What advice would I give to my younger self? I get asked this all the time.
And to be honest, I hope that little Sara would have time to sit down with me for a cup of tea because I’ve actually got quite a few bits of advice for her. There are a few things that she needed to hear!
First thing I’d tell her is, you can learn from every situation.
If I look back long before I started my own business, I did a gap year at university and I went to work for this tiny little craft company and it was quite an interesting year to say the least! Over the course of the year, I had a lot of experiences, some of them were great, some of them not so great. However, it’s actually the experiences that weren’t so great that I learned the most from.
Now, it was very hard at that moment to appreciate the things I learned because it was difficult. And if I look back on my whole life, I’ve had a lot of experiences that haven’t been so good but I am of the opinion that you can either just sweep those experiences under the carpet and imagine that they never happened or you can reflect on them and see what you can learn.
If I look back on my growth and my journey as an entrepreneur over the past 20 years, it’s really been the difficult moments that haven’t gone where I have been to reflect and achieve true growth. I think that if you do reflect on your life in general, you will find that you’ll learn more from the difficult times and the ones that haven’t been so successful than you will from the great times.
Secondly, I would tell Sara that business isn’t personal.
The sooner that you can learn this business lesson, the better. Now, I was quite lucky, and that I did learn this lesson maybe three years into my business journey.
We went through a really big legal battle with a company called Helix, you might remember they were a company that used to make protractors and stationery, and they decided to get into the craft market. They had obviously analysed the market and having seen my product thought ‘that’s a great product, we’ll rip that off’.
They did their due diligence, looked at my patents and the intellectual property that I had on the product and weighed up how strong it was and whether or not it was worth taking the risk to replicate my product. Eventually, they decided it was a commercial risk worth taking and we entered a legal battle.
I can confidently say that now, all these years later, with the benefit of hindsight, at that moment it didn’t feel like Helix was weighing up a commercial venture, it felt personal. I felt devastated and it was as though Mr. Helix himself had it in for Sara. I couldn’t believe that somebody was being so nasty and was out to destroy me. I thought that they were going to be awful and thought ‘how could they do this?’.
I was riddled with anger. I let that anger eat away at me and I let it define the decisions I made in that moment.
Now, luckily for me, I got a happy ending. Well, as happy as it could have been in this very stressful period in my life! But we had a successful outcome and we came to a mutual agreement to move on but it wasn’t until years later when I really reflected on that time in my life that I learned it wasn’t personal for Helix. They weren’t out to get me, they just thought that’s a great product and commercially, we should give it a go.
For them, it was just business, it wasn’t personal.
The third piece of advice that I would give my younger self is that having the ability to be flexible and creative really is the key to success.
When I first started in business, my first idea was a product called the Enveloper and it was a product for making handmade envelopes for people who made their own handmade cards. I designed the product, I had this idea of what I was going to do and then I went and got a quote from a company and it was going to cost £30,000 to have it made in plastic, but I didn’t have that kind of money. I was a Bootstrap business just starting out so I had a couple of thousands in savings and that was it.
Now, I think a lot of people would give up at that point and who could blame them. If you are thwarted at the first hurdle, you think ‘well that’s it the business isn’t going to go anywhere’. However, I’m here to tell you that you’ve got to think creatively and you’ve got to think around the solution.
So in this instance, I thought – we can make them out of MDF. I knew that it was going to cost two or three times more to produce each one, however I didn’t have the big set up cost to be able to make them in plastic.
Trying to find a different way to get to the same outcome, I knew that it might not be as great as what I had in mind but it was a way that I could achieve what I wanted to do. That was the first of many hurdles that I had to overcome in my early business career and it really did teach me that creativity and flexibility are the absolute key attributes to being a really successful entrepreneur.
The last thing I would tell little Sara is to work with the best people you possibly can.
You’ve got to spend a lot of time working with colleagues so it’s just as important to enjoy working with people as it is to have people who are brilliant at what they do.
So often I see people being really protective of the empire that they’re trying to create and they’re terrified that if they work with people who are better than them… heaven forbid they might get found out. And if they get found out, then their value is going to be diminished.
I just think it’s ridiculous. I’ve learned that if you work with the best people, your business will flourish, not flounder and that’s really, really key. Surround yourself with people who are better than you because if they’re better than you, they will be the ones who will drive your business forward.
If you only ever hire people to do what you tell them, your business is always going to be limited by your own skills.
People who are fantastic leaders are leaders of amazing people and brilliant at surrounding themselves with the best people. Now little Sara learnt that really early on in her business career and look where it’s got her!
I really hope that you can learn from these bits of business advice, just as I did early in my career, and hopefully they’ll have a profound impact!