that. So I did a few of those and then went on to websites, made a fitness forum,

so a really basic version of bodybuilding.com, which was huge back in the day. That was where everyone went for fitness information. And then just started making different websites. And there was a point where I thought, I really want to make a website that will transact. So just a website that will sell something. There was actually no, there was no larger goal than a website that would sell something. and it was at that point that I came across Shopify and I thought, oh well, this is going to make my life way easier

than what it has been right. So jumped on Shopify, had the Jim Sharp website, but didn't have any product that I could sell. And there was actually a friend of mine worked at a supplement company in Birmingham. I called him up and he was called Dan. I said, Dan, I need some product. I've got this website. It can sell things, which was like revolutionary in my head, right?

I says, Dan, we've got this website. I can sell things. I need to buy some supplements. off you and this was very much in the days of supplement brands did wholesale big wholesale deals and they wouldn't they wouldn't entertain sort of individuals like me and he says right i've got you a discount i've got you in lower level i can i can get you in here and it was like eight thousand pounds for a minimum order i'm only earning like four quid an hour at pizza right eight thousand pound i've never heard of it let alone seen eight thousand pounds so i thought right that that's a no go

i can't do that so then just use the website to drop ship supplements so basically for anyone that doesn't know what job shipping is, it was basically you would order off the gym chart website, it would trigger another vendor to send the product. And the margin was tiny. I remember it took us two months. We had our first sale. It was, two pounds was the order value. I think less than two pounds of that was profit for us to keep. But, you know, no risk for us whatsoever. It was something new. And it was our first ever sale. And I am quite embarrassed to say this actually. I literally was dancing in my bedroom and my mom and dad's house when we had that first sale. I made two pounds. But it was just the best feeling ever. And it was

that that was probably a moment for me. I sort of realized this is something that I really want to do for the long term. Yeah, there's a big theme, I think, for founders that build successful businesses where it's like both being naive and hard charging. It's like a pretty powerful combination, like your whole thing of like, now that I have a website that can sell things, obviously I'm going to sell things. This is going to be great. It is such a positive attitude. And it's no surprise that that was the beginning. But it was just so fun. Everything's so fun because everything's a first. And this was in 2012. And things like that weren't as common. It might have been slightly different in the US, but in the UK it certainly wasn't. And we were

quite lucky actually because we were at a point in time where fitness was massively on the rise. So there was all the news, particularly in the, oh yeah, yeah, there was a lot of loads. So fitness was on the rise in the UK, it was all over the news, obesity rate is rising, it's higher than it needs to be. Social need was becoming a thing, right? So Facebook pages was huge for us. You know, we were building audiences on Facebook and people were connecting in a completely different way. But also people were slowly but surely becoming more comfortable,

from brands that never heard of online because they were sort of understanding that, well, you know, you can return things if you don't like it and so on. So it wasn't strategic by any stretch of the imagination, but we were just conveniently at the center of these three tailwinds, to your point, that then also helped give us, I think, that push that we really needed. When did you start designing the clothes? So that would have been, that would have been like 2012, I think. And it was very scrappy.

So it might even been 2013. It was very scrappy. It was, I've got pictures of. So you've now sold something on your wall. website, like the supplementing. And now at what point are you actually going to transition to close? So it was quite obvious that supplements would, we would never reach the scale that we would, we would need in all, because I think Shopify did basically a few month free period. And then after that, it would cost you 20 quid a month or something like that. I can't remember what the exact

figure was. And it was quite obvious that we wouldn't be able to make the income we needed in order to sustain the business through supplements. So conveniently, I saw the brother, saw a machine, my nans, um, dining table and started to make the product, started working with sort of local manufacturers, handmaking the product, handprinting the product. And that was, that was completely different right, because the margins were on an, on another level that, like one or two sales a day was enough to sustain a business at that point. And clearly we weren't taking any money out and we didn't for, for years to come, but it was enough to sustain the stock purchases or the inventory purchases we were making, the website. So that was the bit where we thought, oh, okay, so one, this is

