E1 Delivering Pizzas to Managing a Billion Dollar Business | Ben Francis Gymshark CEO
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Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Deep Dive, the brand new podcast that delves into the minds of entrepreneurs, creators and other inspiring people to uncover their journeys towards finding joy and fulfillment at work and in life. My name is Ali and in each episode I chat to my guests about the philosophies, strategies and tools that have helped them along the path to living a life of happiness and meaning. My very first guest on the podcast is Ben Francis, the founder and CEO of billion dollar fitness brand Gymshark, which is one of my favorite brands in the

world. In our conversation, we discuss his humble beginnings, making clothes by hand in a shed with no heating and founding Gymshark at the age of 19. And this was the moment where it hit home because we went from doing £300 a day as an issue in revenue to £30,000 in the first half an hour of the website being live. How he built a viral brand and tips for getting started with entrepreneurialism. So please feel free to grab a cup of tea and enjoy the conversation.

Ben, thank you so much for joining in the apartment. Welcome to the podcast, to the channel, whatever we're going to call this. Thank you for having me. I've been watching you for a long, long time, so it's a bit surreal to actually be here. But thanks for having me. I mean, that feels very bizarre because I've been following you for a long, long time as well. I think Gymshark came on my radar about like four years ago, five years ago, something like that. Mm-hmm.

I just fell in love with the clothing line. And then when I saw that like a Gymshark athletes were a thing, it sort of became a thing in my mind that, oh, you know, one day I'd love to be a Gymshark athlete.

Just as a sort of something to work towards. So it feels very surreal that we're sitting here now having this conversation. I saw something interesting on your Wikipedia page when I did a bit of a stalk, which said that your very first business was selling license plates. What was the story there? So when I was a kid, our next door neighbor, who's some of my closest friends, basically

my best friend and his dad they were just massively into cars number plates all that sort of stuff for whatever reason and um there was this bit where i think they moved into a new style of number plate and you could sort of spell names quite easily

And he would basically sell them, he would buy and he would sell them. And at the time, because I knew how to make websites and stuff, he sort of came to me and he said, can you make a website for this? And long story short, we ended up working together on that and selling plates for a few years. And it went quite well, to be fair. It was quite fun. And it wasn't like...

a direct passion of mine. It's something I just fell into because he couldn't take things online and it was something that I knew about. Nice. How did you get started with the website stuff initially? Ooh. So I was really looking. So when I was a kid, I was doing my GCSEs and I wasn't particularly great at school. Not that I wasn't, I wasn't like a naughty kid or whatever. It's just for whatever reason, it didn't identify with me particularly well and I probably didn't put enough effort in and then as a result didn't get good enough grades.

When I think it's 16 when you finish school. Yeah, I think 16 finishing school I basically ended up getting into sixth form but it was under the idea that I did I had to do English literature as one a level I did business as one a level And they asked me to do English for some reason cuz I just happened to do well It was the water. It was probably the one subject where I didn't have to apply myself to do well, which was weird business studies and I did a B tech in IT and

Now the BTEC and IT was life changing for me because anyone that's, I mean, I'm not sure how it works now, but the old sort of rule of thumb was A-levels was more test oriented, BTEC was more coursework oriented. And for me, that was quite cool because it was like, it felt to me at the time, like a practical application of skill.

So in that one of the modules you had like your standard modules, but one of them was about web development and it was really cool for me because it was just a case of make a website and they gave us access to the Adobe Creative Suite and that was one

one of the most pivotal and life-changing moments for me because that's when I ended up learning. I think you could go down two routes. You either made a website on FrontPage and you made a website using Dreamweaver. And it just gave me that basic knowledge of web development. But because we got access to the whole creative suite, I then learned how to use Photoshop and Illustrator and all these different things, which

anyone that's made websites or anything on any sort of digital products will know that you can't just have a website without graphics and know how to make all these different things. So yeah, it was through IT, the BTEC IT, which I originally learned how to do things like that. Okay, that's really interesting. So my story is kind of similar.

It was IT classes in year eight when I saw one of the kids in the year above was leaving. And I saw that he'd gone to the Google homepage and he'd right clicked View Source and there was all this code floating around. And I was like, oh my God, this guy's a hacker. I need to understand how this code thing works. And then in ICT classes and then at break times and lunch times, because me and all my friends weren't nerds,

I'd go to the computer room and I started dabbling in web design as well. You know, started off in front page, pirated Dreamweaver, pirated Photoshop, sort of back in the day Photoshop, CS2, things like that. But I think it's so interesting how a lot of people I've spoken to who have ended up doing entrepreneurial things have started from the I knew how to make websites front.

Is that something that you've seen yourself? 100%. But it's because, and you see this in a lot of areas, right? It's because not that many people were doing it. Because I remember, because then the next step for me, which I didn't learn in IT, but I ended up learning myself, was app development. And I sort of,

it was around 17, 18 years old. I wanted to go into app development because no one else was doing app development. So web development was cool. But like it got to the point where it's almost like, you know, when you start to learn a new skill, you learn a lot really quickly. Then you get to a level, then it starts to slow down. And it felt like I'd sort of, I was at a crossroads. I can either double down on web development and really try and be great at it. It felt like everyone was doing it. Or I could try app development. I think...

It was like the Apple SDK, you paid 20, 30, 40 quid. I can't remember what it was. You pay the fee and it basically gives you access to like the SDK basically. So then I moved on to apps. So I think a lot of people did well out of websites sort of in our era because not that many people were doing it and there was so much opportunity. And then I think it went to apps and now it's sort of beyond that even. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, especially with websites and apps, and I think now things like TikTok and stuff are, where as an individual, you don't need to ask anyone's permission. You can just make something completely from scratch. So nowadays you have websites and later on apps. And now these days, I feel like the kids are less into websites and apps and just more into content. Once you have that confidence that you can make something from nothing, then the ideas start to flow like license plates. So the thing that fascinated me about the web, right, was...

And to be honest, it's still the case. So I think a lot of people, a lot of young kids now will look at the web, look at apps, look at social, and they'll think, well, it's all been done. Everything's been done. No ideas left, whatever. But there's so much opportunity. We'll look back at this period in 10, 20, 30 years time as like the moment of opportunity. The thing that I loved about the web, I'll never forget this. So when we first started the Gymshark website, we couldn't really get traffic there.

But we then found out that we could make thousands of products in the back end and call them all these different things and Google Shopping would index them right at the top of the page for free. And it's almost like you couldn't do it now, but there were so many little opportunities like that, little hacks probably too strong a word, but those little hacks and tricks that you could do to sort of get ahead. And I still think there's so many opportunities like that on all these different platforms that we're talking about. Okay, awesome. So you...

Learn how to do websites with the ITV tech. Then you started doing the license plate selling. How did that business go? It was all right. We did it for maybe a year or two. So I did it in that period where I was finishing school and then going into university with the guys. It was fun. It was a good learning experience. It was like...

It was basically your typical website. It was just a selection of pages which showed stock and then all of the sales would be done on email or on the phone. So again, it gives you that understanding of buying things, selling things, having websites. It wasn't a transactional website. You know, understanding deals on the phone, that sort of stuff. So it was like, it was a great learning curve for me. Okay.

Then what came next? You said app design came next. How did that happen? Yes. After that, it was just making apps. I learned everything I know about app design. I say I knew about app design because I wouldn't know where to start now. Everything I knew about app design on YouTube and I just watched different YouTubers and they would do tutorials. The first couple of apps, easiest thing I think to make was a web browser because it took 10, 15 minutes to make sort of thing. Made a couple of different web browsers.

And then this is where I started thinking, I sort of built up my skills and I could do different things. And I thought, right, how can I actually make this practical? And because by this point I was really falling in love with the gym and fitness, that's when I thought, right, maybe I could make some fitness apps. And again, very, very basic, like nothing extraordinary in any way, shape or form. But there were apps where you'd sort of go in and it would...

have workouts in the app and then you could go into the calendar section, hit save this five-day split and it would automatically populate your calendar with a workout basically and give you a little reminder to do it. And for me, it was less around almost like the product, but it was me, my sort of learning curve. And I had this aim of, right, I want to make an app and I want to make an app that I can get live on the store because Apple had, albeit fairly low guardrails, but they would definitely like double check that the app was sort of robust enough to go on the store. So I really wanted to be able to do that. And

made two web browsers, which was just basic as anything, two fitness apps. And it was basically just around getting in shape. Oh, wow. So was this while you were at university? It was either last year at high school, first year at uni. I think it was last year at high school. So you were like a full-time student doing like studying and stuff. And then on, I guess, weekends and evenings...

and school holidays just like messing around on a computer making maps. Which was great fun because like I said it just felt like you were doing stuff that no one else was doing. You were doing something that... because I just love the Apple brand and I would be that kid that would watch all of the keynotes when Steve Jobs would walk out and I was just like... I just adored him and the brand so much.

For me, it was like that thing of I just want to be involved in it any way, shape or form. And, you know, you'll know this as well as I do. Then you start learning something and it gets addictive. And then you start going on the forums and you're getting involved in the little communities. And I mean, to this day, I love being involved in all the different communities like from, I mean, at the time it was app development, web development. That was like motorcycles and fitness. But yeah, it sort of gave me a little bit of a home as well. Wow. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Yeah, that's really cool. So then you went to uni. What did you study at uni? So I went to Aston University and I studied business management. Okay. So I'm considering potentially doing a business degree at some point, maybe like an MBA. And a lot of people have said to me that maybe it's not particularly useful because once you've run a business, you learn a lot more about business by running it than by doing a degree. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think it depends. So we basically what we did at Aston is they have a common first year. I don't know how consistent that is across different universities. And then the aim of the common first year for all business students was to give you a solid grounding on everything. So you did a couple of modules on legals, accountancy modules, finance, maths, business, management, all these different things. So I actually think that gave me a great grounding there.

And it, albeit we did make mistakes in the early days, the fact that I knew about trademarks and how important it was, intellectual property, and had that basic knowledge, it actually really, really helped me. And I was confident enough and understood the different sort of classes of trademarks. I was getting trademarks early in, you know, Gymshark. So it definitely gave me a basic knowledge. But yeah, I do agree. I think if you are going to run a business, then you are going to. I think that's sort of slightly separate. You won't learn everything.

the things you would learn starting a business through a degree, but easily vice versa. Because running a business, you learn things as you do them. And the problem is, because you don't know what you don't know. So if you don't know that you need trademarks or strong IP, then you'll never think about it. Whereas the business course will actually give you that grounding. Yeah. So this is a problem we're having in our business right now, whereby I've sort of been making shit up as I went along for the last four years. And

We've now got a team of 12 people and we're trying to hire five more. And just even thinking, what is a director of operations? What's a director of marketing? Apparently that's a thing.

