Preserving Legacies: Roy Moëd, Founder & CEO of Lifebook Publishing, on the Power of Sharing Life Stories

Join us for an inspiring episode of The Brand Called You (TBCY) as we sit down with Roy Moëd, Founder & CEO of Lifebook Publishing, hosted by Mark Sadovnick. Roy shares his remarkable journey—from growing up amid apartheid and antisemitism to building successful businesses across multiple sectors. He also reveals the personal story behind the founding of Lifebook and explains how documenting life stories can preserve legacies, strengthen family connections, and restore a sense of purpose and self-worth. From unconventional career choices and entrepreneurial setbacks to business innovation and the importance of remembering history, Roy offers candid insights into resilience, leadership, purpose, and the value of learning from experience. If you have ever questioned traditional paths to success, wondered about the true value of storytelling, or thought about preserving your family’s history, this conversation is not to be missed.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  All right, I guess I could say I'm excited to be here with my Commonwealth brother, considering I'm from Canada and you're from the UK. Welcome, Roy.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's great to be with you.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  No, I really appreciate you being our guest on our Leaders Who Care series, and I think our audience will figure out why, you know, we do recognize you as a leader who cares. And a great way to start, as always, would be if you can briefly introduce yourself, family, where you're from, whatnot. We'll get into the business in a little bit, but share a little bit about who you are.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I'm in England at the moment, in sunny, relatively sunny, English countryside. I was born in South Africa in sixty-nine years ago, unfortunately. It just turned sixty-nine.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  But we emigrated in nineteen sixty from South Africa because my parents couldn't stand the politics there and they didn't want to bring four kids up in a country full of the kind of apartheid and what was going on. And we emigrated to an island called Jersey in the Channel Islands. A lot of Americans know New Jersey, but this was the original Jersey where the Jersey cows come from. And we did that because my mother heard that it was a tropical island with palm trees off the coast of England. And yeah, there were four palm trees there, but they're all dead and they were dead then, they're dead now. But it's a nice island, a great place for a kid to grow up. And then by sixty-seven, two of the kids had moved to London and my parents said, "Well, we didn't travel six thousand miles to split the family." So we moved to London.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  So as a fourteen-year-old, well, just before that, in Jersey, as a small island with sixty thousand population, the problem for me was great school, was great upbringing, but there were no Jews in the island. And we were, the only two Jews in the school was my brother and I. And the antisemitism was unbelievable. And so we'd gone from the apartheid to being the aggressors as such, to being the subjects of antisemitism. And I used to get beaten up at school, literally every term, by there's some kids there which were pretty mean. But we left in nineteen sixty-seven and came to England.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  And that was a great time to be in London. We were literally in the middle of London, Carnaby Street, floral trousers, pink chiffon scarf. And great times. On the bus, I would go past Abbey Road every day. I'd come down Baker Street where the Beatles offices were, the Apple offices. I went to Led Zeppelin concerts, Free Rolling Stone concerts in my back garden, which was the Hyde Park. So it was a hell of a time to grow up as a fourteen-year-old in England. But academically, I was always pretty challenged and it transpired later that it was probably dyslexia. I don't think I was ever diagnosed,

• 2:58Speaker 01

  but I think it was. And the reality of it was I got kept down at school for a year in Jersey. I used to get beaten every year, every term at school, but not just by the antisemites, but by the teachers, because if you did anything wrong, you got six of the best. And so the upbringing there was kind of strange. But being a nineteen-year-old now, leaving school, i.e. because I was kept down, having failed everything except for economics, which I got a grade E on, which is just a pass. But I spoke fluent French and I failed that because with dyslexia, you know, I couldn't pass the grammar.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  I couldn't, the dictation, I got nought out of twenty.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  So that was, from an academic point of view, there was nowhere to go. All my friends were going to university. I couldn't even get into university. They might choose one. And at the age of nineteen, that started a, today you call it a portfolio career, but I had twenty-nine jobs in the next six years.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  So literally, I did everything from a barman to driving a van to door-to-door insurance