a margin-rich product. It's a product that we really loved as well. We really started falling in love with testing the product, when it in the gym. People would come and ask us about it, even just chatting to people and saying, you know, you should try this and this is why. And I think it was just, again, all of those different things that made it really exciting to us. Amongst your group, were you the one that was like this material, that design, this color, was that a collaboration? Like, how did you sort of ultimately make decisions? If anything. So we obviously all had our opinions. All of our mates had our opinions. We, so as kids, we really got into watching YouTube as a young lad getting into the gym. It was difficult outside of YouTube to find

the information on how to lift weight, how to do it safely and so on. So we fell in love with YouTube and there was a few YouTubers that we would message. It was very different back in the day, right? You could just message a YouTuber and they'd respond. And we actually built relationships with, there was a guy called Lexup in Manchester. There was Matt and Chris. who at the time were in Sacramento and there was a guy called Alain who was in, he was down in Germany and we would just chat to these guys.

Particularly, it was particularly Chris. Chris and Matt were absolutely brilliant and Lex to be fair and we would just send them products and we'd make something we'd send it to them and they go, oh, you know, this needs to be a bit longer, this is too tight and so on and they would actually give us the product feedback and they were at the time some of the best natural bodybuilders around

so it was a combination of what we wanted to see but also what you know the best lifters in certainly in the area we were saying as well and were you still flirting with a bunch of different products like supplements and you know for a bit we ended up pulling supplements off and because again it was just the website was it was just starting to get big and clunky supplements was really helpful actually because it allowed us to build a massive product portfolio very quickly so we looked like a far more sophisticated business than we were because it was just cluttering the website and it didn't look like

we were specializing in apparel as we were so we took it all off and just purely into apparel at what point were you starting to say to yourself and your co-founder is like okay this is working in birmingham at the time there was one of if not the best fitness event in europe and it was actually a very much bodybuilding focused event and as a kid i would go we would all go to these events and we would love it right because some of the best lifters in the world were there and so many them would fly out from the states and they would come into birmingham and you'd see people you'd never think you'd be able to see and there was one year that we were there and it was at the point where we just starting making our own clothes and I thought we've got to be here if we're going to be taken

seriously in fitness we have to be at this show because all the big brands were there and I went it to the show office there was I'm still mate to them actually now there was there was I went to them and said right we need a stand and they were like right yeah it's you know minimum stand is three thousand pounds I think it was and I thought oh god we can't afford three grand and he said oh but you know you pay on in terms or you pay in installments throughout the year and I thought I didn't know you could do that but yeah I was like yeah too right, I'm going to do that. So we just signed up to a 3,000 pound stand. Didn't have 3,000 pounds, but just signed up to it anyway, knowing that through the year

we could pay for it. Just a great entrepreneur. Yeah, what's the worst that can happen, right? Let's go. And it was through that year, we started to make our clothes. And because the sales picked up, because the clothes were all the power was going so well, we could not only afford that $3,000 stand, but the lifters I told you about out in Sacramento and Germany and up in Manchester, we could also afford to fly them to the show. So we flew. these guys to the show, we had this stand and we literally built it, like I jumped in my

granddad's van, loaded up all the inventory, went to this show, and before this show, we were doing around 250 pounds a day in revenue. After the show, we had to turn the website off because we weren't at home to, you know, manage a lot of the stuff, yeah. So got back and I think it was the Monday or the Tuesday.

And we weren't going to turn the website until the next day, and I remember I couldn't sleep. It was 11 p.m. or something like that. The show was all over our Facebook page. And I just thought, right, I'm just going to flick the website on. You know, I can't sleep. We'll turn it back on. Did the post. And we went from 250 pounds a day in revenue to 30,000 pounds in revenue in the first 30 minutes the website was live.

Wow. And we sold out of everything. And that was the point where I realized that we were onto something really, really special. And at that point, I was so proud because there was two of the things that happened that weekend of the event. I quit university, not because I wanted to, by the way, just because I had to, because I couldn't do the business, yeah. And I also left pizza hurt. So my mom was so nervous, right.

