GROWTH HACKS: HOW TO SCALE A MULTI-MILLION POUND BUSINESS

we are live and we are talking growth hacks on this session about how to scale and grow your business i'm really excited about this conversation because so many of the business panel events i do focus on just starting out which of course is a really important part of the journey getting your idea off the ground but actually i think um perhaps lesser talked about in these sessions is how can we scale and grow um and i think it's a especially important conversation around female owned businesses from my experience writing about business over the years we often with female businesses talk around kitchen table and startups and small businesses but what i also want to hear about is businesses that have really big aspirations and are growing in numbers and revenue and teams so that's what we're going to be talking about in this session and so i would love you to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your businesses starting with you emily so i'm emily i founded a business called emerge when i was 22. and we are a full-service program launching agency based in london and then we have um boots on the ground in la2 there's now uh 20 of us and we're all female which isn't particularly diverse but perhaps we can come onto that later um we are are responsible for launching and scaling a number of businesses and often well backed and by investors and sometimes large in other countries and launching here so brands like uh lick her and ray ban hule fit uh and this whole series of other brands amazing thank you pip tell us about peppernut hi so i'm pip i'm the founder of pippennut we're a all-natural nut butter brand which i launched about six years ago now um so we're stocked in about seven thousand stores up and down the uk um largely uk and ireland rented um as a business and yeah we um yeah our team of 20 um and have had quite a amazing year last year despite all the chaos and um it being quite a difficult year i think generally personally um from a business perspective covered was quite interesting so yeah i'm very excited to talk more about our growth journey over the next uh half an hour or so fantastic thank you maxine hi i'm maxine lacey i'm the founder of absolute collagen and i started absolute collagen in my kitchen at 50 years old with absolutely no business experience whatsoever and you know i believed my product i believed in me and i just got on with the job in hand which is you know what women are absolutely brilliant at uh we are we grew to a 10 million pound business in three years we're direct consumer that's really important to me i wanted a relationship with my consumers and we are on track for 17 million this year we've just towards the end of last year secured minority investment i am still the main shareholder and i did that in order to grow the business and put the scaffolding around the business that a 200 million pound business needs and i'm really excited to be here fantastic thank you so much um so just starting out um i just want to hear a little bit about your kind of founders journey so maxine tell me what was um how did the idea for the business come about and what practical steps did he take to launch well it was a bit crazy really but that's kind of should be my middle name so i started a fine art degree and a really long story quick i part of my first so i started a fine arts degree at 50 part of my one of my first projects was stripped myself bare of makeup let my hair go gray what it actually made me realize is how desperately insecure i was about who i was and what i looked like so i kind of started looking at myself physically emotionally and mentally and one of the physical things i did was i started making and drinking my own bone broth and i just had the most amazing sense of well-being again this is a very long story short i sort of did some research into what is it in this bone broth that's having this effect and i assume worked out it was the collagen and so i asked myself what did i want because i was creating a collagen supplement for myself and i wanted maximum of the best collagen in the minimum dose i wanted it ready mix i want the liquid first of all there's lots of reasons for that um but yeah so that was how i started and this is where we are today i love it i love that it started with your own need to create something that made you feel amazing and then yeah and i think everything everything we've done has just felt organic and has been organic and i am me every single day and that just feels wonderful that was ethnicity emily how did emerge come about so towards the beginning of last year i started looking at what the business needed so i wanted arrogantly i wanted in and out in three years uh being 50 and i kind of put scaffolding around me of a very young hungry capable team i asked them what they wanted they didn't want out and i said okay i respect that and actually i'm really enjoying the journey and we had so far to go and so i knew that in order to make uh i i with my lack of business experience i didn't want to risk us doing it on our own nobody in the business had experience whatsoever none of us and so i kind of realized that in order to secure my that they were completely looked after never let down and secure the team the team were looked after and the scaffolding was put around i decided to seek investment makes sense emily tell me how did emerge come about so um i was at university i was at manchester studying i did criminal law in the native politics and and i which is not necessarily an obvious uh jump into pr but i was quite interested in the idea of language and messaging and communication and um was quite