Latest / Business for Humans / From Startup to Sale: The Leadership Journey of a Creative Agency Owner: An Interview with Steve Osborne

Transcript

From Startup to Sale: The Leadership Journey of a Creative Agency Owner: An Interview with Steve Osborne · Business for Humans

• 0:00
  I'm Jamie Gennaro, business coach, consultant, and founder of Practica Consulting.
• 0:05
  Today I'm talking about why emotional intelligence is the secret weapon of great
• 0:10
  leaders, and why ignoring it could be costing your business more than you think.
• 0:14
  From disengaged teams to high turnover and lost revenue, leadership without
• 0:19
  emotional intelligence could be a ticking time bomb. Enjoy.
• 0:30
  Hello, everybody. Today's episode is so exciting for me because I am talking
• 0:36
  to Steve Osborne, who is the founder of Osborne Pike.
• 0:40
  And we're going to talk about his leadership journey in running that company
• 0:45
  and then also leaving that company.
• 0:47
  So thanks again for being game for this topic.
• 0:51
  Yeah, no worries. Thank you. So will you explain to everyone just a little bit about your background?
• 0:57
  Where did you start on your path to entrepreneurship and launching a business?
• 1:02
  What was the original kind of negative idea?
• 1:06
  So as you said, I've recently retired from my business Osborne Pike, which I set up in 2002.
• 1:13
  And I left literally last July, so 2024.
• 1:18
  So I ran it for 24 years. My career has been in essentially brand design and
• 1:24
  within that largely packaging design, which is essentially brand design for
• 1:29
  FMCG or brand design for consumer goods.
• 1:32
  And before all of that, when I left university, I had just finished six years studying chemistry.
• 1:37
  I got a PhD in chemistry, and you might think that would lead to a career in chemistry.
• 1:41
  But actually, to be honest, the PhD was just to give me a bit more time to think
• 1:46
  about what I wanted to do with my life. I didn't realize until the end of the
• 1:49
  PhD, I thought, you know, I really want to be in advertising.
• 1:51
  That's what I really want to do. I certainly didn't think about studying anything like that.
• 1:55
  I was completely unqualified at all kinds of levels for that kind of thing.
• 2:00
  It was also a slightly recessionary year, 1982.
• 2:03
  So my getting into advertising was pretty much a non-starter.
• 2:06
  And I soon decided it'd be better off if I tried to go one notch down from that
• 2:10
  as I saw it and applied for marketing jobs.
• 2:14
  And, you know, and eventually I got a couple of offers and joined what actually
• 2:18
  was a pretty big fish, I thought, in the marketing world, which was Brookbond, OXO.
• 2:22
  They have a lot of tea brands and they also had a brand called OXO, not surprisingly.
• 2:26
  And so, yeah, I thought, yeah, this is going to be great. But it turns out marketing
• 2:30
  isn't quite as much creativity and fun and, you know, vibing with the ad agency
• 2:34
  all day as I expected it would be. Much more mundane stuff in there as well.
• 2:38
  And if you didn't have a big budget for your brand, you know,
• 2:41
  you weren't spending all that time in the ad agency. And even if you got there,
• 2:43
  you'd be about the fifth in line to have an opinion.
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  So yeah, it didn't quite work out, but it was great experience.
• 2:49
  And during that time, I learned that there were other types of agencies beside ad agencies and then.
• 2:54
  I discovered there were things called design agencies that designed packaging
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  and worked on your brand in a completely different sphere than the ads,
• 3:01
  you know, that you had to create designs and branding.
• 3:05
  And that sort of opened my eyes and thought, oh, this is actually quite good.
• 3:10
  Also, you know, intellectually challenging in a way because it's about,
• 3:14
  well, you're really in a field of psychology now.
• 3:17
  You're in sort of, why do people buy that stuff?
• 3:19
  What is it about how that looks or what it's called?
• 3:23
  And of course the ad is the thing that we all think of well
• 3:25
  it's it's the ad the ad does all of the work but actually it's pretty
• 3:28
  obvious to me now and it and it started to become then that that isn't the case
• 3:33
  you know the the brand is the brand it's a very complicated thing it's in your
• 3:36
  head it's made up of associations and many of those associations have nothing
• 3:40
  to do with advertising some brands don't have advertising or if they do it's
• 3:43
  very sporadic so the image has to be made from other places too.