I was the first birth to my family to go to university. I'd work so hard. I'd given everything to get into university. And I told her on the, I think, the Wednesday before, and I said, my mom, this is it. I'm officially quitting. I'm leaving. I'm going in on gym shop. She was so scared.

And yeah, and then I could show her the, like, the following week, this is it. And we spent all, by the way, that $30,000 that came in, spent all. of it the next day. Straight away, went boom. We bought inventory. We signed up to body power next year. We signed up to Cologne. And then the following year, we did body power and Cologne. Again, we had a similar experience there. That went really well in Germany. Again, load of money came in, spent it all, did Germany again, did body power. We did an event in Columbus, Ohio. We did the LA Fit. We went out to Melbourne, and we just spent the next few years traveling the world, selling the product at the event in person. And I absolutely loved it.

conversation with your mother about leaving school to commit to Jim Shark, that's like the ultimate taking the leap moment, so to speak, like I'm all in on this. Was that a fundamentally obvious decision to you? Like your conviction level was a 10 out of 10? Yeah, it was. I knew, I felt instinctively like I was making the right decision. I was scared just because, just because I didn't want to upset her more than anything. And my dad is as well the same. And they were nervous. And they did sort of say, are you sure this is the decision that you want to make? But one of the, I mean, we talk about look, I think probably the biggest stroke of look I've had is my parents, right? They said, are you sure this is what you want to do? And I said, yes. And then they said,

fine, we'll support you then. And having supportive parents, as the first person in your family to go to university, that just gave me the freedom to feel like, do you know what, I'm going to go and do this. That was a special moment as well. Yeah, it's a fascinating moment, like the leap for an entrepreneur because I think for a lot of people who are struggling with this idea of am I going to start this company, am I going to follow my passion? They're like at this intersection of having high conviction that's what they want to do, but being afraid. And they let those things blur. Yeah. And I think you described it well where you said, you know, you're afraid of how your parents might feel or what it might mean, but you still knew it was the right path. And following that

voice i think is something that founders get very comfortable with in the early days and i think it's also worth it's easy to say in hindsight weighing at the risk i explained the risk earlier that my my granddad took that was on another level to that like me dropping out of uni worst case i could reapply the following year do you know what i mean like if jim shark completely fell apart i can just go i can go back to another university but it certainly doesn't feel like that at the time at the time when you're i think again 18 19 it feels like every week's yeah it feels like yeah it feels like Everything is life-changing. But yeah, I was so lucky.

And the other thing that I would say, well, there's two things. Going out and doing those expos and traveling the world as a teenager and someone in my early 20s was so incredibly important, both to me personally, but also for our business. And there's two reasons I think that. One, I was meeting people in places that I never ever thought I would meet, right? So being in Cologne, in Germany or Columbus, Ohio. I flew to Columbus, Ohio, with only T-shirts, because I just assumed it wouldn't be that cold. The UK winter is quite a temperate country, so it doesn't get that cold. I landed into Columbus, Ohio, and there was snow on the ground.

And I had no idea that it would be snowy, because I'd just never been there. I'd never heard of it. I just sort of got on the plane, and we just went. It was, I think, for me to be able to be on the ground and meet people. I learned, by the way, so much around about our customer, and I learned so much about the product, and that was, I think, was game-changing for me. but we also managed to build communities in those areas. And even today, 10, 11 years on from there,

if you look at, I guess, the Jim Chart following, there's still hotspots in Cologne, Germany, in the UK, obviously, in the Midwest, in the United States, on the West Coast, in Melbourne, Australia. Those hotspots still exist. And I don't think that that's just a coincidence. I think that's because we were on the ground and we've built those communities over the long term.

Well, I mean, we've just met, but a theme that I can sense from hearing your story is that you have constantly been comfortable with like this figure it out mindset. Yeah. And in fact, putting yourself probably in an uncomfortable position, you land on the ground in some place you don't know it all and you don't know the people and then all of a sudden you just kind of turn your antenna up and say, I'm going to learn them something. You know, I'm going to grow from this.