I just don't know what I don't know and it's only when I speak to people who run businesses and I describe my problems when they say, "Oh yeah, that sounds like you need a director of marketing." And I guess that's the sort of stuff that you got a kind of reasonable foundation in before starting Gymshark. Yeah, 100%. But I would also say that there's like this weird thing of there is a conventional way of running a business and there is a way that you'll be taught and that tends to be based on the old school business models.

Yes, having a grasp of what the different areas of a C-suite will do is very, very important. But equally, like in your business, you're doing something that really hasn't ever been done at a reasonable scale. Like granted, there's massive people, there's huge companies that will do similar sorts of things. But compared to where they'll be in 10, 20 years, it's completely incomparable. Yeah.

So I guess it's reasonable to make it up as we go along. The other thing as well, and I speak about this quite a bit. So I've been really lucky to be around some incredibly inspiring, talented and successful business people. Like running businesses far, far larger than Gymshark. And all of them to a degree are winging it. Genuinely all of them. So again, it's like I always think about it. And it hit me. It's going to sound weird, but it hit me when I first walked into the gym, right?

I was 15, 16 years old and I walked into the gym and I was trying to do a bicep curl and I didn't know what I was doing. I felt really self-conscious. You know, it felt like the whole world was looking at me and going, who's that kid messing around with those weights? But in reality, everyone was sort of working, like worried about themselves and they were all thinking the same thing. And some of them were probably looking at me thinking, oh, he knows what he's doing when he doesn't. And it's the same in many ways of business, right?

Granted, there's some incredibly talented people and they've learned a lot, but anything that's new, everyone is winging it and working out as they go along. Even up to the multi-billion dollar corporations. Yeah.

Have you got any examples of when you realized that that was a thing in the world of business? So basically, Gymshark has been built on Shopify since day one, pretty much. We ended up moving off Shopify. It didn't go very well. We moved back. And we've had an incredible relationship with them for a long, long time. And I'm really fortunate because...

Harley, who's now president and he was the chief operating officer for a long, long time at Shopify. There was a guy who ran Shopify Plus called Lauren. Brief conversations with Toby, who founded the business. And the fact that they sort of took us under their wing in many respects. And sort of I would ask Harley questions and he would be like, you know, I don't know, we haven't worked out either. And this is one of the largest, I think this is Canada's biggest company or one of Canada's biggest companies, like thousands of employees, such an inspiring group of people.

You know, there's other people that I've spoken to as well. There's a good friend of mine called Ajaz who runs a company called AKQA. Again, I would ask him questions and he's just like, you can just work it out sort of thing. There's not this prescriptive rule book like some of the greatest minds in the world might not know the answers to your problems because they're unique and they need to be solved in a unique way. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I had a similar moment. It was a few weeks ago. So we've got a guy on our team, Jakob, who helps out with marketing and stuff. And I was saying to Jakob, all right, Jakob, you know, we need this like, you know, dream director of marketing. I want to be able to basically say to them that we want to hit 3 million YouTube subscribers next year and they'll be able to come up with a strategy. And he was like, hmm.

I'm not sure they would. Because if you imagine a director of marketing, maybe they've got an MBA or something like that. But he was saying that, like, you know, you as the YouTuber, you know, far more about how to grow on YouTube. And these directors of marketing would be looking to you for how to grow their brands. And I was like, Whoa, but I just make it up as I go along. He was like, Yeah, but you know, people will literally hire you to be a consultant to tell them how to grow on YouTube, which just, again, speaks to that thing that everyone's

Everyone's just figuring it out. It's true. It's true. And so we have a similar sort of thing where we were looking at marketing, but marketing is, it's so many different things to different people. We've actually moved it in a slightly different angle where we'll have like a chief of brand and then marketing sits elsewhere in the business because then we would split our organic approach and our more quantitative approach to marketing or like a paid approach. So,

Listen, everyone does things in different ways. And equally, I know companies that have a more conventional model that are wildly successful as well. So I just think it's what works for you. Yeah. And I guess part of it is, I suppose part of it is just like the semantics. Like, do you call it marketing? Do you call it brand? Do you call it strategy? Like for us, it's like we call it content because most of our content is, most of our stuff is content. But then do you call it product? Do you call it operations? All this kind of stuff. And I think the boxes do have their place, but also just that recognition that, okay,

Does this department belong in operations or belong in marketing? Who cares? The point is they're researching content ideas. Exactly. When you get to the nuts and bolts of it, that's what you need to be thinking about rather than just the names. One thing I'm curious about, I saw you did a video about Black Friday, I think it was last year, where there was a lot of references to how you were working very closely with Shopify. And that seemed really interesting to me because obviously I've been following Shopify for years.

And I know of Shopify's, I pay $29 a month and I figure it out and do it myself and I message their support once in a while. But it seems you guys have a much more like integrated, like,

What does that look like at Gymshark scale working with a company like Shopify? So I think one, so we're very culturally aligned with Shopify. The way that Gymshark and Shopify works is very, very similar. And there's periods in time where there'll be a group of people from Shopify will fly over from Canada and spend time working in the Gymshark office, particularly around Black Friday and sort of sales periods. And you wouldn't know, they wouldn't stick out. Do you know what I mean? It's like everyone's very, very similar. Because Gymshark has...

very, very high levels of traffic anyway. And we have super high levels of traffic around times like Black Friday. For whatever reason, Gymshop becomes super attractive around those sorts of times. I think it's because we tend not to do too many sales.

Now, because the spikes are so high, there's been periods in the past where we've broken all of Shopify's records in terms of people jumping on the website in a moment. So we basically need people on hand to make sure that the website is running in a robust way because we've had periods in the past where it has fallen apart and hasn't gone well. So what will tend to happen, so Black Friday that's just gone, Shopify will send a group of individuals over and we'll be managing the website live in our office. Obviously, there'll be Shopify staff, so they'll have access to all of Shopify's systems.

And then you'll have the Gymshark guys sort of next to them managing our side of things as well. It's amazing. That would be quite exciting. It's like mission control. It's incredible just to see it all going on because a lot of the sort of extra things and add-ons that we have onto our website and a lot of even some of our analytics tools in real time will break just due to the amount of traffic that we're receiving in that moment. Wow.

Okay, that's pretty cool. I guess when you get to that level of scale, you're starting to solve these sorts of problems. That's stuff that I never thought we would have to solve for. But yeah, Shopify is such a great platform. And that's why it works for us is they do really support us and help us during those sort of peak periods. Nice. Yeah, I actually got an email from one of their marketing people the other day being like, hey, we want to work with you about entrepreneurship content. I was like, yes, that's cool. Yeah.

Sweet. So if we go back to kind of you were doing the apps around fitness. Yeah. When did Gymshark become a thing like relative to the app design stuff? So it was 2012 when the company was founded.

And the reason it was started was one, I wanted a website that would transact. So before that, I'd made the basic number plate website. I've done all these different basic apps. I messed around with a few WordPress websites, fitness forums, tried to make a little fitness social network. It was all just a bit messy. It wasn't particularly great. And then it was like, right, I've done all these different things. Let's do a website that will transact. That's where I stumbled upon Shopify.

I wish I could find one in 2012. That would have been really early days for them. It was early days, very basic. But it was just, again, it was just a simple solution of transacting online, which was great for us.

Now, because essentially there was the time wasn't taken up with massive hours on development. Then we were really thinking carefully about the product and I really wanted to be involved in fitness by any way that I could. And at the time I was massively into supplements. I think anyone that first gets into the gym, you're like looking at all the different nutrition, you hear about how important it is. And I went to a mate of mine worked at a local company and he

I said to him, I want to stock supplements on the website. What's your minimum order? The minimum order was 8,000 pounds for supplements. Now, I'd never heard of 8,000 pounds, let alone seen 8,000 pounds at the time. I was at Pizza Hut on, it was four pounds something an hour. It was just, I wouldn't have been able to afford that. So I sort of sat down and now sort of the term dropshipping, you know, it's, I think it's a term that a lot of people will understand. And for those of you that don't, it's basically you don't hold stock.

um someone orders from you and basically you act as a middleman someone else ships it out to the customer now at the time i'd never heard of drop shipping but i had this sort of idea of okay so i've got limited knowledge of a website and i know around how google works i know that i want a large website i want it to be broad i want a vast product array i want lots of pages i want it to index well in google it's brand new it's it's not going to be seen otherwise

So what I did was I drop shipped loads of supplements from the Gymshark website, filled it up with loads and loads of supplements, wasn't making great margin, but it was again, if we're looking back to the bar that was set, the very low bar of, I want to be involved in fitness and I want a website that transacts. So I'd sort of filled that right, even though we didn't own the stock.

Did that for a while and took a few months, got a sale. First sale, I was dancing around my bedroom like it was the best feeling ever. First sale as in someone bought a support? Yeah, someone bought something online. Oh, okay, after a few months? Took about two months to get the first sale. Oh, bloody hell, okay, that's a long time. It's at the point where you almost forget about it. It's like running the background. I think we were paying Shopify a few quid a month. The domain cost me £3.50. So my investment costs would have 20 quid round numbers, as a guess. So you sort of forget about it.

Got the sale and I was just buzzing. It was a £50 sale and we made £2 profit on it, but it was a sale. Did that, kept going, started to get the odd sale, like a sale every week and so on. And basically I bought a tank because I was obsessed with bodybuilding. I wanted to be, I'd sort of realised I was never going to be a footballer. I wanted to be a bodybuilder.

So I bought this tank online, like an Arnold Schwarzenegger style stringer tank and it just completely drowned me, basically fell through the middle of it because it was built for a big bodybuilder, not someone like me with more of a slender frame. So at that point I thought, right, I would love for us just to make our own clothing because no one makes the clothing that we want. Conveniently, my nan was doing a curtains course, my mom knew how to sew, local lad knew how to screen print, so saved up, bought a screen printer and a sewing machine and started to hand make the clothes from there.

So you went from supplements to clothes? Yes. Because you saw a problem that you wanted those clothing that looked a certain way. It was like a selfish problem, right? I wanted this stringer. I looked terrible in it. I was looking around online. No one was making the product that we wanted. So we did it and it was at that weird time, right, where I loved the California bodybuilding aesthetic. A lot of the American product just wasn't really coming over to the UK and that that was, it didn't fit in the way that we wanted.

