John talks about growing up in Ireland in the the early 80s. How he met Andrew Palmer and started the New Covent Garden Soup Co. The reality of building and exiting a business (which takes much longer than you think). His new sustainable vertical farming business launching in the UK. And how he learnt more about entrepreneurship from his 1 failed business compared to his 2 successful ones.

John's recommendations:

Simon Sinek - author

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Hello and welcome to this week's episode of BWB Extra, where we get to know entrepreneur, mentor and investor, John Stapleton, a little better.

So John, let's wind the clock back.

We've had a bit of a taster of this, but we're just going to cover it a bit more.

How did you end up doing what you now do?

So what did you do at university?

Well, I studied industrial microbiology in dub, which is usually a show, a conversation stopper straightaway as well.

There's lots of these.

There's a story here, which is kinda like interesting way back in 1987 or so.

Yeah, I studied industrial microbiology and there's lots of things you could do, which really exciting.

Then in, in Ireland there was, the economy was on its knees.

So in the 1980s, mid it, mid 1980s is like, there was, there were no jobs.

Yeah, so it was really important to figure out when you come outta university, what.

What were you going to do?

What sort of job was this university experience going to prepare you for?

And there were two things which we weren't quite sure if they were going to, you know, have any longevity.

And you'll chuckle when I say, one was genetic engineering, another was biotechnology.

So both of them turned out quite well in hindsight.

Maybe I took the conservative approach, you know what, I've got to go into food because that's one thing that's never going to go out of fashion.

Food is always going to be around because lots of people, and we even, you know, population is growing.

Which is.

A different challenge in terms of trying to feed the world.

But people are always going to need to eat.

So food, the food industry is going to evolve, but it's always going to be around.

So I'm going to get into food.

So then I came to Reading University and studied food science.

So I became kind of a bit of a techie in the food science, to understand all of that.

But then I met a guy called Andrew, Andrew Palmer, and he was the entrepreneur.

He had this crazy idea of making fresh soup, and he came to Reading because it was a centre of excellence in food, which is why I had gone there, to ask these guys about making soup.

Now, An entrepreneur asking a scientist a question about how you do things is like, just the wrong question.

Because the scientist won't understand the question.

You know, science is all about certainty and testing and proving.

An entrepreneur is about gut feel and intuition and doing.

So he didn't really get very far, but what they did say to him, and I still to this day don't know why, I guess they were just trying to get rid of him.

They said, this Irish guy finishing up his master's, he might be able to help you.

You should meet him.

And I was on campus, we met, we went to the pub for lunch, and we were kicked out of closing time.

We spent the entire afternoon, the entire evening, Talking, arguing, discussing, we ended up with more questions than answers.

You were just talking about soup.

Well, soup and everything that goes with it, you know, soup, consumers, how, what, how do you make it?

He had no idea, I clearly had no idea, but between the two of us we were going to figure it out.

So in the end, the short version of the story is, we ended up, like I say, with so many questions, the only way we could figure out what the answer would be was to go and do it.

So we decided then to do it.

And that's when New Covent Garden Soup Company ultimately was founded.

It was born all the way back in 1987 in Reading University.

Uh, so that's how I got into it.

Purely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Do you have a long term goal?

Yeah.

The long term goal was five years later sell the business.

Yeah.

That's as long term as we could think.

I mean, I was out of university.

That five years seemed like a long time.

It was very naive to think you could do that in five years.

You probably needed ten, and we did.

It's always ten.

It's, it's, it's, it's more than five, certainly.

Because if you sell a business in the food industry, Uh, five years in, you've almost, you've kind of invariably left value on the table.

Because you haven't realized the value yet.

You haven't proved enough to be able to get, you know, a return that you, that you probably could.

Now, don't get me wrong.

You've got this kind of what I call entrepreneurial sort of disease or, or, or, or, yeah, it's a kind of a, uh, an illness if you like, which, which where you say to an entrepreneur, when are you going to sell your business?

And they go, two years time, because I want to do this, this, and this.

There's an opportunity here.

I've never done this properly.

I think I want to do that.

I'd say two years.

So.

That's not like a sensible answer.

You come back in two years time and you have a problem though.

If you ask the same question, you get the same answer.

Two years time.

Because I've got this to do, and I've got that to do, and there's so many exciting...

So an entrepreneur will always say, I need more time to do more, to add more value.