I mean, I've met quite a few similar to you, I guess, successful entrepreneurs. But I feel like that's a very consistent. mind frame that I think everyone has and it's very much all the entrepreneurs I've met have had certainly an optimistic mindset a can do will make it work a mindset it's a can do mindset and like a self-acknowledgment that it's going to be hard yeah yeah and accepting that you're not the finished article but you're just going to give it a shot anyway what's up folks if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health performance fitness you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep,

recovery, strain, and you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days to see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. I was listening to some of your interviews before this. And you were talking a little bit about how your management style evolved. In these early days or, you know, the first few years of the company, describe your personality, how you were leading this fledgling but up-and-coming organization. Yes, I got a bit of a flack for this actually online. When the business started and it was successful very quickly, I was quite arrogant and I was very determined to do it sort of my

way at all costs. And I think I was, I knew where I wanted the business to be. It was very, very clear in my head where I wanted it to go. And I felt like I was quite comfortable to drag it there, you know, by any means necessary. That was something that at the time worked really well. It definitely ran its course because there was a point. I think that worked well when you're in a very small team and everyone is very aligned. We're talking five, ten people maybe. As the business then started to grow, it felt like my role changed. And I think at that point, I realized that other people's opinions are incredibly valuable and all it takes is sort of one or two things to happen right like if someone does a better job at something that I thought I was good at

then all of a sudden the role comes from dragging the business by hook or by crook to where you want it to go to a more of I guess a more conventional leadership role of trying to understand where every individual in your business is good and trying to understand I guess the best course of action and then I guess leading them in that direction rather than I think when I was much younger, I was very much blinkered. It was, I'm not too fussed on opinions. This is where we're going and this is how we're going to get here. You were completely uncompromising.

Yeah, at the start, yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like from other people on your team, you learned from some form of self-reflection that that was arrogance. Yeah, so I am. Or that was at least being perceived as arrogance. Yeah, I had a, I had lots of feedback, actually. There was someone that I still work with. She runs all of the women's design at Jim Chart.

She's called Lois. And she came to me, and she described me one day. She said, you're like Hurricane Ben. I was like, what do you mean, Hurricane Ben? She was like, we can, you know, we can be doing this. And you can come in one day, and everything's terrible, and we have to completely change everything and go in a completely different direction. And there was that.

She gave me some feedback, and there was another funny moment that was absolutely heartbreaking. And it sounds stupid now, right? But I basically managed to connect the Jim Sharp website into the Royal Mail system that allowed shipments to automatically just flow through raw mail. Back in the day, you had to literally manually import sort of a CSV file. and then all the labels would come out and you'd manually pick them. I basically automated that, which nowadays just sounds like laughable, but that was actually a problem we had to solve at one point.

And then I was really proud of this. And then I brought someone in, again, he's still at the business, he's called Chris. And I remember he was in the other room and he was looking at this. And he was laughing going, oh, my God, this is terrible. This is an absolute mess. I'm going to do it so much better. And he did, to be fair to him. And I was simultaneously heartbroken because my woman,

work was so bad, but I was also pleased with the fact that he did a far better job than me. So I had two parallel experiences of one, Hurricane Ben, you're not doing a great job in the sense that it's really difficult for us to all move in a direction if you keep changing your mind, combined with the fact that I realized that other people could do a much better job at me in certain areas of the business. And it was there that I then realized that I'd have to then change my way of working and probably be a bit more collaborative, a bit more thoughtful, learn to articulate a vision in a more effective way, think in a long-term way, and all of these things really started to develop for me then.

And how did you go about the self-reflection for that? Was there a certain practice you brought into your life? Did you start meditating? Do you write stuff down? Did you do a lot of 360? I did a 360, which was really helpful. I think the funny one, the funny one was, I did a 360 actually, yeah, you're right, and I had this 360. and it was printed off

and I took it home I was so angry I went home I was so so angry and I put it I put it on the side my now wife had she just moved to the UK

actually I left it on the side and I think I'd gone to the gym or something and I came back and as I came back she was just finishing the last page of it

she'd read through my 360 and I was human right I was like grabbed it and I was like don't read that it's a waste of time it's all nonsense it's all rubbish

bunch of haters yeah yeah yeah losers whatever and then later on I calmed down I said oh what did you think of that What did you think about? She said, that's the most true thing I've ever read about you.