• 3:48
  And that, if you think about it, the product and its packaging is going to be
• 3:54
  number one. That's what you're actually being asked to buy.
• 3:56
  An ad is a piece of fluff in the air, which I obviously loved and I still love.
• 4:01
  But packaging is just a thing. It's an actual thing. So you don't go up there
• 4:04
  and go, this is trying to sell me something.
• 4:07
  Yeah, it is, but it's the thing. You think it looks nice or it doesn't look
• 4:10
  nice or you like it or you don't like it or it's expensive or whatever,
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  but you don't think you're trying to sell me something.
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  And that's a huge kind of advantage when you actually understand consumer psychology.
• 4:22
  That they don't think it's trying to do anything. It can do all of those things
• 4:25
  in a way that advertising also does, by the way.
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  Advertising is literally subliminal and under the radar.
• 4:32
  It's all the stuff you don't actually consciously take note of that does the job.
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  I guess as a scientist, although I hadn't really connected them at the time,
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  and I did do psychology as what we called a subsidiary subject for the first year of my degree.
• 4:45
  So I had a little bit of background in that, although I found it very boring at university. But,
• 4:50
  Coming back to it in packaging and branding, I'm a very logical person.
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  I want to know how things work.
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  But I also love the fact that in the work of creative work in marketing,
• 5:02
  message making, design,
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  you have their deeply subconscious effect that is really hard to measure and
• 5:10
  to find out whether you've succeeded or not or to what degree you've succeeded.
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  And obviously, everyone wants to measure things all of the time.
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  And we try to get rid of the uncertainty.
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  In in our lives but in particularly in the marketing world we spend a
• 5:23
  lot of money doing something that may or may not work but there is
• 5:25
  no certainty in in either advertising or branding you have to accept that you
• 5:30
  can be strategic that you can find out a lot that you can know where to dig
• 5:33
  you can kind of know more or less the territory that you're in but the difference
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  between good bad and meh is is a matter of creativity you know it's a matter
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  of just something that suddenly,
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  takes it to, you know, three or three times as good as it was just before that.
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  And you can't really easily plan for that.
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  You know, you can give yourself a good chance, but in the end,
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  it does boil down to that creative leap, which is pretty unmeasurable, but pretty powerful.
• 6:01
  Thank you for all of that background, because I can see the way that your brain
• 6:05
  makes connections with things and how now you're reflecting on,
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  and I was a scientist, and this is why I look things a certain way.
• 6:11
  So here's my question for blending the two worlds. When you say like everything's
• 6:16
  a little bit of a risk, we want to measure it, we want to control it,
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  but we can't always do that.
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  How do you take that into the lens of being a business owner?
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  Because that leap is scary. You were in marketing, you had a good job.
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  There was a reason you leapt from that job to start your own thing,
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  which was risky and you couldn't control it and it's changing all the time and
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  there's no true path for a business owner that's just like do it this way it
• 6:45
  will always work so how do you look at it through that lens now and reflecting
• 6:51
  on it those that kind of bridge,
• 6:53
  yeah that's a really good good question i think part of
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  the reason i'm in this business at all and why i love it
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  so much is that combination of
• 7:03
  strategy logic and then creative leap
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  into the into the dark into the unknown because when you you know when you see
• 7:10
  that happening in front of your eyes in in the studio you go well that's it
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  isn't it that's it there it is look there it is there's a creative leap there's
• 7:17
  something that's going to work and you could call it an arrogant claim but i
• 7:20
  i kind of feel i speak brand it's like a kind of language it's like.
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  There is a language to everything. There's a language to design.
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  And these are languages which you can study, of course, like any other language.
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  It's less structured, obviously.
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  You know, there's a lot of opinion involved. There's a lot of art involved.
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  There's a lot of things you can't measure.
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  And I love that because I happen to be able to speak it. If I couldn't speak
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  it, it would be a locked world.