All I can say is that, take that, you know, element out of it.

And five years is too short, and ten years might be about right, or somewhere eight to ten years is about right in my experience.

So we thought five years we'd sell the business took us ten.

But in those days, 10 years went by, like 5 years anyway, you know.

What do you think about these kind of, uh, uh, structuring, the way people structure a lot of the deals these days where, you know, you, you effectively sell a, a majority stake, or you sell,

uh, almost a majority stake, and then you've got a deal to sell some more in a couple of years, and a couple of years after that, you know, to try and avoid that leaving the money on the table.

Uh, how's it work?

What are you saying?

What, what, what kind of deal?

You basically, you sell, say, 51%, The entrepreneur does, but you've got put and call options.

This is exactly what happened with Innocent, that say, we'll sell you another chunk in two years time, we'll sell you another chunk in four years time.

To the investor.

To the investor.

But the, the entrepreneur is still in there, in the business with the investor for that period, so you can...

You know, structure the business and what the business is doing in a way to make the most money on the second and third sales.

Yeah, I call it the Green and Blacks model because for us, Green and Blacks were the first to do that, that I heard of, and it was kind of, oh, that's an interesting way of doing it, why would you do that?

And the reason is, it reduces the uncertainty, it takes away a bit of the risk, you know, the Cadbury's in that case were coming into the business, providing investment.

But you almost, almost always end up making around the same.

For, you know, a third of your business as you did for half your business at the start.

Really?

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah.

It's not more.

Yeah, I mean, if you're well advised.

It normally works well.

Obviously advising on deals like this.

So you've got to take account of the stuff that you don't know yet.

So that, I want to end up with that value at the end.

So, yeah, my put and call option makes sort of sense.

Otherwise, you kind of think, well, how do I know?

Well, in that case, leave.

Don't do that.

And you also need to maintain enough control that you can pull the right levers during that period.

You can make the right decisions.

You do.

You do.

So it's another model.

Yeah.

I wouldn't knock it.

It clearly works for lots of businesses.

You need to be a little bit more mature though.

You know, five, six years in, or at least.

Yeah.

Before you start thinking about that.

Uh, but you can get resources into the business.

It's another way of, you know, bringing resources into the business you don't have, which is your argument when you sell, ultimately, if you don't do that, you're selling tomorrow, you know.

Tomorrow's potential, but you want to get tomorrow's price today.

So you kind of say, we've done all this, realize a huge amount of potential.

It clearly works.

You guys can come in with your experience and your money and marketing opportunity, take it international or do more.

Which is exactly our argument.

Yeah.

We sold it to Daniels.

But we want a premium for that.

And they, and they agreed and they bought and then they took it to, we sold 20 million revenue and they took it to 100 million revenue over, over the next eight years.

So great for them and great for us.

And do you personally have a long term goal?

Um, I, I guess I'd like to do more and more and more of what I'm doing is a bit of a cop out this answer, but more and more of what I'm doing in a way that, that really makes a difference.

Right.

So I'd like to help small businesses to grow.

Um, so I got a great opportunity and scope to help all sorts of small businesses to grow that are in the food and drink space.

I like to get involved with, with, um, challenger brands and brands that have a purpose.

And one of the other things, by the way, that I'm involved in these days, apart from what we talked about earlier, is I'm chairman of a vertically farmed business or a vertical farm business.

Oh, in a building.

Yeah.

Fisher Farms is a vertical farm business.

And we, We are just about to open the biggest, we think actually, the biggest vertical farm in the world, outside Norwich, in Norfolk.

Actually, we're not really building a vertical farm, we're building more of a horizontal farm.

Traditionally it was stacked, you know, very high, and you can still stack high, but we just build out.

Um, and the whole idea is it's a fantastic opportunity to contribute to, you know, sustainable goals and food security.

It is one of the best ways.

To, to, to, in a post Brexit world, to satisfy some of the opportunities, some of the, the challenges, um, that the UK, um, retail category is facing.

Because the majority of what we will grow, which is green leafy things, so bagged salads and herbs, are sourced from overseas.

Um, during the winter months, for obvious reasons, you can't grow in the UK.

And all the issues with importing and control of overseas.

And you saw a lot of empty shelves this winter in the UK, for various reasons.

But most of the time for, because the security of the supply chain coming from overseas was disrupted or was unreliable.

And we remove all that uncertainty.

