Hire owners or your business stays stuck with you | Gavin Bell

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]The number one struggle in any business owner that I've spoken to is that they're too involved. The founder is going to do pretty much everything from day one. You know, if I if I saw a founder that came to me and said, "I want to build a business from day one, but I don't want to be involved in it."

[00:00:15]I'm going to I'm thinking it's not going to work. The founder should always be involved in the business. But the difference is the founder shouldn't be involved in the delivery of the product or the service. The mindset shift that you need to get into is rather than hiring people that helps you, hire owners. People that can own, for example, the entire content creation system, hire people that can own the client delivery system. I think there's a balance. Focus on hiring. So, this can be done with a junior or a senior person, but still hire somebody that's an owner as opposed to a helper. This week's Millennial Master is Gavin Bell, entrepreneur and exited [music] founder by the age of 30. He's worked with hundreds of businesses and his view is shaped by actually going through the full cycle, building, scaling, and exiting. That's why Gavin is direct about what actually holds businesses back, especially when things look like they're working from the outside. In this episode, we talk about why hiring owners changes [music] how your business grows, what makes a company actually sellable, and where founders slow things down [music] without realizing.

[00:01:29]>> Gavin, welcome to Millennial Masters.

[00:01:31]Where are you joining us from today?

[00:01:33]>> Thanks for having me. I'm joining you from the love, lovely Scottish countryside in Kin Ross.

[00:01:39]Well, I'm almost in the Lincolnshire [music] countryside, but let's get straight into it, Gavin, because I know you've built and sold Yata pretty quickly, and we're going to get to that in a moment, but before that, you [music] were in business in a much more direct way.

[00:01:57]So, I'm wondering at what point did you realize that model had a ceiling? So I I I got into the world of marketing and advertising probably 10 years or so now.

[00:02:09]And I got into that industry via a realization that fitness professionals, which was the sort of area and world that I was interested in, couldn't market themselves. They didn't know how to use social media.

[00:02:20]>> You a regular gym goer or >> Yeah, regular gym goer. Um I had tried to set up a fitness business actually.

[00:02:29]It was a and made a total mess of it. It was that business was a total failure.

[00:02:34]But from that I had built relationships with fitness professionals, nutritionists, personal trainers, realized that they were not very good at marketing. And this social media thing that I had sort of grown up with was something that I could help them with.

[00:02:49]So I got into the world of social media, social media management, helping these fitness professionals to essentially just post on Facebook and Instagram.

[00:02:59]And one day I had a client ask me, the sort of niche of fitness dissipated pretty quickly and I had a sort of more broader business client base. One of those clients one day asked me to help them run some Facebook ads for a competition that they were running. And I said, I have no idea what I'm doing, but let's give it a try. See what happens. So we we spent £500 or so on this competition, and they ended up generating something like £12,000.

[00:03:26]total fluke. But I was sort of going, "Ah, this is quite interesting." Social media, I'm being judged on the number of posts I can make. In the advertising world, I'm being judged on how much money I can make a customer make. And I really liked that. I like the maths. And so I then got into the world of Facebook advertising. And it was my goal to try and become the go-to Facebook advertising person in the UK. That was my goal. and I built a decent >> How did you set out to go about that?

[00:03:56]What was the the plan, the execution of it?

[00:03:59]>> All in on my personal brand. So that meant lots of video content, blogging, tweets, dm.com, you know, just trying to be everywhere to everyone, following the classic Gary Vee model, you know, from back in 2015 or so.

[00:04:18]And from that business from from doing that got decent number of clients and I realized one day that I had sort of reached capacity. I needed to find a way to scale this business and I thought let's >> was that because everything was dependent on you and you had to produce all the posts. Were you outsourcing any of the work? Were you working with collaborators, freelancers or you were doing everything yourself? at that point everything myself. So I thought the best way to scale this and look in hindsight this was not the right decision but I thought the best way I can scale this is to create a course. So I went down the route of having a course.

[00:05:00]>> So Alex Horosi then >> this this was pre Hormosi >> pre Okay.

[00:05:04]>> This was pre Hormosi. This was your Gary Gary Vee limelight.

[00:05:10]>> He was the man. So >> I went down the route of of a course. I realized I didn't like the course model.

[00:05:16]So I [snorts] flipped the course into a membership. Realized I didn't like the membership model. Flipped that into the coaching model. Realized I didn't enjoy the coaching model. So all of this sort of like this would have been over a course of maybe 3 four years. I'm like this this business I've created I'm not enjoying. There has to be a better way.

[00:05:36]And so that would be the point going back to the original question where I thought there's a ceiling on building a business specifically around my personal brand and the business being me.

[00:05:49]>> Was that because it was more of a lifestyle business and it was also tied to your time and capacity versus something that could scale and multiply?

[00:06:01]Yeah, I would say that when I first got into business, I hadn't ever thought about is this lifestyle or is this built, you know, a business that I'm building to sell. But as I sort of developed and got to a point where I'm at capacity, I'm running a business that I don't really enjoy, there has to be a better way. You know, I started having conversations with my accountant at the time who's built and sold companies, and it was really him that got me thinking. You know, are you building a lifestyle business or are you building a business that you want to sell one day? And this would have taken us around the time of co and what happened during co in the advertising world was all clients stopped spending money.

[00:06:46]>> I remember.

[00:06:47]>> Yep. All clients said, you know, we're stopping. And that gave me the time to sort of reflect on what am I building?

[00:06:55]What do I actually want to build here?

[00:06:57]And it was at that point conversation with my accountant just by luck reading the book Built to Sell by John Warllo that I thought actually what I need to build here is a business that I can sell one day and a business that isn't attached to my personal brand.

[00:07:15]So this would have been just co time and and quite >> counter everything you you've done by that point.

[00:07:22]>> Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So what we what I decided to do was stop everything that I was doing from a personal branding perspective. Stopped all the videos. I stopped all the blogging, all the content, all the speaking, all the podcasts, everything.

