Moment 44 - Ben Francis: Knowing This Will Accelerate Your Business

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Ben Francis is the genius behind Gymshark, the $1.5 billion fitness business. With success at 19, Ben had a vision, he had an idea and he had the passion. He wanted to create a truly iconic brand to help inspire people around the world. Ben leant into his strengths, and in this clip he advises those who want to become entrepreneurs to do the same. Leaning into those passions, along with hard work and smart work, will inevitably lead you to different opportunities. Fitness is Ben’s passion, it drives him everyday and in this clip, he encourages you to follow yours. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/4pR1CteGvnb Ben: https://www.instagram.com/benfrancis/ https://twitter.com/BenFrancis1992?s=20 Watch the episodes on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Steven Bartlett?

  I know that there's going to be a lot of young entrepreneurs watching this and I know that they typically ask me the same questions. So I want to ask you just a couple of them before we wrap. One of them I get a lot is, you know, there'll be someone listening to this, they've not got any money.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:13Steven Bartlett?

  They want to start a business. They don't have an idea, but they want to start a business. What would you say to them?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  If you don't have an idea or money.

• 0:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, but they want to, they want to be an entrepreneur. I get this a lot.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  So the first thing for me would be to find out what you're truly, truly passionate about. Because for me, when I started Gymshark, I made two fitness apps beforehand. I made two fitness apps, both failed miserably. I made a little fitness social network failed miserably, a little fitness sort of forum that failed miserably. And then Gymshark was, I wanted to be involved in the industry more than anything. I wanted to be involved in fitness because it changed my life. It was the thing that got me from being a D student to an A student. Literally, that was the thing that changed my life.

• 0:59Steven Bartlett?

  The discipline.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, the discipline that I learnt, the structure, the fact that if I was tired on a Monday, the gym doesn't care. Go in and lift. It doesn't matter. And most importantly, that if January 1, I joined the gym and I left five days a week, every single week, by December 25, whatever, I am better than I was a year ago. That, that, those lessons to me were massive because previously I didn't really realise that. And I'd do this thing in school where I would be like, I'd work, try really hard and I'd get a bad grade. And then there'd be another thing that I wouldn't try out and I'd get a really good grade. And I just, it didn't, do you know what I mean? It didn't add up to me. So for me, I was in love with the industry and, and fitness was and is my passion. And that carried me through some of the difficult times because I remember the difference it's

• 1:41Speaker 01

  made to my life. And it's this inherent passion that drives me every day. So if you've got no ideal money, just lean into that community, whatever it is, it might be boxing, it might be golf, it might be videography, it might be motorcycles or bicycles or whatever, lean into it. Because inevitably, there will be an opportunity, especially now because of this new social media world that we live in. There's a massive, there's so much room for people to create brands. So yeah, I would just lean into whatever your passion is.

• 2:10Steven Bartlett?

  So true, because you can waste a ton of time procrastinating and falling into indecision by trying to guess. And as you said there, I read that Jim Shark was actually like the seventh Apple website you created. So you leaned into the industry, did this process of like failure and exploration and stumbled across the winner.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And you have to fail. If you're a young entrepreneur, just do not be afraid to fail. Just all names out of boxes, ideas out of boxes aside, the likelihood of an individual starting a business and that one being the one that strikes gold is ridiculously low. What we've got to remember is you could start 30 businesses and you are still more likely to fail than you are succeed. So just honestly, just keep trying and keep trying and don't be afraid to fail. I think that's so, so, so important. And everyone I've met, by the way, from the people that run businesses that are 10 times bigger than Jim Shark,

• 3:09Speaker 01

  to every entrepreneur that I've met, every business person, every successful person in sport, in business, whatever, whether they've started a business or not, every single one of them has failed time and time and time again. And I think then people look at the final product and just assume that they were either this incredible human who was born this way, and it is just never, never, ever the case. More often than not, all the most successful people I've ever met are all winging it. They're all literally just working incredibly hard and they're just giving it their best shot.

• 3:42Steven Bartlett?

  Can I ask you one more on this point? I think that was a superb answer as well because it's just incredibly true. The other question I'd get a lot from young entrepreneurs is something like, you know, they're in a job at the moment and they've got an idea. So this is an example where they've got a business idea that they want to pursue. But they're just, you know, they've heard you say that, they want to pursue it, but there's something holding them back. And they're, you know, I know you get this a lot as well.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:08Steven Bartlett?

  Probably most conversations. What do you say to those people?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Well, I think if it's your passion, then I think you should jump in. The other thing I would say, and I think this is a dangerous thing. I do see people online going, quit your job, jump in, go and do something. And it's a bit like, personally, I'm sat there thinking, no, don't quit your job. It's fine. Like, I worked at Pizza Hut for whatever, I can't remember what the amount was. It was four or five pounds an hour. And Jim Sharp was doing hundreds of thousands in revenue. The utility of having a job whilst running the business is huge. One, because you can earn money to survive, so you don't need to remove, you know, you don't need to remove money from the business. So two, you can then reinvest all the profits that you can make in that business. If you just quit, and two, by the way, if business number one fails, you've still

• 4:55Speaker 01

  got your job, you try number two, number three, number four. And I think whatever it is, find your passion. I genuinely don't think it's a good idea just to jump out of your job just on a whim. There are some people, you'll hear about the one in a million that succeeds and congratulations, more power to you. I'm super happy for those people, but you don't hear about the 99% that ended up quitting their job and it didn't go as well as what they would like. And then they ended up having to go back and find a new job. So use that job as a superpower, as stability, and invest the money you earn from that job in the business and just keep trying, try and try.

• 5:29Steven Bartlett?

  And hard work, where does that fit? What's the importance of it? Because there's a narrative I talk about a lot on this podcast that hard work is maybe a little bit, the narrative you see online from the hustle porn stars, a little bit toxic.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:40Steven Bartlett?

  But would you be sat here without hard work?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Oh, definitely not, no. It's that combination of hard work alone is definitely not enough. You have to work hard, but you also have to work smart. There were periods where we were finding out ways to manipulate Google in a way that got Jim Sharp to the top, which gave us huge revenue for next to no cost, right? That was smart work, but there were days when we would work 12, 14, 16 hours sewing and printing t-shirts every single day. There were days like that now where we just work and work and work to get the job done. So exclusively hard work won't solve your problems. You definitely have to work smart, but I've never met anyone who was genuinely successful that wasn't hardworking.