Because we grow, we, you know, the conditions we generate in our vertical farm internally.

is ideal 365 days a year.

So it's optimized for growing whatever we want to grow.

And it's growing in the UK and it's right there.

So we can supply into the retailers or into the food service industry or into the manufacturing industry for retailers.

So there's a huge demand for, Uh, that those products because it solves that solution, it's a solution to solving that problem.

And secondly, it's, it's a wonderful sustainability message, right?

We use 3 percent of the water that a traditional farm would.

Yeah, they're supposed to be incredibly efficient.

And they, uh, we have a client who's done it in an office and people get, you get these sort of huge happiness uplifts.

And the thing that makes them happiest is taking a tomato home, basically.

Yeah, there's a couple of young guys as well that do, um, in London are doing vertical farm.

for supplying restaurants and things for, you know, It's more of a localised approach.

And our approach is doing all of that.

It's hydroponics under lights.

So that's the technology, but it's at scale.

Because we want to ultimately have large enough farms to supply retailers, but also ultimately to bring the cost, the unit cost of growing a bag of salad to be equal to that of Conventionally grown crops.

Okay.

We want it to be accessible.

We're not trying to build a premium product that's only accessible to Brexit.

The biggest problem that Britain has is that it can't feed itself.

It just physically cannot, right?

So it's a net importer.

For a whole bunch of reasons, over many, many decades of decisions or indecisions.

That's a huge problem.

Is that not common with countries?

Or most countries can feed themselves, can they?

Yeah, it very much depends.

Like Ireland is a net exporter for all the historical reasons that agriculture is so strong in Ireland.

You know, take Egypt.

Egypt, before the war, imported 100 percent of their wheat from, guess where?

Ukraine.

Uh, major problem, all of a sudden, right today.

Right now the civil sort of mitigated some of that problem.

But, but, but they are a net importer.

Think of the, of the desert, and think of the major cities like Cairo.

Very difficult to be self sustaining.

However, we can build really large vertical farms in Egypt, for example, or across...

North Africa or the Middle East, connected up to very large solar farm solutions, which is like a renewable energy source, of which they have a lot of, sun, right?

So cheap energy, which is an issue in its own right, uh, supplying energy to the lighting system, we have, as I say And I've seen this where they create water even in the desert.

You create these sort of, if you create these, um, from condensation and stuff, they can actually like grow crops and do this, it's sort

of, you can get a completely self sufficient autonomous There are variations on a theme at Berkeley Farms, so you've got to be careful.

There are hybrid systems using, using, using some element of greenhouse technology as well.

But so, so really, strictly speaking, we're talking about hydroponics, so we have a closed system of waters.

We just need to fill up once, and then we recycle that water with the nutrients in it all the time.

So we're constantly using the same water.

That's why we, Very small amount of evaporation.

So 3 percent of the water that we use is lost in evaporation.

Is that the key?

I mean, more than the key, more than anything?

Well, especially if it's in Egypt.

There's a whole point about how it is with water scarcity and land scarcity to grow enough food to feed the world, literally.

And back in the 1930s we had 2 billion people on the planet.

Today we've got 8 billion.

At this rate in 2050 we'll have 10 billion.

Of which 5 billion, half of it will be the consumption rich middle classes.

And we back, you know, we have grown tremendously, which is fantastic, right?

But we have a huge problem of trying to feed the world without trashing it in the process.

Yeah.

And I'm not saying very Trump's gonna solve all that, but it's one way, it's one, it's one way to have to stop to, to stop trashing the, the planet.

So we, it really is a solution today for green leafy things, but tomorrow for soft fruits and, and, and, and, and, uh, and berries.

And ultimately we think 10, 15 years tall, we'll be able to grow things like soy, wheat, rice, indoors.

And that's a really interesting proposition.

In areas where it's really difficult, more difficult to grow soy, wheat, and rice.

In indigenous populations where because of climate change, adding to all these problems, lack of water, lack of land, climate change is becoming more and more difficult.

Um, to grow all these indigenous crops, high colorific content.

And that's leading to migration, that's leading to strife, and that's leading to all sorts of problems, on a society level.

Now, are we going to save the world?

I'm not saying that.

But I think what vertical farm technology can do is play a significant role of combating all these problems and making it easier to allow indigenous populations to stay where they want to, which is their home.

Because, and they have to leave because they've got hunger problems.

So, I think there's a bigger picture here.