• 4:16Speaker 01

  and to running, I was a manager in a restaurant chain in London at the age of nineteen called GAD, Great American Disaster.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  It was the precursor to Hard Rock. The guy left there to form Hard Rock, which was just down the road, the first one in Park Lane, the Hard Rock Cafe. Peter Morton, I think his name was. So, yeah, so GAD, they had three in London. I eventually got fired from that, eventually, within six months. Basically because I fired the chef for smoking in the kitchen, but he wasn't smoking. He was smoking a joint in the kitchen. And they fired me because I think he was running their drug ring.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  So colorful youth, but for me, that was my university. That's what I called the UOL, University of Life. And during that journey, I made huge contacts. I learned a lot. I was in different industries, mainly around the food and catering industry. My father had started a drive-in restaurant in Jersey, which was the first drive-in restaurant in Europe in nineteen sixty-one. And the trays were imported from Chicago, Illinois, and I know that because I cleaned those hundreds of them and on the back of each one was stamped "Chicago, Illinois", so I got to know where Chicago was. But my first thing after leaving school was, "So you're interested in catering?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  We'll go and run the drive-in," because he had a tenant by then and he couldn't let us. And that taught me, I didn't want to be in catering because it was so hard. So I went into hotels and I became night manager in a hotel in London, a ninety-bedroom hotel. And then I realized that if the chef walked out or something, or there were staff problems, you had guests who were booked in. So, you know, restaurants were great because, I mean, one of the times with a restaurant, the chef did walk out and I ended up on the grill in GAD,

• 6:20Speaker 01

  doing it while everything was going on. And so the hotel was even worse because you couldn't shut the doors. You had guests booked in. So I decided to get into the supply side. And the last job I had was actually be, I was a non-dairy cream salesman for a firm of butchers. So everybody else would have, they had a cow on their business card because they were in the meat business. I had a bull because I thought it was wrong to put a cow on my business card. I was doing non-dairy cream. And that job was the job that I got fired from last, mainly because it was a big life lesson, because

• 7:06Speaker 01

  I had a terrible salary. It was forty pounds a week. But I had a ten pence per gallon bonus scheme, which was commissioned. And the owner, the chairman, thought I would go and sell a gallon to this restaurant and a gallon to that restaurant, the three there. And as soon as I started, I went to British Airways and sold them four hundred gallons a week. And then I went to Kenko Coffee and they were going to buy two thousand gallons a week in Jiggas. And then I went to some restaurant groups and pub groups. So suddenly I was earning more than the chairman. And he didn't like that. So he fired me. And they went bust.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  And it was a great lesson is don't cap your salespeople.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Never.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  It's funny, the best CEO is that I've always known want their salespeople to make more money than them.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  It's not rocket science.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Oh, they have the equity, but this guy didn't get it.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Well, that's ego and control and all those things.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Oh, he was so, you know, he used to make me sign his expense forms. We'd go out for lunch or something with a client, I would have to pay. Or, no, yeah, I'd pay and he'd sign my expense form because he was too duplicitous to get the expense form through because he'd be called to task by the board or whatever, I don't know.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  So, age of twenty-five, I got fired. Sorry, go on.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  No, I was going to say, that's, it's fascinating because I remember you posting about after twenty-nine jobs, you were great at interviews but not great at the job type of deal.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Totally. I was really, obviously, to get twenty nine jobs in that time, I was, one of which was a kibbutz in Israel, so it's not strictly a job. But, yeah, I was good at those interviews, but no. It was hard, but what I did find out was that

• 9:11Speaker 01

  you got to gravitate towards the people you like and you work with the people you like and trust. And in that last job, when they fired me, the chairman, not the chairman, the managing director said, "Look, Roy, I've been told to fire you. That's stupid, but I will make it up to you, I promise you," because he'd employed me. And he said, because just at that time, I was starting my first business, which was an airline catering business. And he said, "My Rolodex is yours, I'll help you." And he was a brilliant guy, who is named John Harwood. To this day, we're still friends, I'm seeing him tomorrow in fact. And if he said, "Lie down in the streets, Roy, there's no traffic coming," I'd believe him.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  And so John proceeded, as I started my first business, Portions, it was called, with two men, myself and a partner, and four thousand eight hundred pounds of the savings that I'd made in those twenty nine jobs.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Started this business, an airline catering, and John introduced me to the British Airways and the catering companies and all of those, so that I could actually grow the business. And we started doing pineapple juice for Iran Air, because nobody else would do it. And that grew to doing a million cups of juice a week. We sliced all the lemons that went onto British Airways and the gin and tonics for twenty five years. And I started slicing them by hand with my partner Gary,