Things over in Europe and the UK were starting to get a lot more fitted and tapered. It was that, you know, top man too for 10 pound era when everyone wore skinny jeans and little tight tops. So it was like that weird morphing of, okay, so I want to be able to look like a bodybuilder, but I just haven't got the size. This was like the fashion over here. So all of a sudden the idea came, how great would it be to make fitness wear that would really accentuate your physique and taper yourself in? And that's when we started to hand make the clothes. Okay.

So what was the trajectory then? So you start hand making the clothes. When did things start to really take off? I would guess 2015. Okay. About 2015, so about three years in. And that was when we did our first Body Power, our first event basically. And that was the trigger point where all of a sudden it went from being this thing that I did from 10pm to 1am to I'm now going all in on this. Okay. And it was around that first event that we did. What happened at that first event?

So as a kid, so about 20 minutes from where I grew up, there's the Birmingham NEC, so it's a large event space. And every year they would do an event called Body Power. So my heroes, these American lifters, bodybuilders, they would all fly in. Everyone would have a huge fitness event once a year. So I would go as a kid. And the one year that we went, which would have been 2014, I believe, 2013, 2014,

And I was walking around and Gymshark existed. And this time it was sort of dropshipping supplements. We're in that bit where I'm about to buy the screen printer and sewing machine. And I'm walking around and I'm just thinking, Gymshark has to be here. Like, which was mental because we had no stock at the time. There was no physical manifestation of Gymshark. And I just had this...

gut-wrenching feeling that we had to be here by any means necessary. So I'm walking around and I'll never forget it because I'm in a bit of a rush because I'm there on the day and I know I've got my pizza at shift at five and it was coming to like three o'clock and I'm thinking right I need to sort of make an action here and do something because I need to get to work.

And I've gone to the show office and funnily enough, the guy that runs it, who's now a friend of mine called Ollie, and there was Steve as well, who were there. And I just said, right, I want a stand, cheapest stand you can get. Give me a stand. I want to be here next year. What's the price? And it was three grand. Again, three grand was a hell of a lot of money, but now it was more reasonable that within 12 months I could earn 3000 pounds because I had the job. Gymshop was starting to get a few sales.

It wasn't crazy. So there and then booked into the stand, followed it up on email, got it going. And over the next year, Gymshark started, we started hand making the clothes, we started getting regular sales. We actually started to become a profitable business. So upgraded the stand, started to work more closely with some of my heroes who were YouTubers. And we basically brought those guys to this event. So we'd stumbled upon

the market mix that many online people use today, right? We'd had a product that was only available at this event. We'd accidentally built scarcity because we turned the website off while we were there. Not through a strategic decision, but because we weren't hand-making the clothes, we had to turn the website off because otherwise people might order and not get them sent.

We flew these YouTubers in who were, again, not strategic, just our heroes and I just really wanted to meet them. Then we would go to this event and we were starting to build a community because at the end of each day, we would just go and lift down the road in Ironworks in Birmingham and just get a lift in with me, my friends, the athletes, the local fans, and we were building this community.

As we were doing this lifting and whatnot, people were taking pictures, they were putting on Facebook and the brand started to go viral without us really knowing. So the event went incredibly well, we completely sold out of everything. And then after the event, turned the website back on. And this was the moment where it hit home because we went from doing 300 pound a day as an issue in revenue to 30,000 pound in the first half an hour of the website being live.

And he just went, it was like boom, overnight. And going back to that, like the website, everything was set to infinite stock because we would never get enough sales to ever trouble the scoreboard. So I'm there at one o'clock in the morning, scrambling on my laptop, trying to turn all the stock to zero to cancel everything off because we were just getting so many sales.

And there was a point where everything's out of stock on the website. I've closed my laptop. It's one o'clock in the morning. There's 30 grand's worth of outstanding sales. And that was the moment where I was like, wow, I'm onto something here. Something is really going to kick off with this company. What did that feel like? Can you remember your thoughts and feelings at the time as this sort of your 100x-ing basically overnight? So that was the period where...

Sort of like I dropped out of uni like the week before. You know, I was starting to really dig in. So I felt like I was then taking, albeit not massive, it didn't feel like massive financial risk, albeit, you know, the stand cost everything that we had to fly the YouTubers over, everything we had. We'd risked everything we had several times. But it was, I don't know, I just felt really excited to be honest. And the thing that we did well, which I'm really proud of,

is we didn't rest at that point. We did one great event. So then the next year we did two. The next year we did five and we just went and went and went and we kept spending everything we had on punts that we thought might come off, but stuff that our gut told us was the right thing to do. Nice.

So between let's say 2013 and 2015, like before this event, how were people finding the supplements and the clothing? Like what sort of marketing, if any, were you guys doing? So Facebook was massive at the time, YouTube and Google were the main three things. So it was the whole Google shopping thing was massive for us. There was a change where all of a sudden you had to pay for your spot on Google Shopping, which sort of affected us.

It's sort of like a bit of an evolve or die moment. So then that was the point where we actually started getting involved with a little bit of paid advertising. Facebook, Instagram wasn't really a thing. So yeah, Facebook, YouTube and Google. So Facebook is in Facebook groups or Facebook ads? Facebook pages was the thing at the time. Oh, it was a thing. So there was a Gymshark page which everyone would comment on. I mean, we ended up building up to well over a million followers, which at the time was just huge. Yeah, that's insane. And that was back in 2015, 2016. Okay. Okay.

Okay. And then on YouTube, what was the thing of like sending product to people and what was the strategy there? Yeah, so this is the thing. So we didn't, we've not really done too much on YouTube. And at the time, so it was going back to My Heroes, it was those guys that were great YouTubers. I say great YouTubers. Matt, who was the biggest at the time, had 20,000 subs, which is...

Like today's numbers are quite small. They're our heroes. They're uploading regularly on YouTube. I would love, I remember thinking like Lex Griffin, who's one of the first athletes, he lives up in Manchester. I remember thinking, I'd love Lex to try on our top, try on our tank and give us some feedback. And then he just happened to wear it on YouTube. And that's where I think YouTube really kicked off for us.

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And the first 200 people to sign up with that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you Brilliant for sponsoring this episode. And so while all this was happening, you were working at Pizza Hut? Yes, so I ended up quitting pizza around the event. Around the event when things really started to take off. Yeah, and I quit pizza and university around the same time. So it was a little bit like, I remember my mum and dad being a little bit like,

Are you sure this is what you want to do? And it's like, yeah, I'm going to go and give it a go. So one of the questions I get all the time, and I know you've recently done a video about this, is like, how do you have time to do all these things? So, you know, early days of Gymshark, you're running this business on the side, you're working at Pizza Hut, you're at uni. Like, what was your time management looking like at the time? Well, I just want to say, so my time management then and now are vastly different, just completely different. So back then it was...

University, which I mean, university, it's like it's not like a solid nine till five, is it? Like you'll have busier days and quieter days. So basically university in the day, pizza shifts would always be five till ten. Normally half ten, latest eleven by the time you sort of washed up because as a driver, you do the pot wash when you're in the building. And then it would be ten or eleven onwards, I would work on Gymshark.

now as Gymshark started to grow we'd have live chats emails and stuff so Pizza Hut was great for me because I could do a delivery then sit in my car respond to two or three emails and then carry on so I'm doing two things at the same time and that was that period where I think it was the iPhone 3GS I think it was my first iPhone and I got my hands on one and I'm like buzzing because I can literally work on the go so I was like almost doing two jobs at once whilst I was at Pizza Hut which was absolutely brilliant for me nice

- Nice. And what does your time management look like now? - Incredibly well just scheduled, organized everything down to the second. It's actually really cool. And for me at the start, it was really difficult to get used to 'cause I just loved the whole thing of doing whatever the hell I want when I wanted to do it. But now I've learned to be really disciplined and essentially, 'cause I am horrifically unorganized, essentially outsourcing that to people who are incredibly well organized and absolutely love doing that sort of stuff.

It's great for me because I basically wake up and it's like a set of train tracks, right? Every minute pretty much from seven or eight in the morning tends to be planned until seven or eight in the evening. So what does that look like on a standard day? Like what does a day in the life of Ben Francis look like? It varies so much. It's well different now because I'm not traveling. So it's actually really, it's simple because it's like there's one moving part whereas before moving around, we've got offices in Hong Kong, Mauritius, Denver, events that we would do all over the world. It was manic. Now it would be, I'd usually...

I usually try and get into the office around 7:30, 7:30, basically just meetings throughout. It could be there'll be a particular day, for example, with one-on-ones in the team, so people that I work directly with. There'll be certain projects that I'm working on, and then we may be on, there'll be certain days allocated to those things. Once a week or every other week, I'll be in London, so they'll sort of batch up the London meetings and do all the London meetings on a particular day.

I'll get involved with all sorts of different things, whether it's content on my YouTube. The only thing I would say is now it's changed because I'm moving into a CEO role. So I'm now just one step slightly more removed, whereas previously it would be product or brand, whereas now I'm chatting with the people that are doing those things, which is, again, just a slightly different thing to get used to. Okay. And we'll come back to the CEO thing in a bit because I really want to kind of explore that.

So going back to sort of imagining 2014, 2015 before the NEC show, what did the team look like in Gymshark? There was myself and Lewis who started the business. There was my brother. So in around 2015, I think it was my brother. So basically my brother was the first employee and the whole thing of Joe joining the business was we're at the event, we need someone back at the...

the ranch to sort of manage the stock. And then that was it really like a few friends ended up joining and doing, you know, bits here and there. But it was just, everyone would just get involved in everything. Like if there was a busy day, we would jump on customer service. Like everyone would finish the end of the day, sat in a circle on their laptops and they would answer customer queries. So it really varied. I just remembered, by the way, it was 2012, not 2015 that we did that first event, 2012, 2013. So it was around that sort of era. Okay.

So you had sort of a team of maybe three or four people. Yeah, so it was in that first event, it was like two or three. And then as it developed, then it was like, okay. And then we started to invest more in the warehouse because we had our own warehouse and we would ship our own product. Then people would basically manage customer service and deliveries and stuff. At what point did you get the warehouse? Like that must have been a big expense. Yeah, so 2012, 2013, just before that first event, that was when we got like a shed basically. Right, okay.

Okay. So it was actually not particularly great. It was a shed on an industrial estate. And I didn't realize until about three or four months in, the whole thing was built out of asbestos. Oh, no. And like the bloke next door, like this lovely lad, like 80 years old he was. He was just like drilling through the walls, through the asbestos walls. And all asbestos was just flaking everywhere. So...