So, that long term goal is one thing, but it's kind of difficult not to be really excited about that proposition, right?

So, yeah, I'm very interested in, and really focused on trying to make sure that we can do something with purpose in our lives.

I knew Kevin Gardner was all about doing the right thing for many, many ways, but, but it's, but yeah, this is one step beyond that.

And would you say climate change is the biggest issue?

Oh, well, I think it's one of the major ones.

I think there are all sorts of big issues out there.

I'm not trying to say that everybody's essence has to be about solving a world problem.

I'm not trying to make that statement.

But isn't it cool that you can leverage your experience in a way that could?

contribute to solving part of the biggest problems that we face as a society.

That is pretty cool.

Yeah.

Uh, so yeah, that, that's part of what motivates me today.

What's most misunderstood about what you do?

I guess, well, the most misunderstood thing about what I do is, is, is that it's easy to do because I just rock up and give a bit of advice and...

Is it easy?

It's not easy?

Jesus, no, it's not.

But if it'd be easy, it wouldn't be much of a challenge.

It's like, it's like, hang on, what is the solution to this particular problem?

And the entrepreneur has been struggling with this for quite some time, and they're closest to the business, they should be

anyway, they are, it's their business, and they're closest to this, and you're meant to come in and give them the answer.

Well, It's like going to a psychiatrist, isn't it?

You never get a psychiatrist to answer the questions.

They always go, well, what do you think?

So there's a little bit of that involved.

It's like, you know, well, you're as close as it is.

So it's usually a question of what's wrong about your implementation or how your implementation can be better as opposed to the concept is wrong, right?

So helping a business, it's not really about me coming in with an answer.

I think it's me sometimes helping a business, helping an entrepreneur making a better judgment about all the different options they have available to them.

Because they probably thought about all the options, probably putting a few of the wrong levers.

Maybe there's a better way to do something.

Maybe they've, you know, just got the wrong mix of what really is successful.

Like there's five things that are successful, but they're doing 20 things.

The chances are they're probably on the wrong five.

You know, uh, or not focusing on the right five.

You know what I mean?

So it's really a judgment call.

So, you know, the entrepreneur knows business best of all.

Therefore, can I help the entrepreneur to be the best entrepreneur they possibly can be?

And I made those sort of decisions.

And that's not easy.

I don't think it is.

There's a lot of value added involved in just like really trying to figure out what the answer is.

Also, some of this stuff is very fundamental.

You can spot it straight away.

And that is probably easy.

But that solves a bit of the problem.

But it's very satisfying, right?

Because, you know, I kind of get the same thing in terms of I like working with startups partly because you really feel like you're

adding some value because, you know, they normally know loads about their thing, but they have no clue, for example, about legals.

Yeah, of course.

And, and so it's great to be able to help somebody do something and really give them something of value.

And now, a quick word from our sponsor.

Business Without Bullshit is brought to you by Ori Clark, straight talking financial and legal advice since 1935.

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What do you think is the biggest mistake you've made in your career, or your biggest mistake generally?

I guess the biggest failure.

It was a different question, I suppose, was the middle of business, which failed.

It was, it was a failure, you know, which, which business was this?

So there were three businesses that I set up.

What?

The first was New Covent Garden Soup here in the uk.

The third was Little Dish here in the uk, both of which were successful in the context.

We had successful ex exits as easy way to define success.

Uh, but by, by, but by comparison, the middle business, which was Glencoe Foods, which was in the States, was a failure.

'cause we pulled outta the business.

We never got to exit.

So I call.

Uh, a little summary of my career, my shit sandwich.

You've got two nice pieces of focaccia on either side and a lot of shit in between.

However, back to the point about failure, I learned more from that five years of real struggle and difficulty and strife in the States than I did from the two ten year periods either side.

And did it make a difference?

to what you did with Little Dish, having had that.

It not only made a difference what I did with Little Dish, but it was the whole reason for doing Little Dish.

Because we did a lot right in this stage.

We got a lot right.

It wasn't like it was like a complete failure from the start.

If it was that, it might have been easier, because you just walk away earlier.

But we had a lot of success, so you keep trying to replicate the success.

What was the business in the US?

It was a very similar business to the business in the UK, so it was even worse.

It was like New Covent Garden Soup Company Mark 2.

Right.

Fresh soup in a carton for the US market.

Right, right, right.

