How I Built GymShark to $1.4 Billion Business | Ben Francis Gymshark CEO

hello and welcome to the very first episode of deep dive the brand new podcast that delves into the minds of entrepreneurs creators and other inspiring people to uncover their journeys towards finding joy and fulfillment at work and in life my name is ali and in each episode i chat to my guests about the philosophy strategies and tools that have helped them along the path to living a life of happiness and meaning my very first guest on the podcast is ben francis the founder and ceo of billion dollar fitness brand gymshark which is one of my favorite brands in the world in our conversation we discuss his humble beginnings making clothes by hand in a shed with no heating and founding jim shark at the age of 19. and this was the moment where it hit home because we went from doing 300 pound a day as an issue in revenue to 30 000 pound in the first half an hour of the website being live how he built a viral brand and tips for getting started with entrepreneurialism so please feel free to grab a cup of tea and enjoy the conversation ben thank you so much for for joining in the apartment welcome to the podcast to the channel whatever we're going to call this thank you for having me i've been watching you for a long long time so it's a bit surreal to actually be here but um yeah thanks for thanks for having me i mean that feels very bizarre because i've been following you for a long long time as well i think jim shark came on my radar about like four years or four or five years ago something like that i just fell in love with with a clothing line and then when i saw that like gymshark athletes were a thing it sort of became a thing in my mind that oh you know one day i'd love to be a gym shark athlete um just as a sort of something to work towards um so it feels very surreal that we're sitting here now having this conversation um i saw something interesting on your on your wikipedia page when i did a bit of a stalk which said that your very first business was selling license plates what was the story there so when so when i was a kid um our next door neighbor who's some of my closest friends basically my best friend and his dad they were just massively into cars number plates all that sort of stuff for whatever reason and um there was this bit where i think they moved into a new style of number play and you could sort of spell names quite easily and he would basically sell them he would buy and he would sell them um and at the time because i knew how to make websites and stuff he sort of came to me he said can you make a website for this and long story short we ended up working together on that and um selling plates for a few years it was it went quite well to be fair it was quite fun and it was it wasn't like a direct passion of mine it's something i just fell into because he couldn't take things online and it was something that i knew about nice like how how did you get started with the website stuff initially oh so i was really looking so when i was when i was a kid i was doing my gcses um and i wasn't particularly great at school not that i wasn't i wasn't like a naughty kid or whatever it's just it just for whatever reason i didn't identify with me particularly well and i probably didn't put enough effort in and then as a result didn't get good enough grades um when i think it's 16 when you finish school yeah i think 16 finished in school um i basically ended up getting into sixth form but it was under the idea that i did i had to do english literature as one a level i did business as one a level um and they they asked me to do english for some reason because i just happened to do well it was the one it was probably the one subject where i didn't have to apply myself to do well which was weird um business studies and i did a b tech in it now the be taking it was life changing for me because anyone that's that i mean i'm not sure how it works now but the old sort of rule of thumb was a levels was more test oriented btec was more coursework oriented and for me that was quite cool because it was a like it felt to me at the time like a pla a practical application of skill yeah um so in that one of the modules you had like your standard modules but one of them was about web development and it was really cool for me because it was just a case of make a website and they gave us access to the adobe creative suite and that was one of the most pivotal and life-changing moment for me because that's when i ended up learning you you had i think you could go down two routes you either made or you made a website and front page and you made a website using dreamweaver and it just gave me that basic knowledge of web development but because we got access to the whole creative suite i then learned how to use photoshop and illustrator and all these different things which anyone that's made websites or anything on you know any sort of digital products will know that you can't just have a website without graphics you know how to make all these different things so um yeah it was through it the btec it which i originally learned how to do things like that oh okay that's really interesting so my my story is is kind of similar um it was uh it classes in year eight when i saw um i saw one of the kids in the year above was was leaving and i saw that he'd he he got on the google home page and he'd right clicked view source and there was all this code floating around yeah and i was like oh my god this is this guy's a hacker i need to i need to understand how this code thing works and then in ict classes and then at break times and lunch times because you know all my friends were nerds um i go to the computer room and i started dabbling in in web design as well you know started off in front page pirated dreamweaver pirated photoshop back in the day photoshop cs2 things like that yeah um but i think it's so interesting how a lot of people i've spoken to who have ended up doing entrepreneurial things have started from the i knew how to make websites front um is that something that you've seen itself 100 but it's because you see this in a lot of areas right it's because not that many people were doing it because i remember because then the the next step for me which i didn't learn in it but i ended up learning myself was was app development and i sort of it was around 17 18 years old i wanted to go into app development because no one else was doing app development so web development was cool but like it got to the point where it's almost like you know when you start to learn a new skill you learn a lot really quickly then you get to a level then it starts to slow down and it felt like i'd sort of i was at a crossroads i could either double down on web development and really try and be great and it felt like everyone was doing it or i could try app development i think it was like the apple sdk you paid 20 30 40 quid i remember what it was you pay the fee and it basically gives you access to like the sdk basically so then i moved on to app so i think a lot of people did well out of websites sort of in our era because not that many people were doing it and there was so much opportunity and then i think it went to apps and you know now it's sort of beyond that even yeah yeah i think like especially with like websites and apps and i think now things like tick-tock and stuff are where as an individual you don't need to ask anyone's permission you can just make something completely from scratch yeah so nowadays these websites then later on so now these days i feel like the kids are less into websites and apps just more into content yeah once you have that confidence that you can make something from nothing then the ideas start to flow like license plates or whatever and so the thing that fascinated me about the web right was and to be honest it's still the case i think i think a lot of people a lot of young kids know will look at the web look at apps look at social and they'll think well it's all been done everything's been done no ideas left whatever but there's so much opportunity we'll look back at this period in 10 20 30 years time as like the moment of opportunity um the thing that i loved about the web i'll never forget this so when we first started the gymshark website we couldn't really get traffic there um but we then found out that we could make thousands of products in the back end and call them all these different things and google shopping would index them right at the top of the page for free yeah and it's like almost like you couldn't do it now but there were so many little opportunities like that little hacks probably too you know strong a word but those little hacks and tricks that you could do to sort of get ahead and i still think there's so many opportunities like that on all these different platforms that we're talking about okay awesome so you learn how to website and learn how to do websites with the with the itv tech then you started doing the license plate selling how did that business go it was all right we did it for maybe a year or two so i did it in that period where i was finishing school and then going into university with the guys um it was fun it was a good learning experience it was like it was basically your typical website it was just a select selection of pages which showed stock and then all of the sales would be done on email or on the phone so again it gives you that understanding of buying things selling things having websites it wasn't a transactional website yeah um you know understanding deals on the phone that sort of stuff so it it was like it was a great learning curve for me okay and then what kind of so you said app design came next how did that happen so after that it was just making apps and yeah um i learned everything i know about app design or i say i knew about app design because i wouldn't know where to start now um everything i knew about app design on youtube and i've just watched different youtubers and they do like tutorials and the first couple of apps easiest thing i think to make was like a web browser because it was like it took like 10 15 minutes to make sort of thing made a couple of different web browsers and then this is where i started thinking i sort of built up my skills and i could do different different things and i thought right how can i how can i actually make this practical and because by this point i was really falling in love with the gym and fitness that's when i thought right maybe i could make some fitness apps and again very very basic like nothing extraordinary in any way shape or form but there were apps where you'd sort of go in and it would have workouts in the app and then you could go into the calendar section hit save this five day split and it would automatically populate your calendar with with a workout basically and give you a little reminder to do it and for me it was less around almost like the product but it was me my sort of learning curve and i had this aim of right i want to make an app and i want to make an app that i can get live on the store because apple had albeit fairly low guard rails but they would definitely like double check that the app was sort of robust enough to go on the store so i really wanted to be able to do that and made two web browsers which was just basic as anything two fitness apps and it was basically just around getting in shape oh wow so what was this while you were at university or when you were like it was either last year at high school first year uni i think it was last year at high school so you're like a full-time student doing like studying and stuff and then on i guess weekends and evenings and school holidays just like messing around on a computer making maps which was great fun because like i said it just felt like you were doing stuff that no one else was doing you were doing something that because i just love the apple brand and i would be that kid that would watch all of the keynotes when steve jobs would walk out and i was just like i just adored him and the brand so much um for me it was like that thing of i just want to be involved in it any way shape or form and you know you'll know this as well as i do then you start learning something and it gets addictive and then you start going on the forums and you're getting involved in the little communities and i mean to this day i love being involved in all the different communities like from i mean at the time it was app development web development that was like motorcycles and fitness but um yeah it sort of gave me a little bit of a home as well wow okay yeah that's really cool um so then you went to uni what did you study at uni so i went to aston university and i studied business management okay so i'm i'm considering potentially doing a business degree at some point maybe like an mba and a lot of people have have said to me that maybe it's not particularly useful because once you've run a business you learn a lot more about business by running it then by doing a degree what what on that yeah i think it depends so we basically what we did at aston is they have um a common first year i don't know how uh consistent that is across different universities and then the the aim of the common first year for all business students was to give you a solid grounding on everything so you did a couple of modules on legals accountancy modules finance maths um business management um all these different things so i actually think that gave me a great grounding and it albeit we did make mistakes in the early days the fact that i knew about trademarks and how important it was intellectual property and had that basic knowledge it actually really really helped me and i was confident enough and understanding the different sort of classes of trademarks i was getting trademarks early in you know gymshark yeah so it definitely gave me a basic knowledge but yeah i do agree i think if you are going to run a business then you are going to i i think that's sort of slightly