• 7:46
  I wouldn't be interested in it. I wouldn't even notice it, probably.
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  I might buy a few pictures for my walls.
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  But, you know, I love the language of an image, the language of what is being told to me.
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  And of course you say, well, yeah, but it's not you that's the customer.
• 8:01
  There are thousands of people out there who probably aren't like you that you're
• 8:03
  trying to sell this stuff to, but I don't think that really matters.
• 8:07
  But when it comes to becoming an entrepreneur, the reason I backtracked on that
• 8:12
  a little bit was the idea that it's all about the logic and there isn't a logical
• 8:17
  path to entrepreneurship.
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  It's usually an accident or it's usually something happens and you have to respond to what happens.
• 8:24
  So that's part of the tale. So I went into a big corporate, worked in a traditional
• 8:29
  marketing department with lots of facilities and lots of colleagues and lots
• 8:33
  of agencies and lots of ladders to climb.
• 8:36
  And I just found I wasn't good at company politics.
• 8:40
  My mind doesn't say, why don't you spend half your time crawling up the right
• 8:43
  backside instead of actually doing your work? Why would I want to do that.
• 8:48
  Surely they'll just judge me on my merits, which of course is absolute rubbish.
• 8:51
  And you need to make the right kind of political connections and you need to
• 8:55
  work on them and you need to have the right drink with the right person for
• 8:58
  a certain amount of time.
• 8:59
  And I just really wasn't into that. I didn't get it. So...
• 9:02
  In the end, I thought, well, I'm not going to really like it here.
• 9:05
  And also, marketing isn't as sexy as I thought it was.
• 9:09
  Maybe it was if you were on the big budget brands. But even then,
• 9:11
  working with the ad agency hadn't been such a fantastically cool experience
• 9:15
  that I was thinking it might be.
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  So I figured I should do something else. And these kind of weird designer people
• 9:21
  came in to look at our packaging.
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  And I worked with two or three agencies on a few projects and thought, I could do this.
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  I think I know as much as these people that are experts about what they're telling
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  me. You know, I kind of felt that they were, you know, some of them were good.
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  Some of them were hybrid. Some of them were just showy.
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  But essentially, I got what they were doing. I thought I could do this.
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  So I kind of made a mention of it to a few people.
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  And then eventually somebody came and headhunted me into their agency.
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  Because, of course, agencies love buying people from big brands.
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  Because then they can say, well, you go back to your old colleagues and,
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  you know, we'll become the agency.
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  Well, it works pretty well. And it worked pretty well in the 1980s.
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  You know, I did bring most of my colleagues into that agency,
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  not straight away, but, you know, over time.
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  And then I spent 15 years with the agency. Now, the agency grew from,
• 10:09
  I was 15, won five as an employee.
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  It's now 500 or maybe 1,000. It's just merged.
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  It's been part of a big international, you know, communications group.
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  At all stages in that 15 years, I was, again, trying to dodge the politics.
• 10:23
  You know, in a small agency, they really weren't there. And in a growing agency, it was a win-win.
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  Every, what's it called, a rising tide floats all boats or raises all the boats.
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  Everyone was just too busy growing to worry too much about politics.
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  But sure enough, you know, at a certain scale, a certain size,
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  and it doesn't take many, some people land in the business and go,
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  hey, this is fun. And I can really exploit this, these sort of innocent people
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  who haven't seen real politics.
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  And a lot of that started happening. And I managed two times to avoid it.
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  So after seven years in London, I was given a chance to open a new office.
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  And that was a kind of strategy of the business. It was like people who were
• 11:02
  at director level could, if an opportunity
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  came up to do something really entrepreneurial, like open a new office.
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  But it was super cool entrepreneurialism because I got shares in the business,
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  as did my creative partner, which I could choose,
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  they were still, you know, 60% of the ownership, and they did a hell of a lot
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  of the work, and especially the kind of schmoozing and bringing in of clients we already had.
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  So I didn't really end up in a job having to sort of completely provide all of the.
• 11:31
  Lead generation and new business. I just run that business and make clients
• 11:35
  happy, which is kind of what I'm best at rather than just digging them out of
• 11:40
  wherever they're hiding.