And if anybody should have known anything about fresh soup, it should have been me.

And that's what I said.

I said, this is the other thing, I went out there, took some shareholders with me, went to the stage, raised more money in the US on

the basis that Just had a great exit based on, not obviously exclusively, but a lot of the time what I had done and my contribution.

So let's just do it in the States.

How difficult can it be?

Very difficult is the answer.

Um, so it was a lot of sort of trust in me in terms of, you know, shareholding.

I really should know, uh, as much about fresh soup as anybody needs to know.

And the answer is I did.

Absolutely.

But that's not the whole answer in that you still have to make the right decisions.

But you go back to...

You need to know about your market, presumably.

Yeah, we, we did a lot, we did, we did a lot of research.

We, we made soup in West London and flew it on Virgin Airlines out to, out to the West Coast.

Had a man in a van drive around so we could get knowledge, local knowledge.

So we, we, we did have local knowledge.

Anyway, there was lots of reasons why it didn't work.

Um, and it culminated in us having to pull the business after four years.

Now, that's a real kind of killer, especially when you come to the point of maybe, you know, talk about entrepreneurs having ego, you know, I've done this and, uh, I can do it again.

And everybody believed that I could, and then suddenly I didn't.

So I let a lot of people down.

But particularly I let myself down.

And there was no way, coming back to your question, there was no way I was going to go out on a failure.

Especially as I had a success.

You know, failure is a very kind of interesting situation.

You're left there in a very introspective place, thinking...

I wonder, did this fail because of me?

Yeah.

Right?

Or despite of me?

Well, I wonder if it was a success.

Initially, despite because of me.

It could have been much more successful if I hadn't been involved.

You might have played all sorts of tricks on you.

So you do think about that.

You've got to dispel all that because that's just wrong, right?

This is, you know, that's not true.

But give me the evidence.

So I said, right, you know what, um, I'm going to have to pull myself out of this situation, which was a failed business, which I really shouldn't have been, following very similar business to the successful one.

And I'm going to have to prove to others, but really prove it to myself, that I could do it again.

So that was the real motivation to do the third business.

I have no idea if the second business had been, had not been a failure.

Would there have ever been a third business?

Because you had two failures, two successes in a row, you might say that's enough.

You'd have been a permanent suit man.

I would have been, maybe a one trick pony, God knows.

But, but the motivation emotionally from, from, you talk about failure not being a great place to be, but a good place to have been.

It really hurt like hell.

So it really motivated me to do something else.

In the food space.

I had no idea what it was going to be, but I figured it out and that was Little Dish.

And that happily turned out to be, you know, quite a good business and we came out with a good exit.

And that took me from 2006, no, 2007 to 2017.

So again, it was another ten year project.

Always ten years, yeah.

What's your passion outside of work?

I don't have any time.

It's not left.

No hobbies, no nothing.

I use all my passion.

You look very healthy.

Thank you.

You're not a sportsman or a runner or...

Well, I used to do a lot of it, so I kind of gone back to that.

I live just outside Munich, so it's, it's a great place to, you know, we don't have to deal with the weather conditions we have in Ireland, which is why we all go to the pub so quick, so often.

And we go to the pub in Munich as well quite a lot, but, you know, the Alps are around the corner and we ski a lot in this winter and we hike a lot in the summer and we're out on the bikes and...

It's quite an outdoors lifestyle.

It is, CoachingBadminton.

com It's beautiful usually.

In Bavaria in particular, but it's much more reliable.

You can plan to do something in the summer outdoors and most of the time do it.

Whereas in Ireland, or the UK, it's like most of the time you have to have a plan B.

Yeah, exactly.

And you know what?

You just default to plan B.

So, so, so that allows me to do an awful lot more.

What's the worst advice you've ever been given?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Oh, really?

You think that's terrible advice?

It's ludicrous advice.

It really is.

Like, who would ever do anything if it wasn't, uh, you know, if it worked?

Because you can still make it better.

Well, of course you can make it better.

You know, just because the way we do things is the way to continue to do things is ludicrous in the first place.

It's just the way it works.

It's the status quo.

You know, the status quo works quite well, especially for the establishment.

But if you're an entrepreneur, and if you're a startup, you're trying to challenge the status quo, then you don't want to, you know, you don't want to continue with how you've done it for years.

buying liquid soup in a can.

That works, nothing wrong with that.