That's probably not great for my health. So it was an old asbestos shed in the middle of nowhere on an industrial estate. And it cost us about 300 quid a month, I think. 250, 300 quid a month. Then after that, we ended up going into a more professional sort of place. We went from, that was 300 square feet. And then the next one, we actually upgraded to a 3,000 square foot warehouse. And what was great about that is it had a small room at the front of it with a radiator in. And if anyone's worked in like a shed through the winter, it was great.

ice cold to have a radiator was amazing because what we used to have to do we'd have the front door of our old shed we'd leave the door open and we'd stick a diesel ceiling heater in there so you go over next door you get your diesel from the pump and you basically you'd fill it up and then it would just blast heat in there but again

Sat in an asbestos shed with a diesel heater blowing at you is not the most exciting way of spending your late teenage years or early 20s. So to have a radiator was game changing. The radiator was game changing, right. And I guess, was it you and your mates making the clothes? Yes. Like hand making the clothes? Yeah, yeah. Like getting cloth and like cutting it up? Yeah, so the sewing would be done at home, essentially. And then we would print generally at the, I don't know what you call it, warehouse. Wow.

So when you're in those early days and you're investing in things like the radiator, the warehouse and stuff. Yes. What's going through your mind in terms of like the profitability of this? Like... Don't think about anything like that. Didn't think... I had no idea how to pay taxes. I had no idea about finances. All we knew was more was coming in than was going out. Okay. And...

Everything beyond that is just at the time it was fluff clearly now. That's not the case But it was everything was purely instinctive everything at the start. I

So you start off as like a band of brothers, like a handful of people in a shed. A radiator is a game-changing addition to the business. And now GameShark is a billion plus dollar company. You're the new CEO of it. How many employees do you have? We're just over 700. 700. And you sell all over the world with offices all around the world.

That's going to feel pretty wild. It's cool. Honestly, I still walk into the HQ. So we've got this gorgeous HQ, and there's the big logo on the front. Over the road, we've got our lifting club. We've got a gym, manufacturing facility, studios.

I do walk in and like I do still get goosebumps because it's such an amazing place and there's a buzz like you've got to visit because as soon as you walk in the door there's a buzz there and everyone's lovely everyone's pulling in the same direction everyone really understands why we do what we do everyone understands the area that they sort of fit in with that sort of wider plan it's such a lovely place to be so it's interesting you say that like everyone's pulling in the same direction because I think I feel like

This is an issue we're having as we expanded from three people to 12 people, whereby I'm now starting to do things like defining our vision and where do we want to be in X number of years and KPIs and goals and all this stuff that in the past I would have thought this is all just corporate bullshit. Who cares about any of that? Presumably, like...

What was your journey through kind of being more businessy about it? - So what you're going through, yeah, so we did that. I used to hate the word corporate. And you're going through, reading between the lines, what I actually think is the most difficult change, and I think this is one of the most difficult things for any entrepreneurial business person. And by the way, not even owning your own business, if you're running or working in a great business, it's so difficult to sort of distribute that control.

I think those that can do that, then after that, it's not plain sailing, but if you've then done that, it's like a muscle memory, right? If you continue to do that, I think scaling becomes so much easier. So my sort of breakdown, I sort of break it down into three areas. And I think every great business person needs to reinvent themselves over and over again. So you can't become too like tied in or emotionally attached to sort of, I'm going to say who you are in many respects. So at the start, I found that,

I had a great creative vision. I had a great idea of where I wanted us to be. And I felt like I dragged the business to where I wanted us to be. And that sounds a bit sort of direct, but, you know, it could be having a great creative vision. It could be great at knowing products. It could be great at whatever it is. But you, because you tend to be a one man band or there's not many people involved, you just do what the hell you want when you want. And it's very instinctive.

Now, you'll then get to a stage where you've got people around you. It might be five people, it might be 10 people, it might be 30 people. And an instinctive way of running things is still great, but you can't just do things on a whim because you fancy it. You have to then learn to work in a team. And I don't mean, when I say in a team, I mean you are part of the team and anyone that's managed a team knows that

that the team doesn't work for you, you work for them. And you need to make sure that you're really understanding how to work with each different type of people, person. So some people will love to be organized and they will love lots of different catch ups. And, you know, some people will be highly creative. Some people will be highly logical. Some people you'll have to spend six weeks trying to buy them into a new idea. Some people have to spend six seconds. And it's about learning how to work with all these different people. So you've gone from dragging the business to where you wanted it to be, learning to work with new people.

And then that's, it sounds like to a degree what you're going through slash the next stage, which is like, okay, you know how to work with people. How do we galvanize them around a vision or a mission? How do we make them understand where they fit in with that? How do we make them understand that, you know, the team that we're working with touch wood is greater than the sum of its parts and really understanding how to articulate yourself and your vision and essentially learning how to inspire people. And I think that's, again, it's very tough and it's,

I hear people a lot of the time saying like, oh, you know, one facet of their personality. That's just me. What am I like? I'm a bit unorganized. Well, when you're at that level, there's no excuse for being unorganized. Like, yes, I am unorganized, but you do something about it. You either fix it yourself or you build the team in a way that negates that weakness. Does that make sense? I think it gets a bit more serious at that point.

And you have to learn new skills. And to be honest, that's why I love the job so much and feel like I've got the best job in the world because you're constantly learning new things and constantly reinventing yourself. It sounds like that's what you're going through now a bit. Yeah, it seems like a real shift in where my default used to be. I want to do something. All right, I'll do it. Now it's like, I want to do something. Okay.

Let's figure out why I want to do this thing. Let's figure out what the actual, what good looks like. Let's figure out who I can give this project to. Let's give them ownership over it in a way that they'll feel more motivated to do it. Let me kind of get out of the way and be there to kind of consult them if they need it, but not step on their toes too much. Do you know what the most exciting thing about that period is, right? You'll have it. There'll be a few things that will happen, and it happened to me. Someone will do something, you'll trust them with it, they'll do it poorly, and it will break your heart. Yeah.

But someone will do something that you didn't think was the right thing to do. And it will be infinitely better than any ideas that you would have come up with. And that is one of the most fulfilling and incredible experiences ever. Because then you're like, okay, now we're a team. Yes. Yes.

Yeah, I've had that a few times. I often describe this feeling when, because I teach people how to be part-time YouTubers. And one of the things I'm very bullish on is to outsource editing ASAP. And everyone is very resistant. Oh, but I like editing. I like doing it myself. I enjoy spending 20 hours a week doing my editing. And I'm like, look, guys,

the moment you add source editing, just that feeling when you upload raw footage of yourself mumbling through a video on Google Drive, and the next day you get back an edited video and it's actually really good. It just blows your mind and then you think, "Oh my God, my whole world is now open." And I guess what you're describing is that at scale when you have a team that can execute stuff. Exactly. Like I said, I love it. I love working with so many different types of people. And there was a point

a few years ago, basically, when I moved into a role as the chief marketing officer at Gymshark. And chief marketing at the time was all your quantitative marketing. It was all your social media. And it was all data. I remember going into this role thinking, love marketing, love social media, not a clue where to start with data. And to be honest, it sounds a bit boring. But I ended up working with a data team. And that ended up being the team I loved working with the most because they would run rings around me at the start. And I would come in with all my...

stupid, irrational ideas that just made no sense and would have flopped instantly. And they would challenge me and it made me a better person. And in terms of sharpening up my ideas and my concepts, but equally, it meant I learned the power of what they do and you know, the validity of it. So it was massively fulfilling to me to work with a team that I didn't expect to enjoy working with or be good at working with and to be able to do that. Nice.

So when you're the kind of founder of the business and like the owner of the business, how did you kind of get to that point where your role was chief marketing officer rather than straight to CEO? Like what was going through your mind there? So we started to, the business grew rapidly, right? We went from, I mean, we've gone from bedroom to half a billion dollar revenue in eight years, I think it was. It was like,

rapid rapid growth so during that growth period it becomes very evident that things start breaking if you don't have great people to manage these things so we what we started to do was we built essentially a chief's team of individuals that manage and run the different areas of the business so a chief products officer chief brand officer you know uh people finance all these different things and it's it's just through necessity it's less of a case of listen i think i i

huge applause to a business that can see ahead and build that team out in front of themselves. We were just at the point of, we need strength in this business, otherwise things are gonna fail. - Okay, and so when you were bringing people on, you were bringing on like C-level people.

For like executive roles and for the people in HR and finance and legal and the whole shebang. And it was a balance, right? So some people we were bringing in with brilliant experience. And then we were also identifying great people in the business that were hugely devoted to the business, incredibly intelligent and competent that would then basically be able to make that leap up to that level as well. So there's a brilliant blend of sort of experience and inexperience in that team as well. How?

How did you, because I guess you were the one doing the hiring initially. Yes. How did you get, and I ask because this is a problem I'm having, how do you hire for a role that you don't have experience in where you're trying to hire someone who is good at that role? If you get what I mean. Yeah, so I was really lucky. So our sort of current sort of outmoving CEO, Steve,

He joined the business purely on gut instinct because it felt like he was the right person to be in the business. And conveniently, he was brilliant at all the things that I was bad at. So that one hire then allowed every other hiring finance, ops, logistics, all the back end of the business then went through him rather than the front end ones that went through me. So it was like one solve for everything beyond that, which was massive. So what were you looking for when you hired Steve? What was his role initially?

So I wanted someone that would basically help, we're going to say, professionalize the business. Because at the time, it was just there was no hierarchy, no structure. A group of people that went in, did a bit of brand on the morning, a bit of social media, event here and there, package on the evening, answer your emails and go to bed. It was literally just carnage and chaos. Yeah.

as I think all businesses are in the early days. And then he came in and he had genuine corporate experience. However, it didn't come across like corporate experience. He wasn't like, you know, your typical corporate guy, suited and booted sort of thing. He'd worked in Reebok.

But he also, even though he didn't understand social media particularly well, he understood the power of brand and growing a robust business and a great brand. So we sort of got comfortable with him and he ended up doing, I think it was a day a month and two days a month and three days a month. And it was a very organic business.

sort of shift into him joining the business full time. Oh, so he started off as like a coach consultant type. Yeah, exactly that. So it wasn't like boom, you're in the business every single day. And that really, really helped us because it allowed us to get comfortable with him, him to get comfortable with us and just to get to know one another. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because I've got a couple of kind of business coaches type people now who are mentors who've been doing this for a few years.