[00:07:42]Went all in on creating a brand that was separate to me and that was that brand was Yat. So I purposely tried to position everything so that I eliminated the chance that I might backtrack or go back to old habits. So that's why I stopped doing everything. I spent a decent amount of money on working with a branding agency to come up with the name and the brand and so that I guess I set the the circumstances so that it was my only choice was to go down this route of of building Yatter.

[00:08:15]>> And what happened next? We came out of the pandemic couple of years at least the lockdown part or the most difficult part in terms of advertising and how did you transition then you've done the branding you launched the agency you stopped doing things under your own name how did you learn the new process it wasn't all in the book was it? No. So what what was interesting was that first period of co everyone stopped advertising like I mentioned >> but there was a period during the co part pandemic I can't remember exactly where and when this happened >> but everybody decided actually no all of our customers are online and therefore we need to spend more money on advertising.

[00:09:03]So again, more so by luck, but what happened was we were able to get quite, you know, a decent number of customers pretty quickly. Now, when I say decent number of customers, it probably was enough to get me as myself up to a level of capacity where I had a good number of customers that I was I was doing the selling and I was doing the delivery on.

[00:09:24]And what what I what I realized was there was two things. one, the number one constraint in the business at the start for any business is getting more business through the door. So, I had to come up with a way of generating leads for the business.

[00:09:41]And I knew because of the personal branding journey that I'd been on that it had to be done in a way that it wasn't relying on me as the face or my contacts, that sort of thing. So we decided really early on to focus on trying to get new business into the agency via our own ads. Okay, >> it's quite hard.

[00:10:01]>> So instead of doing this free promotion in a way plastering all over any channel, every channel your face and indirectly selling, you decided to go down the the route that you were selling to customers which were paints across social media.

[00:10:19]>> Yep. Specifically Facebook.

[00:10:21]>> Mhm. So, face [clears throat] Facebook ads, I thought if we can get that cracked, then we're on to a winner. Now, the problem with Facebook ads, especially for B2B services, is the lead quality is really poor. And out of, you know, 100 leads that you get, probably 90 of them will be pretty bad quality.

[00:10:39]And so, quickly, what I realized was I was spending huge amounts of time on calls with people that didn't have the budget, weren't very, just weren't good leads. And so I found myself in a position again where I was doing something that I didn't enjoy, which was my calendar was full speaking to people that would not show up, weren't relevant. And you know, by the time that somebody was relevant, I was in such a bad mindset that, you know, I didn't even bother trying to sell them properly. And I'm not I'm not a natural good salesperson. So the first hire that I made was to bring in somebody that could do sales on a commissiononly basis.

[00:11:19]and they >> and that's quite rare to find but you found him.

[00:11:24]>> I found them and it was a Scottish chap called Dave whom I happened by chance to meet at a conference in America, the funnel hacking live 2020 I think it was.

[00:11:38]So we got on straight away and he started to take all the sales calls and immediately that meant that I was able to be removed from all of the selling and I was able to focus on the doing.

[00:11:51]Started off the doing being the delivery for the clients. But very quickly that hire allowed the business to start growing and we started to get you know we weren't spending huge amounts of money on advertising. It was a small business at the very start but there started to be a little bit of a trickle of new business coming in on a semi-regular basis. Now that then gave me the confidence to once I was at that level of capacity from a client perspective to then start the hiring process of people that could then deliver the actual work. So I think in you know after a couple of months we hired our first what we called account manager which was the the people that are that do the delivery that actually buy the ads for clients.

[00:12:34]So at that point you detached yourself from the selling part and bringing in the revenue and you found a person who was doing it at a effective cost to you as well and then you the delivery to the clients was also brought in house with another member of staff. How did you manage to let go and not micromanage or keep things too close to your heart after you've been doing it yourself for quite a few years? Well, I think the the the the selling part I I was comfortable not micromanaging because the guy that came on board for us was far better than me at selling.

[00:13:17]I'm not a sales expert whatsoever. So, I was happy just outsourcing that. To be honest, I was happy just to not have to do it. On the side of the delivery, that's definitely where I was pro probably a micromanager at the beginning because some of the clients that I was delivering on had been with me maybe a couple of years and >> you had a personal relationship and you felt responsible. Yes.

[00:13:44]>> Exactly. And you know the the last thing at that stage of business where you're just getting a little bit of traction, you've just made a hire, you know, cash flow is not great. The last thing you can afford to do is to lose your clients because you've made a mistake in outsourc not outsourcing but handing over the delivery to someone else. So probably for that first hire I probably was a micromanager and I think that was important and the the person that I hired a guy called Kier he was very junior and I think he probably benefited actually from the micromanagement because he was able to learn from me very clearly and I think employee number one it's vital that that person is bought into the philosophy of how you work because they're the ones that are going to be doing some of the training and the culture that then starts >> new hires afterwards. Yeah, >> exactly. Yeah. The the we worked very very closely together in in the end.

[00:14:46]Yatra had a hybrid model. So we worked one day a week in the office and four days a week at home. But in those early days when it was me and Kier, we were in the office together every day side by side working on the the clients. and we created a plan to move me out of all the client relationships that I had. And we did so probably over a period of 6 months. There was no right, I'm out of here. Here's your new account manager.

[00:15:16]It was a very slow process to ensure that those clients stayed with us.

[00:15:20]>> This delegation and handover process, I know myself and many other founders will struggle with it. Whether it's employee number one, five or 10, with every new part of your role which wears all the hats, you start delegating. You feel like you lose more control and you try and stay to stay on top of the quality.

[00:15:42]Was that the only way you can find trust in your first employee by being there? And were you verifying their output as well as giving them directions on the input? How did it work in the end? When was the moment you stepped away? You thought, "Okay, this is going to be to my standard or close enough to my standard I can step away."

