Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett How I Built 5 Multi-Million Dollar Companies: Marcia Kilgore About this episode Marcia Kilgore is responsible for revolutionising the beauty industry through the multiple multi-million dollar businesses she’s founded and built. She’s the woman behind Beauty Pie, Fit Flops, Bliss spas, Soap and Glory and Soaper Duper. Marcia moved to New York with just $300, which she spent on a gym membership, became a personal trainer and started a one room studio where she provided facials and spa treatments. Within a few years she’d built a spa empire and sold it to LVMH for millions and millions of dollars.
What’s incredible about Marcia is she never stops moving and innovating, and she hasn’t just got lucky once with one successful business, but has managed to do it again and again. Now, Marcia runs a beauty empire. Today she tells us what it took to get to that point, what she’s learnt along the way, and what she had to give up.
Follow Marcia:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/marcia.kilgore
Twitter - https://twitter.com/marciakilgore
Follow me:
https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 16,196 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 You know, when you have that kind of experience early, you grow up very fast. And you know what's important and you prioritize. So another deep question.
0:08 Steven Bartlett? All of these are deep questions.
0:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, okay, so.
0:10 Steven Bartlett? Did you feel like a bit of a fraud?
0:11 Speaker 00 No.
0:12 Steven Bartlett? No?
0:12 Speaker 00 I totally thought I knew what I was doing.
0:14 Steven Bartlett? People don't do that.
0:15 Speaker 00 Well, you do when you're 20, right? People came back, Madonna and Uma Thurman and Oprah.
0:28 Steven Bartlett? Marcia Kilgore, I can't actually believe what you're about to hear. I can't actually believe that one human being could have achieved that many successful business exits back to back. She's built companies like Soap and Glory, like Bliss, Beauty Pie, which she's building at the moment. And these companies have sold for tens and hundreds of millions. They've made hundreds of millions in annual revenue. And the remarkable thing is she's not just done it once. She's not just done it twice, not three times, not four times. She's done it five times. And I sat here with her trying to figure out why her? What was it about Marcia that made her achieve such tremendous things in her life? And I think we finally got there. I think we finally found the answer.
1:12 Steven Bartlett? And is it something that you can replicate? A lot of it is. And I think that's what makes this podcast today so interesting. So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
1:35 Steven Bartlett? There is so much that makes you unique, so much. And sometimes I think, and I think I'm guilty of this to some degree too, we don't always see ourselves as being unique because we're inside of our minds and we're behaving in the way that feels natural to us. But when I look at your story and the decisions you've made since you were very, very young, it's so clear to me that there's something so different about, many things that are so different about you. And I want to kind of get to the root of that. What is the foundation of that difference? What was it? What was the cauldron, the experience that created the person you went on to become for the? Following, you know.
2:11 Speaker 00 Wow, that's starting with a very, very deep question, isn't it?
2:15 Steven Bartlett? It is, yeah.
2:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, I think that I grew up in a very small town and a small city. And Canada at that time was, you know, relatively simple. And I always had a hunger to learn more and read more and find out more. And kind of knew that I didn't really fit in in a small city. So very early on, I kind of started to think, well, what can I do? And how can I get out of here? But I didn't have much guidance. So my father died early and my mom was not necessarily someone who would help me, you know, look at universities, for instance, or say, hey, you should really, your grades are really great. Why don't you study and do this and that? Because she had never done it herself. So she, no one really in my family guided me.
2:58 Speaker 00 And at that point, there weren't really university counselors or anyone doing that job in in high schools, at least in in Canada. So I think for me, I realized quite early, probably when I was a teenager, that I just needed more stimulation and I needed more than what was there just to, you know, feel fulfilled and and keep my curiosity going. Those teenage years, you have a lot of experiences. And apparently what happens during your teenage years, because your brain is forming in a very different way and it's starting to sort of solidify, right? And those kinds of experiences really stick with you through your whole life. And I remember having several part time jobs when I was a teenager,
3:40 Speaker 00 all, you know, simultaneously while going to high school and never really finding a job where I thought that the person in charge of the business was doing it well. So I worked at a gym, for instance, and always thought, oh, they could do it so much better if they were just doing this, that and the other thing. I taught aerobics classes and I thought aerobics was so boring the way it was done and tried to do it, you know, in a very different way. So it was more fun for the people who came. And just always trying to improve the experience because I was in quite a mediocre setting, lovely setting, but, you know, very average, very, you know, middle Canada. And so that was probably a bit of the, a bit of the stimulation.