uh inspired by those elements in my course i found um institutions quite difficult i found school quite difficult i found university quite challenging and i felt constantly like i wasn't moving quickly enough and i wasn't doing enough and you show up and you've got like 6 000 lectures a week and you think this is madness three years so um i had done a lot of interning whilst at university and in manchester particularly obviously big city quite easy um to get connected with at the time communications agencies and i had two businesses when i was at university one was a social media business which um now sounds sort of um probably quite basic but there was a window of about 18 months where people didn't really know how to use twitter didn't um really know how to harness what was at that point of kind of embryonic social media scene 10 12 12 years ago um and so i had done that and i used to go into agencies and teach them how to use it and utilize it as a tool for their business so by doing that i was observing the way that they around their companies and alongside that i got connected with a series of agents as the special as the sort of reality television thing was happening so um i then started a company in my halfway through my second year with a guy who was an agent when i we did a lot of big branding deals with celebrities it was a lot of the kind of only way of essex channel 4 made in chelsea staff about 10 days after i left university so that business was quite did quite well we made um we had a six-figure profit in that year it was a decent little business about a week after i left university he my business partner drained the bank account and disappeared and on which was um successful and uh so i remember having a conversation with my parents on what was then probably like thursday evening and they were like your business model's good you're young enough you know you'll make that money back again in your life you don't really want to enter your industry with like a lawsuit hanging over you so let's come up with a name tonight and then uh go register at the bank tomorrow and then on monday you can start so i was sort of eggformed by my parents and the attitude of like don't sort of trip yourself up and um my exposure to the industry previously had been that i had really enjoyed um the work and the the industry but i found that i didn't really fit in i didn't really fit in i didn't look right i weighed over 100 kilos at the time i wasn't a big partier i just didn't really fit the aesthetic that the kind of pr piece um wanted you to be but i thought i had something of value to add so in in sort of um summary i decided to create a business that i would like to work at and then i think hopefully attracted other people who you know felt the same way and perhaps didn't didn't fit in what else they were doing and and now as i say there's 20 of us we also have uh we're raising five million at the moment to start our own vp fund we're not investing in some of the early stage brands that we meet we have a merchandising arm of the business called a merch and then i'm the strategic advisor for europe for the un women um so my team do some amazing campaign work with that too so i think we've we've been able to create an environment in which we can all thrive which i felt was lacking before amazing what an amazing story i can't believe he drained the bank account i know it's quite dramatic isn't it i sort of forget that now because i'm 31 and that was over you know a decade ago sort of is it is is alarming but yeah as an early story in business that's what i like about that is the advice your parents gave you because you can spend so much energy wasted on stuff that is going to drag you down so i think your parents gave you really sound advice and you started a fresh without that lawsuit without the energy being drained and i think that's amazing yeah you've got to pick your battles right you learn that really quickly um hit tell me about the idea of your business and the practical steps you took to launching um yeah so i'm a classic kitchen table startup so um i started my business as a spurred on by the fact that at the time i was doing lots of marathons and i was eating looking for like food that would help fuel my training and nut butter and peanut butter was my go-to and i just loved it and very much from a consumer perspective did i come into the category and start working on the brand but i initially started literally with a blender in my kitchen and i'd make jars in my evenings and weekends i watched my day job and i'd take them down to mulby street in birmingham london and tried it out and yeah i guess if i was a tech company that's my minimal viable product like what could i do to get in front of consumers as quickly as i possibly could and i do think that's an integral part of a consumer that bond is trying to speak to consumers as early as possible before you invest in landing and scaling up into supply chain and then i guess that startup kind of scale up piece uh what four years and um you know for any food brand performance seems similar for you like it's the supply chain that takes so long or took me the longest to get up and running you know it is quite an integral part of your business you don't have a product until you've got one that's commercially scalable and and tastes as good as what it is in the kitchen so that took about eight nine months to find the right factory and then really as part of kind of cooking up things like branding and packaging and did a crowdfunding um crowd cube campaign uh where we raised 120k business off properly when i say we it was with me at the time and yeah about four months after that