• 10:45Speaker 01

  and counting them and putting them into little pots. So that business doubled and traveled in size over that period. It went from, literally, the two people to six hundred people in four countries.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  So London, Paris, sorry, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and in the US, in Allentown, we had a warehousing operation. And as we grew to that, the world went through what I call the seven plagues. In the airline industry, we had nine eleven, and global economic downturn, and foot and mouth disease, and avian birth flu, etc., etc. And each time I built the business up, whoosh, down forty percent. Even when nine eleven happened, before the second twin tower got hit, I had to cancel the pipeline

• 11:40Speaker 01

  of goods coming in from the US, because we were shipping food around Europe for American Airlines, US Airlines. So it was just a nightmare, and that's when I decided to outsource all the manufacturing. And I got down to a hundred and forty people. And then I met Delta Airlines, and they said, "It's crazy, one day we need one company doing our food distribution, one doing our equipment. We need one company. Go and see these guys in Zurich." And I went and saw them, and they were doing all of this distribution, and they didn't have a warehouse, and they didn't have a truck. They were six guys in a room, in an office, with a big IBM thirty four computer.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  And so I went back to my board, I said, "Why have we got trucks? Why have we got fifty thousand square foot freezer warehouses? Let's see if we can outsource this." So we did, and we got down to some forty, sixty people. And then airlines were saying, "Well, are you a logistics provider, BPO, business process outsourcer? Or are you making beautiful double choc muffins?" And so the guys who were doing all the product development, I started a new business with them called Portfolio Partners, and they became a broker. And twenty of them left to set that up, and that left us with forty people.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  And at that time, we were supplying our customers with a printed catalog with all of our products. And these were little Polaroid photos of an orange segment, or beef Wellington, or a sandwich. And they had to be updated, they had to be shipped to eighty customers around the world, in Qantas in Australia, American Airlines in Arlington. And it was just crazy, and I had the idea, if we could put all of that onto a floppy disk, and I know you'll remember that.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  We could put all of that onto a floppy disk, and then get those to the customers, then we wouldn't have this problem. But the problem with that was, they weren't allowed to put outside programs in an airline, like American Airlines or British Airways. The IT department would never let them do that. So I got each of my suppliers to pay fifteen hundred pounds to be on that floppy disk, and my suppliers were Coca-Cola, Dr. Gamble, etc. And then they were on the disk with their products. And with that money, I bought eighty Acer computers, these big green square blocks. And I shipped them to Australia, to America, to everywhere in the world.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  And that was phone-to-phone protocol, you know. You dial up, and they'd put their floppy disk in, and they would be able to look, they'd have the latest ones, but they'd also be able to order from us and place their daily orders. So instead of sending us taxes, now we had electronic ordering, and the product ended up being called ECOPS, Electronic Catalog Order Processing System. And it was just as internet was coming in, but nobody would let it in their building, we had the first catalog. The great thing about this catalog was, if you didn't pay me, you weren't on it.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  That's a brilliant precursor to the internet, and I remember clients actually telling me when the internet came out, "Well, I don't know what this website and the internet thing is all about, we're doing fine, we don't need something like that." Without even, you know, being open enough to see what could happen. And it seems to me that, like the way you call it, the university, you know, experience, not being in university.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  What would you say your biggest, your biggest learning experience was from all that? Was it that, don't let someone restrict your imagination or vision? Was it your people skills? What do you think it was?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  I think entrepreneurs are ignorant of risk, and that's a great skill to have. You know, they're optimistic, it's always going to be okay, etc.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  It's also, you know, valuing yourself and what you do, understanding the value of that. And today I talk about the value of legacy in what I do now, but understanding the value of that. And every time I've sold a business, and I've sold seven or eight,

• 16:17Speaker 01

  it wasn't based on an accountant's valuation of the business. It was based on what I thought the person who was going to buy it needed it for. And I once sold a business that didn't exist, and that wasn't a crooked thing. It was three businesses in different countries making fruit salad. And what I did was, I created a pro forma business. I said, "Well, if you pull them all together in one country, you'd have this volume, and then you'd have a business worth this." And it's fresh fruit salad, you couldn't physically do that, because you had to make it fresh every day. But the people who bought it, they actually,