4:19 Steven Bartlett? On that point, though, that that sort of philosophy or even the thought that you could make something better. And that's, that's a point of difference that a lot of people don't have. Where did, where did that come from in you so early that if something isn't good enough, that you had the power within yourself to do something about it? Cause I think most people will go through life just accepting things as they are.
4:39 Speaker 00 That would be just terribly depressing, wouldn't it? I guess if you can connect the dots and see your way to something that might be more elevating for your mind and then for others, or make something a little bit more fun. You can go deep into the childhood stuff, right? And, and just think about, I mean, there were situations in my childhood and it happens to a lot of people, so I'm my, you know, by no means unique in this respect, but where, for instance, and this would probably be more girls than boys, but at some point in every girl's existence in school, you become the unpopular one. How you feel maybe so much of an outsider when suddenly you're out and how painful that can be. I think probably in my experience, when I was suddenly not cool anymore, probably
5:24 Speaker 00 was really painful for me because I also feel things quite acutely. So trying also to think, well, if other people feel left out, how can you make them feel like they're more a part of something? And so most of the businesses that I create are, are very democratic. Bliss even, which was my spa that I created in, in New York. I mean, we had everybody coming in from like Madonna and Uma Thurman and Oprah, right? But then the 12 year old kids who had chronic acne and, you know, their moms would bring them in to have facials, we treated everybody exactly the same way. I think one of my favorite memories from that was when I was actually giving a facial to one of these 12 year old kids that her mom had brought it from Boston and Uma Thurman was in the locker room at the same time and helped her open her locker.
6:09 Speaker 00 So she comes into my treatment room and goes, Uma Thurman just helped me unlock my locker. It was so cute because, you know, everybody was the same and that makes me feel great. I think probably some of that experience as a child, not feeling equal, being left out maybe a little bit. We, we, after my father passed away, we were not necessarily poor or, you know, but not, certainly not comfortable in any way, shape or form. At one point we moved back to a small town and we kind of lived on the wrong side of the tracks. If there was a wrong side of the tracks, we lived on the wrong side of the tracks in this very small town where my mother's family was from. So you kind of felt like you weren't quite as good as everyone else, but that wasn't fair.
6:53 Speaker 00 Very likely, the idea of this democratization of the good stuff probably comes from that, but I'm sure you could grab any therapist, anywhere, and they would give you a different version of it.
7:05 Steven Bartlett? The passing of your father seems to be quite a poignant point. You seem to refer to it as like before and after, how life was somewhat different. And after your father passed away,
7:17 Steven Bartlett? the requirement for you to develop like a real sense of independence seems to sort of really come through. I think I read that you had three part-time jobs at one point.
7:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, well, I had to, I mean, my mother was a secretary. So she didn't have a, you know, huge income. At the time, I was probably 11, right? So I didn't ask her, hey, do we have any money in the bank? You don't really ask those kinds of questions after the death of your parent. But I assumed just from the way that my mother, you know, acted, that we weren't exactly stable or, you know, financially well off. So being, I think, the youngest, but yet potentially the most responsible of the three sisters, I kind of felt like I had to help and maybe help in order for her to feel better herself. Have you ever watched Jim Carrey?
8:07 Speaker 00 He actually talks about, I mean, of course, you've watched Jim Carrey, but there's an interview that he gives where he talks about his mother actually suffered from tremendous depression. And he learned to be funny because he wanted her to laugh. And he wanted to see her feel good. And I know there is something about, okay, I'm gonna have a paper wrote and I'm gonna, you know, be a personal trainer or teach aerobics. And I'm gonna work as a waitress, even though I'm not necessarily old enough to serve alcohol in this establishment. Whatever it was, I would just do it because I wanted to take the stress off of her. I didn't want her to think if I wanted, you know, a car or whatever it was that she was gonna have to pay for it,
8:52 Speaker 00 because I knew it was already quite stressful for her to just pay the rent. So I think, you know, you just do whatever is expected of you and it's fine, right? It's great. It's a skill. It's like a gift. In a way, you can look at it and just think, well, I developed that skill from 10,000 hours of practice, maybe over a year or two, and it was never hard for me to work again.