[00:16:03]>> So, I'm trying to think of what I did versus what I would do now with with hindsight. I think what I did in the in the moment was side by side watching everything that he does and having him check everything with me. Would I do that now? I don't think so. Because what that does is it creates a culture of dependency where they feel like they need to check everything with you. And if you're not careful and probably will happen to an extent as you grow then that actually becomes a cultural norm where Gavin he's always there he will always check. He will always make sure everything's okay.

[00:16:41]If I'm what I'm doing now with the next business will be much more rather than hiring junior people at the start I will try and hire people that are more likely either more experience or from a personality develop perspective are more likely to own the outcome that we need that role to have that we need that role so f first hire in Yat I would have seen it at the time as you're coming in to take this work away from me that that would have been my mindset Now I'm looking at all employees and and hiring roles as you're being hired to own an area of the business whatever that is and there will be KPIs or metrics attached to that on which I will then monitor and yes I'll be here if you need me but it'll be a lot more outcome focused and and thus you can have the confidence if you hire properly because that's another skill making sure you can hire people effectively to give them autonomy to do what they to be there for them if they need you, but you're looking at metrics and KPIs and you're working towards whatever the goals that you both come up with are.

[00:17:48]>> Tell me what happened with Yata next and then we can talk a bit about hiring because it sounds to me like you have a few tips there.

[00:17:56]>> Yeah. So, so Yata was know without without oversimplifying it. We created because all we did was paid advertising.

[00:18:04]We systemized the business really really well. everything. I I'm a systems guy, so I like to look at probably from my early advertising days, I like to look at everything as a a journey or a funnel, whatever you want to call it, where every function of the business has a beginning, a well, a pre, a beginning, and an end. And in each point, there has there's going to be a set of steps or checklist items or to-dos that need to be done and achieved. So from day one everything that I did from when I was delegating my work to Kier who was employee number one to hiring all we created a process behind everything. The journey from employee number one to the point of where we decided to go and sell was pretty linear in that I knew what capacity looked like for each individual person because I had been there and been that person that's running the ads and talking to the >> you knew the job yourself. So that was very important. That's something that a guest a couple of episodes ago, Melissa was uh was sharing. You need to know the job yourself to know what's good and what's not.

[00:19:14]>> Yeah. So, we we basically had a nice little formula, algorithm, equation, whatever you want to call it, which was when somebody reaches around eight clients, this is prei, when somebody reaches around eight clients, they're about at capacity. If they're at 10 clients, they're over capacity. So we thought right when whenever whenever everybody is at capacity and the newest member of staff is at six that's when we start the hiring process. So whenever somebody was at six clients we would start the hiring process bring someone else in and then we could feed them new customers and that was basically how we approached hiring which led >> a waterfall effect.

[00:19:51]>> Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So everything was just we had little systems and processes for everything and that was one of the towards the acquisition that was one of the key things that they were interested in when it came to selling was that they knew when they took acquired our business that it would still operate and run well even though my plan was to exit.

[00:20:14]>> Tell me about the acquisition then. Did you actively search for a buyer? Were you randomly approached? How does it work? I know a lot of people don't know where to start when it comes to that.

[00:20:27]>> Yeah. So, the the the sales process essentially we I knew that I wanted to build the business to sell from day one.

[00:20:33]I didn't know what the time frame on that was, but there came a period two two or three years ago where my daughter had would have been about three years ago. My daughter had just been born. Uh I I I I've had an itch for a while to get my teeth stuck into another business. You know, I'd been in the marketing and advertising world for around 10 years. Daughter was born. And so I started flirting with the idea of why don't we see what the business looks like if we're going to sell it, what it's valued at, how much interest is there. And um so I started working with an M&A consultancy for agencies called Cactus. They're now called Blue Halo and a chap called Spencer Gallagher there.

[00:21:16]And he helped me to shape the business into essentially a one pager and send it out to their database of agencies that they knew were interested in acquisitions. And from that I think we had around seven calls, seven conversations with different agencies.

[00:21:32]Some of them were great, some of them were absolutely not a fit. And um eventually we we had the conversation with Velar and from you know from the first call there was a great connection with them and that's of course who we who we um eventually sold to. So there was it was mainly a case of I felt it was time to to go and then the offer was great.

[00:21:56]>> And did you stay in the business for a while once you've been acquired? Several founders who have sold their businesses have stayed for 2 3 years onwards in there and some of them the the payout was dependent on the earnings and the revenue that the business was bringing in. Was that the case for you as well?

[00:22:16]So you had to continue developing the business.

[00:22:19]>> Yep. So I had a I had a 9-month earnout which is relatively short.

[00:22:23]>> Very. Yes. And um actually we got to month eight and I said to them, look, I'm not really adding any value anymore to the business. It's it's it doesn't need me. And so we had I had a 9-month earn out, but I I um exited after 8 months.

[00:22:39]>> So at that point you were you said almost 10 years in digital advertising and social media. Why were your reflection? How did it change from the early days to that point? because it will we will move into the next stage where it changed again with >> yeah I mean when I first got into that Facebook advertising it was I always refer to like the glory days you know there's you could target any specific singular person with an ad if you wanted to and I did it for um like Steven Bartlett at social chain I had a when I was doing my personal branding I had a vlog series and I wanted to go down to the social chain office in Manchester So I I was able to create an ad target employees of social chain. I think I spent around a a pound before I got an email back from one of them saying, "Look, come down." You know, I go down, I meet Steven.

[00:23:34]>> Pound's not bad, but sure.

[00:23:36]>> Yeah. I meet Stephen, I start running ads for Steven. It's like I look, those days were incredible. They stopped all of that. And what's what's ended up happening, I think, with the advertising world is it's become so complicated and convoluted with all of the different privacy laws all over, you know, different parts of the world have different privacy laws that you now need an arsenal of tools to be able to track what's actually happening to the point where you're almost going in some some circumstances, you're almost going, there's no point in even tracking this.