separate you won't learn the things you would learn starting a business through a degree but equally vice versa because running a business you learn things as you do them and the problem is is because you don't know what you don't know if you don't know that you need trademarks or strong ip then you'll never think about it whereas the business course will actually give you that grounding yeah so this is a problem we're having in our business right now whereby i've sort of been making making [ __ ] up as i went along for the last four years and you know we've we've now got a team of 12 people and we're trying to hire like five more and just even thinking you know like what is a director of opera operations what's the director of marketing like that apparently that's a thing and i just don't know what i don't know and it's only when i speak to people who are on businesses and i describe my problems when they say oh yeah that sounds like you need a director of marketing and i guess that's the sort of stuff that you got a kind of reasonable foundation in before before starting gymshark yeah 100 but i would also say that there's like this weird thing of there are there is a conventional way of running a business and there's a there is a way that you'll be taught and that tends to be based on the old-school business models so yes having a grasp of what a different the different areas of a c-suite will do is is very very important but equally like in your business you're doing something that really hasn't ever been done at a reasonable scale like granted there's there's massive like people there's huge companies that will do similar sorts of things but compared to where they'll be in 10 20 years it's it's completely the other thing as well and i speak about this quite a bit so i've been really lucky to be around some incredibly inspiring talented and successful business people like running businesses far far larger than jim shark and all of them to a degree are winged in it like genuinely all of them so again it's like i always think about it and this it hit me it's gonna sound weird but it hit me when i first walked into the gym right i was 15 16 years old and i walked into the gym and i was trying to do a bicep curl and i didn't know what i was doing i felt really self-conscious you know i it felt like the whole world was looking at me and going who's that kid messing around with with those weights but in reality everyone was sort of working like worried about themselves and they were all thinking the same thing and they some of them were probably looking at me thinking oh he knows what he's doing when he doesn't and yeah it's it's the same in many ways of of business granted there's some incredibly talented people and they've learned a lot but anything that's new everyone is winging it and working out as they go along even up to the multi-billion dollar corporations yeah have you have you got any examples of like when you when you realize that that was a thing in in the world of business so basically gymshark has been built on shopify since day one pretty much like we we ended up moving off shopify it didn't go very well we moved back and we've had an incredible relationship with them for a long long time and i'm really fortunate because harley who's now president and he's been he was the chief operating officer for a long long time at shopify um there was a guy who ran shopify plus called lauren um brief conversations with toby who founded the business and the fact that they sort of took us under their wing in many respects and sort of i would i would ask harley questions and he would be like i you know i don't know we haven't worked out either and this is one of the largest i think this is canada's biggest company or one of canada's biggest company like thousands of employees such an inspiring group of people you know there's other people that have spoken to it as well there's um a good friend of mine called jars who runs a company called akqa again i would ask him questions and he's just like yeah you can just work it out i think there's not this prescriptive rule book like some of the greatest minds in the world might not know the answers to your problems because they're unique and they need to be solved in a unique way yeah yeah i i had a similar moment it was it was a few weeks ago so we've got we've got a guy on our team uh jakub who helps out with marketing and stuff yeah and i was saying to jakob all right jacob you know we need this like you know dream director of marketing i want to be able to basically say to them that we want to hit 3 million youtube subscribers next year and they'll be able to come up with a strategy yeah and he was like i'm not sure they would because if you imagine a director of marketing maybe they've got an mba or something like that but he was saying that like you know you as the youtuber you know far more about how to grow on youtube and these directors of marketing would be looking to you for how to grow their brands yeah and i was like whoa but i just make it up as i go along it was like yeah but you know people would literally hire you to be a consultant to tell them how to grow on youtube which just again speaks to that thing that everyone's everyone's just figuring it out it's true it's true and so we have a similar sort of thing where we were looking at marketing but marketing is it's so many different things to different people we've actually moved it in a slightly different angle where we'll have like a chief of brand and then marketing sits elsewhere in the business because then we would split our organic approach in our more quantitative approach to marketing or like a paid approach so listen everyone does things in different ways and equally i know companies that have a more conventional model that are wildly successful as well so i just think it's what works for you yeah and i guess part of it is i suppose part of it is just like the semantics like do you call it marketing do you call it brand yeah do you call it strategy like for us it's like we call it content because most of our content is most of our stuff is content but then you call it product you call it operations all this kind of stuff and i think the boxes do have their place but also just that recognition that okay does this department belong in operations or belong in marketing who cares like the point is they're researching content ideas exactly exactly like when you get to the nuts and bolts of it that's what you need to be thinking about rather than just the names one one thing i'm curious about i saw your you did a video about black friday i think it was last year where there was a lot of references to how you were working very closely with shopify yeah and that seemed really interesting to me because obviously i've been following shopify for years and i know of shopify is i paid 29 a month and i i figure it out and do it myself and i message their support once in a while yeah but it seems you guys have a much more like integrated like what does that look like at gymshark scale working with a company like shopify so the i think one so we we're very culturally aligned with shopify the way that jim shark and chopra works is very very similar and there's periods in time where there'll be a group of people from shopify will fly over from canada and spend time working in the gym shark office particularly around black friday and sort of sales periods and you wouldn't know they wouldn't stick out you know what i mean it's like everyone's very very similar because jim shark has very very high levels of traffic anyway and we have super high levels of traffic around times like black friday for whatever reason jim shop becomes super attractive around those sorts of times i think it's because we tend not to do too many sales now because the spikes are so high there's been periods in the past where we've broken all of shopify's records in terms of people jumping on the website in a in a moment so we basically need people on hand to make sure that the website is running in a robust way because we've had periods in the past where it has fallen apart and hasn't gone well okay so what will tend to happen so black friday is just gone shopify will send a group of individuals over and we'll be managing the website live in our office obviously they'll be shopify staff so they'll have access to all of shopify systems and then you'll have the gymshark guys sort of next to them managing our side of things as well it's like mission control yeah like it's incredible just to see it all going on because a lot of the sort of extra things and add-ons that we have onto our website and a lot of even some of our analytics tools in real time will break just due to the amount of traffic that we've that we're receiving in that moment okay that's pretty cool i guess when you get to that level of scale you're starting to solve these sorts of problems that stuff that i never thought we would have to solve for but um yeah shopify is such a great platform and that's why it works for us is they do really support us and help us during those sort of peak periods nice yeah i actually got an email from one of their marketing people the other day being like hey we want to work with you about entrepreneurship content i was like yes sure that's cool sweet so um so if we go back to kind of you would you were doing the apps around around fitness yeah um when did gymshark become a thing like relative to the app design stuff so it was 2012 when the company was founded um and the reason it was started was one i wanted a website with that that would transact so before that i've made the basic number plate website i've done all these different basic apps i messed around with a few wordpress websites fitness forums tried to make a little fitness social network it was all just a bit messy um it wasn't particularly great and then it was like right i've done all these different things let's do a website that would transact that's where i stumbled upon shopify right in 2012 that would have been really early days very yeah it was early days very basic but it was just again it was just a simple solution of transacting online which is great for us now because essentially there was the time wasn't taken up with massive hours on development then we were really thinking carefully about the product and i really wanted to be involved in fitness by any way that i could and at the time i was massively into supplements i think anyone that first gets into the gym you like look at all the different nutrition you hear about how important it is and i went to a mate of mine worked at a local company and i said to him i want to stock supplements on the website what's your minimum order and the minimum order was eight thousand pound for supplements now i'd never heard of eight thousand pound let alone seen eight thousand pound at the time i was at pizza on it was four pounds something an hour it was just i wouldn't have been able to afford that so i sort of sat down and now sort of the term drop shipping you know it's i think it's a term that a lot of people will understand and for those of you that don't it's basically you don't hold stock um someone orders from you and basically you act as a middleman someone else ships out to the customer now at the time i'd never heard of drop shipping but i had this sort of idea of okay so i've got limited knowledge of a website and i know around how google works i know that i want a large website i want it to be broad i want a vast product array i want lots of pages i want it to index well in google it's brand new it's it's not going to be seen otherwise so what i did was i drop shipped loads of supplements from the jim charles website filled it up with loads and loads of supplements wasn't making great margin but it was again if we're looking back to the bar that was set the very low bar of i want to be involved in fitness and i want a website that transacts so i'd sort of filled that right even though we didn't own the stock did that for a while and took a few months got a sale first sale i was dancing around my bedroom like it was the best feeling ever first thing someone bought something yeah someone bought is at the point where like you almost forget about it it's like running the background i think we were paying shopify a few quid a month the domain cost demand cost me three pound fifty so about sort my investment costs would have yeah 20 quid round numbers as i guess so you sort of forget about it got the sound i was just buzzing it was a 50 pound sale and we made two pounds profit on it but it was a sale um did that kept going started to get the odd sale like a sale every week and so on and and um basically i bought a a tank because i was obsessed with bodybuilding i wanted to be i'd sort of realized i was never going to be a footballer i wanted to be a bodybuilder so i bought this tank online like an arnold schwarzenegger style stringer tank and it just completely drowned me basically fell through the middle of it because it was built for a big bodybuilder not someone like me with more of a slender frame so at that point i thought right i would love for us just to make our own clothing because no one makes the clothing that we want um conveniently my name was doing a curtains course my mom knew how to sew local lad knew how to screen print so saved up bought a screen printer or a sewing machine and started to make the clothes from there so you went from supplements to clothes yes because you saw a problem that you wanted those clothing that looked a certain way it was like a selfish problem right yeah i wanted this stringer i looked terrible in it i was looking around online no one was making the product that we wanted um so we did it and it was at that weird time right where i loved the colorful when you bodybuild an aesthetic a lot of the american product just wasn't really coming over to the uk and that that was it didn't fit in the way that we wanted things over in europe and