9:13 Steven Bartlett? You mentioned the gym there. Personal training?
9:16 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah. So when I moved to New York, it's a long story, but I then moved to New York when I was eighteen after my twelfth grade and I got accepted to Columbia University and I was supposed to go, but I didn't have any money. And my sister who lived in New York said, I'll help you out with your tuition. But then she had a little snafu with her income that year. It was like a tax thing or whatever. You know, again, no big deal. And so I was in New York and I had no, no money to go to university. And it was too late because I was Canadian to get a foreign student loan. So I decided to use the only skill that I had when I was, and I know you can tell this about me, but I was a bodybuilder. I know it's kind of hard to see now, but I was, I was like a middleweight
9:59 Speaker 00 bodybuilding champion when I was a teenager. You know, between the three part-time jobs, I would then go to the gym at night and, you know.
10:05 Steven Bartlett? Where did that come from? Because that's, that is a, that takes a degree of, dare I say it, dedication, to say the least.
10:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, it was, it was random. I think it was, again, my sister started dating this guy whose brother owned a bodybuilding gym. And he said to me, hey, you should come down to the gym. Because I was a long distance runner and, you know, just to kind of let off steam, I think I just love to always go running. And so he said, oh, you should come down, Miss Canada at the time, like Miss Canada lightweight or featherweight or whatever. She, she worked out there. And so she put me through the paces and gave me a routine and all this kind of stuff. And I just went because it was something to do.
10:44 Steven Bartlett? But even then, though, a lot of people go to the gym, they train, whatever, two days, three days a week. For you to have gone from just walking in the door to becoming a, like a junior bodybuilding champion or something.
10:53 Speaker 00 You know, I suppose, again, if you like had a therapist come in and say, oh, why would you do that? It's probably to give some kind of semblance, control and the ability to achieve something,
11:05 Speaker 00 you know, to my life, which at the time, I'm a teenager in a high school in the Melissa Saskatchewan.
11:13 Speaker 00 School was not so hard for me.
11:15 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
11:16 Speaker 00 So what else am I gonna do?
11:17 Steven Bartlett? Sense of like purpose, I guess, and.
11:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, and to have that discipline, you also have control, right? So if you can control your body, then you could probably control other things. And if you can achieve things with seeing how far you can take it, then, you know, it just adds to the, I guess, the challenge.
11:34 Steven Bartlett? This is a really.
11:35 Speaker 00 You like a bit of a challenge?
11:36 Steven Bartlett? I do. I love a challenge. I also really love working out and I'm, I'm, I will go to the gym every single day. And I, I, you know what it was? I had a, I sat here with a entrepreneur and she is very well known. She's got millions of followers online for basically being a bodybuilder. She describes herself as a bodybuilder, which doesn't, you know, she's a very lean bodybuilder, let's say. But, um, and she told me that when she was in school, she was outcasted a little bit. And she would eat her like lunch in the toilets. Her name's Chrissy Chella. And her, her going to the gym was in some respects an escape from all of that. It was like her way of, yeah, I think.
12:11 Speaker 00 Building herself back up.
12:13 Steven Bartlett? Building herself back up.
12:14 Speaker 00 Yeah. If you think about physically what's happening, right? She's building herself back up.
12:17 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
12:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
12:18 Steven Bartlett? And when you start talking about sort of being excluded from the, the cool kids and stuff. And then that your bodybuilding became a big sort of, you know, feature in your life at that age. I wondered if there was a link or, um, cause it is, it is an extreme thing. It requires a, a, a level of persistence and a, and a, an okayness with being uncomfortable, physically uncomfortable.
12:39 Speaker 00 That too. You know what? The gym was also full of adults. And I think I was a young adult, so I probably had more of a mindset of an adult early. I'm not, I'm not like the most intelligent human being on, you know, on the earth, but I'm probably slightly more intellectual than most of the people that I was in school with. So I found my friends in a, an environment where there were people working out and being healthy and just older. And so I think that probably had something to do with it, too. You had people to talk to there that you could kind of connect to versus the teenagers who maybe were going through their teenage things. I'd say also, and I've had this conversation with, you know, if you've experienced a death
13:22 Speaker 00 in your family early, or if you've had a parent or a sibling who's, you know, chronically ill or handicapped, you see life in a very different way, right? So if your father dies when you're 11 and you're in a high school with a group of girls and they're all very catty and you just think, oh, really? You're not going there? It's not interesting to be part of that kind of crowd. You don't want to talk about those kinds of things. They're not important and you know it because you've been through something profound very early on. So it's hard to connect to people who haven't, like, you know, when you have that kind of experience early, you grow up very fast and you know what's important and you prioritize.