• 16:58Speaker 01

  we had sixty thousand pounds worth of assets, which were stainless steel tables and knives and stuff.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  But we had one contract with one supermarket, selling fruit salad to one of the big supermarket chains here. And the company that wanted to buy it were making coleslaw and vegetable salads. And they couldn't get into the supermarket.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  So I sold it to them for a million pounds.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  A business that didn't exist, that only existed on paper, with sixty thousand pounds worth of assets. And the company buying it were delighted, because a million pounds to get into that market for them was fun. And I think it's that life lesson of, you know, of just making sure that you sell something for the value to the acquirer, not to the accountant's valuation.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's so valuable advice, and I think, in fact, I heard today on the news how so many young people are now making conscious decisions to skip university and just go into business, because they see what maybe was obvious, that there are benefits to college, obviously, but, you know, will it lead to what they really want to do, and, you know, and the value of their time to do it?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  I think you often see people sitting in a classroom thinking, "I'm trying to learn from somebody I don't want to be like, and I don't want that job."

• 18:32Speaker 01

  So why should, you know, it's a little bit like with consultants, you know. There's consultants who actually then go in and do the job and actually implement it, the others who write the report. Possibly the ones who, you know, it's not their risk, and they can always say you implemented it wrong. And I think it's the same when you're sitting there being taught by someone, and you'll find that with a lot of entrepreneurs leave school early, because they're sitting bored. That's in on a London Business School presentation where that business, Portions, was the case study. And the professor at the front was telling people what happened, and, you know, and how we did things and stuff.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  And some of the students were saying, you know, "This guy's an idiot, why would he do that?" I was at the back of the class.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  "Why would he do that?" And the point was, they didn't know the context at the time, they didn't know the tax advantages the government were giving to putting money there, rather than there, etc. And the guy started, the professor, Rupert Meers, he started by saying that, there'd been an article in the FT that day, by saying that anybody who's still listening to me on this course on entrepreneurialship.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  It's not going to be an entrepreneur. The four who are sleeping in this room will be.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  They're not just sleeping, they're dreaming.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  Well, that's a good segue to. Now, you may be determined, there's two parts here, there's the. There's the legacy and the learning of the value of your time and your experiences. And now, as you're saying, there's the. We'll move into our life book part of this conversation, there's. There's remembering the legacy and the experiences of so many people by what you're doing. Share with us briefly to some degree. Your interaction with your dad and how that spurred you on to Lifebook.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Just with my, the situation with my father was that he was blind and towards the end of his life and pretty depressed. My mother was in the same care home, he was, he had a little apartment there, she was in nursing care. She was dying, both of them smoked sixty cigarettes a day as I grew up, so my. Breathing is a little bit compromised.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  And they were in the mid eighties and drank a little bit, you know, brandy and soda every day, but. They went well and my dad was just depressed about it and I tried to find a project, something that he would cheer him up, that we would look at. And the turning point for me was really when I took him out for lunch. He complained throughout the lunch about the money I was spending and the price of the wine was twenty four quid, you kids don't know the value. Anything anymore. And three times he started stories and three times I said, Dad, I've heard that before. And I just shut him down. And I left and I turned to say goodbye when I took him back to his room and I said, don't worry. And I stopped myself because I was going to say, don't worry, it'll be better next week.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  And I knew it wouldn't and it'll be worse. So I got Kathy, who was my P A, to go and visit him each week. I drove back to my office and on the way around, I thought I've got to come up with this project. And I got Kathy to actually go and visit him on the pretext of wanting the story, but I didn't. Just to interview him and not shut him down and ask him what happened next and how did you feel about that? And he passed away too soon, you know, within, I got thirty five pages out of him. And the reality was that. Having. Got that text. I just put it in a drawer, it was a pre computer time, so it was typed on a typewriter and I put it in a drawer.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Today, it's published privately for me and that's, that's my father's book, Life is for Sharing. And the thing about it today is that there are stories in there I wish I could ask him about. Which he'd never told me. But my, my favorite one, I told you before, of the King of Poland. Where our ancestor was around when the king died and they didn't want to be without a king. So they found a commoner without any issue, without children, made him King of Poland for one night. And so they could hand the crown on the next day and that's the first story in his book.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Excuse me. So that was the precursor and then I parked it and then. When I, having sold portions and living a nice life for a while, I thought I needed to do something which was a bit more purposeful. Having taken up polo, which was not really. Got much purpose, except it's great fun.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  So I tried to find a way to take that airline logistics thinking of, you know. A program and a formula to actually make something happen. But try and do something which was on the front end, a human doing what Kathy was doing with my dad.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Went to Baycrest in Toronto, talked to them about slowing down cognitive decline in elder adults. And seeing how you could, you could actually have that effect and then gather that legacy. And seeing the effect it had on people to actually see their book in print, to have. A title to, I mean, these titles behind me, they're crazy with people, they come up fantastic. But to actually. Have all that information in a legacy and have that self-worth and the difference it made to people. And today, because we've been doing it for quite a while. We're even getting stories where people are, they're becoming demented, they're starting to lose their memory. They're reading their book and they're, they're reading it like it's fresh, they're finding the memories.