[00:24:07]As long as we're spending money and we know that we're making money on the back end, then we're relatively happy. So, it's changed. I actually went into Facebook just two days ago to start building a campaign. And it' be the first time I've built a campaign in probably 5 years.

[00:24:24]And even though AI is meant to be making everything easier and simpler, I thought it was, you know, far more complicated and harder to build a campaign now than it was 5 years ago. just with all the the settings that they turn on and all these AI things that you have to turn off and and whatnot. So, I think we're in a little bit of a funny period at the moment where AI is starting to come into it, but we're not at a point where AI has made it better or easier. And it's almost like AI is making things worse at the moment. But we will get to a point where I mean Mark Zuckerberg says you will go to Facebook, you will click a button and it will do everything for you.

[00:25:09]>> He said that three years ago now, hasn't he?

[00:25:12]>> Yeah. But you can't you can see a world if they can get the technology correct.

[00:25:16]You can see a world where because to win on advertising now it's a creative game.

[00:25:21]You the person that can come up with the most number of creatives will win.

[00:25:26]generally speaking. So, >> but that's not a problem anymore. You can have a 100 polished versions of a creative with AI.

[00:25:34]>> Exactly. That's what I was I was going to go next. Copywise, you can do a 100 variations in a minute. If that's the case, >> with a tool that costs no more than 20 a month.

[00:25:46]>> Exactly. So I think the future will be if if Facebook can make the technology work, you will go to Facebook, you will say my budget is X or maybe it won't even be a budget. Maybe it'll be a cost per lead requirement or whatever it might be. You click a button and Facebook will then create all of the creatives for you, you know, and and you can imagine a world where thousands of creatives are tested are are created and tested and you don't even see them in some and it just goes >> different ones for different people.

[00:26:17]>> Exactly. It does its thing. So I think back in the glory days I talk about um you used to be able to create an ad with somebody's name, you know, it might be a t-shirt with that person's name on it.

[00:26:29]Mhm.

[00:26:30]>> There might be a world where we come full circle and AI is able to do that and Facebook will allow you to do that where every single person has, you know, an ad that is specific to them. They then go to a landing page that is specific to them and the entire customer journey is specific to them. Now whether the likes of the European Union allow that to happen from a privacy and you know all these policy standpoints, who knows? But the technology is probably already there, but certainly will be there in a few years.

[00:27:03]>> But just because we have the technology to do this hyperargeted advertising, it doesn't mean that you would want to give a company that much power. The reason some of this legislation came through was not because you could target somebody with an ad with their name on the t-shirt. It had political real world implications which we are still living through today.

[00:27:29]So do you see this hyperargeting outside of the traditional say commercial as that's Facebook and Google to a certain extent allowed to happen damaging the fabric of society?

[00:27:47]>> Yeah. I mean I have a lot of concerns as a father of two two little girls. I got a lot of concerns around what the future is going to look like and I I don't I don't know what the answer is. I think what will happen is that the future of commerce and digital and online is going to become more and more personalized and I think that and I think I think the fact just life in general will become and I'm not saying this is good or bad.

[00:28:13]This is what I think is going to happen that everything will become so hyperpersonalized to the point that kids go into school that each individual kid I can see having an individual lesson plan that's AI generated focused on what they're interested in. And the reason I think about this is because I wasn't the best behaved kid in school.

[00:28:34]I wasn't bad, but I wasn't I wasn't interested. I'm not academic. But I think if they were able to take some of the things that I wasn't interested in, let's call it maths, >> and they were able to create a lesson plan that was around football, a passion of mine, would I be more interested? Well, I think I would be. So, I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I think the world of I think the world due to AI is going to become more personalized. Now, I've got concerns around that. People are going to become hermits living in their own little lives and everything's going to be on them.

[00:29:09]>> People are already having AI partners, AI lovers.

[00:29:12]>> Yeah. And everything in between. But AI basically allows you to just personalize at scale and rapidly. That's that's the only difference. But the distribution of that still holds stays with what they call the duopoly >> in digital advertising.

[00:29:30]>> Yeah. So I I think if if life goes that direction, it's very quickly advertisers will follow suit. It always happens.

[00:29:38]>> In what way would advertisers follow suit?

[00:29:41]>> If we're going down the route of hyperpersonalization, advertisers will see that and they will try and take advantage of that.

[00:29:51]>> If it works and they make money, everybody will be in for that.

[00:29:54]>> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So whether we go to the full circle moment of the name on the t-shirt, you know, selling Daniel t-shirts as happened 10 years ago, I don't know. But it's certainly an interesting it's an interesting dilemma, is it? Cuz you know, the platforms will argue that it provides a better experience. We've already seen it with the, you know, having to allow ads that are personalized to you or not.

[00:30:20]>> Mhm.

[00:30:21]So advertisers and platforms will argue that it creates a better experience and others will complain that they don't want to give their data away. And I I I being an advertiser but also being a human being I see both sides.

[00:30:35]>> But that's the argument that Facebook is making at least in Europe where if you refuse their data collecting practices they just want you to pay a monthly subscription fee. Would you consider that as as a marketing and advertising man knowing how much they try?

[00:30:51]>> No, I wouldn't. I would I think I would either No, I I may be biased because I'm Scottish and Scottish people are are typically more tight, shall we call it?

[00:31:01]So, I would be more inclined to either give them my data or stop using the platform altogether.

[00:31:07]>> It doesn't look like people are stopping using these platforms though because there are no alternatives.

[00:31:14]>> Yeah. And I don't think the vast majority of people know what they're giving away or what it even means to give away data.

[00:31:22]>> Let's flesh that one out. What what is that they're giving away in your view?

[00:31:27]>> Well, let let's you and I and and people listening to this show, we are we understand AI. We understand advertising. We understand how all all this works at least to a certain degree.