I wanted the ground to swallow me because I had nowhere to hide. Everyone at work had said it. My wife, my girlfriend at the time had said it. And at that point, it was like, you know, you're going to have to change or this isn't going to work. What was the hardest thing to read? I haven't read it. No, I've got it saved on my phone. How sad is that?

Ten years later, or whatever is, I've still got it saved on my phone. Well, it sounds like it created an impactful pivot. Oh, it changed everything for me. It was one of the best things I've ever done. I think it would just be the way that I made people feel because, and design is always an emotional, and Lowe will know this. Like, I've worked with Lowe for years. And I think it was about how I made people in design field because I would just sort of

be like, no, that's crap. I don't want it. And people have worked really hard on it. I don't want to see it. It's terrible sort of thing. And just completely dismissed their ideas, which many of which actually ended up being really good ideas when I think I was more open to them. Obviously, it's unavoidable to a degree when you, when you're working in teams.

But I think it was the way that I, made other people feel at time. So I think I've always since then been so thoughtful about and you can't live in a world where you avoid offending people at all costs, but just probably being more thoughtful about that. It's a fascinating phase going from like uncompromising founder to CEO. Yeah. You know, in some ways I thought I felt being a founder was a much more natural role of sorts. You just don't have to think. It's like, yeah, like you say, it's an instinctive role, you're looking in the market, you're with the customer, you're sort of subconsciously recognizing trends or patterns or opportunities, and then you can just go and do them.

You're guided by this intuition, and you've got this feeling of unboundedness, where you can change this and change that and run in this direction, and you're going to pull everyone along with you. But that's only, in my experience anyway, that's only useful in solving problems up to a certain level of complexity, because then if the problem is larger or more complex, then you'll need teams or you'll need much more smarter people involved. And in my experience, smarter people don't just want to be told, you go and do this and let me know when you're done sort of thing. That's where for me, I had to learn to articulate a longer term vision. So I'll talk about

very loosely where I want our brand to be in 100 years, in 10 years, what the next five years looks like. And depending on the conversation that we'll have, or the person that I'm speaking to, we'll talk through that and I think learning to explain that vision and inspire people to move in that direction I think is really important and again when you're in that founder mentality that entrepreneur mentality that really instinctive role I never needed to do that at the time it was just I need to make product I need to make it quick and I need it to be great whereas now it's a slightly different place I would say I agree with 90% of that I think that there's a phase even when your business is quite mature and I think both of our businesses are more mature businesses

now where even as the CEO and you've built this organizational structure and you've got culture values and you know certain routines that you've built into the organizational fabric right like these are the sorts of things that good CEOs create they create fabric and organization and vision I still think that the value of having been the founder oh yeah is that 5% of the time 10% of the time whatever pick your percentage you can go really deep into something in the organization and be like, that doesn't feel right. We got to change this and we got to do it now. And I think that that's an advantage that the founder, CEO has over a lot of people that get put in that position. I agree. And I think you're right. And whether it's being able to just

override all processes for a day to get something done or drop everything, focus, all resource on one thing. I think that's something that you always have to maintain because you're right. Otherwise, you'll become too almost management focused. And I think a lot of business, I'm interested to hear if you made this mistake, but, and this was probably about five or six years ago, where the business starts to mature and then you go, oh God, I need to hire loads of managers now. I need to bring in a load of people that are really good at management. And then I did that. And we had quite a high failure rate. And I think that was because, well, we very quickly realized that in order to be successful, yes, you have to be able to be strategic, but you also have to be able to roll your sleeves up and get involved in the nuts and the bolts of the business. Because, I mean, today we're still. We still consider ourselves very much a start-up business, and we'd hired a load of people that, yes, they were really good at management, but they didn't quite have that ability just to roll their sleeves up and get involved and get stuck in and get things done. I think that's right. I've been thinking about this recently because there's been this popular blog post that was written called Founder Mode. I don't know if you've seen this, but it's Paul Graham wrote about how, you know, founder mode is essentially what makes startup successful. And it's this ability for founders to go deep on certain problems and essentially pull a company along. And manager mode, which is the contrast to this is like, you know, this dreaded sea level class that's about, process and management for the sake of management, but without results. Now, I don't entirely agree with that framing because I think that you can hire managers that embody a lot of the characteristics