campaign i launched the brand in selfridges and that was the start of the proper journey really from that point in so yeah it's um definitely from uh my background from the team accident was very fragmented i was i studied anthropology and geography and i was a theater producer at the science museum in london so yeah i didn't even know what fmpg stood for let alone the scared company so it's definitely a good example of you don't need to have experience to get to get to where you need to go 100 well as this talk is around scaling i would love to hear your insights on what you think has been the most valuable tool or approach that has helped you scale your business so maxine do you have anything to share on how you've helped scale yeah so one thing i'm absolutely brilliant at is recognizing what i'm not great at and for me that's been a real asset and i'm also really good at empowering and recognizing what others are capable of and so i built myself a really good team that kind of you know supported all my weaknesses and that it was absolutely key to scaling my business and i also engaged my absolutes as they called themselves you know that i made a massive decision back in 2017 to go direct to consumer which seems really weird now because everyone does it but at the time i was told i needed the backing of a big brand i was told i needed to be in a shop i was told who are you anyway you know all these horrible things and i just i knew that i wanted a relationship with my consumer because i wanted to look after them i wanted to know what they were feeling what they were everything about the product i just wanted to be there for them and i as ceo i'm so focused on the consumer and the team you know i operate on the power sir that means every um absolutely and team member deserve to make to feel safe important and respected and those two components getting my head down and just getting on with it for a couple of years with those two components really really helped me scale my business i think that point about knowing what you're good at and what you're not is so important because then you don't you can delegate and you can work out who the best possible person is for the bits that you're you're not good at and it's okay it's okay to you know i think i had this big notion that oh my god i can't do this and i can't do that so i'm not capable no one's capable of everything and it's okay pip on scale um and especially i suppose in the last year with covert do you have any anything you can share um i think when it comes to scaling i think and probably a couple of things really i think firstly um what focus i think often the tendency um into a product-based business is to go and rush towards supermarkets um try and get as many listings as many stores as you possibly can get your products on the shelf which is obviously really important you want to get onto the shelf because if you're not visible you're not going to be able to be bought but i think focus on on really don't go too wide too soon i think definitely have made mistakes in my first few years of launching quite quickly into some of the big businesses and quite quickly realizing that we didn't have the marketing budget supported let alone the bond awareness to pull the products off off the shelves and i think often um you can celebrate when you get the listing and you're like you know tesco finally confirm and then you um and then six months later you're like your rate of service isn't where it needs to be so and i think that comes down to a number of things like focus if you if you get into a really big listing focus on really driving that water because you can go kind of deeper and wider in that one store and be really focused actually you can use that and then leap frog into the next place that you're looking at look at going into and i guess the same goes through your product range like have definitely made the mistake of going too broad and too wide with product languages and actually then not looking after all of them as well as i could do and actually have being a bit smart again when it comes to kind of the focus around brand and marketing so yeah the tendency is i think as a founder is you've got so much aspiration and um you see a vision for where you want to go in the next five years but just know that actually sometimes the level of focus is actually really a positive thing and not having a crawling rain or spawning distribution but really making sure you're like expressing what you've got really hard is really valuable and probably something to consider and i think the second one is just about the right moments to get investment and i think all of us will probably have different stories around what we've done when it came to kind of funding um our businesses but i think again you know try first you get the right investors on board and if it doesn't feel right and i think you can feel that and you'll absolute guard i think most people are quite intuitive when it comes to people that align with your value never ever go any further with an investor investment potential investment partner if you just don't feel like they're listening or responding or respecting your opinion and i think that's something to really hold on to and then also just look at the amounts you're raising look at each stage you need to remove them and think okay raises enough to kind of thrive and like drive your business forwards well not so much that you're kind of bloating it and you're ending up spending too much money on things that you don't need so i can always look at it then building blocks like what do you need to get the next stage where you can then raise a bigger round to then drive the business