the uk were starting to get a lot more fitted and tapered it was that you know topman two for ten pound era when everyone wore skinny jeans and little tight tops so it was like that weird morphing of okay so i wanna be able to look like a bodybuilder but i just haven't got the size this was like the fashion over here so all of a sudden the idea came how great would it be to make fitness wear that would really accentuate your physique and tape it taper yourself in and that's when we started to make the clothes okay so what was the trajectory then so you start hand making the clothes when when did things start to really take off i would guess 2015 okay about 2015 so about three years in and that was when we did our first body power our first event basically and that was the trigger point where all of a sudden it went from being this thing that i did from 10 p.m till 1am to i'm now going all in on this okay and it was it was around that first event that we did and what happened at that first event so so as a kid so about 20 minutes from where i grew up the birmingham nec so it's a large event space and every year they would do an event called body power so my heroes these american lifters bodybuilders they would all fly in everyone have have a huge fitness event once a year so i would go as a kid um and then the one year that we went which would have been 2014 i believe 2013 2014. and i was walking around and jim shark existed and this time it was it was sort of drop shipping supplements we're in that bit where i'm about to buy the screen printer and sewing machine and i'm walking around i'm just thinking jim shark has to be here like which was mental because we had no stock at the time there was no physical manifestation of gymshark and i just had this gut-wrenching feeling that we had to be here by any means necessary so i'm walking around and i'll never forget i'm in a bit of a rush because i'm there on the day and i know i've got my pizza shift at five and it was coming to like three o'clock i'm thinking right i need to sort of make an action here and do something because i need to get to work and i've gone to the show office and funnily enough the guy that runs it who's now a friend of mine called ollie and it was steve as well who were there and he just said right i want to stand cheapest down you can get give me a stand i want to be here next year what's the price and it was three grand again three grand was a hell of a lot of money but now it was more reasonable that within 12 months i could earn 3 000 pounds because i had the job jim sharp was starting to get a few sales it wasn't crazy so there and then booked into the stand um followed it up on email got it going then over the next year gymshark started we started making the close we started getting regular sales we actually started to become a profitable business so upgraded the stand started to um work more closely with some of my heroes who were youtubers um and we basically brought those guys to this event so we'd we'd stumbled upon the market mix that many online people use today right we'd we'd had a product that was only available at this event we'd accidentally built scarcity because we turned the website off while we were there not through a strategic decision but because because we weren't making the close we had to turn the website off because otherwise people might order and not get them sent um we flew these youtubers in who were again not strategic just our heroes and i just really wanted to meet them um and then we would go to this event and we were starting to build a community because at the end of each day we were just going lift down the road in ironworks in birmingham and just get a lifting with you know me my friends the athletes the local fans and we were building this community so as we were doing this lifting and whatnot people were taking pictures they were putting on facebook and the brand started to go viral without us really knowing so the event went incredibly well we completely sold out of everything and then after the event turned the website back on and and and this was the moment where it hit home because we went from doing 300 pound a day as an issue in revenue to 30 000 pound in the first half an hour of the website being live and he just went it was like boom overnight and going back to that like the website everything was set to infinite stock because we would never get enough sales to ever trouble the scoreboard yeah so i'm there at 1 o'clock in the morning scrambling on my laptop trying to turn all the stock to zero to cancel everything off because we were just getting so many sales um and there was a point where everything's out of stock on the website i've closed my laptop it's one o'clock in the morning yeah 30 grand worth of outstanding sales um and that was a moment where i was like wow i'm on to something here something's something is really going to like kick off with this company what does that feel like like can you remember kind of your thoughts and feelings at the time as like this sort of your 100x basically overnight so that was the period where um sort of like i dropped out of uni like the week before um you know i was i was starting to really dig in so i felt like i was then taking albeit not massive it didn't feel like massive financial risk albeit you know the stand cost everything that we had to fly the youtubers over everything we had we'd we'd risked everything we had several times um but it was i just felt really excited to be honest and the thing that we did well which i'm really proud of is we didn't rest at that point we did one great event so then the next year we did two the next year we did five and we just went and went and went and we kept spending everything we had on punts that we thought might come off but the stuff that our gut told us was the right thing to do nice so between let's say 2013 and 2015 like before this event how were people finding the supplements and the clothing like um what sort of marketing penny were you guys you guys doing so facebook was massive at the time youtube uh and google were the main three things so it was the whole google shopping thing was massive for us there was a change where all of a sudden you had to pay for your spot on google shopping which sort of affected us but it's sort of like a bit of an evolve or die moment so that was the point where we actually started getting involved with a little bit of paid advertising facebook instagram wasn't really a thing so yeah facebook youtube and google so facebook is in facebook groups or facebook ads like what facebook pages was the thing which everyone would comment on and yeah um i mean we ended up building up to well over a million followers which at the time was just yeah that's something um and that was back in 2015 2016. okay and then on youtube okay what's the thing of like sending product to people and yeah so this is the thing so we didn't we've not really done too much on youtube and and at the time so it was going back to my heroes it was those guys that were great youtubers i say great youtubers matt who was the biggest at the time had 20 000 subs which by today's numbers are quite small they're our heroes they're uploading regularly on youtube i would love i remember thinking like lex griffin who's one of the first athletes he lives up in manchester i remember thinking i'd love lex to try on our top try on our tank and give us some feedback and then he just happened to wear it on youtube and that's where i think youtube really kicked off for us we're going to take a very quick break to introduce our sponsor for this episode and that is brilliant i've been using brilliant for the last two plus years they're a fantastic platform for learning maths science and computer science with engaging and interactive online courses and the great thing about brilliant is that they really teach stuff from a very first principles based approach it's almost like the way that we were taught in places like oxford and cambridge where you learn a concept and then you apply the concept to an interesting problem rather than just being spoon-fed stuff like we initially learned in school my favorite courses on brilliant are the computer science ones as some of you guys might know i was torn between applying to medicine and computer science i went for medicine in the end but i always had an affinity to computer science and taking the courses on brilliant like their introduction to algorithms and their introduction to python really helped me get more of a grasp of computer science than i've ever had before it's also great for learning how to code which is an incredibly useful skill to have especially if you want to start a business and i attribute like 98 of my business success to the fact that i learned how to code when i was in secondary school so if you want to check out the courses on math science and computer science then head over to brilliant.org forward slash deep dive and the first 200 people to sign up with that link will get 20 off the annual premium subscription so thank you brilliant for sponsoring this episode and so while while all this was happening you were working at pizza yes so i ended up quitting pizza around around the event around the event when things really started to take off yeah and a quick beat and university around the same time so it was a little bit like i remember my mom and dad being a little bit like are you sure this is what you want to do and it's just like yeah i'm i'm gonna go and give it a go so one of the questions i get all the time and i know you've recently done a video about this is like how how do you have time to do all these things so you know early days of jim shark you're running this business on the side you're working at pizza hut you're at uni like what was your what was your time management looking like at the time well i just want to say so my time management then and now are vastly different just completely different so back then it was university which i mean you know university it's like it's not like a solid night until five is it like you'll have busier days and quieter days so basically university in the day peter shifts would always be ten five till ten normally half ten latest eleven by the time you sort of washed up because as a driver you do the pot wash when you're in the in the building and then it would be ten or eleven onwards i would work on jim sharp now stream shots started to grow we'd have live chats emails and stuff so pizza was great for me because i could do a delivery then sit in my car respond to two or three emails and carry on so i'm doing two things at the same time and yeah that was that period where i think it was the iphone 3gs i think it was my first iphone and i got my hands on one and i'm like buzzing because i can literally work on the go so i was like almost doing two jobs at once whilst i was at pizza which was absolutely brilliant for me nice and what does your time management look like now incredibly well just scheduled organized everything down to the second it's it's it's actually really cool and for me at the start it was really difficult to get used to because i just love the whole thing of doing whatever the hell i want when i wanted to do it but now i've learned to be really disciplined um and essentially because i am horrifically unorganized essentially outsourcing that to people who are incredibly well organized and absolutely love doing that sort of stuff it's great for me because i know i basically wake up and it's like a set of train tracks right every minute pretty much from seven or eight in the morning tends to be planned until seven or eight on the evening so what does that look like on a standard day like what are the day in the life of ben francis it varies so much it's it's well different now because i'm not traveling so it's actually really it's simple because it's like there's one moving part whereas before moving around we've got offices in hong kong mauritius denver events that we would do all over the world it was it was manic now it would be i'd usually i usually try and get into the office around seven half seven basically just meetings throughout it could be there'll be a particular day for example with one-on-ones in the team so people that i work directly with um there'll be certain projects that i'm working on and then we may be on there'll be certain days allocated to those things um once a week or every other week i'll be in london so they'll sort of batch up the london meetings and do all the london meetings on a particular day i'll get involved with all sorts of different things whether it's you know content on my youtube the only thing i would say is now it's changed because i'm moving into a ceo role so i'm now just one step slightly more removed whereas previously it would be product and or brand whereas now i'm chatting with the people that are doing those things which is again just a slightly different thing to get used to okay yeah we'll come back to the ceo thinking a bit because i really really want to kind of explore that um so going back to sort of imagining some kind of 2014 2015 before the the nec show what did the team look like in gymshark there was um myself and lewis who started the business there was my brother so in around 2015 i think it was my brother so basically my brother was the first employee and the whole thing of joe joining the business was we're at the event we need someone back at the um back at the um the ranch to sort of manage the stock and then that was it really like a few friends ended up joining and doing you know bits here and there but it was just everyone would just get involved in everything like if there was a busy day we would jump on customer service like everyone would finish the end of the day sat in a circle on their laptops and they would answer customer queries um so it really varied i just remembered by the way it was 2012 not 2015 that we did that first event 12 2013 so it was around that sort