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  It's amazing.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  I had one yesterday who just said, thank you, thank you, thank you, three times. Because my brain was empty and they, they'd asked a question, the daughter showed them. In the book where it was, where they'd met their wife. And they could enjoy that memory again themselves, I didn't do it for them, I did it for the kids.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, one thing I found. Just amazing and, and, and the good fortune to have met you and, and engaged together is.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  I understood the, the importance and value of documenting and having those stories, those experiences for people to read, for the family to cherish, to have, but even for other people to read and know about. And with Covid and everything that's going on, I think it brought an awareness of people even more so, what's important in our, in our life. However, the thing I didn't expect, which I was so amazed by, since we do a lot in, in wellbeing and mental health, is that spark in the eye, that trigger of, of. Of having purpose, that excitement of remembering their own stories that you talked about, that.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  You know, to quote Mastercard, is priceless.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  I was worried, I did a number of radio interviews with a woman we employ as a. Psychiatric gerontologist or, and she's a neuroscientist and I was worried about. So we have this project, it lasts three, four, five months, somebody comes and visits you every week, interviews your mother, father, you in your home. And you, you're, you're looking forward to it, some of our clients get their hair done before their interviewer comes, et cetera. And you've got all this and then it stops, the book's finished and the project's completed. And I thought, well, what then, how do you, how do you deal with that? And what Linda said on these radio shows, she said, Roy, typically people, when they're aging, they're, they're going downhill in whatever way.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  They're losing control, mental, physical, financial control and they're deteriorating, they're isolated, people are not talking to them. They're not interested, so they're sort of going down like this. So what you've done by writing their book is you've taken them up there. And you've given them self-worth and you've given them a legacy, a legacy they can be proud of. And now they'll start aging and going down, but they're starting from a higher place. So I, I, I appreciated that.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, and, and so do I and I. I think there's so, there's so much value to it, especially as I said, for, for learning, for kids to read stories about not only their ancestry, but. You know, talking to other kids about it, I mean, I, you know. Show and tell of, of the kid bringing their, their, their great grandfather's book or whatever to a place, it's, it's beautiful.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  So we, we have a team of seven behind each project, so there's project manager, interviewer, ghostwriter, editor, typesetter, proofreader. And then it gets printed and gets printed, they're handmade in, in a bindery here and they're sewn and everything, so it's a beautiful end product because. The customers were saying, initially our books were pretty sort of cheap and they were P P C bound. But they were saying, this is the best book on my bookshelf, I wanted to feel like that. And so for, for Lifebook, it was really key that we had, we had that team there. But that team, so every, every day we have a daily call. And as the books come in, and you can see there's a pile on the floor there which.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  We're building new bookshelves, yeah, but as they come in, we do a show and tell. So the project manager who did that book. And they tell us the story, they've been working on it for six months, but they tell us the story. Which is always different, amazing, some really big, important people, some very normal people. And all with a family. Who they want to leave a legacy for and in America, the company's called Lifetime Memoirs and, you know, Lifebook UK. But both of them have got clients who are doing completely different things. Some of them are arguing about which picture of their yacht to put in there and some of them, you know, I just.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  And they, now I can't show you those books because they're all private, I was going to show you one, but.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  I, I love, there was an English woman, just her title here is Could Be of Interest. It's like so unassuming.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I spoke to a, I interviewed a fellow, a very, very senior. Brilliant guy and he said to me, he said, you know, we all seem to have to go somewhere else to find the best speaker or somewhere else to get the best experience. Maybe you should just ask the cashier at your drugstore, what's her story? And I'll bet you she's got one.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, or the postman or, yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  No, that's a brilliant thing. There are two quotes which I love. One is it's an African proverb which says when an elder person passes on, a whole library burns down. Because those memories are gone. David Brooks talks about eulogy eulogy resume virtues and eulogy virtues. And the different ones and the resume ones are the things as you know only too well. You can Google, you'll be able to find forever. But you talk about anybody born sort of pre, I don't know, 1960. There's very little you can Google on them and the eulogy virtues are the one that normally we don't hear because we're in the box.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  But they're the nice things and not so nice things that people might say about you. But those are the ones that it'd be good to know before you popped off.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Well, you know, when we started working with you, and I know you know this, but just to share with everybody. Almost every individual we spoke to said, "Man, I wish I would have done that with my dad or my grandfather." And I actually have cassettes and stuff. My grandfather was from Kiev. And he told stories and we were fortunate enough to have a brain to record some of them when he told. And you know, you can, it's just maybe the deepest heartfelt feeling you can have to keep that alive.