that you would like in a founder. And at the end of the day, it's not really whether you were the founder. It certainly helps if you're a founder. But I think it's whether you are making decisions based on new data, whether you're operating from first principles, right? Like one characteristic that founders naturally have is that when new information comes in, they can change their mind on a dime, right? They don't feel like they need to wait for a committee to assess that new information. It's just very intuitive, oh, this change, we change. And I do think that there's a set of people that have worked at big companies that have a really

vast experience that are used to a culture where new data comes in and you have to sit on it for a while and think about it and, you know, set up a meeting with the other people to talk about it and da-da-da-da-da. Whereas there's, of course, a class of managers or anyone who just says, okay, new information, new direction. Yeah. No, I completely agree. I completely agree. And I think you're right. So we've built a leadership team at our place. And I think one of the things that I most admire is I think each of them have a really entrepreneurial mindset. And then I think some of them actually started their own businesses and they've moved in. Some of them haven't.

But I think it is that mindset and that ability to get stuck in when they need to. I think I really admire with our team. Now, your role, if I understand correctly, has moved in and out of being the CEO. Yeah. So I stepped out of a CEO role in 2015 or 2016, I think it was. someone else came in, a guy called Steve Hewitt, he came in and he was CEO for a number of years and then I came back into the role about two, three years ago, I think it was. And that was great for me because I was quite young and working out how I wanted to, I guess,

approach my career at the time. When he came in as CEO, it meant that he could do, I don't know how to put this in the plight way, more of the boring parts of the business that I wasn't interested in at the time. but equally I could learn about those areas with a I guess a reduced consequence of failure so because we had a CEO in a CFO and so on I could jump into the finances or the operational side of the business I could learn I could meddle around with it I could fail fast but then knowing that because I had these guys behind me to fix any mess that I made it was like a period of complete accelerated learning which I absolutely loved whereas if I was the CEO then ultimately the book stops with me and there would have been less I guess, coverage for the values that I would have had. Yeah, you embody this great attitude towards learning, which I think is so critical for any young founder or a young CEO, because I really don't believe you can read a book about how to be a CEO. Like, you can understand what it may feel like,

but you're not going to feel it, you know, the moment of firing your best friend or the moment of, you know, of someone who worked with you for 10 years and you have to part, ways or not like you know just these things aren't yeah there's no book to describe that and so you have to embody this sort of growth mindset yeah and then acknowledge that in order for the company to scale you have to scale and if actually you don't scale the company may not be able to you need to develop and grow at least as the same rate of the business otherwise by definition you'll be slowing the business down if the business grows more quickly than you then that's a really dangerous place to

me, but it's that ability to be self-aware enough to recognize and understand that, combined with your aspirations for your business to be bigger than your aspirations for yourself, I think is really important. I think that's right. I mean, for me, I got a lot of value out of trying to separate my identity from the company's identity for a long time, especially in the early days, it was like, if Woop had a good day, I had a good day, and if Woop had a bad day, and if Woop was failing, I was failing. And it's actually much more productive to separate those two identities because there's a lot of things that you could do well but for a variety of external factors go poorly for your business and vice versa we've probably both met entrepreneurs

who their business from the outside looks like it's scaling and doing really well and yet they're kind of spinning out of control correct yeah and you're right and it goes both ways isn't it like there's periods where things will go incredibly well and i think it's important not to get carried away to remain humble, to remain level-headed and grounded and understand that things change so quickly. Things go worse a lot more quickly in my experience than they go well. And I think even on the good days and on the bad days, to don't necessarily be defined by them, but just again to constantly be objective and use them as learning experiences and adjust to what you're seeing in the world or the market. Now you've built a multi-billion dollar company. What has kept

do you humble? I think there's a, well, there's a few things. I think one, my upbringing, having such normal upbringing in a very normal sort of working class part of the UK, I think is helpful. Got a really great team around me. I absolutely love my job. I love the people that I work with. And I think, and I had a really good group of mates as well.