of era okay so you had sort of a team of maybe three poor people yeah so it was in that first event it was like two or three and then as it developed then it was like okay and then we started to invest more in the warehouse because we had our own warehouse and we would ship our own product okay then people would basically manage customer service and deliveries and stuff at what point did you get the warehouse like that's been a big expense yeah so 2012 2013 just before that first event that was when we got like a shed basically right okay honestly it was it was actually not not particularly great it was it was a shed on an industrial estate and i didn't realize until about three or four months in the whole thing was built out of asbestos oh no and like the bloke next door like this lovely lad like 80 years old he was he was just like drilling through the walls through the asbestos walls and all asbestos was just flaking everywhere so that's probably not great for my health um so it was an old asbestos shed in the middle of nowhere on an industrial state and it cost us about 300 quid a month i think 250 300 quid a month okay then after that we ended up going into a more professional sort of place we went from that was 300 square feet and then the next one we actually upgraded to three or three thousand square foot warehouse and what was great about that is it had a small room um at the front of it with a radiator in and if anyone's work worked in like a shed through the winter it was ice cold so to have a radio it was amazing because what we used to have to do we'd have the front door of our old shed we'd leave the door open and we'd stick a diesel heater in there so you go over next door you get your diesel from the pump and you basically you'd fill it up and then it would just blast heat in there but again sat in an asbestos shed with a diesel heater blowing at you is not the most exciting way of spending your late teenage years or early 20s so to have a radio it was game changing radio was game changing right and i guess whether you and your mates making the clothes yes like hand making the clothes yeah yeah so like getting cloth and like cutting it up so this yeah and so the sewing would be done at home essentially and then we would print uh generally at the the um i don't know what you call it warehouse wow okay so when you're in those early days and you're investing in things like the radiator the warehouse and stuff yes um what's going through your mind in terms of like the profitability of this like don't think about anything like that didn't think like i had no idea how to pay taxes i had no idea about finances all we knew was more was coming in that was going out okay and everything beyond that is just at the time it was fluff clearly now that's not the case um but it was everything was purely instinctive everything at the start okay so you start off as like a band of band of brothers like you know a handful of people in a shed yeah a radiator is a game-changing expense yeah a game-changing addition to the business and now james shark is a billion plus dollar company you're the new ceo of it like how many employees do you do you know uh we're just over 700 700 and you sell all of the world with offices all around the world that's going to feel pretty wild like it's cool it's called honestly i still walk into the hq so we've got a gorgeous hq and there's the sort of the big logo on the front over the road we've got our lifting club we've got like a gym manufacturing facility studios i do walk in and like i do still get goosebumps because it's it's such an amazing place and there's a buzz like you've got to visit because as soon as you walk in the door there's a buzz there and everyone's lovely everyone's pulling in the same direction everyone really understands why we do what we do everyone understands the area that they sort of fit in with that sort of wider plan it's it's such a lovely place to be so it's interesting you say that like everyone's putting in the same direction because i think i feel like this is an issue we're having as we expanded from three people to 12 people whereby i'm now having starting to do things like defining our vision and where we want to be in x number of years and kpis and goals and all this stuff that in the past i would have thought this is all just corporate [ __ ] like who cares about any of that um presumably like like what was your journey through kind of being more businessy about it so what you're going through yeah so we did that i used to hate the word corporate and you're going through for reading between the lines what i actually think is the most difficult change i think this is one of the most difficult things for any entrepreneur or business person and by the way not even owning your own business if you're running or working in a great business it's so difficult to sort of distribute that control and i think those that can do that then after that it's not plain sailing but if you've then done that it's like you know it's like a muscle memory right if you continue to do that i think scaling becomes so much easier um i'll give you so my sort of breakdown i sort of break it down into three areas and i think every great business person needs to reinvent themselves over and over again so you can't become too like tied in or emotionally attached to sort of i'm gonna say who you are in many respects so at the start i found i had a great creative vision i didn't exist i had a great idea where i wanted us to be and i i felt like i dragged the business to where i wanted us to be and that sounds a bit sort of direct but you know it could be having a great creative vision it could be great at knowing product it could be great at whatever it is but you because you tend to be a one-man band or there's not many people involved you just do what the hell you want when you want and it's very instinctive now you'll then get to a stage where you've got people around you it might be five people it might be 10 people it might be 30 people and an instinctive way of running things is still great but you can't just do things on a whim because you fancy you have to then learn to work in a team and i don't mean when i say in a team i mean you are part of the team and anyone that's managed a team knows that the team doesn't work for you you work for them and you need to make sure that you're really understanding how to work with each different type of people person so some people will love to be organized and they will love lots of different catch-ups and you know some people will be highly creative some people will be highly logical some people you'll have to spend six weeks trying to buy them into a new dear new idea some people have to spend six seconds and it's about learning how to work with all these different people so you've gone from dragging the business to where you wanted it to be learning to work with new people and then that sounds like to a degree what you're going through slash the next stage which is like okay you don't have to work with people how do we galvanize them around a vision or a mission how do we make them understand where they fit in with that how do we make them understand that you know the team that we're working with touch what is greater than the sum of its parts and really understanding how to articulate yourself and your vision um and essentially learning how to inspire people and i think that's again it's very tough and i hear people a lot of the time saying like oh you know one facet of their personality that's just me what am i like i'm a bit unorganized well when you're at that level there's not there's no excuse for being an organizer like yes i am an organized but you do something about it you either fix it yourself or you build the team in a way that negates that weakness does that make sense it's um i think it gets a bit more serious at that point and yeah you have to learn new skills and tourists that's why i love the job so much and feel like i've got the best job in the world because you're constantly learning new things and constantly reinventing yourself it sounds like that's what you're going through now a bit yeah it seems like a real a real shift in where my default used to be i want to do something all right i'll do it i was like i want to do something okay let's figure out why i want to do this thing let's figure out like what the actual like what good looks like to figure out who i can give this project to let's give them ownership over it in a way that they'll feel more motivated to do it i mean kind of get out of the way and be there to kind of consult them if they need it but not like step on their toes too much the most exciting thing about that period is right you'll have it there'll be there'll be a few things that'll happen and it happened to me someone will do something you'll trust them with it they'll do it poorly and it will break your heart but someone will do something that you didn't think was the right thing to do and it will be infinitely better than any ideas that you would have come up with and that is one of the most fulfilling and incredible experiences ever because then you're like okay now we're a team yes yeah i've had that i've had that a few times um i often describe this feeling when because i i teach people how to be how to be uh part-time youtubers and one of the things i'm very bullish on is to outsource editing like asap and everyone is very resistant oh but i like editing i like doing it myself i i enjoy spending 20 hours a week doing my editing and i'm like look guys the moment you outsource editing like just that feeling when you upload raw footage of yourself mumbling through a video on google drive and the next day you get back an edited video and it's actually really good it just like blows your mind and then you think oh my god like i've just like my my whole world is now open and i guess what you're describing is that at scale when you have a team that can execute stuff exactly like i said and i i love it i love working with so many different types of people and there was a there was a point a few years ago basically when i i moved into a role as the chief marketing officer at gymshark and cheap market at the time was all your quantitative marketing it was all your social media and it was all data i remember going into this role thinking love marketing love social media not a clue where to start with data and to be honest it sounds a bit boring but i ended up working with the data team and that ended up being the team i loved working with the most because they would run rings around me at the start and like i would come in with all my stupid irrational ideas that just made no sense and would have flopped instantly and they would challenge me and it made me a better person and in terms of sharpening up my ideas and my concepts but equally it meant that i learned the power of what they do and you know the validity of it so it was massively fulfilling to me to work with a team that i didn't expect to enjoy working with or be good at working with and to be able to do that nice so when you're when you're the kind of founder of the business and like the owner of the business how did you kind of get to that point where your role was chief marketing officer rather than straight to ceo like what was going through your mind there so we we started to the business grew rapidly right we went for our i mean we've gone from bedroom to half a billion dollar revenue in eight years i think it was it was like rapid rapid growth so during that growth period it becomes very evident that things start breaking if you don't have great people to manage these things so we what we started to do was we built essentially a chief's team of individuals that manage and run the different areas of the business so chief products officer chief brand officer you know uh people finance all these different things and it's just through necessity it's less of a case of listen i think i huge applause to a business that can see ahead and build that team out in front of themselves we were just at the point of we need strength in this business otherwise things are going to fail okay and so when you were bringing people on you were bringing on like c-level people yeah for like executive roles and for the people in hr and finance and legal and the whole shebang and we and it was a balance right so some people we were bringing in with brilliant experience and then we were also identifying great people in the business that were hugely devoted to the business incredibly intelligent and competent that would then basically be able to make that leap up to that level as well so there's a brilliant blend of sort of um experience and inexperience in that team as well okay how did you because i guess you were the one doing the hiring initially yes how did you get so and i i asked this is a problem i'm having like how do you hire for a role that you don't have experience in where you're trying to hire someone who is like good and good at that role if you get what i mean yeah so we i was really lucky so i so our our sort of current um sort of out moving ceo steve um he joined the business purely on good instinct because it felt like he was the right person to to be in the business and conveniently he was brilliant at all the things that i was bad at so that one hire then allowed every other hiring finance ops logistics all the back end of the business then went through him rather than the front-end ones that went through me so it was like one solve for um everything beyond that which was massive so where you like what were you looking for when you hired steve what was his role initially so i wanted someone that would basically help we're going to say professionalize the business because at the time it was just there was no hierarchy no structure a group of people that you know went and did a bit of brand on the morning bit of social media event here and there package on the evening and your emails and go