even further forward so for us for instance we did 128 20k funding to get the brand out the door we then spent the first year gathering listings launched into accrdo sainsbury's holding and then at that moment did i then start to go for my next round with the building blocks of what i've had to demonstrate the success for the brands just think about what are those goals and where you need to be and money you want me to get there so it's probably a few things yeah amazing thank you so much i've had a comment from someone who says they find your story really inspiring and they're on a similar journey from kitchen table to getting their overnight oats breakfast pots manufactured into retail best of luck with that emily tell me um do you have any insights you can share on a valuable approach or tool or anything you've used to scale your business yeah so i think just to kind of um pick up on what pip said we've worked with like shul's a really good example where we launched them with nothing and it was just two co-founders and they're now worth over 600 million and they did a fundraise you know the worst way to raise money is when you really need it everyone knows that they did an early fundraise to you know rainy day fund but one of the things that they were brilliant at um aside from as per says focusing and knowing what your product is and fuel started with one product it was also the sequencing so as you know what you said about um when to when to raise money but also to not not be fighting as a business and not just take on loads of stuff with a real sort of spray and pray attitude it was like you know there's a lot of glamour in pr and agency because it's exploiting and it dries ego and you know it's fabulous to see recognition of you and your product and you know undeniably there is a benefit back to the business but we do turn down some brands for being too early stage because actually that false growth and that visibility can be really damaging if you don't have the infrastructure to deal with it um and what we've seen particularly in the last year or something we have an at-home fitness device and really well set up for that growth that probably came about six months before they were ready but actually that fast growth can break a lot of companies because you just do not have the capacity and capability to grow in a consistent way across the company through personnel hr premises and then you know whatever else is on the list so i think an observation from the brands that we've launched since failed is that the sequencing about when and where they um deploy capital and for what has been has been crucial i think probably you know for me running an agency i've i've never taken investment personally i work with a lot of vc funds because series a we're quite involved in the detail of that and i've been involved in raising and over 100 million pounds of funds for brands in the last decade really so and whilst i haven't done it personally for myself i you know do have an understanding of it and my business is entirely margin so why i you know everything i make over what i spend is my profit but i don't have any investment to bolster that so it is kind of like in and out um proposition and it's not you know there are some businesses that have in their business plans that they can run at a loss for a period of time for for kind of obvious growth reasons i think um being self-aware and um maxine to your point about embracing your weaknesses is a really crucial skill i definitely felt when i started that i needed to be good at everything and then you sort of grow up and realize that actually you know people study accountancy and other things for a long time because it's their full-time blob and you don't have to know how to do it you just need a grasp on on the numbers and i'd say the one thing that really helped me scale and there's probably a pivotal time where we went from like six seven people up to about 20 in quite a short period of time is um knowing who we are and doing the brand work so that we could bring people on the journey with us so as an agency and as a growing agency me still at the moment figuring out who i was the business is sort of an expansion of me right because it's like the way i like to work the types of businesses i want to work with you know etcetera and that and i'm the vision holder of the business as many founders as ceos are with an agency you can't talk with feel it's not a terrible product so if you're selling a service which differentially it's based on team so we did proper brand work that we invested in to come up with our brand maxims which ended up being phyllis curious kind so that we could um create consistency and uniformity across how we dealt with a variety of situations it also helps inform our branding and gave us so much more priority on what what we sort of who we would work with and who wouldn't because i think that's you know i hear a lot for fmcg businesses turning down investors or retailers if it's not right and i think the the bravery to say no to something that looks quite sexy and alluring um because you've got to trust your gut is a really important skill and in an agency it's hard because you you don't have sort of um physical product for people to touch peace and smell so i think being able to bring people on the journey with you by having a very clear vision of where you're trying to get to and making that interesting and engaging relatable for the people that were trying to help you get there i think that was quite a big moment for us in terms of our our scale journey that's so interesting thank you so much because you're right actually with service-based businesses there is