14:04 Speaker 00 So it's hard to find anyone to relate to if you have a bunch of teenagers who haven't, right?
14:12 Steven Bartlett? Are you saying that you didn't fit in? You didn't think you fitted into that?
14:14 Speaker 00 I don't have any friends from high school.
14:16 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, same.
14:17 Speaker 00 Do you, yeah, okay. So did you fit in?
14:19 Steven Bartlett? Uh, no.
14:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, so, yeah, I probably didn't fit in. I mean, didn't feel like an outcast in any way, shape or form, but I had not much to talk to them about, right? What they were, what they wanted to talk about at that time just wasn't that interesting to me. So whether or not I was fitting in or not, I just didn't have the same interests, I guess, you know, as, as the other kids who were maybe able to grow up at a normal pace because of, you know, their normal existence.
14:48 Steven Bartlett? So take me back then. So you, you get the place at Columbia?
14:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, I got a place at Columbia and then it didn't work out that year. And I thought, oh, maybe I'll save up and I'll go next year, but I have to, here I am in New York, I have $300, right? And my mom, for, I was the third of three girls and the two older ones were a bit of a handful, right? So she gave me for my grade 12 graduation present, like a backpack that was also a suitcase. And I was, I was actually the really disciplined, helpful one, but I think she had just had it. Like by then, she'd been through the death of my dad and then my, my older sister who had moved away quite early and then my middle sister who... You know, was, I wouldn't say complicated, but she'd been in a couple of car accidents. Like, it was exhausting for my mother.
15:35 Speaker 00 So by the time I was done high school, I think she was just like, see ya. And I don't blame her, right? A single mom, three girls, you must be like up to here. So she gave me this back and I moved and I actually moved in with my sister who was living in New York. And, and I needed to work because I had to, you know, it was like, well, here I am. I'm not going back to Saskatchewan. And so I had to figure out what to do. And the only skill I had at the time was like the body. And so I got a gym membership at this place called Better Bodies, which was on 19th Street between 5th and 6th. And it was the place where kind of everybody who was anybody, you know, back then, like bodybuilding had started to kind of be a thing, you know, everybody was talking about Arnold.
16:20 Speaker 00 I think pumping iron had kind of maybe just come out. This was way before Arnold was a governor. And, and so I went to the gym and Jean-Claude Van Damme worked out there and his wife Gladys Portuguese, who was also this famous bodybuilder, and then all the kind of cool film directors and fashion designers. Everybody went to this gym. However, they were quite new to it. I had been like bodybuilding by then for three years or four years, maybe even. And so I looked great, right? And so did Jean-Claude and so did Gladys. The rest of them, not yet. So I would have people come to me and I'm 18, right? And say, hey, I wanna, you know, I wanna look like you. Cause I wasn't really bulky. I looked like an Olympic athlete.
17:05 Speaker 00 And so they wanted how I looked.
17:07 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah.
17:07 Speaker 00 And so I charged them 15 or 20 dollars an hour and do personal training, which, you know, back then for an 18 year old, it was a lot because minimum wage was probably 350. So I thought, oh, this is amazing. And so I became a personal trainer to, you know, a lot of kind of celebs. And they would then send me to their friend and refer me to this person or that person. And so it started out that way. But I kind of realized working in the gym for 15 bucks an hour was not going to pay my rent. And or anything else and probably was not that sustainable over the long term. And I had no business skills as such, but I knew what good service was like. Cause with common sense, you know how you want to be treated and you know, how you would want to show up and how you want to treat your customer and how
17:52 Speaker 00 you try to make sure that they enjoy their experience so that they have you back. Now, personal training is one of those things where most people who need a personal trainer hate exercise. Otherwise, you wouldn't really need a personal trainer. So there was a lot of thought that went into like the, I would, I guess you would talk about it now as like a loyalty mechanic.