to bed it was it was literally just carnage and chaos as i think all businesses are the in the early days and then he came in and he had genuine corporate experience however it didn't come across like corporate experience he wasn't like you know your typical corporate guy suited and booted sort of thing he'd worked in in reebok but he also even though he didn't understand social media particularly well he understand the understood the power of brand and growing a robust business and a great brand so we sort of got comfortable with him and he he ended up doing i think it was a day a month and two days a month and three days a month and it was a very organic sort of shift into him joining the business full-time oh so he started off as like a coach consultant yeah exactly so it wasn't like boom you're in in the business every single day okay and that really really helped us because it allowed us to get comfortable with him him to get comfortable with us and just to get to one and know one another oh interesting yeah because i've got a couple of uh kind of business coaches type people now who are mentors who've been doing this for a few years and i meet with them maybe once every other week and every time i talk to them it's like oh my mind gets blown by yeah just all of the stuff that all of the unknown unknowns i just didn't realize um things like you know restructuring your organizational chart and how when you have the you know there were there was a time i think it was about two weeks ago where i was i was chatting to this guy's name's rohan and i was like yeah at the moment this is what the business looks like it looks like this and it just felt felt a bit like a bit of chaos and within about half an hour he just asked a load of questions and we kind of on that whiteboard over there just like drafted out to this structure which just made so much sense and brought so much clarity yeah i was like i can't believe how much clarity i've now got in my mind from just drawing this diagram on the board it's so good it makes such a difference but you'll find like if when you work with genuinely brilliant people like that they they revolutionize like teams businesses brands everything like so many people talk about all the different nuts and bolts of businesses and brands but ultimately it's literally just people it comes down to people and it's so important that you understand how to work with people and you know work with great people i am similarly i was chatting to someone the other week and i was talking about that he was he worked with one of the most successful business people of sort of like my parents generation and i just said all right what do they do in a sentence like cut all the [ __ ] sort of thing one sentence what do they do really well and they said they attracted great people and then left them alone and i just thought that was so cool and i think you know in its most simplistic form that's what any great entrepreneur or business person does and they do it in different ways so some people are tracked through insane levels of competency some people do it through charisma some people do it from being an incredible creative or an incredible organizer or all these different things but ultimately it just does come down to that nice okay so you were a chief marketing officer for for how long jim trump oh god i don't know i haven't got a clue yeah two years in the lineup what was your role before then uh so i did chief of brand yeah then i came out a brand a guy called noel did it then i sort of i moved around and messed around with product for a little bit and that was that was a great period for me because that was where i was like really in the nuts and bolts and i didn't actually have a job and i'll never forget this we wanted to there was a particular product that we wanted to make and i was typically i'm quite impatient and it was a case of like you can either wait for these guys for six weeks to make it or we can jump on a tr a plane fly over to istanbul spend a week in istanbul sit in the factories and make it and i'm like too [ __ ] right i'm doing that you know what i mean so it was like that sort of really impulsive role product brand moving around events i then went from that into the chief marketing role marketing was great because i worked all with social which i had done anyway i worked with the data team and really understood data and then i went from there into i did chief product officer for a little bit a little bit of work in tech and this is where i am today so when you're like this is your company right so do you are you applying for the position of cmo are you just saying steve i want to see him like what does that look like yeah so it depends so some of them so cmo i was i was definitely the the right person for the role um i went into product out of necessity i wasn't like i mean in terms of immediately available basically we found someone we did the whole interview process we found someone who was brilliant but they had like a really long period of time before they could join the business so it was it was like it was like a 12-month period basically where no one does the role or i do the role so it was more out of necessity marketing and brand it was like it was my bag products and then my limiting time in tech it was more out of necessity if i'm honest okay and then so this transition for you now being ceo what's what's the story there what's that been like so far been amazing so um two years ago steve mentioned to me that he thought jim shot needed a different type of ceo to take it to that next level at the time i didn't think he was right now i do um so he's got great foresight there so i then spent two years working as best i could to get into a position where i was the right ceo because again steve steve would basically say like you need to be he genuinely thought i was the right person and confident enough to do the role but i needed to really prove it um and the alternative was to hire someone else now fortunately i got to the level of being able to do the role so two years of making sure i could speak publicly talk to camera understand a profit and loss properly understand you know long-term strategic decisions and working with teams and all that sort of stuff which again going to the different chiefs roles that i've done it gave me incredible grounding across the business which really helped and then more recently the sort of official transition started may 1st and it completes august 1st and we're we're what july now middle of july so i'm about two or three weeks away from like officially completing that handover so two years worth of kind of like training to be the ceo yes i've like every single day like writing a list of things i need to do working towards them the wallpaper on my phone would talk about the things i need to get better at just every single day working towards that wow and i guess like but weirdly not having not been able to tell anyone which is like really weird so i'm not really wanting to tell anyone either yeah i didn't why would anyone tell you because so listen i'm more than happy to talk about my ambitions usually but the ceo won i didn't want people to go oh ben's just going to get it because he wants it so i think it was it was literally a case of this is steve's decision it's solely steve's decision so i didn't want that to be you know out there as it were i wanted to almost like work on my craft in silence and and then almost people then almost be going then you should be doing that wrong rather than me telling them okay yeah that makes a lot of sense i guess it you you must care about the brand a lot to not put yourself in that position just by default and knowing that you've got all these weaknesses and weaknesses that you want to work on yes well clearly yeah my baby is not i love it more than anything yeah yeah because that was the thing that i was i was most intrigued by when when i first started stalking you a few years ago i was like oh i i would have just assumed you were the ceo um but now i think that i've got a bit more experience in business and like i wouldn't want to be a ceo right now because i know that it would just be an absolute [ __ ] show and it's like so this is the thing i talk about this a lot right so steve came in and he was the best person to be the ceo so anyone that has an interest in self-development would jump at this chance because usually there's a decision where you focus on your strengths or you work on your weaknesses and it's it's very difficult to do both in like a in like an efficient way because steve was so good at all my weaknesses and running the business i could focus on my strengths and then have a go at my weaknesses when i want knowing that steve would basically fix anything that i wasn't good enough that so i could you know steve would do a lot of the or all of the profit and loss sort of work but then i could just mess around and ask questions and learn as i go so the the best way i liken it to is like i could focus on my strengths and on my weaknesses i could just keep taking the same exam again and again and again until i got the grade that i wanted because i could just try again fail try fail try fail try fail yeah because i think like right now one of the things i'm struggling with in the business is this thing of do we hire people with experience because right now our team is very young where it's like and i've kind of brought brought them on for in in that apart from i think apart from christian our editor like no one on the team is like i think better than me at doing the thing because it's like i've i was doing the thing initially and then i delegated to them and that was sort of out of necessity at the start when we didn't have much money and didn't have much revenue coming in and so you have to kind of get people on the cheap as it were like at entry level positions yeah but now that we're a bit more profitable it's a thing of what my business coach says is you really want to hire for example a managing director or like a marketing director or director of operations who has 5 10 years experience because you won't know what that is like but when you have the right person there it will just be like such a breath of fresh air yeah you want you want i'm a firm believer you want the opposite true you want everyone in their respective area to be better than you are and you just amalgamate those people and you know look at longer term strategies and visions and you know build a cohesive team okay but like if you're the best editor in the business then the business is only as scalable as you are yeah if you're the best do i mean you need to be able to really think about that and then when it comes to like let's say we were to bring someone in with experience and they would sort of come in at a level above other people who've been in the business for the last two years how how do you deal with that like it was that like weird very difficult yeah very difficult because what tends to happen as well is like people will come in and they'll be there from the start and that's an incredible thing to do and some of them will be able to grow with the business and some of them won't and it's not a you know it's not negative or positive on them it's just the way it is and like reading between the lines it sounds like your your business is it's elevating itself up a level and anyone that's into football will know that teams that get promoted from the championship to the premiership generally try and hold on to the spine of the team in the core of the team but ultimately there's a lot of changes that have to happen for that team to then succeed in the champ in the premier league it's very rare a championship team gets prepared to the premiership and succeeds by maintaining the same team so it sounds like you're almost the championship team getting promoted to the premier league and you need to by the way it's not experience doesn't necessarily mean competency yeah so i wouldn't sort of i'd try and separate those two things and sometimes experience in certain areas can actually be a negative because then if they've done or if someone's done something in a particular way for a prolonged period of time it can be often very difficult and time consuming to try and move them out of their set ways so i would be cautious about that um but ultimately you need to understand like i don't know pick five key facets of the business and then you need individuals that are better than you in every single one of those facets and by the way it takes a long time and it's very difficult it's heartbreaking it's gut-wrenching it's filled with horrible conversations you will never want to have but if you manage to do it you as an individual will be incredible incredibly competent and brilliant at so many different things and the business and the team will be great in the sum of its parts nice okay yeah that's the dream um so one thing i was going to ask you about like you often hear for example tennis players that when wimbledon at the age of 23 and now they've like made it and now there's no like they could kind of get a bit depressed because you know that's the pinnacle like what more do you go for do you feel like you're in the position of having one wimbledon at 23. i was really scared of that like legit no no would have lie i was really scared because what we did is when we when we when we did this deal and general atlantic came in and helped tidy up the shareholding i did i essentially i earned you know i own good money i and i've done okay and i i earn really good money now and i was scared that oh okay so there is a point now i'm at a point now where i'm gonna be completely candid i i don't you know what i mean i don't need to work i could comfortably retire happily and i was really scared that when that happened that i would lose the hunger genuinely and i was really open-minded with myself that i would react accordingly to however i felt um but i am absolutely buzzing that