[00:31:37]But I I think you know 95% of the population that you know aren't listening to this show or are minded like us have zero idea what probably even how the internet works these days. An example of this slight slight tangent. An example of this is my mother-in-law who hopefully won't listen to this. She's been sending me um AI generated Instagram reels which are you know some of them are stupid things like how to grow vegetables in your garden and I'm like that is clearly AI but she as a six-year-old woman can't see it and you know there's so she I don't know whether it's an eyesight thing or she can't see the fact that it's AI you know I watch it and I can there's there's clear signs that it's AI so I can see that she can't see it. And I think it's an example.

[00:32:30]>> I'm a more trained eye. You know what's from that perspective. Myself, whether it's copy aided by a GPT or whether it's a video, I can I can tell straight away in support of your argument, the scams online have been multiplying because they can create so many more and reach at scale. So that's another side effect of the the AI and the deep fakes as we would call them.

[00:32:58]>> Yeah. Like the era of AI influencers is here. And you know I made a video recently that it's like is this the next big business opportunity?

[00:33:08]I as a brand can create hundreds or thousands of AI influencers and put them out there into the world and try to get millions of views. Or and is this the start of one of the biggest waves of scams that we've ever seen? Because people like my mother-in-law are going are believing what they're seeing to be real when it's not. And the implications of that are terrifying.

[00:33:31]And don't social networks or the platforms have a responsibility in labeling properly and policing their platforms.

[00:33:41]>> Yeah. What what what I would love to see is the likes of LinkedIn or all the platforms to say this is AI generated to be able to filter it all out. I would love to just have a social media platform again that is I don't know how this I don't even think this would be possible anymore but it's only human.

[00:34:00]>> Well no cuz LinkedIn you write a post and you got a button next to it where you know refine or assist with AI. So it's they're encouraging you to do it.

[00:34:09]>> Yeah. And I I just think that I don't know, maybe their their numbers obviously showed differently, but you know that there's got to be a an opportunity for a platform out there where it's got to be human. It's focused on the chronological feed.

[00:34:25]>> We'll we'll give a shout out to Substack here. Let's do that. There's somewhere in between that all of that. They have a social media element. They have a uh long form traditional style blogging.

[00:34:40]The heyday again I live through that.

[00:34:43]I'm I'm not sure about you. There somewhere in between but at the same time they don't have the scale but they do have the good people there.

[00:34:50]>> Yeah. Well you know Substack. So in our coms before this it's a platform that I'm interested in. And I've not spent any time there, but any time that I've gone on to it, I've seen what looks like interesting people sharing interesting things. And it reminds me of Twitter back in the day or Medium back in the day where you could go and meet interesting people. Whereas it just feels like all the platforms these days are it's harder to meet and engage and connect with great people because I think we're all so used to getting DMs and messages from clear AI that you then just turn off to everything. So I'm I'm very interested in Substack and um maybe you can share I'd love to >> I can't say it's the future. they they have elements of there's this term uh that's been coined by a Canadian journalist Cory Dr. And it's called enitification which the he wrote an entire book about it and the theory rings true. There's a point in a platform's life which you get the traffic, you get the attention, you get the love and everything is great because they're trying to capture the market.

[00:36:04]The moment they reach the critical point, you will see a massive change.

[00:36:09]The dial will tighten. You will not get that reach. they will want more return on their advertising products and then things will slowly and slowly get worse but you will be trapped there because you can't go anywhere and that's the same with LinkedIn at this stage and for anybody who's just listening to the audio version Gavin's been nodding and um nitification naturally comes after every service Apple has been there or is there Amazon is there every large company once they have control of the market, they will turn that dial on without fault.

[00:36:47]That's the theory which has plenty of evidence to back it up.

[00:36:52]>> Yeah, I I mean I totally agree.

[00:36:54]>> But I want to go back a bit into business cuz we could rant about these platforms for like a whole three other episodes and people have read some of my rants already. I wanted to ask you reflecting on your sale of Yata because you're now on the other side of an exit and building again and you're going to tell me about that one in a second as well.

[00:37:17]Why would you never do the same again that you've done with Yata when you built it even though you deliberately built it to sell?

[00:37:24]>> Good question. What would I never do again? I I'm not sure I would ever build a clientf facing business again. I >> And by that you mean like an agency where you would deal with clients directly. Okay.

[00:37:38]>> Yeah. Yeah. I >> You would do something to do with consumers or >> Yeah.

[00:37:44]>> Yeah. I I I love my my best type of day is I make a coffee, I sit at my desk and I build and make stuff. That's my people will call it zone of genius. Whatever you want to term >> build and make Yeah, builder mode. I I'm not the stereotypical maybe agency founder which is more extroverted, goes to dinners, you know, goes to, you know, smoozes clients, that's not me. I much prefer to build systems around myself so that I can focus on building and making stuff.

[00:38:23]So whether that's building funnels, building ads, creating content, whatever it might be, that's that's my perfect day. So I think that lends itself much more towards uh ecom software that type of business. I think yeah I think in hindsight I think the lesson if we were to take a lesson from that it would be understand what you want from your life. And this is something and the reason I'm sharing this is because going into the next business post exit, this is something I really had to wrestle with and struggle with, which was your business should be built around your life. So what do you want your life to look like? What do you want your days and your weeks to look like? It's very easy to build a business that >> in your 20s when you started, you didn't know that.

[00:39:13]>> No, exactly. You don't know that until you start doing things and you go, "Hold on a minute. I actually don't like taking sales calls." So, how can I build myself out of taking sales calls? And don't get me wrong, this is there are parts in business where you just have to suck it up and do it. But if you're trying to build something for the long term and you as the founder, as the entrepreneur who is really the only person in the business that has that magic, you have to ensure that you are putting yourself in the best position to succeed. actually in fact not even just a founder and entrepreneur. I think that's a good piece of advice for anyone is to try and position people where they are the best and that means knowing your skill set, knowing what you're good at, knowing what you're bad at, and then trying to build the business around those things.