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  So we started that business. I chose my creative partner from within the teams
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  I already worked with and had to be somebody willing to move countries.
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  Surprisingly, not everyone wants to do that. I desperately wanted to do that.
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  It turned out to be the Netherlands. So I got to start my own business out of
• 11:56
  the politics that were busy developing in London and thinking, well, this is cool.
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  I'm on my that. And then my only connection back to the sort of mothership was
• 12:04
  my boss, who was my chairman of the business, who, you know, he was really good.
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  He got me and he managed me without feeling that he was being heavy handed about it.
• 12:14
  You know, it didn't feel like I had some guy trying to control my every move.
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  It just felt like somebody who was reporting back.
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  And I love living in Amsterdam, spent seven years there. Is that where you're based, by the way?
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  Yeah. And it's funny because I had the same opportunity here.
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  So an American agency wanted somebody to manage their Amsterdam office.
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  And so I kicked off the Amsterdam office and built a network and met all the
• 12:38
  contractors and freelancers and kind of scaled this business.
• 12:41
  And then, unfortunately for me, I landed in that agency in 2017.
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  Grew it from zero to three million in a couple of years, and then COVID hit.
• 12:53
  And we were making commercials and production stopped.
• 12:57
  And so, you know, of course, the American side of the business was like,
• 13:01
  it doesn't really make sense for us to keep that office open.
• 13:04
  We should probably just retreat and figure out what we're going to do next.
• 13:08
  So that's what launched me into the business I'm in now, which is consulting
• 13:12
  with creative agencies. Similar thing. And I've been here for seven years.
• 13:15
  Okay. No, that's super cool. I mean, from getting back to your question about entrepreneurship.
• 13:19
  So I kind of had it. I had it. I had entrepreneurship and a kind of really cozy
• 13:23
  introduction to entrepreneurship.
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  I had shares in the business. I could grow the business. I could really operate
• 13:28
  the business. It was small business.
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  And I loved working with the Dutch anyway. And even being on the ground,
• 13:34
  it was even nicer because I had all, pretty much all, not all,
• 13:37
  but nearly all Dutch clients.
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  I just thought that straightforwardness. And I really think that contrasts sharply
• 13:42
  with the English approach, which is, you know, you don't really know what the English are thinking.
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  And most clients in Europe will tell you that, but they still kind of manage
• 13:51
  okay, because they love the Brits, and they love the creativity,
• 13:54
  and they love Monty Python.
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  And so you get a free pass on your sort of strange way of being a bit vague
• 14:03
  about what you really think.
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  Whereas the Dutch are very blunt, and they often apologize for it.
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  Actually, I found it extremely refreshing. I used to call them a nation of Yorkshiremen
• 14:11
  because they were proud of their bluntness, but realized it could be a little
• 14:14
  bit sharp for some taste.
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  But certainly in business, I find that really refreshing. You know exactly where to stand.
• 14:19
  And you get to work in Amsterdam, which is a super sort of example of a European
• 14:24
  city, you know, a city that feels like a village, relatively small,
• 14:27
  I know, but sort of full of exciting things to see and do.
• 14:32
  And, you know, it just fit me like a glove, really.
• 14:35
  So, you know, I was really happy. I was a sort of semi-entrepreneur running
• 14:38
  my own business, but not my own, supported by a huge sort of mothership.
• 14:42
  And that, again, worked really well for about five, six years.
• 14:45
  And then, you know, the growth kicked in, politics kicked in,
• 14:51
  and I didn't handle it very well.
• 14:54
  And in the end, I was there sitting in Amsterdam with two young children who
• 15:00
  were both born there and out of a job.
• 15:04
  So I had to make a choice as to whether to go and find a job in the Netherlands,
• 15:09
  as you clearly chose to do, or return to the UK. despite a few offers to stay
• 15:14
  in the Netherlands from British companies.
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  But I think if you read very, very slightly under the headline.
• 15:23
  It was, you're going to be our sales guy in the Netherlands.
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  You're going to be building, and that's all you're going to be doing.
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  And that was just not what I do. I'm a strategist.
• 15:32
  I'm a thinker. I'm a relationship builder. And I, you know.