i'm more hungry now than i've ever been to the point where i have to really carefully control the amount of work that i take on because i'm still prone to i will just take on the work take on the work take on the work and like genuinely i was i was worried about that why do you think it is that you're more hungry than you were no idea okay i think no so first and foremost i do think it might not be but it could be something to do with it being a grandparents run their own business my parents are so ridiculously hard working like they will like i speak to my grandparents about it they work and they work in their work um i also think and i'm really driven by this i'm driven by the team that i work with and i want to do well for them and i want them to do well and i want them to succeed i also think we've got a once in a lifetime opportunity so i don't think certainly in our generation there's never been a brand that has had the opportunity to go from being you know a local brand or a national brand to a truly global brand um and one of the greatest brands in the world and i think we've got that opportunity and i feel i would kick myself in 30 40 years 50 years time if we didn't do everything within our power to become one of the greatest brands on the planet okay so it sounds like uh it's it sounds like even from the start like money wasn't a particular motivator for you no i mean listen it certainly helps and money gives you choice completely but the reason that the business was started because i wanted to be involved in fitness the reason or one of the reasons now it's around i think we've got the chance to genuinely improve the world improve people's lives and i'm fortunate right i've traveled the world and i've met individuals that the brand has impacted and it has genuinely brought me to tears at times it's incredible that feeling and i want more of that and i want it to impact more people and ultimately 16 year old ben walked into the gym and he didn't know what to do and he was massively self-conscious and skinny and felt very alone and the thought of being able to take that away from other people and give them a community an area to learn a product that makes them feel like superman i think is amazing what really strikes me about you and on like on on the on the interviews i've seen and on your youtube channel and stuff is that you seem to like genuinely breathe the passion for the business because i guess if i imagine another kind of billion dollar business like for example for example they would have like their vision they would have like their model for oh we want to make the world a better place by doing x yes and it can always feel a bit hollow because it's just like a corporate promise on their website yeah but it sounds like you genuinely like that is the thing that trying to genuinely love it like i said i've stood in outside i've been to every event that we've done like all of the large-scale events i've traveled the world and i've met people that have lost weight built muscle improved their mental health and i mean i said at the start like the product that we built at the start was it was for a selfish reason it's because i wanted that product and i now is it i don't know i think because i've had that experience myself of not knowing what to do not being in a great place and i've felt the positive effects mentally and physically of fitness i would love other people to experience it so yeah it just it really resonates with me thick i'm excited to hear more about your business by the way i want to see the structure you've drawn oh yeah i'll show you i'm fascinated by what it would look like yeah it's a it's pretty simple but it's like before it was so like kind of all over the place and now it feels a bit more streamlined um because you're in many ways your your business model is or it feels to me more pioneering than what we're doing because at least we've got we can lean back on retailers sportswear brands tech brands all these different things and amalgamate it into a structure i wouldn't know where to start with you yeah i mean the the thing i've i'm i'm looking at recently is uh like tv and film production companies okay because ours is kind of a production company right um and like what does it look like and in fact the new org chart like before the way it was it was organized was i was thinking all right well there's me and then we've got like angus who's in charge of like the youtube channel we've got gareth who's in charge of like the website yeah in charge of this uh sort of splitting things up based on the platform right so basically channel split but yeah basically channel split yeah whereas now i think what makes much more sense is splitting it like a production company would in terms of pre-production production post-production yeah so pre-production is all of the idea generation and the writing production is uh me and a videographer which is currently angus who's also director of operations um and then post production is our editing team yeah and just having that structure it's like oh okay whether it's a youtube video we make or a tweet thread or a blog post or even me writing my book or an online course or anything like that it all has that pre-production production post-production and therefore if we've got angus as director of operations managing that then theoretically i can give a vision through a marketing team or directly to our operations saying hey i want to make a course about this thing here is my vision for it let's make it happen yeah and then it goes through that kind of pipeline of pre-production production post-production in theory and is it all so none of it's hardware as it were it's all software or it's content it's all online yeah sort of tangible we have a new like we've got our productivity planner over there we're launching a line of stationery go on so you're getting a sneak peek this is like the proof versions the uh part-time productivity planner what's up so why part-time productivity what does that mean uh part-time productivity is that so i think one of the problems again i'm solving yourself one thing i learned today yeah that's like what have i heard that before is that like the benjamin franklin sort of thing oh quite yeah i think a lot of people do this thing yeah this is cool like what one of the issues i have with these sort of planners is that when they've got dates in them yeah and if i miss a date then i just get so demotivated and then i will never ever use the planner again and it's going to go in the bin yeah so this one crucially does not have any dates on it so you can use it some days you don't have to use it every day yeah but every seven days it gives you a weekly review it says all right just reflect on your week and that might not actually be every seven days because you might not actually fill it in for seven days but yeah it's it's better than not doing any kind of reflecting at all and you've got my to-do list as well which are quite nice i've never seen that before yeah i don't like to do this because it feels like you know i'm being a slave to my to-do list yeah whereas i call it i might do list because it's like oh i could do this stuff if i wanted to and then i feel more optimistic like yeah why not why not i like that that's cool yeah amazing so we're doing like a lot of live stationery these sort of like daily to-do list pads if yeah instead i was gonna ask you about this so uh these are some of my mantras like journey before destination it's it's the client miley cyrus yeah um and the theme the kind of theme of the book that i'm writing is that um you know it's its core message is that productivity and getting things done is not really about working harder um and like the the real secret if there is one is to learn to enjoy the journey of what you're doing yes because when you're having fun then productivity takes care of itself yeah i was gonna ask you does that resonate with you and do you have any examples from your life where yeah having fun has led to productivity yes so what so for me it's split into two distinct areas things i love doing and i genuinely like adore and now by the way also within gymshark within the under the heading of gymshark because i love gym charts so much i would do anything within gym shop because i just love it and i love the fact that it speaks back to the greater sort of mission now within that spend a day in product love to fly over to a factory all day go to an event love it meet people i mean meet athletes all that absolutely your door every every second of it now would i spend my sunday afternoons looking at operational strategies profit and loss thing do i mean accountancy finance stuff no i probably wouldn't under the banner of jim sharp then i again then sort of get extra enjoyment from it the the thing that's really helped me massively to motivate me to do the things in that second bucket of things i probably wouldn't enjoy as much is having the overarching an overarching goal yeah so again when i had this thing in my in my sort of site do i want to be a ceo okay a ceo needs to understand the customer the product and the brand fine got it sorted but also needs to understand finance and logistics for example so because i had this one it sat under the banner of jim chart and two i had this broader goal of i want to be a chief exec it gave me huge motivation to do those things and all of a sudden it was just so easy for me to spend hours on end learning about them because it spoke back to a goal that i had ah okay so i think i have to have an aim i have to have a reason for doing things i'm not just going to learn about something for the sake of learning about it that i don't enjoy okay which i would do with other things yeah interesting so like having that kind of purpose that meaning behind the thing that you're doing makes the thing more fun yeah and then so what i did was i said i want to be a ceo i need to do x y and z and then i would i wouldn't i've never been good at just like battering something for like 12 hours straight i would have to do it just a little thing every single day and then having that that goal in my head like the best example i can give was i want to be a ceo i'm terrible at public speaking so i need to be i need to get better public speaking it's like one of my things was literally public speaking and then i sort of navigate through life and as i'm an event whatever on the tube chatting to people as you go oh what do you do for a living spoke to someone and they're like oh i'm a public speaking coach and normally i'd be like if i didn't have the goal it would be nice have a lovely day see you soon but because i had this goal and it was in my list i'm like oh my god i'd love to be great at public speaking can i take your number can we chat some more can i learn from you so this is why i think it's so important to have that goal because then i think it helps with self-development so i think it's like if you don't aim at something you can't i just don't think you can get you can't just meander through life and expect to be something like you can't just you know roll around and expect to be a premier league footballer the premier league football as a premier league footballers because they've worked every single day and they've dedicated their lives to it so i think it's the same with any endeavor that's how i try to dedicate my learning now have you have you come across the the law of attraction kind of stuff no i've heard about it but i don't really know yeah so it's it's the there was this book called the secret that was published i think a few decades ago that like went viral back in the day and the whole principle behind the law of attraction is that um it's about like manifestation that if you if you really set a goal if you really believe something then the the law of attraction in the universe will like make it happen for you yeah then it kind of goes a bit overboard that you know if you've got cancer and you believe you don't have cancer then it will get cured magically you know the only reason you're poor is because you just don't believe enough that you're right it's all yeah it's it's very very wishy-washy um but i think there is some truth to this stuff in that when you manifest when you when you have a goal like i want to become the ceo you start seeing the opportunities that you wouldn't have seen otherwise you see what you look for don't you like the public speaking thing or you know when i decided i wanted to buy a tesla suddenly i started seeing tesla's everywhere everywhere because you just have that thing and so your brain turns on to the the various options here so i think that's really cool yeah honestly i'm a massive massive advocate for that i think just whatever it is just set a name and and the thing is that's been really powerful for me is i haven't gone i want to be a ceo so i'm going to do these massive things like set the bar so low and it's only now looking back i've realized everything i've ever wanted to do i've set the bar low so gymshark was started because i wanted to be involved in fitness the website was built because i wanted a website that would transact i didn't go i want a multi-billion dollar business as one of the greatest brands in the world it was just those really little things and by setting the bar low it then you know allows you to take those baby steps because nothing great is achieved in a short in the short term it's over prolonged periods of constant progression okay so what's your what's your kind of low bar now these days now that year now that you see you honestly um consistency okay that's my biggest thing at the moment i just want to be consistent steve gave me some advice coming into the chief exec role was he said you just have to be consistent so i was absolutely knackered yesterday i went and watched the football on sunday traffic coming out of wembley was an absolute nightmare i had about three hours sleep and i went in and i said if i do one thing