[00:40:05]>> You never went for a co-founder though to complement some of the skills you didn't have at the time. Did you contemplate it after Yata or you were determined to continue building solo cuz you said you said you got the itch very soon after.

[00:40:22]>> Yeah. Um so I essentially found myself.

[00:40:26]So one of the things that happens when you sell is you hand over of course the reigns to your business but your identity which has been so tied up in that business doesn't change on day one of selling >> or month one or sometimes year.

[00:40:40]>> Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You need So you really need to spend or I've certainly found I had to spend a lot of time just thinking what do I want? Who am I? What am I trying to build? What sort of dad do I want to be? Sort of these existential questions that when you're head down building a business, you don't actually sit up and think about time to >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. The business is more important than yourself in some circumstances. So I [gasps and sighs] found myself slowly as I was doing that work finding myself drifting back to the desk to the point that I was like you know actually I really I really want to build something. I I when I first got into business I thought this success for me meant freedom but actually success for me is building something and building something with great people. So in terms of the co-founder, I would never say not having a co-founder at Yat wasn't a intentional decision. It was just how it happened. And then going into this next business, my business partner is my brother-in-law and we're actually it's going to be a great fit because we're going into the world of healthcare and he is a pharmacist and for the business model that we need that we have we need a pharmacist. So he's able to bring the skill set from the pharmacy and being a pharmacist and and owningarmacies and I'm able to bring my skill set in building a business to sell the marketing the growth behind it and hopefully those um those skill sets will complement themselves very well.

[00:42:15]>> And how did you approach that? It was because there was the business opportunity and you needed that trustworthy partner that was close to you and you had the family link otherwise or did the idea come about separately >> the idea so post Yatter as I'm thinking about what's h what am I doing I essentially created a Google doc and every business idea that's ever come into my head goes into that Google doc and then I started to think about how do we how do you choose a business cuz when Post exit, I'm not really working anymore from a necessity standpoint.

[00:42:51]It's more what am I really interested in? And so, I've always been interested in health and fitness and wellness and longevity. I started, you know, I started to think about, well, what does that look like? And what happened one day was I needed to go get a prescription from the pharmacist.

[00:43:11]And to get the prescription for the pharmacist, anyone in the UK, I'm not sure about the US, but anyone in the UK will probably relate to this experience.

[00:43:18]You have to fight to get a doctor's appointment at 8 8 in the morning. You then have to take half a day off to go to the doctor.

[00:43:25]>> They pay for it directly. So they I think it's slightly diff.

[00:43:29]>> Yeah. So I mean you go to the you know by the end by the time you've gone to the doctor, had a conversation, gone to the pharmacist, half a day is wasted.

[00:43:36]And I thought that >> that's if you're in a small rural place.

[00:43:40]If you're in a large urban area, you would be very lucky to be able to do that in half a day.

[00:43:46]>> Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Even worse. So, I thought that the thing I had been focusing on is where industries have terrible customer experiences. And I I kept coming back to this. Anyway, so my brother-in-law's a pharmacist. So, I say to him, Dave, we need to meet. We need to get a coffee.

[00:44:02]Tell me about the world of pharmacy. and he explained in Scotland, I'm not sure about the rest of the UK, but in Scotland, there are actually certain rules that mean that that that customer journey has to exist like that if it's if you're going down the NHS route. So, we started talking about well, what about the world of online pharmacy and private healthcare?

[00:44:23]And we started to go down the route and that's when we decided, right, I think there's an opportunity for here for us to go into the world of online pharmacy.

[00:44:31]And what really excites me is we there's a culture of reactive healthcare. You have a problem, take this pill. It will get rid of the symptoms, but it won't actually fix the problem. So where I would love to tap into is move from reactive to proactive.

[00:44:51]And one of the ways I think we can do that is by getting more people to do more regular testing on things like bloods, gut, all the tests that are available. And then once we have somebody's results and we can see the real problems, we can then help to treat them either through lifestyle or medication if that's what's required.

[00:45:12]That's the route that we're going down.

[00:45:13]And I share the story because when it's a business like that, then I I need a co-founder that's in that world otherwise I would have to >> the knowledge. Yeah. The detailed knowledge and the permissions because to to dispense medicines etc. you you need to have a certain qualification.

[00:45:33]>> Exactly.

[00:45:34]So that that was your route to it. And then you're applying your skills on brand building, marketing, and everything else in between in order to get the clients. But you didn't want to deal with B2B anymore. You wanted to sell direct to consumers.

[00:45:50]>> That's quite a big shift from everything you've done before.

[00:45:52]>> Yeah. Don't get me wrong, I'd never say never, but I've always had that running an agency where you've worked with >> 250 plus clients over, you know, a long period of time. I've seen inside lots and lots of different businesses and I've been able to see where where people do things wrong, where where some opportunities are, where I feel like I could do things better and the world of I've always just had an itch to get into BTOC business to consumer and take a stab at that that world.

[00:46:23]>> And the pharmacy items have a high ticket price compared to anything else.

[00:46:28]Yeah, I mean it should from that's another you know there's there there's so many things that have brought me to this business model and you know the high lifetime value of you know somebody that's on that's been treated by us is fits in nicely to the world of advertising. Now there's actually a lot of challenges in advertising and health because obviously there's rules and regulations >> strict rules. Yes.

[00:46:49]>> And you know on the likes of Facebook you can't you can't really you're not allowed to track health information. So tracking purchases and things are is actually really challenging and difficult. So you don't get me wrong, it's not um it's not all going to be easy, but that at least is the framework that I've tried to use to come up with the next next business.

[00:47:09]>> And I'm assuming that this time around you will not attach your personal brand to the business at all. even though you are still running your own YouTube channel almost 10,000 uh subscribers I've seen there you you're a speaker you go on podcasts and you run your own campaigns this is not going to be directly related to you >> no two different things >> so why would you advise anybody who just started or is looking at starting soon to do about their personal brand and attachment to the business even if it's their own consultancy.