But here's a whole bunch of things that are better, uh, uh, called fresh soup, in a carton.

Now, it costs 1.

20, and, uh, what goes down in the can, 33 pence, back in 1987.

So, so there's a huge premium attached to it.

But listen, it's not the price of progress, it's not the price of making things better, it's not the price of premium.

Um, so, so, you can always make things better, but if it ain't...

Bro, don't fix it.

It's like, that's just such a level of mediocrity attached with that.

I think it only applies to IT, if you ask me.

If your IT is functioning, don't mess with it.

You know, just get on with it.

And what's the best advice you've ever been given?

The best advice I've ever been given, and I'm pretty sure I didn't believe it at the time.

was that, um, investment is 80 percent the person and 20 percent the idea.

I used to think that's right, that can't be right, it's got to be the other way around.

It's all about the idea, it's all about the consumer insight, it's all about this, you know, idea.

And, of course, without an idea, you never get off the ground, because you mustn't grab yourself around.

Um, but it comes back to my belief that it's all about the resilience of the entrepreneur.

And I remember exactly the person who said it to me way back, it was, it was, uh, Apex.

Who back then were a pretty big VC firm.

These days are astronomical VC firm.

But they invested in our business way back in the day.

And that was the only food business they had.

I think the only food business they ever had.

So it was almost a mistake.

But they invested.

And I remember Alan Cohen, who's the um, the chairman of APAC saying that to me.

It's all about, it's all about the individual.

I always say, always think, um, respect capital.

You know, people can be like, I've got the idea.

You know, they're just bringing the money.

It's like, if you tried to get a hundred grand together, if you tried to get a hundred thousand pounds, you know, it's very hard to have capital.

So I feel, you know, people get, you know, ideas or we can all come up with an idea with a bottle of whiskey in enough hours, you know.

No, no, I mean, I think there are a bunch of critical ingredients.

And I sometimes ask me, what are the, you know, what are the important elements about making an investment, purely from the investment point of view, which is the same.

Set of ingredients or elements you need to consider if you're looking for investment.

And there's probably 20 things.

Let's just say there are 20 things you'd want to consider.

Doing due diligence and making sure they're right.

Ticking your box and being comfortable with it.

But actually, I'd say of those 20 things, 17 of them could be wrong.

And you could still decide to make the investment.

Because you could probably put those things right.

Now, 17 things to put right are rather a lot of things to put right.

So you probably wouldn't.

But 17 things could be writeable.

The three things that are if they're wrong, you probably walk away.

from because they're not writable.

Our product, we deal with meeting a consumer need.

You know, a really, that product does meet a consumer need.

And if it doesn't, well, why are you having a conversation?

Secondly, scalability.

So there are lots of those consumers out there that would be willing to pay that price.

So you can scale and the unit economics works.

So that's scalability.

The universe is big enough.

At the price you're going to charge.

And the third is yet again the entrepreneur.

And if any of those three things are wrong, walk away.

Because especially the entrepreneur, you're never going to fix that.

Entrepreneurs?

I mean it's not necessarily.

Oh yeah, of course.

Team, entrepreneur, entrepreneurs.

Oh, who's going to make things happen?

Yeah.

Great idea, scalable, yeah it works.

But who's going to make it happen despite all the setbacks that I said before.

All the no's you're going to get.

You know, and we got so many at Newcombe Garden.

You're just going to not take, yeah, but thick skin, not take no for an answer and say, I'm going to do it anyway.

You know, I've got some clients at the moment who will remain nameless, who have a fantastic idea.

It's a really, really good idea.

But they've been talking about it for about two and a half years now.

You know, we did a term sheet for investment about 18 months ago.

And I'm just kind of like, you're absolutely right, you've got to be able to push it to that next step and actually do something about it.

I think part of the problem sometimes is getting to perfection before you do anything, and how do you know what perfection is until you actually do it?

I remember I had a conversation, was it yesterday, and I kind of started off by saying, I haven't really figured this out, but by the end of this conversation, it really has helped me to figure this out.

So it's kind of an iterative conversation.

This is what I think I need.

Let me explain my problem.

Which isn't very well defined yet.

It's funny how talking out loud is so important sometimes.

Talking out loud, and then you know, a guy or girl comes in and goes, Yeah, and you build on the idea.

That's really, actually, that's what I meant to say.

That helps me.

And by the end of it, we ended up with, okay, so your problem is this.