And I meet with them maybe once every other week. And every time I talk to them, it's like, oh my, my mind gets blown by just all of the stuff that, all of the unknown unknowns I just didn't realize. Things like restructuring our organizational chart and how when you have the, there was a time, I think it was about two weeks ago, where I was chatting to this guy, his name's Rohan. And I was like, yeah, at the moment, this is what the business looks like. It looks like this. And it just felt a bit like a bit of chaos.

And within about half an hour, he just asked a load of questions. And we kind of on that whiteboard over there, just like drafted out this structure, which just made so much sense and brought so much clarity. I was like, I can't believe how much clarity I've now got in my mind from just drawing this diagram on a board. So good. It makes such a difference.

But you'll find like if when you work with genuinely brilliant people like that, they revolutionize like teams, businesses, brands, everything. Like so many people talk about all the different nuts and bolts of businesses and brands, but ultimately it's literally just people. It comes down to people. And it's so important that you understand how to work with people and, you know, work with great people. I am similarly, I was chatting to someone the other week and I was talking about that he was, he worked with one of the most successful business people of

sort of like my parents' generation. And I just said, "What do they do?" In a sentence, like,

Cut all the bullshit sort of thing. One sentence, what do they do really well? And they said they attracted great people and then left them alone. And I just thought that was so cool. And I think, you know, in its most simplistic form, that's what any great entrepreneur or business person does. And they do it in different ways. So some people attract through insane levels of competency. Some people do it through charisma. Some people do it for being an incredible creative or an incredible organizer or all these different things. But ultimately, it just does come down to that. Nice.

- Nice. Okay, so you were a chief marketing officer for how long, Jim Tronck? - God, I don't know. I haven't got a clue. A year, two years, something like that. - What was your role before then?

So I did chief of brand. Then I came out of brand, a guy called Noel did it. Then I sort of, I moved around and messed around with product for a little bit. And that was, that was a great period for me because that was where I was like really in the nuts and bolts. And I didn't actually have a job and I'll never forget this. We wanted to, there was a particular product that we wanted to make. And I was typically, I'm quite impatient. And,

It was a case of like, you can either wait for these guys for six weeks to make it, or we can jump on a train, a plane, fly over to Istanbul, spend a week in Istanbul, sit in the factories and make it. I'm like, too fucking right. I'm doing that. Do you know what I mean? So it was like that sort of really impulsive role, product, brand, moving around, events. I then went from that into the chief marketing role. Marketing was great because I worked with social, which I had done anyway. I worked with the data team and really understood data.

And then I went from there into, I did Chief Product Officer for a little bit, a little bit of work in tech, and this is where I am today. So when you're, like, this is your company, right? So are you applying for the position of CMO or are you just saying, Steve, I want to be CMO? What does that look like? Yeah, so it depends. So some of them, so CMO, I was definitely the right person for the role. Okay.

I went into product out of necessity. I wasn't like I mean in terms of immediately available basically we found someone we did the whole interview process we found someone who was brilliant but they had like a really long period of time before they could join the business so it was it was like it was like a 12-month period basically where no one does the role or I do the role so it was more out of necessity marketing and brand it was like it was my bag products and then my limited time in tech it was more out of necessity if I'm honest. Okay.

And then so this transition for you now being CEO, what's the story there? What's that been like so far? It's been amazing. So two years ago, Steve mentioned to me that he thought Gymshark needed a different type of CEO to take it to that next level. At the time, I didn't think he was right. Now I do. So he's got great foresight there. So I then spent two years

working as best I could to get into a position where I was the right CEO because again Steve would basically say like you need to be he genuinely thought I was the right person and competent enough to do the role but I needed to really prove it

And the alternative was to hire someone else. Now, fortunately, I got to the level of being able to do the role. So two years of making sure I could speak publicly, talk to camera, understand a profit and loss properly, understand long-term strategic decisions and working with teams and all that sort of stuff, which again, going to the different chiefs roles that I've done, it gave me incredible grounding across the business, which really helped. And then more recently, the sort of official transition started May 1st and it completes August 1st. And we're here.

We're what, July now, middle of July. So I'm about two or three weeks away from like officially completing that handover. So two years worth of kind of like training to be the CEO. Yes. I've like every single day, like writing a list of things I need to do, working towards them. The wallpaper on my phone would talk about the things I need to get better at. Just every single day working towards that.

And I guess like... But weirdly not being able to tell anyone, which is like really weird. So I'm not really wanting to tell anyone either. Yeah. No.

Why didn't anyone tell you? So listen, I'm more than happy to talk about my ambitions usually, but the CEO one, I didn't want people to go, oh, Ben's just going to get it because he wants it. So I think it was literally a case of this is Steve's decision. It is solely Steve's decision. So I didn't want that to be, you know, out there as it were. I wanted to almost like work on my craft in silence and then almost people then almost be going, Ben, you should be doing that role rather than me telling them. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

- I guess you must care about the brand a lot to not put yourself in that position just by default and knowing that you've got all these weaknesses that you wanna work on. - Yes.

Well, clearly it's like my baby, isn't it? I love it more than anything. Yeah. Yeah. Because that was the thing that I was most intrigued by when I first started stalking you a few years ago. I was like, "Oh, I would have just assumed you were the CEO." But now I think that I've got a bit more experience in business and I wouldn't want to be a CEO right now because I know that it would just be an absolute shit show. So this is the thing, and I talk about this a lot, right? So Steve came in and he was the best person to be the CEO.

So anyone that has an interest in self-development would jump at this chance because usually there's a decision where you focus on your strengths or you work on your weaknesses. And it's very difficult to do both in like an efficient way.

because Steve was so good at all my weaknesses and running the business, I could focus on my strengths and then have a go at my weaknesses when I want, knowing that Steve would basically fix anything that I wasn't good enough at. So I could

Steve would do a lot of the, all of the profit and loss sort of work, but then I could just mess around and ask questions and learn as I go. So the best way I liken it to is like, I could focus on my strengths and on my weaknesses, I could just keep taking the same exam again and again and again until I got the grade that I wanted. 'Cause I could just try again, fail, try, fail, try, fail, try, fail. - Yeah, 'cause I think like right now, one of the things I'm struggling with in the business is this thing of, do we hire people with experience? 'Cause right now our team is very young, where it's like,

And I've kind of brought them on for... In that, apart from... I think apart from Christian, our editor, like, no one on the team is, like, I think, better than me at doing the thing because it's like I was doing the thing initially and then I delegated to them. And that was sort of out of necessity at the start when we didn't have much money and didn't have much revenue coming in. And so you have to kind of get people on the cheap, as it were, like at entry-level positions. But now that...

where a bit more profitable, it's a thing of what my business coach says is you really want to hire, for example, a managing director or like a marketing director or director of operations who has five, 10 years experience.

Because you won't know what that is like, but when you have the right person there, it will just be like such a breath of fresh air. Yeah, you want, I'm a firm believer you want the opposite true. You want everyone in their respective area to be better than you are. And you just amalgamate those people and, you know, look at longer term strategies and visions and, you know, build a cohesive team. Okay.

But like if you're the best editor in the business, then the business is only as scalable as you are. If you're the best, do you know what I mean? You need to be able to really think about that. And then when it comes to like, let's say we were to bring someone in with experience and they would sort of come in at a level above other people who've been in the business for the last two years. How do you deal with that? Like, was that like weird? Very difficult. Yeah. Very difficult. Because what tends to happen as well is,

like people will come in and they'll be there from the start. And that's an incredible thing to do. And some of them will be able to grow with the business and some of them won't. And it's not, you know, it's not negative or positive on them. It's just the way it is. And,

Like, reading between the lines, it sounds like your business is elevating itself up a level. And anyone that's into football will know that teams that get promoted from the Championship to the Premiership generally try and hold on to the spine of the team and the core of the team. But ultimately, there's a lot of changes that have to happen for that team to then succeed in the Premier League. It's very rare. A Championship team gets promoted to the Premiership and succeeds by maintaining the same team.

So it sounds like you're almost the championship team getting promoted to the Premier League and you need to. By the way, experience doesn't necessarily mean competency. So I wouldn't sort of, I'd try and separate those two things. And sometimes...

experience in certain areas can actually be a negative because then if they've done or if someone's done something in a particular way for a prolonged period of time it can be often very difficult and time consuming to try and move them out of their set ways so i would be cautious about that but ultimately you need to understand like i don't know pick five key facets of the business and then you need individuals that are better than you in every single one of those facets

And by the way, it takes a long time and it's very difficult. It's heartbreaking. It's gut-wrenching. It's filled with horrible conversations you will never want to have. But if you manage to do it, you as an individual will be incredible, incredibly competent and brilliant at so many different things. And the business and the team will be great on some of its parts. Nice. Okay. Yeah, that's a dream. So one thing I was going to ask you about, like you often hear, for example, people

tennis players that win Wimbledon at the age of 23 and now they've like made it and now there's no like they kind of get a bit depressed because you know that's the pinnacle like what more do you go for do you feel like you're in the position of having won Wimbledon at 23 I was really scared of that like legit no no would have liked I was really scared because what we did is when we when we when we did this deal and General Atlantic came in and helped tidy up the shareholding

I did, essentially I earned good money and I've done okay and I earn really good money now. And I was scared that, oh okay, so there is a point now, I'm at a point now where I'm going to be completely candid. I don't, you know what I mean, I don't need to work. I could comfortably retire happily. And I was really scared that when that happened that I would lose the hunger, genuinely. And I was really open-minded with myself that I would react accordingly to however I felt.

But I am absolutely buzzing that I'm more hungry now than I've ever been to the point where I have to really carefully control the amount of work that I take on because I'm still prone to, I will just take on the work, take on the work, take on the work. And like genuinely, I was worried about that. Why do you think it is that you're more hungry than you were? No idea. I think, no. So first and foremost, I do think it might not be, but it could be something to do with it being an eight. Grandparents run their own business. My parents are so ridiculously hardworking. Like they will like...