sometimes it is harder to identify what makes you stand out and you would not always do the work that you definitely would do with a product business because you have to so actually thinking how can you market a service based business as well um something i wanted to ask about was challenges so what are some of the challenges that you've encountered with scaling and how have you overcome them um maxine do you have any anything you can share yeah i think there's lots of challenges and i think some of you know what emily has said is is you know the grand bible making sure you know your product making sure you know your values your principles and i think as a founder led business that we all are or product you they're so aligned you know everyone on this call knows that your product becomes you you become the product and you share the same values and principles and it's really really important to set them um and the growth you know we again have gone from sort of six team members to over 33 i think we are now in a very short period of time and that can be challenging especially in the pandemic because you're not meeting people you're not you're not seeing them face to face so that's where the branding really comes in the values and the culture of the business is so important because everyone has to feel the same otherwise it kind of gets lost so one of the another challenge i found was telling my digital marketeer to stop acquiring new customers every now and again uh because we were growing so fast we had a fire under the business and she just wanted to you know obviously bring customers through the door which was great and we did that but i made the decision on i think three occasions to say okay can we stop acquiring customers let's do some brand awareness and let's make sure all our systems let's make sure we can cope with everything that's coming in so that we i my point of reference is always i do not want one customer to be let down so making sure that those uh everything's in place and the challenge in that is i was saying that to somebody with lots of business experience um and it's about trusting what's right for you and you know it's already been said about the uh the the the sequencing that you know the selling spray attitude we have so many you know inputs from people why don't you do this why don't you do that you know you could sell this you could sell that and we could have done and we still could but it's about what's right for us so it's about having the confidence within your brand within who you are to say yes i could sell that to my customer but it's not in line with the branding and that's one of the challenges one of the early challenges i faced was nobody took me seriously you know i was this crazy woman kicking up pigs trotters and chicken feet for goodness sake you know that's how i started obviously we don't do that anymore and everybody thought was quite crazy but the great thing about that is i took that as an opportunity to just get on with the job in hand and go under the radar um and we did that for a couple of years and everybody thinks we're an overnight success and we're not so there's many challenges and as emily said fight or somebody said finding the right i don't i think it was pip actually the right investor investment sounds very romantic and yeah you know it's great to do that and i spent almost a year looking for the right investor and we had four offers on the table and i chose the investor based on the most human and the one that was aligned with my principles and values and that in itself was quite a challenge but it's always are you always come back to you know what is right for the business what is right for us and data will you know i never use i'm not a data led person but i've got people that do that so when the data comes in and tells us when what the business should do what would be good for the business my job as ceo and the founders to take a temp take the temperature of that data what does this feel like because it is it's it's knowing that there's part data and there's part u um and then it's yeah that is a challenge because you i i didn't have business experience but i kind of trusted my guts trust me about so important thank you so much for sharing that do you have anything to add on challenges that you've overcome i i love what maxine just said then about you know trust it trust in yourself i think that is such a big thing to get over and i think it's almost sometimes a daily challenge sometimes depending on what you're working on at any one time i think some really valuable insight and advice there um i guess some of the things that some of the more practical challenges which i think is like process of setting up the business well but also just managing being to increase the detail i think the first one being cash flow i think for any product-based business it's a nightmare at some points or another particularly when you're scaling quite quickly i remember a couple of moments particularly um when we first listed with sainsbury's that was a particularly tight moment because i'd set the business up to basically pay my manufacturer up not up front but in advance for some of the products and then i had sort of 30 i suddenly had this massive gap when we had this huge volume that probably was being ordered by some employees and it's a real like just those things can sometimes catch you out so i think it's like push every aspect of your question in the early days like really stretch and push your supplies as hard as they possibly can to like give you 60 day communications it's a really like basic thing but it can really block your grades in the first couple of years in particular you're