Joe Foster and his brother Jeff founded Reebok in post-war Britain, turning it into a globally recognized brand valued at $4 billion.

In this episode, Joe shares powerful insights from his journey, highlighting how he overcame family tensions, navigated international markets, and built strategic partnerships...

Long before the era of the internet.

You'll hear Joe's perspectives on identifying real business opportunities, building genuine relationships, and why having fun is essential in entrepreneurship.

Talking Points:

• Breaking Free from Family Business Constraints

• The Importance of Having Fun in Business

• Identifying Genuine Market Opportunities

• Navigating Early International Expansion

• Building Strategic Relationships

• Choosing the Right Partners and Employees

• Overcoming Early Failures in the US Market

• Strategic Pivoting to Aerobics and Women's Market

• Growing Without Internet and Modern Technology

12 Reasons to Listen…

• Leaving the Family Business

It’s at 02:00

• Developing Independent Drive and Mindset

It’s at 05:30

• Buying a Caravan in France as a Strategic Move

It’s at 08:00

• Taking Reebok to America

It’s at 09:30

• Understanding What Makes a Strong Partner

It’s at 13:00

• Importance of Patience in Business

It’s at 17:00

• How Joe Approaches Hiring and Team Culture

It’s at 18:00

• How Reebok Attracted Influencers Before Social Media

It’s at 25:00

• Getting the Game-Changing Five-Star Shoe

It’s at 27:00

• Pivoting Successfully into Aerobics

It’s at 28:00

• Building a Strong, Ego-Free Team

It’s at 21:00

• The Value of Face-to-Face Conversations

It’s at 30:00

Guest Deets:

Joe Foster – Co-founder of Reebok, Author of "Shoemaker"

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Joe Foster

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Toby Goodman: I wonder. How much of this noise we need? How much we use tech solutions to avoid fully engaging with what, as you'll hear Joe would call 'the challenge'?

Toby Goodman: I'm happy to report since this recording, Joe is still traveling the world, working with my friend and the man who introduced me to him. Steve Foster. No relation. Thanks Steve. And recently Joe celebrated his 90th birthday.

Toby Goodman: There is so much to learn from Joe's mindset and life, so I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

Toby Goodman: If you are in business and identify as pod curious, or your podcast isn't working out the way you'd hoped, I've got more for you, including episodes, my bestselling book, narrow Podcasting and Profitable Pod Method Skill Sessions. For all that and more about how I can support your business, head over to NarrowPodcasting.com

Toby Goodman: Now, Joe, there's a chapter in your book, Shoemaker. Mm-hmm. Called Showdown.

Joe Foster: Okay.

Toby Goodman: And during that showdown, your father hands you a blade and essentially says, you may as well stab me in the back now. And, and you also communicate that you have the feeling that he, he solely blamed you. And in that moment you say in the book, you were liberated yourself, you or you. You liberated yourself from the chains of convention.

Toby Goodman: And so my question as you reflect back is where did you refine that drive?

Joe Foster: You did the normal things, but two years away in national service, you just take a different perspective to life. You, you learn how to look after yourself. You learn that, uh, nobody else is going to do it. You have to do it. And uh, in that case, when we came back and we came back to the, uh, JW Foster business, now run by my father and uncle who didn't speak to each other, this is, this was the reason the company was sort of failing.

Joe Foster: You know, we, and uh, we tried, Jeff and I tried, but probably I tried harder than Jeff because I was probably the more outspoken one. And so. You go and do it, Joe. You know you do it, so, okay. I was probably the most outspoken one, so that's why I got the blame. I gotta blame when we did go that, uh, I'd taken Jeff, I'd convinced Jeff he gotta leave the company and we gotta goal no matter what.

Joe Foster: And eventually I sort of, uh, well, I just said, no, I wanna be out with the guys playing football. I don't wanna be a runner. So I, I think he in a way, probably turned his back on me at that point because I had let him down. Uh, but. You know, that's only a supposition. And we never had the argument, we never had the discussion.