I speak to my grandparents about it. They work and they work and they work. I also think, and I'm really driven by this, I'm driven by the team that I work with and I want to do well for them and I want them to do well and I want them to succeed. I also think we've got a once in a lifetime opportunity. So I don't think, certainly in our generation, there's never been a brand that has had the opportunity to go from being, you know, a local brand or a national brand to a truly global brand.

and one of the greatest brands in the world. And I think we've got that opportunity. And I'd feel I would kick myself in 30, 40 years, 50 years time if we didn't do everything within our power to become one of the greatest brands on the planet. So it sounds like even from the start, like money wasn't a particular motivator for you. No, I mean, listen, it certainly helps and money gives you choice.

completely, but the reason that the business was started because I wanted to be involved in fitness. The reason or one of the reasons now it's around, I think we've got the chance to genuinely improve the world, improve people's lives. And I'm fortunate, right? I've traveled the world and I've met individuals that the brand has impacted and it's genuinely brought me to tears at times. It's incredible that feeling.

And I want more of that and I want it to impact more people. And ultimately, 16-year-old Ben walked into the gym and he didn't know what to do and he was massively self-conscious and skinny and felt very alone. And the thought of being able to take that away from other people and give them a community, an area to learn, a product that makes them feel like Superman, I think is amazing. What really strikes me about you and on the interviews I've seen and on your YouTube channel and stuff is that

you seem to like genuinely breathe the passion for the business because

I guess if I imagine another kind of billion dollar business, like for example, they would have like their vision. They would have like their model for, oh, we want to make the world a better place by doing X. Yes. And it can always feel a bit hollow because it's just like a corporate promise on their website. Yeah. But it sounds like you genuinely, like that is the thing that drives you. Genuinely love it. Like I said, I've stood in outside. I've been to every event that we've done. I love the large scale events. I've traveled the world and I've met people that have lost weight, built muscle, improved their mental health. And I,

I mean, I said at the start, like the product that we built at the start was it was for a selfish reason. It's because I wanted that product. And now it is. I think because I've had that experience myself of not knowing what to do, not being in a great place. And I've felt the positive effects mentally and physically of fitness. I would love other people to experience it. So, yeah, it just it really resonates with me.

I'm excited to hear more about your business, by the way. I want to see the structure you've drawn. Oh, yeah, I'll show you. I'm fascinated by what it will look like. Yeah, it's pretty simple, but it's like before it was so like kind of all over the place. And now it feels a bit more streamlined. Because in many ways, your business model is...

or it feels to me more pioneering than what we're doing because at least we've got we can lean back on retailers sportswear brands tech brands all these different things and amalgamate it into a structure I wouldn't know where to start with you yeah I mean the thing I've I'm looking at

recently is like TV and film production companies. Okay. Because ours is kind of a production company. Right. And like, what does it look like? And in fact, the new org chart, like before the way it was, it was organized was,

I was thinking, all right, well, there's me and then we've got Angus who's in charge of the YouTube channel. We've got Gareth who's in charge of the website. Jacob in charge of this. Sort of splitting things up based on the platform. So basically channel split. Yeah, basically channel split, yeah. Whereas now I think what makes much more sense is splitting it like a production company would in terms of pre-production, production, production. So pre-production is all of the idea generation and the writing. Production is...

me and a videographer, which is currently Angus, who's also a director of operations. And then post-production is our editing team. And just having that structure, it's like, oh, okay,

whether it's a YouTube video we make or a tweet thread or a blog post or even me writing my book or an online course or anything like that, it all has that pre-production, production, post-production. And therefore, if we've got Angus as director of operations managing that, then theoretically, I can give a vision through our marketing team or directly to our operations saying, hey, I want to make a course about this thing. Here is my vision for it. Let's make it happen. And then it goes through that kind of

pipeline of pre-production, production, post-production in theory. And is it all... So none of it's hardware, as it were. It's all software or it's content. It's all online. Yeah. Sort of tangible. We have a new... Like, have we got our productivity... I don't know over there. We're launching a line of stationery. Go on. This was a...

You're getting a sneak peek. This is like the proof versions. This is the part-time productivity planner. So why part-time productivity? What does that mean? Part-time productivity is that, so I think one of the problems, again, I'm solving a selfish problem. One thing I learned today. Yeah. That's like, where have I heard that before? Is that like the Benjamin Franklin sort of thing? Oh, quite, yeah. I think a lot of people do. Yeah.

This is cool. One of the issues I have with these sorts of planners is that when they've got dates in them, and if I miss a date, then I just get so demotivated and then I will never ever use the planner again and it's going to go in the bin. So this one crucially does not have any dates on it. So you can use it some days. You don't have to use it every day. But every seven days it gives you a weekly review. It says, all right, just reflect on your week.

And that might not actually be every seven days, you might not actually fill it in for seven days. But yeah, it's better than not doing any kind of reflecting at all. And you've got a 'might do' list as well, which are quite nice. I've never seen that before. Might do, yeah. I don't like to-do lists because it feels like, you know, I'm being a slave to my to-do list. Yeah. Whereas I call it a 'might do' list because it's like, oh, I could do this stuff if I wanted to. And then I feel more optimistic, like, yeah, why not? Why not? Why not?

I like that. That's cool. Amazing. So we're doing like a line of stationary, these sort of like daily to-do list pads if ideas instead. Oh, I was going to ask you about this. So these are some of my mantras, like journey before destination. It's the climb, Miley Cyrus. Yeah. And the theme, the kind of theme of the book that I'm writing is that

You know, it's core message is that productivity and getting things done is not really about working harder. And like the real secret, if there is one, is to learn to enjoy the journey of what you're doing. - Yes. - 'Cause when you're having fun, then productivity takes care of itself. - Yeah.

I was going to ask you, does that resonate with you? And do you have any examples from your life where having fun has led to productivity? Yes. So for me, it's split into two distinct areas. Things I love doing and I genuinely adore. And now, by the way, also within Gymshark, under the heading of Gymshark, because I love Gymshark so much, I would do anything within Gymshark because I just love it. And I love the fact that it speaks back to the greater sort of mission.

Now, within that, spend a day in product, love to. Fly over to a factory all day, go to an event, love it. Meet people, do you know what I mean? Meet athletes, all that. Absolutely adore every second of it. Now, would I spend my Sunday afternoons looking at operational strategies, profit and loss thing, do you know what I mean? Accountancy, finance stuff.

No, I probably wouldn't. Under the banner of Gymshark, then I again then sort of get extra enjoyment from it. The thing that's really helped me massively to motivate me to do the things in that second bucket of things I probably wouldn't enjoy as much is having an overarching goal. So again, when I had this thing in my sort of sight of I want to be a CEO,

Okay, a CEO needs to understand the customer, the product, and the brand. Fine, got it sorted. But also needs to understand finance and logistics, for example. So because I had this, one, it sat under the banner of Gymshark, and two, I had this broader goal of I want to be a chief exec, it gave me huge motivation to do those things. And all of a sudden, it was just so easy for me to spend hours on end learning about them because it spoke back to a goal that I had.

So I think I have to have a name. I have to have a reason for doing things. I'm not just going to learn about something for the sake of learning about it that I don't enjoy. Okay. Which I would do with other things. Yeah. Interesting. So like having that kind of purpose, that meaning behind the thing that you're doing makes the thing more fun. Yeah. And then, so what I did was I said, I want to be a CEO. I need to do X, Y, and Z. And then I would, I wouldn't, I've never been good at just like

battering something for like 12 hours straight. I would have to do just a little thing every single day. And then having that goal in my head, like the best example I can give was, I want to be a CEO. I'm terrible at public speaking. So I need to get better at public speaking. It's like one of my things was literally public speaking. And then I sort of navigate through life. And as I'm at an event, whatever, on the tube, chatting to people as you go, oh, what do you do for a living? Spoke to someone and they're like, oh, I'm a public speaking coach. And normally I'd be like,

If I didn't have the goal, it would be nice, have a lovely day, see you soon. But because I had this goal and it was in my list, I'm like, oh my God, I'd love to be great at public speaking. Can I take your number? Can we chat some more? Can I learn from you? So this is why I think it's so important to have that goal because then I think it helps with self-development. So I think it's like if you don't aim at something, you can't... I just don't think you can get... You can't just meander through life and expect to be something like...

You can't just roll around and expect to be a Premier League footballer. The Premier League footballers are Premier League footballers because they've worked every single day and they've dedicated their lives to it. So I think it's the same with any endeavour. And that's how I try to dedicate my learning now. Have you come across the law of attraction kind of stuff? No, I've heard about it, but I don't really know. Yeah, so there was this book called The Secret that was published, I think, a few decades ago that went viral back in the day. And the whole principle behind the law of attraction is that...

It's about like manifestation that if you if you really set a goal if you really believe something then The the law of attraction in the universe will like make it happen for you Yeah, then they kind of goes a bit overboard that you know If you've got cancer and you believe you don't have cancer then it will get cured magically You know, the only reason you're poor is because you just don't believe enough that your race. It's all yeah It's it's very very wishy-washy

But I think there is some truth to this stuff in that when you manifest, when you have a goal, like I want to become the CEO, you start seeing the opportunities that you wouldn't have seen otherwise. You see what you look for, don't you? Like the public speaking thing or, you know, when I decided I wanted to buy a Tesla, suddenly I started seeing Teslas everywhere. Everywhere, yeah. Because you just have that thing and so your brain turns on to the various options here.

So I think that's really cool. Honestly, I'm a massive, massive advocate for that. I think just whatever it is, just set a name. And the thing is that it's been really powerful for me is I haven't gone, I want to be a CEO, so I'm going to do these massive things. Like set the bar so low. And it's only now looking back, I've realized everything I've ever wanted to do, I've set the bar low. So Gymshark was started because I wanted to be involved in fitness. The website was built because I wanted a website that would transact. I didn't go...

I want a multi-billion dollar business as one of the greatest brands in the world. It was just those really little things. And by setting the bar low, it then allows you to take those baby steps because

Nothing great is achieved in the short term. It's over prolonged periods of constant progression. Okay, so what's your kind of low bar now these days now that you're CEO? Honestly, consistency. That's my biggest thing at the moment. I just want to be consistent. Steve gave me some advice coming into the chief exec role was he said you just have to be consistent. So I was absolutely knackered yesterday. I went and watched the football on Sunday.

Traffic coming out of Wembley was an absolute nightmare. I had about three hours sleep and I went in and I said if I do one thing today it is I'm going to be consistent through the day and I don't want anyone that sort of to notice that Benny's really tired today or whatever. I want to be consistent. So that's my low bar. Sick. All right. A few more kind of random unconnected things that I want to talk to you about. So

You're kind of like a celebrity now. I wouldn't say that. You're like famous in... What are the perks of that? Do you get cool stuff for being you? You get to meet amazing people. Like really, really cool people. Like this never would have happened. This is like a massive pro for me. Meeting... I mentioned a guy called Ajaz earlier. I get to meet really, really cool people. And like...