just trying to stumble and then find the right partners find the right banking partners find the right investors find the right suppliers that allow you to like and believe in you and i think it's funny like some of these relationships i think you um that you build around your brand um that support and obviously some of them make your product like are invest in them and really want them as people as people that are going to be part of the business even as such um yeah as much as possible using your story and your your wall i don't know a passion for the business to kind of engage others and help get them to support you and i guess a little bit on sort of what maxine was saying about kind of customer and making sure you craft the customer at the heart every morning i think is a really important one and it kind of relates i guess like also into kind of making sure really that the heart of everything that you do and never forget that you can get quite wrapped up in such a brand campaigns and you know um pr in yourself and the business and but if your product splits at any point that's this game over so there are sometimes moments where you feel like you're getting a bit too in the detail but when you think it comes to products you really can't be too in the detail when it comes to like the smallest forms never let your attention flip from that other things i think you can develop develop other people and they're the experts in certain areas of business don't be afraid to really dive in i think again when i've stepped away to allow other people to manage certain things particularly when it comes to the product um sometimes it drifts and i i have to kind of come back in so i don't think don't get that don't make sure to not have that distance from some really important things in your brand the really core important stuff like keep it close to you yeah that's so true well the products taste utterly delicious um emily um any particular challenges that you've overcome with scaling and how you've approached them i think probably variations on what cena said but certainly um decision paralysis was something that i struggled with in the early stages i think that some of the advice that i've been given is that um you've just got to make a decision and if it's wrong you can deal with the ramifications and if it's right you know you move forward but actually i think that um i've probably always known the right answer big decisions whether it's personnel or growth or investment but my the failures and the challenges rather we're not acting quickly enough and i think that definitely prohibited our growth and i think also if you start to grow quickly you can almost psych yourself out by worrying that if you make decisions quickly you haven't given them enough thought and then you just end up in this um quite sort of dangerous space where you can start to really doubt doubt yourself in order to do this i think that's why having having a plan and a vision is important because it's much easier to decide whether plan whether decisions fall inside or outside of that if you've actually got some sort of clear directive um one of the other challenges probably is a retention of company culture i think that um as i mentioned before you know particularly pre-muslims branding piece but but certainly afterwards here you know there's a tendency and culture really is i think wide from the founder or ceo of the business who's obviously upheld and continued and grown by the people that work within it but you've got to i've had to be quite careful to not rely on individual it sounds quite weird things say not rely on the individual to uphold company culture it has to be the sum of the team put yourself at tremendous risk um if one person occupies that role and it's not actually embodied and felt by the whole team and you know with hires that have been less positive or perhaps you know damaging in a small team of you know small teams with five people a bad hire can be really quite really felt across the team and equally the benefit of a good hire can be felt too but i think what you're what i looked for in the last few years is more consistency across everyone being able to access what vision in whichever way is appropriate for them rather than um tripping yourself up by having too much reliance on one person and you know the small of everyone is is obviously um more important particularly in a business where essentially my team are offering a service and we're judged on the value you know similarly for example with pip if someone has a product and it's bad then you know that's potentially a customer loss you just have no very little moisture inherent in terms of showing up and delivering every single time and the final thing i would probably say is that a realization that no one really knows and no one's born the same and that's why there's so many fascinating variations on people's stories and journals because everyone's sort of wiggling their way through and sometimes it's wading through treatment and sometimes you're on ice thing that everyone's you know someone said to me the other day like you know people can people can skate on ice for a long time but when the summer comes and it melts they've got to figure out a new way to get across there and i think i thought i quite liked that idea that you know things evolve and change all the time and you sort of have to be prepared that that you're going those challenges are part and parcel of the journey they are not it is not about eliminating them it is about mastering them and i think that that's an important realization for me so that you stop fighting at the time well and especially if we look at the last year none