today it is i'm going to be consistent through the day and i don't want anyone that sort of to notice that ben is really tired today or whatever i want to be consistent so that's my that's my low bar thick um all right a few a few more kind of random unconnected things that i want to talk to you about so you're kind of like a celebrity now in i wouldn't say that oh well you know what i mean you're like famous in like what are the perks of that like do you get cool stuff for being you like yeah you get to meet amazing people like really really cool people like like this never would have happened like this is this is like a massive pro for me meeting i mentioned a guy called jars earlier like i get to meet really really cool people and like so it's you've got the the public world so the thing i love about youtube and podcasting writers it gives the mass audience access to conversations that they would never normally have access to and that's great but then there's a huge group of people probably the vast majority of very talented people that don't really want to be on camera don't really want to do the whole youtube public facing thing they're just quite happy to do their own thing i get to speak to a lot of those people as well that's really cool because oftentimes that's where you like i personally learned so much from and like i'm trying to i'm my sort of self-development's at a point where it's very niche the specific things that i'm trying to learn and so again i'm now coming into the ceo role i'm trying to find other people that have done a similar scale role have had different pro similar problems to me so that the amount of people is is significantly smaller so i would say access is amazing um and choice like you get you do get a lot of choice within reason which is great so access then you could just like email like i don't know like film night and be like bro probably not probably not him but do i mean like within within the uk there's so many amazing people that i've met and it's and it's so cool like um i i got to a few years ago i got to go and spend time on downing street like i never thought that would be possible it was it was life-changing for me to walk through the gates and see that because it was just something i never thought was possible and those sorts of things are you know i find them really inspiring nice that's cool um why did you start the youtube channel i started the youtube channel this is so basically i was very happy to not be the public facing face of the brand very happy to do that and anyone that's followed the story will know for the first five or six years i just wouldn't have really posted anything online now i took loads of content loads of pictures loads of videos and i never posted them then all of a sudden like the core people started to understand and know who i was and what i was doing at the business and a lot of people would ask a lot of people to ask a lot of people to ask and i was in dublin once and a lad came up to me and he said i'm doing a i'm doing a something written a written piece on jim sharpton i think was a degree it was like a dissertation and he said can you just give me an overview a video on how gymshark started um i said i don't really want to do it i've been asked before and he said come on just one video that's it like it's what a couple of hours of your time sort of thing um but i couldn't really say no and i i hate i hate lying i don't want to ever sort of make a promise that i can't keep and i said you know what fine i will do it um i recorded it two or three times ended up deleting the footage and then my my now fiance the time girlfriend was a youtuber so she knew how to do it all so she was like right sit there i'm putting the camera on a tripod i'm going to record you talking and then she would basically edit edit it for me um so we put that live and it just completely blew up the reaction was amazing and it was weird because it was like it was big on youtube which is cool and it was big on facebook and instagram and all the social networks then all of a sudden like newspapers would start writing about it and it sort of went into that world as well and i just kept doing it ever since really okay because yeah like this is an area in which i think like there are so many like really cool companies and really cool like founders and ceos of those companies but you never really hear from them unless they're being interviewed on a podcast yeah and so the fact that you have got your own youtube channel where you're showing the behind the scenes of like just the insane warehouse setup you guys have and like how shopify works with you for black friday it's all just so inspiring and so cool to see because you never get that behind the scenes so it's important to me because so i mean similarly to yourself right i love the thought of people being better in the business that they're working in starting new businesses and being entrepreneurial and creative i love that i'm really passionate about it so i i thought like no one else shows the in the inside of a multi-billion dollar brand so i thought well you know why don't we do that why don't we show people like you know there are things that we will mention and will it give a competitor an opportunity to do something quickly yes it probably will but in the grand scheme of things for me the idea of inspiring people to build businesses start businesses and be better in themselves is is incredibly fulfilling nice yeah that's really cool um yeah every time i see that you you put out a new video i always get excited like yes because i find that like you're operating at a level of scale that i can't even imagine and the fact that you're making it public means that i can now sort of imagine that level of scale i think it was similar to um when i first started listening to podcasts and things like the tim ferriss show and stuff like that see hearing people like gary vaynerchuk where these guys are operating at a level that most of us just don't even know exists and then you talk about productivity those guys operate on a level that i didn't even think was possible yeah yeah it's really really cool um i'm hoping that with this kind of podcast i can it's a pretty good excuse to like hang out with someone meet someone have a long conversation um i don't think i was going to ask about is that i mean you know as as jim shark has gone has gotten bigger yes you know as like you know as a youtube channel gets bigger you start getting you you start to get haters you start to get negative comments i guess you sort of buzzfeed has had this issue where people working at buzzfeed or working for buzzfeed will then make a a thinker piece of why i left buzzfeed that kind of thing yeah how does that stuff make you feel like how do you how do you deal with the yeah so there's a point where like the whole thing of leaving jim shark yeah post it on youtube it would like a massive everyone wanted to hear about it um listen it's gonna happen i just think i think so the thing is especially being in my position i guess i'm public facing i'm not massively public-facing there are people that are far more so but just growing a business it's so incredibly tough i just feel like i've been beaten with a stick around the head so many times now you just sort of get used to it um you know i've been on the receiving end of you know people sending me messages on social media personally in person difficulties in the business the growth phase like yeah it's it's part and parcel of the job um i also by the way think that in the long term it's a very positive thing because i feel like i'm held to a high level of account um and i think that only makes me and the business better health because on social media anyone can call anyone out right and if there's validity to the claim then publicly people are going to know about it whereas maybe in yesteryear in my parent generation you you would find or you'd look back and you'd realize companies or individuals would do bad things and sort of get away with them and i think it's great now that people can hold individuals and businesses to account online um granted sometimes it can go too far and like cancer culture i'm massively against i think people need to look at things with a logical set of eyes and like i said you know for me sometimes it is very very tough but i think i'm putting myself out there i'm saying i want to be the ceo of a of a large business and a business that's in many ways at the center of a culture and a community and to do that you have to have a thick skin and you know you have to be doing the right things and i think i'm i think i will do those cool um i guess finally i think i want to ask about like what is your what's your workflow for video production with with like games more than me very varies it varies a lot right so sometimes we'll have an idea again so the ceo video we saw obviously we saw coming well in advance um and we said we need to do this video we want it to be special we actually recorded it a few times and been the footage because i was terrible basically i was not very good on camera um i didn't i just honestly it was quite an emotional subject for me and my word just weren't i wasn't even speaking in coherent sentences so um that one we'll all sit in a room and work together there are certain things which are more like paul i.e some some people will message us and say can you make this content sometimes i'll jump on instagram and say what would you like to see people will message me uh we've got someone who's brilliant called lily and the team who will build out a brief so you'll start with title and thumbnail so that's something i was told actually a long time ago by um a guy called john olson that we used to work on yeah and i said i asked him the same question and he said i always start with title and thumbnail nice yeah if you don't click on the title of the thumbnail then you can't you can make the best video in the world but no one's going to watch it um so we start with the title and the thumbnail with the the purpose of the video what do we want to get across and now just because of how busy the role is i'll have a brief and i'll sort of read through the brief okay so people want to see this video um i'll be sat down on a chair and we'll we'll record basically okay and then all of the drone footage all the time lapses of the warehouses is that all done right james perry who is an absolute wizard absolute wizard life-changing me and james been working together for what two years now two years and um yeah it's been absolutely brilliant absolutely listen i early days i edited my own videos so robin did edit in i then learned to edit she taught me um it was very time consuming editing i remember there was videos i'd spend 8 12 15 hours editing and it just wasn't an efficient use of time and by the way i wasn't even that good at it then worked with other people and and james came in and just revolutionized the channel so what's it like having someone film everything you do weird at first but then yeah like me and james are mates anyway like so the biggest thing when i was looking for someone to work with it's almost like can you you know can you edit can you work a camera great but like it needs to be someone that we get along with yeah um coverts obviously change things but we travel the world together we've been to the states been to hong kong we would we'd you know be around the uk all the time we spend a lot of time together so we have to get on with each other and be comfortable with each other um because if i'm rigid on camera or he doesn't like me then you know yeah a problem isn't it what about like do you do you film like literally everything like what if you're like having dinner with friends or like so we wouldn't film that would we it would be anything sort of extracurricular would tend to get filmed any trips will all be filmed um we'll normally have a filming slot every week where we'll sit down and talk to camera we'll occasionally so james was looking at um you're going to record for an entire month weren't you basically completely which is going to be really fun for me so we're going to do an entire month what we'll use of that i'm not sure okay um people love the day in the life they love yeah so we've we've done some really cool high almost high budget professional things and then we do wander around with a camera for a day and people just love that so yeah we want to bring people a little bit more sort of in behind the scenes nice and you just wear the microphone at all times as well just yeah i tend to yeah yeah yeah so then james ends up with like hundreds of gigabytes of footage yeah that's the problem that the genuine that was another problem wasn't it during cove video because then i would have my camera and i would film at home and i didn't realize just how big the footage is nowadays when you record it in 4k you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes i would have to drive to yours with the hard drive wouldn't i give you the give you the hard drive with all the footage it was just too slow on our home internet yeah so we we we did this whole thing where uh up so we've got two editors in romania and romania has ridiculously fast internet speeds everyone's on like one like a thousand megabytes per second like upload download and the instant internet speed in this place was like 20 meg upload download it was just physically impossible to upload files yeah so i got like the most expensive bt infinity option i found this guy to kind of wire the the router from over there wire it around the house so it feeds into this laptop over here yeah so we use that to upload files now so what is your workflow so you record your videos and then you send them out to be edited in romania basically basically yeah and then and then you'll comment i'd assume because it's never going to be perfect first time or how does that work yeah so for the first two years i was i would there was around a review