• 15:39
  That's what I did for the seven years I was there. I wasn't going to suddenly
• 15:42
  turn into some kind of sales guy for another agency.
• 15:45
  I didn't really, I mean, I didn't know who they were, but that just never been my bag.
• 15:50
  I've seen those people in action. They're really good. What they do, it's not me.
• 15:53
  So we went back. And I suppose I thought, well, two times I failed at politics
• 15:57
  now. Maybe I should work for myself.
• 16:00
  And it was a kind of, wasn't a kind of, I've been dying to be an entrepreneur
• 16:04
  and going alone for all of my life. Absolutely not.
• 16:07
  But I had also realized that I do need a lot of independence.
• 16:11
  I just thought I'd give it a shot.
• 16:15
  It might go right and it might go wrong and I might have to look for a job,
• 16:18
  but at least I could give it a go.
• 16:19
  We gave it our names because we were actually quite well known,
• 16:23
  in the Netherlands at least, as the guys who ran DesignBridge over there.
• 16:27
  That was our kind of logic. That's our best kind of asset in a way.
• 16:32
  We're quite well known in this market.
• 16:35
  But still, I thought that it would take you know two years before we'd run out
• 16:37
  of Dutch clients and we'd end up working in the UK,
• 16:40
  as an agency which was the exact opposite of what happened but I didn't set
• 16:46
  out to be an entrepreneur it was kind of forced on me but it also made sense
• 16:49
  I didn't have a clue if it was going to work beyond you know just.
• 16:53
  Trying it and it could have failed. It could have folded in four months or something,
• 16:56
  but it obviously didn't.
• 16:58
  Well, I love that you were in this moment where you had two kids.
• 17:05
  You were trying to contemplate where to live.
• 17:08
  I mean, I was in the exact same place, so I just absolutely identify with this
• 17:14
  idea of, yes, it's risky.
• 17:16
  I've traditionally been the breadwinner in my family too.
• 17:19
  So I had two small kids and was trying to figure out what was next.
• 17:24
  And in my mind, I was like, going out and finding a job is no different than
• 17:29
  going out and trying to find clients.
• 17:31
  To me, the process was the same. I was like, I'm going to have to go out,
• 17:34
  pound the pavement, talk to people, have some coffees, see what's available.
• 17:39
  I could do the same thing, but sell a service instead of selling my skills as a worker.
• 17:46
  And then I just kept doing it. I was just like, I don't have a job. I need a job.
• 17:50
  What's the quickest path to bringing in some revenue and some income?
• 17:55
  That seemed like a quicker path, actually, than going out and cold calling and
• 17:59
  sending blind applications. I just don't think I represent myself very well in that space either.
• 18:05
  I don't think I look that good in a CV, but I think when people start talking
• 18:09
  to me, they're like, oh, your service seems really interesting.
• 18:12
  I love that you, number one, were brave enough in that moment to say like I
• 18:18
  know I can do this like you had seen people in your past where you were like
• 18:22
  I could be an account person I could be a planner like what are they doing that's
• 18:26
  so special that you had that confidence and also that forward thinking,
• 18:31
  mindset to say I think I can do this I've done it before how risky is it and
• 18:37
  I think you kind of need that sort of mentality when you go into business because
• 18:40
  everything's a risk from then on it's like your first employee is a risk.
• 18:44
  And then your first, you know, move to an office or whatever it may be is a risk.
• 18:49
  And every time you hit that risk door, you have to use that same.
• 18:55
  Mindset. Yeah, I think so. And also be, in my case, be grateful for the autonomy of it all.
• 19:02
  It's like I get to make all the decisions bar none now.
• 19:07
  And that can be scary as well.
• 19:11
  But to be honest, the agency, the autonomy completely outweighed the scary factor.
• 19:19
  And I had some compensation as a result of leaving my previous employer.
• 19:25
  So I kind of thought, you know, I can handle whatever comes at me for the next
• 19:30
  year or so. So, you know, why wouldn't you try it?
• 19:34
  And, you know, I knew David was there, not that satisfied over in London.
• 19:37
  I was going back to the UK. The kids were just that sort of age preschool and needed a school.