And this is how you might want to solve it.

And I might be able to help, or I might not.

Conversate, rather than, I'm not going to have that conversation until I really figure out what I'm trying to ask this person.

And then guess what?

You may never have that conversation.

Because you're relying on just yourself to come up with the answer.

So perfecting everything before you launch, you've got to have a few things right.

Otherwise, you know, you just go, but when is enough?

to get going and get started and, and, and then iterate along the way, uh, because you might think you know who the consumer is, you might be the consumer.

This is the great, the great fallacy is a lot of the time that in the food industry somebody comes up with an idea because

they're really frustrated the product doesn't exist because they're trying to find it themselves and it doesn't exist.

So they say, Oh my God, there's a marketplace, let me give up my day job and go and do it.

And they know the consumer inside out.

The problem is they think they know the consumer inside out or they are one version of the consumer.

Yeah.

So I'm going to continue to define.

Uh, meeting my need.

And they never ask the actual consumer group.

They never even define the consumer group, what their need is.

Because it might be a bit different to their need.

And over time, guess what?

Tangentially, their needs and the consumer group that they're trying to satisfy, their needs diverge.

So, consumer insight is not about what I think.

ever, even if I'm my best owned customer.

Consumer insight is what the consumer needs.

And I think if you can, if you can understand those, and they evolve as well, so you've got to keep up with them.

And trends are important and all the rest of it, but, you know, lack of familiarity with the consumer never makes up for any decisions you can make on your own.

So, if, if you have an idea, great, but get out there with it and test it.

And you might be kicked right back, it's a rubbish idea.

Well, okay, that's good feedback, let me take that forward.

So don't try to perfect before you do anything.

Get it to a point where it's ready enough, and then get it out there.

And is there any advice that you would have given your younger self?

Loads.

Absolutely loads.

The problem is, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have taken any of it.

Okay.

Yes.

You know what?

It's so, it's so true.

It's like, it's what you were saying earlier, Andy, about ego.

It's like, what do you know about it?

Well, actually, a lot.

But I only know that now, and if I was, you know, I was very young when I started Newcomen Garden, I was like, what was I, 23 or something, or, you know, straight out of university.

So there's a bit of ego, there's a bit of all that to get things moving, to get things started despite being told by everybody you're wrong.

You have to be egotistic and say Yeah, father, son, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to go in a completely different career as well.

Well, I've just, I've just asked the expert and they've told me I'm wrong.

But you know what?

The expert's wrong, I'm going to do it anyway.

That, where does that come from?

Don't believe the expert, certainly.

So then when you're trying to take advice, is, well, you're a bunch of experts.

I'm not suggesting, I'm not trying to be Michael Gove here, because, you know, we don't need any experts.

Of course we need expertise to provide, you know, you guys do a lot.

Nobody wants to be Michael Gove, just to be clear.

But the point about it is, what advice would I give to my younger self?

Oh, loads of stuff, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have listened.

Any recommendations of anything to read, watch, or listen?

I'm the last person to ask, really, about that.

I keep abreast of things in the food industry by reading the grocery.

Are you a reader?

Are you a big reader?

I'm not.

I'm not.

Are you another dyslexic, do you think?

I don't know if I'm dyslexic, but I don't bother.

to read and, and, and I, you know, other members of my family and sisters particularly read constantly and they just don't understand how can you not read.

So I just don't, I just kind of, you know, pick stuff up along the way and Simon Sinek, is it Simon Sinek?

Sinek.

Sinek.

Sinek.

He talked about a common sense.

It's a book, I don't know, he's a, he writes books.

He does a lot of good stuff.

Do you know him at all?

I haven't met him, no, but, but, you know, I've, I've come across him, literally, and I don't kind of root him out to purposely go and listen to what he has to say, but when I do come across him,

I always find he's saying stuff that is relevant to the situation, and he seems to have an insight as to what's important for people to think about in a common sense kind of way, and I often think.

Myself included sometimes, but I often think, you know, common sense isn't that common.

You know, are we trying to overcomplicate stuff?

I agree with that.

People who are really good at having their feet on the ground, it's a rare skill.

And this guy talks about how to do that a lot, well at least when I've ever heard of it.

Overcomplicating things is one of the worst things in the world.

And so that was this week's episode of BWB Extra, and we'll be back tomorrow with our finale for the week, The Business or Bullshit Quiz.

Stay tuned.