where i would comment on things uploaded to a website called frame i o where you can like yeah um affiliate link in the video description um um but now like recently christian who's my main main editor and who was employee number one he said that hey you know me reviewing footage is always a bit of a bottleneck because if i'm out then you know whatever he was like is there any need for you to review it i haven't thought about it i was like oh you're right there isn't really any need for me to review it and so now video videos come out twice a week and angus is like oh yeah we've got we've got our videos come out we're like oh yeah i can't even remember which one that was because we filmed it three weeks ago yeah and we're getting into this like production it's cool that's really production companies um i think one of the things that that resonated with with what you said is finding finding people and building systems to combat your own weaknesses my weakness ironically is that i suck at motivating myself to film videos when i'm on my own really uh and it always felt felt like such a such a heavy lift like oh you know work i'd give myself i don't know five hours to film a video and i procrastinate four and a half and then i film it right at the end no way um i wouldn't expect that of you yeah mate like i think when i was working full-time i had to film a video in two hours in the evening because you so yeah you know wake up early before going on call that kind of thing but when i took a break from medicine intending to travel the world yeah which then didn't happen because of covered that's like i've got the whole day to film a video yeah and then it takes the whole day to film one video yeah so now every thursday we have a filming day where angus comes over it's behind the camera and it's like all right ally chop chop come on let's do another one let's do another one let's do the thumbnails and that's been really good it's just so nice working with other people so how does that work creatively then like video ideas thumbnails obviously titles how does that work yeah so we've got a team so we have um every every monday we have like a content editorial meeting with me angus our writers and everyone rocks up to that meeting with three ideas for videos yeah so titles thumbnails and talking points and then i would look through them with angus and we would give them the green light be like really like that one don't really like this one hear some feedback about that one and they would work on the video idea the concept for the next week and the following monday we'd have like the full video basically ready yeah and then i would kind of go through it to be like okay if i was actually filming this based on these points you know i'd add a story about my life over there harry potter reference over there we'll put a story from medicine over there and then the video is ready to film yeah so that when it comes to thursday we can bang bang film four videos in a day so when you say like bang bang bang are you talking would they would what would you what would it look like to you so someone else has come up with an idea are you having a script are you having key messages are you just having a title what does that look like yeah so title thumbnail and talking points okay so bullet points i don't like reading from a script it feels very inauthentic and yeah it's impossible um so i just like bullet points and the team like over time like they've seen all my videos and so they know what examples from my life i could use for different things let's say we're talking about imposter syndrome someone they will have written oh you can talk about when you were directing the hospital pantomime yeah i was like that's a good point yeah i can't talk about that and it feels really weird and nice that people know my life so well that they can tell me what examples i'm gonna be using and stuff because that's that's the thing that always fascinates me so like it's like scalability because ultimately you are one person and if you're gonna be recording then they'll always the guys will always need you so i'm really interested to see how that sort of becomes scalable or do you do it through all the different arms of the business and the channels and you know the products and things like that yeah so the thing that the the the vision i set for us i think it was this time two years ago i wrote it on on a page in notion of being like basically i want us to get to a point where the only thing i'm having to do is talk to a camera yeah because i think that's the only aspect of the business in which i add unique value in being me yeah uh to an extent in like idea generation but like even even that yeah cannies can be outsourced to someone who's who's good at it and so now we're actually pretty close to that point where the only really the only thing i really do for the youtube channel is talk to a camera once a week um what i didn't realize at the time is that being kind of the ceo kind of role is actually mostly about having meetings with people and organization clarity and setting vision setting goals and tracking metrics and stuff hiring hiring is a big one looking to hire five more people and that's been such a bottleneck for me because we have no process for hiring we've just been making making it up as we went along and now i've discovered there's all these like platforms like workable and stuff where you can post a job description and they will do the applicant tracking and stuff rather than a google google form yeah which is what we used before and so that's kind of where we ended up like once a week for the youtube channel but the thing i love about your setup and when you mentioned you were going to bring the videographer i was like yes because what i'm imagining is i would love to have a james who can like travel with me especially as i want to travel around the world and stuff yeah and often i find that in conversations with the team or in conversations with friends asking for advice about anything yeah i often just come out with bangers and i'm like oh i wish i wish i wouldn't film this yeah that's interesting that's cool that's really cool but yeah like i said for me um the fact that we get on is massive you should genuinely you should come to jim charlotte though you should look around our studios because granted it's slightly different but then we'll have the full creative sort of sweetened team um i think you'd love it sick we're actually looking for a studio to film an online course about productivity come on have a look can we do it genuinely come and have a look so we've got like we've got all the ecom studios and we've got something called studio x which is basically an innovation studio we would build full gym sets in there so there's um there's campaigns we've done where you've got like people in the gym but they're not actually in a gym the whole thing's just been built in that studio nice okay that's really cool definitely come and have a look yeah because my personal trainer at the moment he's got like a home gym in his garage and so we've sort of been filming a bit of content for the instagram there yeah honestly you'd love it we've done we've got all the studios we've got the podcast studio um it's it's absolutely brilliant because similar to you so what you do is like we we consider content as much of a product as you know as desktop it's it's exactly the same um so content's massive for us um yeah i think i don't i don't know any other any other brand in your thing that does content as well as you guys do it's like most of them just don't do content they do like expensive advertising campaigns that run a single video and that's it yes i know and like it's i think it's just because it's been it's been the lifeblood of the business since day one and i think growing up like yeah i'd watch tv i'd watch match of the day and stuff but beyond that everything was on youtube and it was all content and all of a sudden when you realize that you can play your part in that it just yeah you end up building a business around and a brand around that content and community nice um i think well so you who are who are the kind of mentors through either in real life books podcasts who have inspired you over the years um people should check out so i don't have like a defined group of mentors and i don't have people that i will regularly check in with as a mentor i know some people jim sharp will do that and it seemed to work really well for them um steve and paul who were the sort of original people that helped professionalise the business in the early days um have been massive to me i've got a lot of friends again i keep mentioning jars one of the most inspiring people i've met and like a very creative ceo he's not a ceo as you would sort of expect um harley at shopify i'll sort of lean on occasionally if i if i have a problem that i don't know how to solve uh online i'll watch anything can anyone like the thing is i'm a massive believer that that you can learn something from every single person that you meet and i think i learn more from the amalgamation of meeting a thousand people than sort of one individual and i'll try and chat to people that are good at specific things there's not like one human who i think is the perfect human being i'll try and pick things from so many different people nice um and are there any kind of books videos podcasts that you kind of find yourself commonly recommending to people that they want to ask you uh you know ben how did how did you do x or um so again it's very similar so yeah i read um a book ages ago which i thought i would hate and i really liked it and i don't actually read that much it was called poor charlie's almanac which is by uh charlie munger or it's it's so it's not but it's like an amalgamation isn't it yeah which i thought was amazing and there was one particular page which i can just about remember where i think it was on why it was like what other one or two page where he broke down the entire success of the coca-cola brand i remember thinking wow this is amazing and i went into this book thinking he's an investor he's a financier we have nothing in common he's an old bloke like and i ended up thinking wow this is amazing because he was very brand first he's talk he talks about lots of different sort of psychological models and basically it's almost like imagine you've got like a problem here and it's about attacking this problem from a load of different angles in a load of different ways and it's exactly the way that we and i try and solve problems at gymshark and in life so i found that book massively inspiring and then mulling around youtube i love your channel you introduced me to notion notion like genuinely life-changing and we i mean we've run almost everything on notion now don't we from a creative point in the entire in the entire business by the way not just as a meat person i run i think you you coined it like a life os i have my life os i have a professional life yeah the different gym sharks stuff everything's from a notion so that was life changing so thank you for that you're very welcome um yeah um and that's it i'll just mull around the internet jordan peterson i love jane peterson i'm a massive massive fan of him i think he's brilliant um he's really helped me as well sick um i'd love to check out your notions behind scenes i was gonna say that's one of the things i thought as we were driving down yeah it's really cool yeah that would be that would be pretty sick um cool and any sort of let's say someone's watching this and they're thinking they're they want to get started being an entrepreneur yeah maybe they're sort of uh late teens early 20s haven't really started anything yet but really inspired by you and your journey any kind of advice you'd give yeah i mean it's fairly standard right you have to do what you love because otherwise you'll end up you'll end up giving up um i'm a firm believer now that there's no niche too small especially with the internet being so vast i always think and it sounds stupid saying it now if i'd have said as a kid i want to be a professional gamer growing up yeah my mom would have been like you're nuts whereas now it's like a legitimate sport career and everything in between like even i guess with yourself it would have been so difficult for you to articulate what you do now as a kid yeah i just think there's no need too small so i think whatever it is double down on it and just genuinely give it a go like gymshark was the seventh business website product that i've made and the other six failed miserably now unfortunately that's not a sexy story so no one talks about the failed apps the failed websites they only talk about the one that did well and it's a consistent theme on everyone else that's successful that i've met they've failed miserably so many times and they've been endlessly optimistic about it and they've just gone again and again and again yeah i think that's one of the things that like i see this a lot with people starting youtube channels where there's this sense of i have to get it right first time yeah and if you look at the stats like the average youtube channel takes 152 videos to get to a thousand subscribers and i get messages from people being like you know like i it took my channel 52 videos in six months to hit the first thousand subscribers and that was like a lot faster than the average yeah and so i get messages from people like 10 videos in being like oh this youtube thing isn't working keep going just try things right just keep trying new things like i'm like incremental improvement i think is so so so important as well but yeah sweet well thank you very much for taking the time thank you for having fun been a good chat good stuff

Channel: Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

Views: 315,751

Keywords: business, entrepreneurship, selfdevelopment

Id: Ix5ON9dZ-es

Length: 95min 45sec (5745 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021