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the fascinating thing is you said you've got cassettes. And by the way, we do need to type those out and get those into a book, but you've got cassettes. That medium changes all the time. One of our printers is on his website. If you want to read the Magna Carta from 1066, you can go, 1086, you can go. You can turn the pages with white gloves and you can read it. If you want to read a floppy disk from 1996, you can't.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  That's a great point.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  And a printed book, you know, that folds flat, that's sewn, that'll last 400 years is forever.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  Plus, there is something, obviously there's pros and cons, video and this stuff. But there's something about holding that book in your hand. That there's an energy, there's something there.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you see a 12-year-old kid, we've got a photo of one in America. He was given it by his grandmother and he's got Nike shorts, he's got an Adidas hoodie. Up like this, no shoes on, he's sitting on a sofa. Leafing through this book and going, "Wow, that's amazing. That's amazing." Now, if it was on a Kindle or whatever, his attention span would have been limited. And one of the key messages of that is that you can't ensure your memory. We're all going to lose that at some stage in some way. But you can ensure your memories if you write them down.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  And there is triggers. And you've seen this with music too. When someone who's lost mostly all their memory and they start remembering a song. Or they start playing the piano, or they start reading a story, as you said, it does trigger. And that, even if it's for moments, and it's generally for longer, it's a way to bring back joy.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the last thing we do in our project is we actually get the client to read out from their book their favorite stories or just tell them. Because you get the laughter and emotion there. And we do, it's on the shelf over there, we do a one-hour USB with your granddad's stories on there in his voice. Because that is priceless to have that voice forever.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it definitely is. Little switch, one last question in this segment I wanted to ask you is. We deal with a lot of corporates, a lot of business people, whatnot. They're always looking for ways to show that they really do care about their employees. That's literally where leaders who care came from. How do you, if you care about your employees, you'll attract and keep and develop them better. What's the possibilities that leaders of companies can offer, you know, life books as rewards or special benefits for their employees to use in their families?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  I've always thought that, you know, when somebody retires, it's a big moment for them. And it's a scary moment because they go from having a secretary or being in, you know, having a photocopy or whatever it is, to being at home and now treating the spouse as their employees. And that first six months or 12 months is a huge gap in their lives. And I thought if people would give us a retirement gift, a lifetime memoir. Which means that this person's going to talk about the company as well that's given them this gift. Rather than a watch or something. But they're actually going to recount their working life and their time to now. Somebody's going to come and visit them each week for the next six months.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  So they're actually doing something, having a project, looking for the photos, doing that. And slowing down. And then at the end of it, get on with the other half of your life.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's brilliant because you're right, there is a gap. More so for men even at this point than women. But that'll change with more women working. But there is like, there is like, "Holy cow, now what do I, now what do I do?" type of scenario. And, "Am I really as valuable as I thought?" type of thing.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  When people don't answer your calls anymore because, you know, you can't do anything.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's really sad part too, actually.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think when, when they get to reread their book and when they hear their children or grandchildren. Because quite often, you know, the children don't want to hear about, they've lived your business life, your work life, they don't want to hear about it anymore. But it's the time when the memories are there and somebody will drag it out of them and get it there forever. And they can be proud of stuff. They can be proud of where they've come from and what they've done.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  And it should be. And the most amazing stories also come from the not famous, not celeb, not known people that have done amazing things. And I think, yeah, I think it's spectacular. And we're telling everybody about it because they need to know, they need to know about it. One last thing I want to ask you on this part is, with everything that's happened over the last few years and whatnot. What are you most grateful for and what are you most hopeful for?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Oh. I, I'm most grateful, certainly within the the last two, three years of COVID and everything that's brought to us. Is I built a business, we have some, well, by then we only had about 15 staff. We grew it during COVID to 30 staff, 29 we are now. And we were able to pivot, we were able to get them all working at home. We were able to, we didn't furlough anyone, we grew the company. Because people were stuck at home and they were lonely and they were, you know, doing your memoirs when you're worried about your mortality and you're not going on a cruise anymore or whatever, and you're worried about longevity was important.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  What I'm grateful about is the fact that all of these people, we kept them together as a team. A lot of them are young and the mental health issues that surround that are horrendous. Now, we see it in the loneliness of our clients. But when you see the light on the faces of these guys who are producing their life stories and memoirs. Who are telling those stories, who are, you know, all these staff that we have who are under 30. They see the black and white photographs in these books. They see a man in a one-piece swimming costume, you know, on the beach.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  It's a whole new world to them that they haven't seen before. They're getting an education by sort of osmosis.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Not, I mean, our staff, you know, they're all sort of pretty educated to be able to do the the kind of editing and project management work we do. But it's, it's not about education, it's about an understanding of that time period.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  And what are you most hopeful for?