• 19:42
  So it was a good time in a way to go, although it was quite hard to find all
• 19:45
  the things we needed, but we did find one in the end and yeah the the most amazing
• 19:50
  thing was that it you know within,
• 19:53
  it was really fun actually because a we had to decide where to go we
• 19:56
  had to decide where to put it because we could have gone anywhere and i
• 19:59
  was so in love with amsterdam that i just thought well christ where can i find
• 20:03
  in the uk that's remotely like that and the answer is well there isn't anywhere
• 20:07
  remotely like that but if you're going to at least sort of try to approach it
• 20:12
  you'll be looking for somewhere that's small and pretty and attracts tourists,
• 20:17
  easy to get around, easy to get to.
• 20:21
  And that is the absolute opposite of London. Oh, yeah. And affordable.
• 20:26
  And then, yeah, Bath is the things I just described.
• 20:33
  Then that became great. So we sort of went there and we sort of pitched up and
• 20:37
  looked for the things you need to make a company.
• 20:40
  You know, an accountant or an office. Yeah.
• 20:44
  And, you know, this was before working from home was anything like a thing.
• 20:48
  So nobody would have thought about that. and so
• 20:51
  yeah so we did all that stuff and it was like like you know every
• 20:54
  day going out and getting a new piece of the kit and then
• 20:58
  eventually having a company and sending out
• 21:01
  letters to everyone we knew and going hey we're a company want
• 21:04
  to want to try us out and then two people said yes and one
• 21:08
  was in cambridge which was about a three and a
• 21:10
  half hour drive and the other one was in utrecht which
• 21:13
  if you worked it out was about a three and a half hour trip as well
• 21:16
  more or less i mean i'm probably
• 21:19
  exaggerating but it actually wasn't that much more difficult to
• 21:22
  get to the the dutch client than the british
• 21:25
  one so we we kicked it off like that and then the
• 21:28
  dutch side just grew like you know a repotted plant and the british side just
• 21:36
  kind of carried on at the same sort of minimal level until in the end we were
• 21:41
  a dutch business pretty much or a european business and i've been working in Europe,
• 21:45
  either physically or even from London for most of my career.
• 21:49
  I only spent a couple of years working for UK clients.
• 21:52
  So that was where I kind of was comfortable anyway.
• 21:55
  And that's where all my network was. So it was in a way natural,
• 21:58
  but we weren't expecting it.
• 21:59
  We weren't sure that people would want to support a two-person agency,
• 22:05
  but they'd been working with a bigger agency.
• 22:07
  The Dutch were really good at trusting us with big projects.
• 22:11
  Because actually, we all know that inside the agency, two or three people are
• 22:14
  running the whole show anyway.
• 22:15
  It's not actually that much different, but it might look that way to somebody
• 22:20
  who doesn't really understand what the inside of an agency looks like and how it operates.
• 22:24
  And the Dutch also, they like the idea that something could be a good value
• 22:27
  for money because it isn't overloaded with big offices and swanky cars or whatever it might be.
• 22:34
  So actually they're really open to experienced
• 22:38
  people who are really small in scale
• 22:41
  but big in experience and i
• 22:44
  think in again back into the uk as well as that sort of political aspect you've
• 22:48
  also got this kind of badge agency thing where people think well and nobody
• 22:51
  got fired for hiring agency x but i might get fired for hiring a couple of guys
• 22:55
  that i used to work with but they don't think like that in holland they think
• 22:59
  yeah those are the guys i work with they're really good hire them.
• 23:02
  Here's a follow-up question to this idea of having autonomy and being the decision maker.
• 23:07
  And this sort of leads me to that bigger question of you leaving and deciding to retire.
• 23:14
  I'm curious how many of your toes are still dipped in there.
• 23:18
  But when you're the person who's making the decisions and sitting in that strategy
• 23:24
  seat, you know, clearly you have this passion for branding and a passion for
• 23:28
  the work that you've been doing.
• 23:30
  So how do you know when's the right time to step out?
• 23:35
  And how do you relinquish all of that autonomy to someone else when it's been your baby for so long?
• 23:44
  Yeah, it's like, it is about autonomy again.