So you've got the public world. So the thing I love about YouTube and podcasting right is it gives the mass audience access to conversations that they would never normally have access to. And that's great. But then there's a huge group of people, probably the vast majority of very talented people that don't really want to be on camera, don't really want to do the whole YouTube public facing thing. They're just quite happy to do their own thing.

I get to speak to a lot of those people as well. That's really cool because oftentimes that's where you, like I personally learned so much from and like I'm trying to,

My self-development's at a point where it's very niche, the specific things that I'm trying to learn. So again, I'm now coming into this CEO role. I'm trying to find other people that have done a similar scale role, have had similar problems to me. So the amount of people is significantly smaller. So I would say access is amazing.

And choice like you get you do get a lot of choice within reason. She's great So access then you could just like email like I don't know probably not But you're I mean like within within the UK there's so many amazing people that I've met and it's and it's so cool like I I got to a few years ago. I got to go and spend time on Downing Street Like I never thought that would be possible. It was it was

life-changing for me to walk through the gates and see that because it was just something I never thought was possible and those sorts of things are you know, I find them really inspiring. Nice. That's cool. Why did you start the YouTube channel? I started the YouTube channel. So basically, I was very happy to not be the public facing face of the brand. Very happy to do that and anyone that's followed the story will know for

The first five or six years, I just wouldn't have really posted anything online. Now, I took loads of content, loads of pictures, loads of videos, and I never posted them. And then all of a sudden, like the core people started to understand and know who I was and what I was doing at the business. And a lot of people would ask, a lot of people would ask, a lot of people would ask. And I was in Dublin once and a lad came up to me and he said, I'm doing a, I'm doing a, something written, a written piece on Jim Sharpe. I think it was a degree. It was like a dissertation. And he said, yeah.

"Can you just give me an overview, a video on how Gymshark started?" I said, "I don't really want to do it. I've been asked before." And he said, "Come on, just one video. That's it. Like, it's what?"

couple of hours of your time sort of thing. But I couldn't really say no. And I hate lying. I don't want to ever sort of make a promise that I can't keep. And I said, you know what? Fine, I will do it. I recorded it two or three times, ended up deleting the footage. And then my now fiance at the time, girlfriend, was a YouTuber. So she knew how to do it all. So she was like, right, sit there. I'm putting the camera on a tripod. I'm going to record you talking. And then she would basically edit it for me.

So we put that live and it just completely blew up. The reaction was amazing and it was weird because it was like, it was big on YouTube which is cool and it was big on Facebook and Instagram and all the social networks. Then all of a sudden like newspapers would start writing about it and it sort of went into that world as well and I just kept doing it ever since really. Okay. Because yeah, like this is an area in which I think like there are so many like really cool companies and really cool like founders and CEOs of those companies but

You never really hear from them unless they're being interviewed on a podcast. Yeah.

And so the fact that you have got your own YouTube channel where you're showing the behind the scenes of like just the insane warehouse setup you guys have and like how Shopify works with you for Black Friday, it's all just so inspiring and so cool to see because you never get that behind the scenes. It's important to me because, so I mean, similar to yourself, right? I love the thought of people being better in the business that they're working in, starting new businesses and being entrepreneurial and creative. I love that. I'm really passionate about it. So I think,

I thought like no one else shows the inside of a multi-billion dollar brand. So I thought, well, you know, why don't we do that? Why don't we show people like, you know, there are things that we will mention and will it give a competitor an opportunity to do something quickly? Yes, it probably will. But in the grand scheme of things for me, the idea of inspiring people to build businesses, start businesses and be better in themselves is, is incredibly fulfilling. Nice. Yeah, that's really cool. Um,

Yeah, every time I see that you put out a new video, I always get excited like, yes. So I find that you're operating at a level of scale that I can't even imagine. And the fact that you're making it public means that I can now sort of imagine that level of scale. I think it was similar to...

um, when I first started listening to podcasts and things like the Tim Ferriss show and stuff like that, see, hearing people like Gary Vaynerchuk, where these guys are operating at a level that most of us just don't even know exists. And then you talk about productivity. Those guys operate on a level that I didn't even think was possible. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really cool. Um, and I'm hoping that with this kind of podcast, I can, it's a pretty good excuse to like hang out with someone, meet someone, have a long conversation. Um,

I don't think I was gonna ask about is that, as Gymshark has gotten bigger, as a YouTube channel gets bigger, you start to get haters, you start to get negative comments. I guess Buzzfeed has had this issue where

People working at BuzzFeed or working for BuzzFeed will then make a think piece of why I left BuzzFeed. That kind of thing. How does that stuff make you feel? How do you deal with the... There's a point where the whole thing of leaving Gymshark, posting it on YouTube, it would go massive. Everyone wanted to hear about it. Listen, it's going to happen. I just think...

So the thing is, especially being in my position, I guess I'm public-facing. I'm not massively public-facing. There are people that are far more so. But just growing a business, it's so incredibly tough. I just feel like I've been beaten with a stick around the head so many times now. You just sort of get used to it. You know, I've been on the receiving end of...

You know, people sending me messages on social media, personally, in person, difficulties in the business, the growth phase. Like, it's part and parcel of the job. I also, by the way, think that in the long term, it's a very positive thing because I feel like I'm held to a high level of account.

And I think that only makes me and the business better. How's that for a high level account as in? Because on social media, anyone can call anyone out, right? And if there's validity to the claim, then publicly people are going to know about it. Whereas maybe in yesteryear, in my parents' generation, you would find, you'd look back and you'd realize companies or individuals would do bad things and sort of get away with them. And I think it's great now that people can hold individuals and businesses to account online.

Granted, sometimes it can go too far and like cancel culture, I'm massively against. I think people need to look at things with a logical set of eyes. And like I said, you know, for me, sometimes it is very, very tough. But I think I'm putting myself out there. I'm saying I want to be the CEO of a large business and a business that's in many ways at the center of a culture and a community. And to do that, you have to have a thick skin and, you know, you have to be doing the right things. And that's

I think I will do those.

Cool. I guess the final thing I want to ask about, what's your workflow for video production with the team? James, more than me. It varies a lot, right? So sometimes we'll have an idea. Again, so the CEO video, obviously we saw coming well in advance. And we said, we need to do this video and we want it to be special. We actually recorded it a few times and binned the footage because I was terrible, basically. I was not very good on camera. To be honest, it was quite an emotional subject for me and my words just

I wasn't even speaking in coherent sentences. So that one, we'll all sit in a room and work together. There are certain things which are more like pull, i.e. some people will message us and say, can you make this content? Sometimes I'll jump on Instagram and say, what would you like to see? People will message me. We've got someone who's brilliant called Lily in the team who will build out a brief. So you'll start with title and thumbnail. That's something I was told actually a long time ago by someone

a guy called Jon Olson that we used to work with. - Oh, yeah, nice. - And I asked him the same question and he said, "I always start with title and thumbnail." - Nice. - Because if you don't click on the title of the thumbnail, then you can make the best video in the world, but no one's gonna watch it.

So we start with the title and the thumbnail with the purpose of the video. What do we want to get across? And now just because of how busy the role is, I'll have a brief and I'll sort of read through the brief. Okay, so people want to see this video. I'll be sat down on a chair and we'll record basically. Okay.

And then all of the drone footage, all the time lapses of the warehouses, is that all done by James? It's been James Perry, who's an absolute wizard. Absolute wizard. Life-changing. Me and James have been working together for, what, two years now? Two and a half. Two years. And, yeah, it's been absolutely brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Listen, early days, I edited my own videos. Robin did edit, and I then learned to edit. She taught me. It was very time-consuming editing homes.

I remember there was videos I'd spend 8, 12, 15 hours editing and it just wasn't an efficient use of time. And by the way, I wasn't even that good at it. Then worked with other people and James came in and just revolutionized the channel. So what's it like having someone film everything you do? Weird at first, but then you get used to it. Like me and James are mates anyway. So the biggest thing when I was looking for someone to work with, it's almost like, can you, you know, can you edit, can you work a camera? Great. But like, it needs to be someone that we get along with. Yeah.

obviously changed things but we travel the world together we've been to the States been to Hong Kong we would we you know be around the UK all the time we spend a lot of time together so we have to get on with each other and be comfortable with each other because if I'm rigid on camera or he doesn't like me then you know it doesn't work particularly well yeah it's definitely a problem isn't it

What about like, do you film like literally everything? Like what if you're like having dinner with friends or like? So we wouldn't film that, would we? It would be anything sort of extracurricular would tend to get filmed. Any trips will all be filmed. We'll normally have a filming slot every week where we'll sit down and talk to camera.

We'll occasionally, so James was looking at, you're going to record for an entire month, weren't you? Basically, completely, which is going to be really fun for me. So we're going to do an entire month. What we'll use of that, I'm not sure. People love the day in the life. They love it. We've done some really cool, high, almost high budget professional things. And then we do wander around with a camera for a day and people just love that. So fantastic.

we want to bring people a little bit more sort of in behind the scenes. Nice. And do you just wear the microphone at all times as well? Just

Yeah, tend to, yeah. You sort of get used to it. So then James ends up with hundreds of gigabytes of footage every day. That's the problem. Genuinely, that was another problem, wasn't it, during COVID? Because then I would have my camera and I would film at home. And I didn't realize just how big the footage is nowadays. When you're recording in 4K, you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes. I would have to drive to yours with the hard drive, wouldn't I? Give you the hard drive with all the footage on because it was just too slow on our home internet. Yeah, so we did this whole thing where...

we've got two editors in Romania and Romania has ridiculously fast internet speeds everyone's on like one like a thousand megabytes per second like upload download and

And the internet speed in this place was like 20 meg upload/download. It was just physically impossible to upload files. So I got like the most expensive BT Infinity option. I found this guy to kind of wire the router from over there, wire it around the house so it feeds into this laptop over here. So we use that to upload files now. So what is your workflow like? So you record your videos and then you send them out to be edited in Romania basically? Basically, yeah.

And then you'll comment, I'd assume, because it's never going to be perfect first time or how does that work? Yeah. So for the first two years, there was a round of review where I would comment on things. We'd upload it to a website called Frame.io where you can like, like, yeah. We love Frame.io. Frame.io is great. Affiliate link in the video description if we get one. But now, like recently, Christian, who's my main editor and who was employee number one, he said that, hey, you know, me reviewing footage is always a bit of a bottleneck. Because if I'm out, then, you know, whatever. He was like,

is there any need for you to review it? I hadn't thought about it. I was like, no, you're right. There isn't really any need for me to review it. And so now videos come out twice a week and Angus is like, oh yeah, we've got videos come out. I'm like, oh yeah. I can't even remember which one that was because we filmed it three weeks ago. And we're getting into this production company mindset. That's really cool to see that.