I think if there was ever a minute where I got carried away, I think they would clip my wings very quickly. And I think they'd thoroughly enjoy doing it as well. So I think friends, family, colleagues. colleagues, upbringing, I think all these things really help. But on top of all that, I think it's the knowledge that there's just so much room for growth. I think we could triple our business and we'd still be one of the, we'd still be tiny in the market. So I think that knowing that, it always keeps you humble because you know that you've still got so much further

to go. Hmm, well said. Now you've been out whoop for a little bit. I'm enjoying it. What do you use before so i use so i my training sort of split into three sort of areas now so when i was a kid lifting weights that was it i obviously sports grown up and then i fell in love with lifting weights and that was it now i'm in my 30s i've got kids i'm trying i'm trying to think about my sort of longevity a lot more so i'll do weight lifting i'll do sort of rooking i think that it's sort of termed and it sort of weighted mountain climbing hiking that sort of stuff i'm actually training to do something called the fan dance at the moment, which is it's basically a

15, is it 15 miles? 15 mile rook, up a mountain called Penny Fan in Wales, back down, back up and back down. It's sort of one of the military tests that they put the UK military. How much weight do you have to have on your back? It's in pounds, 23 kilos, isn't it? I don't know what that is in pounds. 50 pounds, probably. Yeah, and it's about, you have to do it in under

four hours, 10 minutes, I think. So it's tough, it's really hard. So I'm training for that as well. And then, like, when I'm traveling and things like this, it'll be just sort of 5K runs. So I'm not the sort of person that's checking in my stats every single day. But what I want to see is I want to see a long-term positive trajectory. And I want to know that the metrics that I, you know, I'm personally interested in and moving in the right direction. The other thing that I actually find it quite useful for is when I'm, when I'm training for the fan dance is I'll have to do sort of long training levels, but in a certain zone.

So it's quite useful for me just to be able to like put it up on the treadmill or whatever, I'm competitive as I'm sure you are. When I'm on that, I'm like, I always want to get it done. I'll go faster. But the problem is that's not necessarily giving me the outcome that I want. So I'll watch it to make sure I'm operating in the right heart zone. Yeah, you probably need to stay in like zone two or zone three below your anaerobic threshold so you can do forever, right? Yeah, but that's the thing because I'm impatient as well. I would quite happily just max it out, get it done as quickly as possible and move on. But I've been told that that's, that's not the right thing to do. What's your advice to someone who looks at the success you've had at your

age and says, I want to do this. I'm 20 years old. I want to build a company. My advice would be, and this is, it's quite generic in a way. I would say the risk isn't as big as you think it is. Every successful entrepreneur I've met is in an industry or an area that they're truly passionate about. And I met people that are just like, oh, there's this great opportunity in this. So I'm going to go and chase that. It never works. I really, like in the short term, it might. But if it's not something you're interested in, you will be in the long term out-competed by someone that is passionate about it. I really believe that.

And I also think the other thing I would say is as you are starting your business, accept that failure is necessary. Failure is inevitable and don't be personally defined by your failures. Use them as opportunities to grow. What would you say have been your biggest failures? Oh, God. The list is so long. There's been several times that we've run the business sort of too hard

and we've had to take big, big financial risk in the early days, particularly. You know, I struggled a lot in management as well. When I first started having to do management, I think that was hard. Yeah, I think in the early days, I think there was definitely points where I could have changed more quickly than what I did. I'm lucky because I got there in the end. And just because of the nature of our business, I had the flexibility to do that. There was another bit where, and again, this was another moment where I think, going back to you sort of founder mode, there's this thing that I'm really proud of that we've done in our business.