Joe Foster: I mean, those sort of events, you remember what you, it's like forever. But, uh, um, I don't think, I don't think mother blamed me over much, but yes, uh, father blame me.

Toby Goodman: Your drive was, that was coming just through pent up anxiety or, or pent up sort of stress that the business wasn't working. 'cause your uncle and and your dad weren't talking and you'd also had some time away from home because of the army.

Toby Goodman: So you'd found your own sense of self. Right?

Joe Foster: Do what you like with it. Mm-hmm. I say, I'm sorry, dad. You know, we don't want you to go. That's not the plan. The plan is this business is going, this business will be dead long before you are. And uh, and indeed it did, it did die about, well, my uncle died probably two years after we left. And the business, it went at the same time because my father was not really ready to

Joe Foster: We, we need a future. Mm-hmm. And, uh, we're gonna leave. What can go wrong? You know? And so that, that probably drove Jeff, myself to, uh, and, and it was good having, having somebody to do talk with, uh, on my own. I don't know. But that, that wasn't a question, but, uh, with Jeff, wow. You know, yes, we could do it.

Toby Goodman: Well, thank you for that. Um, so then you grew Reebok to become the number one sports brand and you did it before the internet. So thinking about your first trip out of the UK to mainland Europe and later the US Hong Kong Far East, buying a mobile home in France isn't a strategy I'd heard of until I read your book.

Toby Goodman: So wondering what moments helped you understand you could run a global business?

Joe Foster: You know, it helps sort of, uh, take your mind off, well, you've gotta do this, you've got, but we could buy a, a caravan. We could have holidays in the South Bronx. Why don't we do that? So it wasn't gonna break the company. Um, but it was gonna give us somewhere to go and enjoy. Um, and we enjoyed the South of France and we enjoyed the caravan, even though we did say it was our sort of, um, office in Europe, because in those days you had to justify spending money.

Toby Goodman: Yeah, I love that. And then eventually you get to travel over to the US Were there conversations that you had, um, in the US where you realized you, they were taking you seriously and, and that this was a real, real business that could go beyond, beyond the uk?

Joe Foster: Well, I think, um, the experience at Fosters. Fosters had been exported into Yale University.

Joe Foster: And they were doing 200 pairs of hands-on shoes every month. Um, by the time they went out business, uh, the guys at Yale, that was Bob G and Jack and Frank Ryan, they were getting on a bit. I think they were ready if, if they're not all ready, retired as head coaches. So they were not ready to take on Reebok.

Joe Foster: We did a check, uh, on sort of, um, available money, you know, money to spend what. How much would you spend in America? And we put America over a hundred. The UK came in at about 15 by comparison, and I think Germany was about 25 and Japan about 30. So, you know, we said, well, those, those are the, this is the big market.

Joe Foster: Well, Adidas and Puma we're big, we were small, we were just a small business and. 27 languages or so, different cultures and what they have in Scandinavia, I guess what they have in the Italy, totally different. You know, it just one's into cotton, the other one's more into fleeces and so America, that was the decision that was the market.

Joe Foster: They didn't need to, uh, go through the pain of invitation. And it was a pain into America.

Toby Goodman: Mm-hmm.

Toby Goodman: From perspective employers or partners, you frequently point to strong relationships being the key to, you know, happy life and business. So my question is, what clues do you look for and what questions do you ask to help you decide if a relationship will be worthwhile getting into.

Joe Foster: Well, okay. Um, having read the book, you'll obviously have, uh, become aware that I had six failed attempts.

Toby Goodman: Yeah.

Joe Foster: And I think in your conversations, you've also got to find out that they're like, they're like-minded people. They're people who wanna put the effort in. They're people who were probably hungry at that time. And when we eventually got Paul Fireman, he was hungry. He needed that market. He wanted something, he wanted to change his life.

Joe Foster: We needed to move on. So when you, when you find like-minded people, people are not just sort of asking questions about how much does this cost, how we're going to finance, how you've gotta, you've gotta have a personality that you, you can work with. And, and that was Paul. The other guys, yes, I could work with them, but other things weren't in place.