18:12 Steven Bartlett? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:13 Speaker 00 Yeah. How can I get them to make sure they don't cancel, right? Because they hate this. Otherwise, I wouldn't be coming.
18:19 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
18:19 Speaker 00 I have to make sure that this whole experience, that you're just looking forward to it. So that every, you know, Tuesday and Thursday or whatever, I'm showing up and making my 40 bucks. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to pay my rent. So I think the early seeds of how do you get someone to come back? And, and how do you give service that's so above and beyond that there's nobody else who will try this hard? It was planted then because-
18:43 Steven Bartlett? What did you learn about loyalty and customer retention?
18:46 Speaker 00 You gotta always be pleasant, right? I mean, you have to be patient. You have to be totally, absolutely focused on your customer, right? So it was about them. It was not about me. And I think there are a lot of people who slip into friend mode, right? Or start to kind of talk about their problems. It's like no one is paying you to listen to your problems. So whether you are a personal trainer or giving a facial or waxing somebody's legs or whatever it is, nobody wants to hear about your stuff. That's not why they're paying, right? You're there to focus on them and no one gets enough attention. Maybe some people get enough attention, but most people don't get enough attention. They don't have someone who really listens to them, right? All rushing around all the time.
19:31 Speaker 00 So even to just be there, doing whatever it is you're doing, taking them through their paces, running them up flights of stairs. I mean, I took people jogging, right, around Manhattan nine times a day. I was fed.
19:43 Steven Bartlett? And you went on to start Bliss?
19:44 Speaker 00 Yes. So-
19:46 Steven Bartlett? Tell me.
19:46 Speaker 00 From running around Manhattan nine times a day, running upstairs and in the summer especially, my skin got quite bad. And it had never been great. You know, through my teenage years, everybody has a little bit of, you know, acne, et cetera, et cetera. But mine, I'd never quite solved it. And I bought a lot of products to try and solve it. And I actually personally trained somebody who worked at one of the hot, you know, skincare brands at the time. He gave me everything and nothing really worked. And so I thought one summer, in the summer, when you're a personal trainer in New York, all of your clients generally will go to the Hamptons. And so for me, that was like two months without income, right? No one pays you when they're not working out. So I thought, I can either go to the Hamptons and be captive in somebody's house,
20:30 Speaker 00 because you then become kind of like, people would drag you to the beach and say, oh, here's my personal trainer. And you just, it was not a good dynamic for somebody like me who does not.
20:40 Steven Bartlett? It's freedom.
20:40 Speaker 00 I want freedom. So I decided, I found this skincare, it was, it was like a school. And I decided to take this crash course in how to, you know, fix your own skin. And it was actually how to do facials. But I was taking it for myself. And then I realized I really loved it. And then I convinced my very trusting, and I am so grateful to them, but personal training clients, these were, you know, some A names. And they let me.
21:09 Steven Bartlett? Name drop.
21:10 Speaker 00 They let me practice on them.
21:11 Steven Bartlett? Name drop.
21:12 Speaker 00 Like at the time.
21:13 Steven Bartlett? Oprah?
21:14 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah, I've had, oh, yeah. Yeah, like, yeah, yeah. But when I, very, very early on, it was more like Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher. So, I mean, everybody, everybody who was anybody kind of came in and, and let me do their face. And it was a real, it was like a real gift to be trusted with people who relied on their faces for their work. Right? At that early stage.
21:36 Steven Bartlett? Your own location in Manhattan?
21:37 Speaker 00 Well, it started with people coming to my, to my apartment.
21:41 Steven Bartlett? Oh, okay.
21:42 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I would personally train people by running all over Manhattan during the day. And then at night, I, because my sister had some connections with the modeling, uh, modeling industry, let's just say. She had some bookers who had some other models who had terrible skin. And so they would send these models to me because I was known, I guess. I mean, I didn't even have a reputation for knowing what I was doing, but and they would come to my apartment in the East Village and literally lie on the floor.
22:12 Steven Bartlett? Did you feel like a bit of a fraud in those early days when you were like?
22:15 Speaker 00 No.
22:16 Steven Bartlett? No?
22:16 Speaker 00 I totally thought I knew what I was doing.