of us could have predicted the kind of the new version of the world that we were operating in so always being ready i think it is expecting the up and downs and having the approach maxine did you answer yeah i mean i i totally agree with everything has been said and the whole piece on we are all learning on the job you know every day we wake up we're learning and that's okay what i will say and i don't know if it's saying for the other two ladies is i've got to know myself so well in business it's unbelievable and i've got to know that sometimes you have sometimes either decision might be the wrong one and sometimes i can get paralyzed by that i also got to know that i need time sometimes to to look at all the you know what is the risk of taking that decision and it's about weighing up the consequences of each road you may take what would that mean for the business what would that mean for the team what would that mean for the absolute and what that mean for us and going so i guess what i'm saying is sometimes either decision may be the right one and you've just got to make that decision yeah yeah i love what emily said about sometimes we double you know we second-guess ourselves when we've made a decision quickly and sometimes you can make the decision quickly and it is still the right one we don't have to dwell and ponder on everything to get to the right decision just to wrap up the final thing i wanted to ask about was imposter syndrome so mindset when it comes to scaling because i think that can be often the thing that holds us back is when we do have to step up when we are growing how do we get in the mindset of someone who is ready for that growth do you have any advice to share on imposter syndrome any any ways that you have overcome it and set yourself up for success anyone at all yeah i mean i can spot that if it's uh helpful i am i've always i would say that largely i've been quite fortunate that i have um never suffer from the lack of confidence of my job properly i feel like i'm doing the thing i was supposed to be doing i find it very natural to be interested and want to keep learning and i feel like i've done the ten thousand hours so i certainly didn't have um a feeling i don't have me feeling necessarily of like i shouldn't be doing this job or what am i doing here i think the rub i had all the tension i had was two things one was that i've always felt that i was treading a line between being an introvert and an extrovert because in my personal life i'm actually very happy with myself and um sometimes even more solitary things and reading and always and actually very comfortable not being sort of front and center and then you know i've chosen an industry in a business which literally requires me to be constantly unspelling and storytelling there was always a bit of tension of like can you be both those things and can you co-exist and that for me made me felt you know i'm ready to get caught out for like pretending to be one and the advice i was given by my dad was when i was much younger was if you can't be brave just pretend to be brave and that's something i've used in different iterations it's like you can kind of show up by sort of convincing yourself that you or sort of playing that and and i think the second thing is that the constant comparison that i probably only felt really in the last three years i was perhaps a bit naive to it before but certainly once you once your business starts sort of moving and shaking and you feel like you've lifted your head above the parapet a bit you suddenly there's a fragility that comes with that i think can be quite stressful that you desperately sort of want to protect it certainly in my experience but you also want to grow and develop it you slightly lose control of it because you're um bigger and there's more people involved and therefore you've got to kind of dice with different decisions and that you know that's why a lot of successful businesses grow and then hire an industry ceo or someone to come in because you know there's a consideration that the person who founded it isn't always capable of making that transition so i think that is a very real real thing that that founders are presented with and but i do think that the the fear or the impulsive syndrome is more linked to you once you achieve the thing you thought you wouldn't achieve and you had three goals that you know was more goal oriented as a as a people that um it you feel more i felt a lot more exposed i felt like i suddenly had more to lose i desperately didn't want to be performative to what i thought then people thought i could be like and having started a business to create an environment in which i wanted to work i take it very personally if someone is not happy whether that be not our team or client because you kind of feel like you're betraying your former self but the business has to grow and evolve and those things are going to happen um just by share volume so i think trying to find a way to be have good practices and feel comfortable i i haven't always made the right decision i've made mistakes with personnel i've got myself into awkward situations and etc but on balance i'm comfortable with the way that i behave and the way that i deal with things and i learn from things and i think that's a different standard to trying to just be a perfectionist which is obviously a sort of um intangible uh intangible goals so um yeah that's that's probably i think it's about taking those things in your strides and not giving yourself a hard time about them but allowing them to be part of your journey and and we are all growing and developing maxine um do you have anything on him on imposter syndrome yeah you