• 37:51Speaker 01

  I'm scared, to tell you the truth, in terms of hopeful with what's going on in the world at the moment. Yvette and I, we chose not to have children because we were worried about Vietnam and grass, you know, drugs and war. Today's so much, so much worse than that. And it's not a very optimistic note to leave on. I've been involved in some ways with homeless charities, with a few things to do with what's going on in Ukraine.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  And what I'm most hopeful for and optimistic about is the number of good people that are there doing stuff. Unbelievable. And you, when we're doing the homeless charities and you're standing there with a bunch of volunteers. And you turn around to the next guy and he's a banker or he's a coldstream guard or he's a delivery driver. There was one guy who was a JP Morgan banker. And he was giving his time and in a dangerous place and way. So there's optimism in that respect. There's a lot of good people come together.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  As long as the, you know, evil that's going on is not ignored by silence.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a, it's a sad and hopeful way to end this part of the interview. And, but I agree, there are, I still have to believe there are way more good people than evil people. And so it's got to give you hope to some degree in that, but.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  You know, what's going on at the moment, as what happened sort of 70, 80 years ago. One bad person or one very bad person. And we've got to learn from that is to not have bad people able to be in power. Now, that's easier said than done, but it's a reality. We thought, we thought the world had balanced itself, that NATO and things like this would, United Nations would enable us to avoid this sort of thing, and it hasn't. So let's hope we are learning from that.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Let's hope and not short memories either.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Write it down.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  To write it down and shout it out is also, but yeah, let's definitely hope for that. And thank you for all you do. Thank you for sharing Lifebook. I think it's an amazing, amazing service and an honor for a lot of people to have. And thank you for what you've done with Ukraine as well, you and Yvonne, it's great.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yvette, don't get that wrong.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  What's that?

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Yvette, not Yvonne.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Sorry, Yvette.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  It's all right, she was going to be christened Yvonne and her parents changed it because her surname's Con. So Yvonne Con didn't work, so.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  That's right. Well, okay, there you go. So, and, and thank you for being a leader who cares.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  I appreciate it and it's been great working with you and it's how we discovered each other. So let's, let's keep it up.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  You bet. Thanks a lot.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Thank you. Take care.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Thank you for listening to the brand called You, videocast and podcast. A platform that brings you knowledge, experience and wisdom of hundreds of successful individuals from around the world. Do visit our website, www.tbcy.in to watch and listen to the stories of many more individuals. You can also follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Just search for the brand called You.