[00:47:48]>> Yeah. Well, I guess I I can only share why I'm interested in the personal brand. There's two there's two reasons.

[00:47:54]One is when I stopped personal branding, I actually felt like I got a little bit lazy when it came to my ability to communicate. And there was an element of wanting to improve my own ability to articulate thoughts, come up with frameworks and get better at speaking quite simply. And um creating content is the best way to do that because you are forced to come up with an idea to think about how to either illustrate or communicate that idea and then put it out into the world to get real-time feedback.

[00:48:29]>> Mhm.

[00:48:30]>> So there's an element of that. There's an element of now that I've had all of these experiences in business from starting and selling it. You know, somebody asked me the question once.

[00:48:41]They were like, "So, what actually made Yatter successful?" And I thought I thought I actually don't know cuz a lot of the things that I had done I had just done. I'd never taken time to think about it. And so personal branding for me as well is almost an opportunity to improve my own thinking and to connect the dots of what I've done.

[00:49:06]>> The element of creating content for personal branding at least that that element of it.

[00:49:13]>> Exactly. And then the the final one which I think is import also important is that even more so in today's age the per the people that have the audience get the opportunities over the person that actually might be the best fit.

[00:49:26]Whether we like that or not that is the case. All of the opportunities in an industry float to the small number of people that are best known. Being known I think is one of the highest leveraged things that you can have as an entrepreneur. Now for a co coach or a consultant means more consulting gigs, more speaking gigs, more clients. For me, I'm looking at it more of the lens of as I'm building this business, more connections of people that might buy us one day, that might acquire us, more connections with investors that might invest if we ever need to seek funding. Talent, access to talent. if you're well known.

[00:50:06]>> That's what uh that's what uh Susan and Chris, a couple of the other investors and James Church as well, who is going to be a couple of episodes behind now as we talk about this. He's wrote the book of the investable entrepreneur. The founder is the one that gets checked out first. Their social media presence, what they've done are videos, clips, photos, interviews, podcasts.

[00:50:32]even any investor that is looking at buying a business or investing in a business will look at the founder first and their story. So, I just wanted to kind of like cross the tea there and put an accent on what you've been saying and why you're building it even though it might not necessarily say help sell more for the business in the initial stages.

[00:50:55]>> Yeah, exactly that.

[00:50:56]>> So, are you going to deal with sales this time around, Gavin?

[00:51:01]Well, no. So, it's all going to be going to be online.

[00:51:05]>> So, people that need access to the treatment, they will come online. They will go through a series of questionnaires and if they're eligible, they will be able to buy there. And then for when we get into the more so treatments like weight loss, which we're not starting with, but when it becomes weight what are called more higher risk >> treatments, then that does require face to face. But I think what what I will do is because we've got capital behind the business, I will be able to hire people from day one to be able to do that again, allowing me to focus on the things that >> But that that's an advantage that you didn't have before. So you're you're now building with hindsight and in a way skipping past certain stages in building the business because you have the capital to do that.

[00:51:50]>> Exactly. Yeah. And I think that's that's a good point. The longer you're in the world of business, the more leverage you get generally speaking in terms of connections, capital, >> you know, so we're in a fortunate position with this business where there's capital behind it now. But Yatter didn't have that. It was a case of having to hustle and grind and do everything you can to just try and get the business the the smallest bit of momentum and then >> bootstrapping as the Americans like to say. Yeah.

[00:52:18]>> Exactly. Yeah. So what do you think then Gavin founders still get wrong about building a business that can run without them?

[00:52:28]Can you design it from the start or do you need to have still need to have the experience of every single role within that business to be able to understand what it takes and even how to augment it with AI which I've argued in in my pieces that it's you need to know what's good and bad as output and what's the process in order to train your AI to do it in the way that you need it done.

[00:52:53]Well, I would say it's the number one struggle in any business owner that I've spoken to is that they're too involved.

[00:53:00]So, I think everybody has this problem.

[00:53:04]So, that means there's a series of steps that need to happen to transition them from being too involved to not involved.

[00:53:11]I I generally think that unless you're in a position where you've got huge amounts of capital or co-founders, the founder is going to do pretty much everything from day one >> that is nine times out of 10 always going to be the case. So there therefore we need there it's a transition that needs to happen as opposed to you know if I if I saw a founder that came to me and said I want to build a business from day one but I don't want to be involved in it I'm going to I'm thinking it's not going to work. The founder is going to be involved. I have wrestled though with the idea of this concept of the founder the business operating without the founder. I think the founder should always be involved in the business but what's the difference is the founder shouldn't be involved in the delivery of the product or the service because >> the operational part so moving into leadership or coming up with the next >> exactly so the exercise that I get founders to do I do I do a small amount of mentoring and when I do it the exercise I get them to do is really boring not sexy but something that I actually did which was just spend time auditing your time. So, what are you actually spending your time on dayto-day?

[00:54:33]Take a list of all that and then start to work through every single task and say, "What do I enjoy? What do I not enjoy? What am I good at? What am I not good at?" And your job then is to step by step go through each of those tasks and get rid of the things you don't enjoy and the things that you're not good at.

[00:54:50]But the problem, >> Gary Das, another guest called them the £10 an hour tasks, the one that you are overqualified for as well.

[00:54:58]>> Yes. But here's here's where a lot of people get the problem is what they do is they hire what I would call a helper.

[00:55:04]So they might hire a virtual assistant or, you know, they'll go to Upwork and they'll find somebody that can do video editing for them, you know, just as an example. That's okay to an extent, but what ends up happening is you spend just as much time giving them directions and doing things.

[00:55:21]And what the mindset shift that you need to get into is rather than hiring people that help you, hire owners. People that can own, for example, the entire content creation system. Hire people that can own the client delivery system. And this is where you said that you're doing a change in terms of hiring more senior people rather than starting with juniors and training them up.