Joe Foster: And I mean, the thing that got us in was that five star shoe. Yeah. Runner's World. Everybody. There must have been 35 million Americans reading Runner's World. And you know that alone when people are reading that magazine and you get a five star shoe, that's impressive. And that's what, in fact, Paul Fireman, I don't think Paul Fireman would've come with us if we hadn't got that five star shoe because that was his side.

Toby Goodman: So what was it about Paul that you liked? 'cause I imagine if you got a five star shoe, you, probably could have picked, uh, had a pick of a, a few people at that point.

Toby Goodman: Um, and, and they would've been open to doing, at least trying to, to have an agreement with you for some amount of time. What was it about his personality that you felt. Okay, this is a guy that, that I could spend some considerable time working with?

Joe Foster: Yeah, well he was easygoing. He was sort of, uh, honest, upfront, you know.

Joe Foster: But that might have been my first and my last. 25,000 pairs that because I, you know, you, you just look around and, you know, all of a sudden you're looking at a guy who's, who's, who's looking at square footage, you know? Right. How many square feet will we give this Reebok brand? Okay, we'll give them 10 square feet.

Joe Foster: Now if we don't make enough money , for that 10 square feet, then we've gotta move on to another product. So I was trying to build a brand. We had a passion there. No passion with Kmart. That was pure, simply a business proposition. We'll buy the product, we'll sell it if it sells, well, we're with you, but they want to build the brand.

Joe Foster: And he had a lot of challenges, you know, and there was some big challenges product that wasn't right. It took us a while to get that product and get that product out of, uh, South Korea.

Toby Goodman: Yeah. So you had a patience as well that perhaps the bigger players might not have had.

Joe Foster: Well, yeah, I, I do know that during those, uh, months when he had his, uh, his little office there in his sort of place for storing shoes, he also had a Pacman machine and he used to spend more time on his Pacman machine, I suppose, really just to get rid of the annoyance that the stuff isn't arriving.

Toby Goodman: And the other side of that question around strong relationships , that I wanted to ask you about was, was hiring.

Toby Goodman: Becuase you've, you've hired a number of people in your life. Um, what, how do you know. How do you know when you've hired, hired a good one. And and what, what kind of questions do you ask when you're trying to build a team?

Joe Foster: Well, I think luckily we were in quite a glamorous business. I. Sport and sports footwear, and in those days quite glamorous and very sort of in your face, something, you know, you, you're not just making, uh, a widget and that fits into something and, and I, I need to make 10 million widgets next week.

Joe Foster: You it has three damage, you know, with, with apparel, with a shirt, whatever it is, it hangs on a hanger. It doesn't have that feel that that sort of, you know, it is flat. You've gotta put it on somebody for, to really see what, what it looks like. Whereas a shoe, you can just put it there and you, you can go around it and see it, and you can feel it.

Joe Foster: So, footwear and sports footwear in particular is, is something very tactile, something you can pick up and enjoy. It's light and weight. It, it, uh, it bends nicely. It's, it's something you can really, uh, feel. It's great. So you get that. So when employing people, uh, I found most of the people as Paul Fireman, he came to me.

Joe Foster: And if once you could feel that enthusiasm, great. That most people were employed eventually in America. But they, they built a team, and again, you know, we, we grew , from almost zero to 1 billion in five years. Now that mean, you know, everybody's working hard, running fast. You don't think too much.

Joe Foster: Women generated opposite. When it took off, it just took off and it wasn't a master of, uh, where did we get our next sale from? It was a matter of where did we get our next pair of shoes to satisfy these sales. Because for those five years, we were just chasing, chasing the numbers, just trying, trying to supply.

Joe Foster: So for us, it was a five year supply job. Uh, instead of being a sales job, it was a supply job. So people coming in were just, they were seeing this company, it just grow so big, so fast. So, uh, employing people. Yes. The, the one thing I I try to avoid is egos. And, you know, you do, you do definitely, uh, attract the egos.