• 23:47
  There comes a moment in your career as an entrepreneur, I think,
• 23:52
  where, and all of the, you know, kind of advisors and self-help books and courses
• 23:58
  are pretty much on this track.
• 24:00
  You thought you would get freedom, but now you're in the shackles of running your own business.
• 24:04
  Now, your time is never your own. You're 24-7 on the business.
• 24:08
  You don't have the freedom you hoped for.
• 24:11
  And of course, while you're starting
• 24:13
  up and while you're growing and while everything is just fun and funky.
• 24:18
  That doesn't matter at all. That isn't anything that would count as what they're saying.
• 24:23
  No, that doesn't ring true at all. I love this thing.
• 24:27
  Yeah, it has its challenges.
• 24:30
  The market can go all over the place. Weirdly, as a small agency,
• 24:34
  you think you could hide in the cracks, but you can't.
• 24:36
  When the market goes all over the place, you go with it, along with the big boys.
• 24:40
  We learned that in the 2008 crash. We thought, well, we're so small.
• 24:45
  We don't need much but even the much
• 24:47
  we needed it wasn't there so you know we ended up with
• 24:50
  a downsize in 2008 or was it 2009 but then you know for the rest of those 22
• 24:55
  years it was pretty pretty stable sometimes you know more fun than other times
• 24:59
  sometimes just breaking even sometimes making good money you know it's quite
• 25:02
  variable i could put it very bluntly and say i don't really have a growth mindset
• 25:05
  i i wanted this business to be a lifestyle business i wanted the business,
• 25:10
  to pay me well to give me time off and have holidays and spend time with my
• 25:14
  kids when they were growing up.
• 25:16
  And that's what we did. We didn't stay late. We went home and saw our kids and put them to bed.
• 25:20
  It kind of delivered really, really well for the first six or seven years.
• 25:24
  And then we had that big setback with the financial crisis. And then we spent
• 25:29
  a few years recovering from that.
• 25:32
  But because we never had this growth mindset, I suppose we were always vulnerable
• 25:36
  to ups and downs in the market.
• 25:38
  There came a point, I think for me, it was in 2018. so
• 25:41
  i'd been doing it 16 years when we lost a particular pitch
• 25:44
  where everything i thought was on our side you know a familiar client familiar
• 25:49
  market just a fantastic brief that you know we i was all over strategically
• 25:55
  and really kind of thought you know this is this is great this is a natural
• 25:59
  step now we'll get this and we'll move on and we lost and um,
• 26:04
  I kind of looked around afterwards and I sort of took in the reasons why.
• 26:10
  And obviously my client was quite a close friend, so he was able to be quite
• 26:14
  specific about what happened.
• 26:15
  And I've seen that we'd been completely outperformed by a much bigger set of people.
• 26:23
  I mean, it kind of just made me realize that me and some people wasn't going to work anymore.
• 26:30
  You know it was kind of i mean it might on
• 26:33
  a on a on a on a good day but we had
• 26:36
  sort of firepower range against us not from a particularly big agency i
• 26:39
  mean it was it was bigger much bigger than us but it wasn't huge and even if
• 26:43
  sometimes i think the huge ones don't have all the advantages because because
• 26:47
  you know there's just too many opinions and it's too big a team and i i think
• 26:51
  you can you know it's not about size it's just about i don't know how many big
• 26:57
  hitters are on the team, I suppose you could argue.
• 26:59
  And I lost this pitch because I was probably the one big hitter on our side
• 27:04
  and they probably had four.
• 27:06
  I kind of think, well, this is not going to work. So I need to hire some people
• 27:09
  that either at my level are going to be at my level. I had to build a team.
• 27:14
  And I don't think this was at the time a sort of leaving the business step.
• 27:20
  I didn't see it that way. I just saw it as having more competence and more brains
• 27:24
  and more firepower in the room. And we started slow.
• 27:28
  I'd run the whole business with an account manager as my only account support
• 27:33
  or strategy support for that matter for 16 years.
• 27:36
  And I suddenly thought I'd better get some account people in, senior account people.
• 27:39
  So I started to build the account team and we.