[00:55:48]But the conundrum remains you need to have the funds to do that to hire a way more senior person from day one.

[00:55:59]>> Yeah.

[00:55:59]>> To do that and without being an exited founder or having the external capital to do it. And most entrepreneurs or founders would not have it in the early stages. Then how can you marry that?

[00:56:13]>> I think there's a balance is try focus on hiring. So this can be done with a junior or a senior person but still hire somebody that's an owner as opposed to a helper. So when Kier first came in my first hire, he was junior and I needed to be a junior. I couldn't afford to hire a senior person at that time and also a senior person probably wouldn't even want to join me at that period. So I needed to hire someone that was junior but Kier was able to come in and own effectively all the clients that we had.

[00:56:47]And that meant that I didn't have to give him tasks to say right go and lower that client's budget, go and write copy for that client, you know, go and do this. I was able to fully delegate those jobs to him. So that's the difference and verse what I see a lot of entrepreneurs do and I've done before is is they hire freelance or overseas people to just pick off certain tasks and it never actually unless you can get somebody fully integrated into the business. I just don't think it works. It works for certain things, but not for if you're looking to really step away from the nitty-gritty work. It >> might work for emails, but say not for copy delivery. Yeah. And have you experimented with some AI agents who would take on some of these roles on behalf of you?

[00:57:43]>> Yeah. I mean, for my personal branding stuff, so there's probably a good example actually. So, my personal brand at the moment is purely me. And I think it has to be me because I've been out of the game for five or so years, I feel like I need to learn what is good, what's bad, what works, what doesn't work, what I like, what I don't like.

[00:58:03]So, before I can hire people to come and help me with that, and I've hired a helper in a video editor, I've hired a video in some helper in some circumstances to do a video shoot for me.

[00:58:16]But there will reach a point where I'm where I feel like I've got a sense of how this should work that I can then just hire somebody to do it all. So there is a there is an element of you have to go through some early stuff before you can then finally make a decision on hiring an owner. But >> but there's no shortcut around that. You still have to do the early work in order to do the craft. I think so. Yeah.

[00:58:41]Unless, again, going back to unless you've got lots of money, you can hire a CEO who's done it before, who can hire um, you know, a head of marketing that's done it before, but 99% of people can't do that. So, what I've been trying to experiment in my own personal branding business is, well, where can AI fit into some of the things that previously a person would? So, I've been experimenting with Claude um mainly Claude co-work creating projects for different tasks like idea generation, coming up with initial scripts, taking my scripts and can we improve the hook, things like that. I got to be honest, I I I haven't yet found I I haven't yet found it to be transformational in the productivity from it and >> because you need to verify all its output and it's not simple output when you ask it to do creative stuff.

[00:59:35]>> Yeah. I I still find if I had just spent the time writing the post as opposed to going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, probably would have taken the same amount of time. Um, so what one of the a pitfall that I found myself falling into was outsourcing my thinking. [snorts] and you know, write me a post on three tips from selling your business, for example, and get Claude to Claude to do it for you. And then I had I had a realization. I was like, "No, absolutely not. Yes, AI can help me write a post, write a script, or at least give me the the start or the edit, but absolutely not am I getting it to do the thinking for me. me as an entrepreneur, I want to stay sharp and on the top of my game.

[01:00:22]>> And that's something that I've heard and I've written about from multiple millennial masters. The best way to interact with it right now is like you said, not to outsource your thinking to it, but to get it to polish your idea, stress test it, and then package it in a way tailored to different audiences.

[01:00:46]Think of it like your editor. I want to create a LinkedIn po post which says this and this is my idea and what I would like to say and then let AI create that or polish it in into a shape and then you still have to edit it. So, and one of the key parts from what you've just told me Gavin is giving it feedback is very important when it throws up at you something that you do not like and it's off base and it will possibly do that. Let's say eight out of 10 times is my experience. You get lucky a couple of times out of 10. You need to correct it and give it the right examples of what you like and what you don't like. And it will be a while until it starts understanding it. And and I've been part of this process. A simple example will be for anybody tuning in. If you carry most of your conversations in one chat window or you create new chat windows for every single instance, the memory between them will be lost. There will be no context, no background and you basically start from scratch and that's how you end up losing lots of time as well in in dealing with AI. and Claude is people rave about it, but you can do pretty much the same things with projects and contain chats in chat GPT as well. So, anybody considering a major move, first try all the options. I would say you settled on cloud, but I'm guessing you use chat GPT for a while before that too.

[01:02:15]>> Yeah. what what I've actually been finding um or what I've been experimenting with, but I I can't quite figure out whether this is just procrastination yet or whether this is a smart move is using a tool called Obsidian, >> which is [clears throat] where you can create your own M markdown files. So what I've been doing is sort of taking things I like, things I don't like in terms of writing styles and content framework and my personal brand. What do I talk about? What do I not talk about?

[01:02:43]And creating markdown files so that I can upload those to Claude or any platform because it's Claude today, but it might be something else tomorrow.

[01:02:53]>> GPG accepts markdown files as well. I've done one today. So >> exactly >> you can create them as well.

[01:03:00]So, so your your information and so it's got me thinking about whether this is the future of everybody having to, you know, take their essentially create a second brain, a digital brain that can then interact with the with so I'm playing with at the moment.

[01:03:19]>> Well, certainly the we are only at the beginning of the AI era and and what it can do. So far, in my experience, even the best and the latest and newest models have Alzheimer's half of the time. Did we not talk about this an hour ago in in this chat? Yes.

[01:03:37]Sorry. At least it apologizes. So, that's that's my experience. Thank you so much, Gavin, for sharing your lessons and learnings from building from scratch, exiting, and rebuilding again. and I am very curious to see how we are going to put a spin on an online pharmacy in the AI and digital era.

[01:04:03]>> Thank you for having me. I've uh I've really enjoyed this conversation. So, thank you.

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