And I think one of the things that resonated with what you said is finding people and building systems to combat your own weaknesses. My weakness, ironically, is that I suck at motivating myself to film videos when I'm on my own. Really? And it always felt like such a heavy lift. I'd give myself, I don't know, five hours to film a video and I'd procrastinate four and a half and then I'd film it right at the end. No way. I wouldn't expect that of you. Yeah, mate. I think when I was working full time,

I had to film a video in two hours in the evening. Because you had to be asleep. Or wake up early before going on call, that kind of thing. But when I took a break from medicine intending to travel the world, which then didn't happen because of COVID, I was like, I've got the whole day to film a video. And then it takes the whole day to film one video. So now every Thursday we have a filming day where Angus comes over, is behind the camera, and is like, all right, Ali, chop, chop. Come on, let's do another one. Let's do another one. Let's do the thumbnails. And that's been really good.

It's just so nice working with other people. How does that work creatively then? Like video ideas, thumbnails, obviously titles. How does that work? Yeah, so we've got a team. So we have every Monday we have like a content editorial meeting with me, Angus, our writers.

And everyone rocks up to that meeting with three ideas for videos. So titles, thumbnails, and talking points. And then I would look through them with Angus and we would give them the green light. Be like, really like that one. Don't really like this one. Here's some feedback about that one. And they would work on the video idea, the concept for the next week. And the following Monday, we'd have like the full video basically ready. And then I would kind of go through it to be like, okay,

if I were actually filming this based on these points, you know, I'd add a story about my life over there, Harry Potter reference over there, we'll put a story from medicine over there, and then the video's ready to film. So that when it comes to Thursday, we can bang, bang, bang, film four videos in a day. So when you say, like, bang, bang, bang, are you talking... What would it look like to you? So someone else has come up with an idea. Are you having a script? Are you having key messages? Are you just having a title? What does that look like? Yeah, so title, thumbnail, and talking points. So bullet points. I don't like reading from a script. It feels very inauthentic and...

Yeah, it's impossible. So I just like bullet points and the team like over time, like they've seen all my videos and so they know what examples from my life I could use for different things. I'd say we're talking about imposter syndrome. Someone they will have written, oh, you can talk about when you were directing the hospital pantomime. I was like, that's a good point. Yeah, I can talk about that. And it feels really weird and nice that people know my life so well that they can tell me what examples I'm going to be using for stuff.

Because that's the thing that always fascinates me. It's like scalability because ultimately you are one person and if you're going to be recording then the guys will always need you. So I'm really interested to see how that sort of becomes scalable. Or do you do it through all the different arms of the business and the channels and the products and things like that? Yeah, so the thing that the vision I set for us, I think it was this time two years ago,

I wrote it on a page in Notion being like basically, I want us to get to a point where the only thing I'm having to do is talk to a camera. Because I think that's the only aspect of the business in which I add unique value in being me. To an extent in idea generation, but even that can be outsourced to someone who's good at it. And so now we're actually pretty close to that point where the only thing I really do for the YouTube channel is talk to a camera once a week.

What I didn't realize at the time is that being kind of the CEO kind of role is actually mostly about having meetings with people and organization clarity and setting vision, setting goals and tracking metrics and stuff. Hiring, hiring is a big one. Looking to hire five more people. And that's been such a bottleneck for me because we have no process for hiring. We've just been making it up as we went along. And now I've discovered there's all these like platforms like Workable and stuff where you can post a job description and they will do the applicant tracking and stuff.

rather than a Google form, which is what we used before. And so that's kind of where we ended up, like once a week for the YouTube channel. But the thing I love about your setup and when you mentioned you were going to bring the videographer, I was like, yes, because what I'm imagining is I would love to have a James who can like travel with me, especially as I want to travel around the world and stuff. And often I find that

in conversations with the team or in conversations with friends asking for advice about anything. I even just come out with bangers and I'm like, oh, I wish someone were here to film this. That's interesting. That's cool. That's really cool. But yeah, like I said, for me, the fact that we get on is massive. You should genuinely, you should come to Gymshark though. You should look around our studios because

Granted, it's slightly different, but then we'll have the full creative suite and team. I think you'd love it. Sick. We're actually looking for a studio to film an online course about productivity. Come and have a look. Can we do it? Genuinely, come and have a look. We've got all the e-com studios, and we've got something called Studio X, which is basically an innovation studio. We would build full gym sets in there. There's campaigns we've done where you've got people in the gym, but they're not actually in a gym. The whole thing's just been built in that studio. Nice. Okay, that's really cool. You should definitely come and have a look.

Because my personal trainer at the moment, he's got like a home gym in his garage. And so we've sort of been filming a bit of content for the Instagram there. Honestly, come and have a look. You'd love it. We've done, we've got all the studios. We've got the podcast studio. It's absolutely brilliant because similar to you. So what you do is like we consider content as much of a product as, you know, as this top. It's exactly the same. So content's massive for us. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, I don't know any other brand in your thing that does content as well as you guys do. Most of them just don't do content. They do expensive advertising campaigns that run a single video and that's it. Yes, I know. And I think it's just because it's been the lifeblood of the business since day one. And I think growing up, like, yeah, I'd watch TV. I'd watch sort of Match of the Day and stuff. But beyond that, everything was on YouTube and it was all content. And all of a sudden, when you realize that you can...

play your part in that. It just, yeah, you end up building a business around and a brand around that content and community. Nice. I think I'll ask, so you, who are, who are the kind of mentors through either in real life, books, podcasts, who have inspired you over the years that people should check out?

So I don't have like a defined group of mentors. I don't have people that I will regularly check in with as a mentor. I know some people at Gymshop will do that and it seemed to work really well for them. Steve and Paul who are the sort of original people that help professionalize the business in the early days have been massive to me. I've got a lot of friends again, I keep mentioning, at Jars, one of the most inspiring people I've met and like a very creative CEO. He's not a CEO as you would sort of expect.

Harley at Shopify I'll sort of lean on occasionally if I have a problem that I don't know how to solve. Online, I'll watch anything. The thing is I'm a massive believer that you can learn something from every single person that you meet. And I think I learn more from the amalgamation of meeting a thousand people than sort of one individual. And I'll try and chat to people that are good at specific things. There's not like one person.

human who I think is the perfect human being. I'll try and pick things from so many different people. Nice. And are there any kind of books, videos, podcasts that you kind of find yourself commonly recommending to people if they were to ask you, you know, Ben, how did you do X?

And again, it's very similar. So I read a book ages ago, which I thought I would hate and I really liked. And I don't actually read that much. And it was called Poor Charlie's Almanac, which was by Charlie Munger. It's not a book. It's like an amalgamation of speeches, isn't it? Yeah. Which I thought was amazing. And there was one particular page, which I can just about remember, where I think it was on one or two pages where he broke down the entire success of the Coca-Cola brand and

I remember thinking, wow, this is amazing. And I went into this book thinking, he's an investor, he's a financier, we have nothing in common, he's an old bloke. Do you know what I mean? And I ended up thinking, wow, this is amazing. Because he was very brand first.

He talks about lots of different sort of psychological models. And basically, it's almost like, imagine you've got like a problem here. And it's about attacking this problem from a load of different angles in a load of different ways. And it's exactly the way that we and I try and solve problems at Gymshark and in life. So I found that book massively inspiring. And then, yeah, mulling around YouTube. I love your channel. You introduced me to Notion. Notion, like genuinely life-changing. We...

I mean, we've run almost everything on Notion now, don't we? From a creative point in the entire business, by the way, not just as a me person. I run, I think you coined it like a life OS. I have my life OS, I have a professional life. The different Gymshark stuff, everything's run on Notion. So that was life changing. So thank you for that. You're very welcome.

Yeah, and that's it. I just mull around the internet. Jordan Peterson. I love Jordan Peterson. I'm a massive, massive fan of him. I think he's brilliant. He's really helped me as well. Sick. I'd love to check out your Notion setup behind the scenes. I was going to say, that's one of the things I thought as we were driving down. I thought, I want to see your Notion setup. Yeah, it's really cool. That would be pretty sick. Cool. And any sort of, let's say someone's watching this and they're thinking they want to get started being an entrepreneur. Maybe they're sort of,

Late teens, early 20s, haven't really started anything yet, but really inspired by you and your journey. Any kind of advice you'd give? Yeah, I mean, it's fairly standard, right? You have to do what you love because otherwise you'll end up giving up. I'm a firm believer now that there's no niche too small, especially with the internet being so vast.

I always think and it sounds stupid saying it now if I'd have said as a kid I want to be a professional gamer growing up. Yeah, my mom would have been like you're nuts Whereas now it's like a legitimate sport career and everything in between like even I guess with yourself It would have been so difficult for you to articulate what you do now as a kid. Yeah, I just think there's no niche too small So I think whatever it is double down on it and just genuinely give it a go like

Gymshark was the seventh business website product that I've made and the other six failed miserably. Now, unfortunately, that's not a sexy story so no one talks about the failed apps, the failed websites. They only talk about the one that did well and it's a consistent theme on everyone else that's successful that I've met. They failed miserably so many times and they've been endlessly optimistic about it and they've just gone again and again and again.

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that-- I see this a lot with people starting YouTube channels, where there's this sense of, I have to get it right first time. And if you look at the stats, the average YouTube channel takes 152 videos to get to 1,000 subscribers.

And I get messages from people being like, you know, like it took my channel 52 videos in six months to hit the first thousand subscribers. And that was like a lot faster than the average. And so I get messages from people like 10 videos in being like, oh, this YouTube thing isn't working. Keep going. Just try things, right? Just keep trying new things. Like incremental improvement I think is so, so, so important as well.

But yeah. Sweet. Well, thank you very much for taking the time. Thank you for having me. Been a good chat. Good stuff. That's it for this week's episode of The Deep Dive. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to see how me and the team got on at Gymshark HQ, check out the link in the video description or in the show notes wherever you're watching or listening to this. And if you did enjoy this episode, then do hit the subscribe button, whether you're watching this on YouTube or whether you're listening to this on audio. If you subscribe to the podcast in whichever domain, you'll be more notified of new episodes as they come out. So thank you so much for listening. Have a great day and always remember, journey before destination.

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