Joe Foster: Yeah, with Jeff, we founded the brand. But you know, it was the brand that people would come into work with, not Joe Foster.

Toby Goodman: That enabled you to have some semblance of personal and. That you wouldn't have been able to have had you been, you know, Branson style on all the posters?

Joe Foster: Well, yes. I mean, it's, uh, yeah, Branson was sort of selling himself at the same time.

Joe Foster: We were a few months in with Paul Fireman, well probably nine months in with Paul Fireman, but that's just a start area and unfortunately, yeah, he, he had cancer and uh, he with it. Yeah. At that time it probably made me double down harder to make sure that we, we succeeded you, but it was sort of great tragedy.

Joe Foster: Mm-hmm. It really is.

Joe Foster: Yeah. And, uh, if, you know, if people said, what would you change? If I could, I would change the fact that he, uh, he died at that time. Everything else, no. We became number one.

Toby Goodman: That's pretty amazing. You wanted, you wanted to create a shoe that served athletes and, and, and by doing just that, the retailers couldn't ignore that product. Could you share a little bit about how you got. How you got those athletes, the shoes in the, in the first place and, and later other partners on board with that mission.

Joe Foster: Well, I, I guess when we were growing, we know what we, everybody knows that the way that, uh, Nike and Adidas, they just put a lot of money in shoes and, uh, got people to wear shoes. And so money. Money made a big difference. And, uh. And it makes even more difference these days, so you buy your athletes, you buy your influencers, and uh, I had a friend who thought he could do it differently.

Joe Foster: that sounds all right. But people wanted influencers and they want to be influenced. You know, if, an athlete, a footballer, whatever, is wearing a certain product, that's the influence. So there was no real way of changing that. So we had to go, we had Ron Hill, we had numerous athletes, David Jenkins, who was, in fact, David Jenkins was quite good because he, he actually won the American 400 Meter championship and he was, he was British, but he won the American.

Joe Foster: And so that, so these things, they helped. Plus you've gotta advertise. Um, we had, Don Hartley. I don't know if I ever remember Donna Hartley. Um, and, uh. So they were influencers. They, they were good. We, we had quite a nice group, Alan Pasco, who was also, and uh, and, and this was round about the time when we were trying to, making waves round about the late seventies when things were happening.

Joe Foster: And I say by about nine to seven, five when he, when he started to, uh, well, he, he was so big. He, he decided he could tell everybody, which was the number one shoe. And of course it was Nike. Well, you know, they're pretty close together on the same West coast. So he had a big influence on, on athletic, on running, because.

Joe Foster: And of course the big one was aerobics. We were a little tiny company, a $9 million company when at Martines came across, well, his wife was doing aerobics, and you know, that was a big change. We're a small company. Adidas was big, Nike was big. They were male, they were sweaty. All of a sudden, we come up with a woman's aerobic shoe, a woman's dancing shoe.

Joe Foster: And women grew us that way. Tremendous growth was on the fact that women have found something for themselves and we actually made it just for them. We only made it in women's sizes. We made it on a woman's last, and everything was focused on that. Woman's and aerobics. The men wanted shoes, but it took us, took a while before we gave in and started to make men shoes in that nice soft leather.

Joe Foster: And I think Reebok, and this came from America. Reebok, were responsible for making athletic shoes in very soft materials. Soft leather. Now everybody does it. You know, if you want to really sell the nice, uh, athletic shoe, you make it soft and comfortable.

Joe Foster: Right.

Toby Goodman: You, you still travel a, a great deal. I've come, I've come to sort of notice this. You've written your book, you know, have to, um, travel. We're having a chat on Zoom and, and that's fantastic.

Toby Goodman: How important do you feel in-person conversations, in-person meetings still are today and you know, this is post being locked up in our houses for the best part of two years after COVID as well. How important are these in-person, moments, meetings?

Joe Foster: Well, I, I, I think it's, you can do so much with a Zoom.