this. And if you look at, if you search Jim Shark, if you look at any of our ads, you'll generally see three words. And those three words are we do gym. Okay. And that's because we want to be the best gym apparel brand in the world. And we want to be the best gym brand in the world. And as always happens, there's this period a few years ago where you go, oh, there's all these opportunities. We can go left. We can go right. We can go into sports. We can do this. And there was a point where we started to do that. And then the brand almost started to get diluted in a way. And we recognized it and we said no no this is this is not the way that we want to go this might be the the way that if you were to look from the outside looking in if you were a consultant you'd go

oh yeah you can stretch into golf or whatever else there is and there was a point where that's terrible yeah yeah exactly yeah but i mean i'm sure you'll have had it a million times oh the addressable market is massive they you know there's so much opportunity here and that was a mistake that we made but then one of the things i'm most proud of is that we stopped and we said no we're not going to do that and we're going to focus on being the best in the best in wear a brand in the world. And we know there's opportunities left and right. But ultimately, the most important thing for us is authenticity and legitimacy in the area that we do best and that no one else can beat us on. And that was something of those. Well, I think you nailed that.

And it's not surprising that you're building a brand as a consequence because I think building a brand requires saying no to a lot of things. And you have to have a really strong identity. Brands aren't built by being everything for everyone. They're built by having a sort of singular focus that's authentic and then repeating it over and over and over again. I agree. And I think I worked directly with our product teams. I'm very much a product focus person. There's a brand local to us. They still build a lot of the cars, actually, not far from our office, that I absolutely love. And the brand is Land Rover. The first Land Rover was built in 1948, I think it was. And when they built it, it was the best off-roader that has ever been made. And I think there's a stat somewhere that

says most of the emerging world, the first vehicle they saw was a land rover because it was the only vehicle that could get to where they were, right? Fast forward to now, 2024, the best off-roaders are still land rovers. And you might have to jack up the suspension and stick some different tires on. But if you're going out on an expedition, you are going in a land rover. And I admire and love that red thread that has been consistent in their brand through their entire history, through various different ownerships and so on. And then this is the point where normally someone puts their hand up and goes, yeah, but then one, Land Rover don't make their money from people that take the cars off road. Land Rover make their money from range rovers and, you know,

people that make, people that earn good money in New York and London and places like that. But the reason that they sell the range rover is because of the authenticity that was built in the defender. And I think Jim Shark does that really well. The reason that we sell so much our product is because people know we're the most authentic gym brand. We are the brand that was founded in lifting, founded in the gym and always will be. And I think that one of the things that I admire about whoop. I saw some of your content actually. Whoop went against the trend because you didn't include a screen on the band. Yeah.

And that's authentic to Whoop and no one else has that level of authenticity. And I think that I really admire in the same way that Land Rover protect off-road in the same way that Jim Sharp protects the gym, that Woop protect that. And I think that's really, really inspiring. And I think it also means that no one else can do that in the way that you do because it's, it would never be as authentic to anyone else as it is to we. Well, I appreciate you saying that. You know, in a lot of ways, we built a tech company, but we wanted to take the tech out of the tech. You know, we wanted to make it non-invasive and not distracting and something that you felt like you could wear a 24-7 on your body. And a lot of tech products, especially in the wearable

space, were kind of look at me, look at me, look at me. Yeah, distracting. Yeah, distracting. And also unclear if they were for health or for 25 different things. And so that, that singular focus certainly helped our growth as well. I think it will continue to do so as well. Well, it's no surprise you've built a great business, Ben. It's been terrific sitting down with you. I'm excited to see what we can do together in the future. Thank you.

Thank you for having us. Big thank you to Ben Francis for joining me on the show today. Fascinating story. And it's been amazing to see the growth of Jim Sharpe. If you enjoy this episode of The Wooop Podcast, please leave a rating or review. Please subscribe to the Woof podcast. You can check us on social at Whoop at Will Ahmed. Have a question to answer on the podcast.

Email us, podcast at Whip.com. Call us 508-443-49-2. If you're thinking about joining Whoop, good news. You can sign up for free. That's at whoop.com. New members can use the code Will W-I-L. Get a $60 credit on W-W-Acessaries when you enter the code at checkout. All right, that's a wrap, folks.

Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the Whoop podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in. the green.