22:18 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
22:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, because I've worked so hard, right? So I knew the steps of a facial and I had never had a facial somewhere where it was any different than what I was doing. And I knew that I was more, you know, where a normal facial would take an hour, I would spend two and a half on somebody. So I knew that if I didn't necessarily have the best technique, I was going to try harder. And so I'd make up for it that way. People came back and then they sent me all their friends and then they sent me all their friends. And then suddenly, you know, it was like a social club, you couldn't get people out of the house. So I'd have to get up at five AM to go do a personal training session with somebody. Someone would have come over for a facial at eight o'clock at night, the night before. I finished them at ten thirty and then they'd want to chat.
23:02 Speaker 00 And it was like, I gotta get an office because I gotta get these people out of here. Cause you're kind of stuck in your apartment and it's hard to then get the client to then go when they're in your house.
23:16 Steven Bartlett? There seems to be a theme emerging here, which is, I mean, you only just told me about two kind of professional pursuits. The personal training and now the facial business as it started. But you're, you seem as to be someone that's really remarkable at customer experience. Because the fact that you can't get them out of your house and that you're, you know, these personal training clients are, you know.
23:37 Speaker 00 Letting me do.
23:38 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
23:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, letting me experiment on them with wax and things like that.
23:41 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
23:42 Speaker 00 Yeah.
23:42 Steven Bartlett? That's like a really underrated thing. I mean, what we're talking about there is fundamentally like sales.
23:46 Speaker 00 Sales, I guess, and trust.
23:48 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
23:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
23:49 Steven Bartlett? Which I think is part of sales, right? Like trust is a super important part of being, you know, and you.
23:54 Speaker 00 And sales, you know, if you're selling.
23:56 Steven Bartlett? It sounds bad, I know, doesn't it?
23:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, because I mean, I hate the idea of sales, but I love selling.
24:03 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
24:03 Speaker 00 But I couldn't sell something if I didn't think it was great.
24:06 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
24:06 Speaker 00 Don't ask me to sell something I don't love because I can't do it. But if I love something, I could sell it to anybody. So I guess it's more about aligning your. Like moral conviction with whatever it is that you are then selling.
24:21 Steven Bartlett? Do you do you consider yourself a salesperson?
24:24 Speaker 00 Well, would I say I'm a salesperson? That's a really hard.
24:28 Steven Bartlett? So without the stigma.
24:30 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:30 Steven Bartlett? Let's remove the stigma.
24:31 Speaker 00 Well, everything is sales, right?
24:33 Steven Bartlett? Exactly.
24:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, you just have to be, look, you gotta be pleasant, right? Unless you're some kind of genius that people need to have around. The world gets to choose who they're interacting with. And so if you want in in any area of your life, right? If you want to have like great team members in your office, you better be pleasant to be around or they're not. They're not going to stay if you wanna, you know, meet with an editor or a journalist or what. Who are they going to write about? Probably the people, eh, yes, everybody's got an interesting story, but those who they like are probably going to get a little further than those who are assholes. Right?
25:12 Steven Bartlett? Interesting.
25:13 Speaker 00 Yeah. Do you consider yourself a salesperson?
25:16 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
25:17 Speaker 00 Yeah.
25:17 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, but without you, I have the same allergic reaction to the term where I'm like forcing, because we're not forcing things upon people that we don't believe in.
25:25 Speaker 00 No, you're helping them find what they probably would have bought, but find the right one.
25:28 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, sales is persuasion, it's body language, it's communication, it's the way, you know, the passion you have for what you're talking about.
25:35 Speaker 00 And and it's delivering information in a way that helps somebody make a choice without feeling stressed, right? Because generally, I think if you if you are trying to get someone to try something, right? But you're pushing it in the wrong way that isn't aligning with what they need to hear about it. Then that is a failed sale.
25:57 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
25:57 Speaker 00 Yes, because actually you should be listening.
26:00 Steven Bartlett? And if they don't think you're objective, right? And this is one of the things that I think has been most successful with my longest standing clients from my previous company was they knew that I would come there and I would tell them when our work was bad.
26:10 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:11 Steven Bartlett? So I would say, don't do this, it's a waste, it's going to waste your money.
26:14 Speaker 00 Yes.