know it's really strange ever since i've started my absolute college journey everything has just felt right you know i didn't other people often think i suffer from imposter syndrome because i'm really humble but i'm happy with that i don't need to prove myself i don't need to shake from the tree tops i'm just kind of happy being me and sometimes people confuse that with imposter syndrome and i'm like no it's kind of like and i'm 55 and i think that does make a difference i'm really content being me i've got nothing to prove so i don't feel that i've suffered from it although other people will often say to me or you've got imposter syndrome but i really don't think i have i'm just getting on with the job in hand and being maxine it's been like me i love it yeah i just want to be more angelica to be honest go for it yeah i feel like i need to channel a bit of you maxine um no i definitely get it and um maybe it is a bit of a just experience it's the thing that that gets you over that imposter syndrome hump but i think one of the things i sometimes find i've got a senior leadership team now in place and you've got your um header box your marketing director your finance director and you know like emily said they've all got their you know years of experience which is the reason why you've hired them because they're better at the stuff that you're not and it can feel uncomfortable sometimes particularly when you're managing them because actually you're directing and making decisions and stuff where you kind of actually don't feel like you know as much as they do and i think comes back and i've definitely done some work on this because i i definitely have wobbles and moments of confidence like that you know i'm lacking confidence i think some of it's about actually physically doing the work getting a quote and working through some of the stuff where why is it that you're feeling that way and and trying to identify what value you as a founder bring to the business it sounds very odd when you're the one that starts it in the first place but sometimes i think you do need to remind yourself that the reason why you're in this position is because you took the ring so you built the business you rolled overseas and you had the idea and you went for it well you know the people around you haven't and i think it's a really important thing to remind yourself of sometimes because you i'd certainly find sometimes i'll be like why am i in this role like i don't have the experience but you forget that you do it's just not necessarily as niche or applied as maybe the people that you employ so yeah i do think you kind of sometimes if you do suffer from it like me like you do have to do a little soul-searching and except sometimes you'll have wobbles but actually like just defining your value-add which i think can be um a good exercise to do like what are the bits that you're amazing at and do those and i think certainly what i've found and certainly over the last year during lockdown where you're in kind of covered mode um working from home and stuff like that it's just reminding us all trying to understand where are the parts of the business that you get energy from like when you're thriving and dr like you know and you almost don't realize that time is passing you're just doing work that really just gets you get going gets that ball in the belly and just try and do more of that and just let go of the stuff like the ip the legal this is just me personally i hate that stuff um that just doesn't lift you up because you're not going to be adding volume in that sense so yeah it's it's just that one so you want to be perfect in moving all of it but again coming back to what emily says sometimes she's just going to drop this buff and just accept it and move on and reconnect to the initial thing that excites you about it i think we get it amazing how you can forget that you can forget those things that sparks the initial idea guys thank you so much for your time so this has been such an insightful conversation if people would like to find out more about you and your businesses where can they go online emily um so uh well you can go to our website which is uh emergency.com um but we are we do make on instagram and we're actually about to launch um a pay as you go pr proposition for businesses that don't necessarily want to get tied into large returners but need a little bit of a bump to try and help uh i guess and potentially overuse facebook to sort of democratize the industry by allowing early stage brands to have a better experience perhaps as if the barrier is is financed more so and all of that stuff to me to have a amazing what a great concept vaccine maxine lacey or absolute collagen.com you will

eventually get to me through all the various social media channels so yeah that's it really i love the videos you do with your daughter oh do you know i feel so blessed to work with my girls i'm not a helicopter mum and they've kind of really been left their own devices more than most actually and the fact that we actually work together is amazing i love it they're such lovely videos you can just feel how genuinely like excited you are to work together and like that yeah product sorry very blessed and then yeah find us on tippinghut.com and yeah follow us on on instagram or tick tock we just started doing that and new worlds um linkedin all those places wonderful thank you so much thank you to everyone thank you shortly with a lunch time cook along if anyone would like can't come make some brunch with us and thank you to our speakers thank you thank you emily thanks pips thanks angelica bye bye

2021-04-03 18:14

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