Joe Foster: So you could be waiting for a long time and you had to wait in your room. Because you didn't have mobiles, we didn't have, uh, cell phones or, or anything like that, you know, so everything was, uh, was really sort of depending upon if you could get a call through writing a letter was almost impossible when you're talking about, uh, doing business abroad.

Joe Foster: I think one of the reasons I failed in America on my first time, um. Probably the second or third attempt. I was with this guy for about four years trying to make it work. But we were writing letters and, you know, he was answering a letter as we were writing a second letter. So we got all mixed up about, you know... what is he talking about now? Which, which letters he responding to?

Joe Foster: And you know, the first thing they sort of learn from this is they ask, okay, first of all, make your exit, exit plan. Let's see what is, what is your exit plan? You know, you get an exit. And they asked me and say, what was your exit plan, Joe? And we didn't have an exit plan. There was no such thing as an exit plan.

Joe Foster: We wanted to build a brand. We weren't interested in just making money or just being, uh, a successful five years or whatever. You know, we, we did have that feeling. So it gets attention and then we start getting questions similar to yourself. Why did you do this? Why did, what happened when, you know, we all have computers now.

Toby Goodman: Well, and I appreciate that 'cause uh, you know, if I deal with a lot of Americans!

Joe Foster: But, uh so we didn't have all these, in fact, we didn't have 'em until I'd retired. I'm sitting back in av enjoying a bit of sun and a bit of relaxation.

Joe Foster: Um, in those early days, first retirement, the, the phone was ringing all the time asking me what happened? How did this happen? It's, it's surprising that when, you know, you think everybody knows everything, but suddenly questions come up. Uh, you know, we, we had questions from the IRS in America. Why is the American company paying the British company or royalty now?

Joe Foster: This is how Reebok started. No, there's also a photograph of Joe Foster, founder of Reebok. Don't know who is, he might have been called Joe Foster. He certainly was not a founder of Reebok, and so that convinced me I should write story. So now, you know that's my mission right now. I, I've got a challenge back.

Joe Foster: The challenge is to sell the book and it's worth it. So I think the, I think the question started on travel. So now.

Toby Goodman: Yeah. Travel and, and, and just, and just, yeah, it did. And that, and that's just all brilliant. Just, just every, you know, all, every, almost every line of that book, I'm thinking, this guy didn't have the internet or a mobile phone or any of these, you know, during any of this, you know?

Joe Foster: I, I think so. I, I think, uh, for people to actually feel what you feel. It's gotta be face to face, you know, this is great. And yeah, you know, we can express ourselves as much as possible, but I think when you're in there and people are listening and people are asking questions, you know, okay.

Joe Foster: So that's one. And then we travel off to Boston and I shall be meeting up with some of the. People now at Reebok, because Reebok has changed. Of course, it's no longer with Adidas, it's now with ABG, Authentic Brands. So we, you we're gonna see what are they're doing, how we can help, and hopefully how they can help maybe, uh, sell my book.

Toby Goodman: reading yours, you know, and, and being a Brit and knowing the north of England as I do. I just felt, yeah, like this is, this is completely, this is a completely different journey to, what it is to build a brand. And, and that it came from, the north of England. Um, and, and from a town and, and from the kinds of people that, you know, do what we always do.

Toby Goodman: And, and, and to watch how, and to read how, you moved it, um. in the way you did was just, yeah. Incredibly inspiring. So, I'm , so, privileged to speak to you and thank you so much, Joe.

Joe Foster: It's been an absolute pleasure. It really has. And uh, yes. What we're doing now is, like I say, we're trying to get this to be a number one or a best seller in America, and that's a challenge.

Toby Goodman: Thank you.

Toby Goodman: Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please give it a five star review and share it with someone you think it would help. If you are a business owner considering podcasting, or you are not getting the results you wanted from the podcast you have, I've got more episodes, a bestselling book, narrow Podcasting and Profitable Pod Method Skill Sessions, all designed to help you where you are right now.

Toby Goodman: For all of that and how I can support your business, head over to NarrowPodcasting.com