26:14 Steven Bartlett? But these things here, I actually think are going to work really well. So the minute I would say, but these things here, they'd go, yes.
26:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:19 Steven Bartlett? Because they felt I was.
26:20 Speaker 00 It's trust, it's trust also.
26:22 Steven Bartlett? Right, exactly.
26:23 Speaker 00 Yeah, which is sort of number one, isn't it? It's like worse for us, better for you.
26:27 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
26:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, and if people feel like you're aligned with them doing better, which is what you always should be anyway.
26:34 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
26:34 Speaker 00 Because that's just listening to the customer and giving, I mean, it's so basic, right? It's back to the basics of you listen to them and you give them what they're asking for. And that's sales, actually. So if you, they'll tell you, any customer will tell you what they want.
26:49 Steven Bartlett? The customers always know what they want, though.
26:51 Speaker 00 No, no, definitely not, right? Somebody said to me, and they weren't talking about customers. They were talking about buyers at department stores. So the people who are employed by department stores to purchase the merchandise that then get sold on to customers. And he said, buyers, department store buyers are experts at yesterday, right? And to some extent, it's true, they look at their data from, you know, before. And so, of course, if you look at the world, the percentage of people who are visionary enough to think about something new that people might want, it's probably quite a small percentage. And all the rest of the people think in a different way and, you know, provide a lot of value to the world in different ways. But there are a select few, I suppose, who think of the new stuff. And like, that's our job.
27:35 Speaker 00 And then, of course, you have to get people to come with you, which is difficult sometimes.
27:39 Steven Bartlett? Because they don't necessarily see it.
27:41 Speaker 00 So you've got to figure out how to describe it to them, whether that's by pictures or words or however else.
27:46 Steven Bartlett? That's the sales part, right?
27:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, I suppose so. It's also a lot of psychology. I mean, there's so many barriers, right? There, I mean, have you ever, I mean, do you read behavioral economics?
27:57 Steven Bartlett? Behavioral economics? Yes, I've read like The Psychology of Money, which I think is pretty much behavioral economics. And then I did a course on psychology and I've, most of my books in there are psychology books, but.
28:07 Speaker 00 There's so many fascinating books like by Dan Ariely or Richard Thaler or Daniel Kahneman. And they, they won, you know, Nobel prizes for the behavioral economics, which is the opposite kind of, of economics. And the theories of economics don't include human beings and their behavior and their emotions. So behavioral economics is all about how the emotions that we have interact with, you know, with economics to create different outcomes from buying decisions that would normally be.
28:40 Speaker 00 Expected, people will rationalize things based on what they've done before.
28:44 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
28:44 Speaker 00 Right? So this mental framework around old things.
28:46 Steven Bartlett? Hmm.
28:47 Speaker 00 So if you're trying to create something new, very often you have to relate it to something existing.
28:53 Steven Bartlett? Hmm.
28:53 Speaker 00 And people can more easily understand what you're talking about because you can say, oh, it's like this.
28:58 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
28:58 Speaker 00 But da, da, da, da, da. But very often it's hard for people that they don't have a mental framework or a mental model of how something already works.
29:05 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
29:06 Speaker 00 If you come in with something really radical and disruptive.
29:08 Steven Bartlett? They don't know what a place are.
29:10 Speaker 00 No. And so it's really so much easier, like with Beauty Pie, right? We're a buyer's club in England. Apparently people don't know what a buyer's club is. In America, everybody knows what a buyer's club is, right? Cause there's Sam's Club and there's Costco, which isn't the same in England as it is in America. Costco in America has like the highest household income per customer.
29:33 Steven Bartlett? Oh, really?
29:34 Speaker 00 Because people just pull up in their Range Rover and buy, you know, they sell diamonds at Costco, right?
29:39 Steven Bartlett? Oh, bless you.
29:40 Speaker 00 But it's always a deal. So Beauty Pie, right, is kind of like Costco, but for luxury cosmetics and skincare and wellness products. And so we source from all these fantastic labs and we get the highest quality stuff. And then people can buy it. If you're a member of the club, you buy it cheaper than wholesale. But people in England don't know the concept. So you have to think, well, it's kind of like Netflix, right? But, but then you have to actually pay for your product. So it's not really like Netflix. So kind of like, you know, you have to, you're always doing this mental modeling so that people can understand it really easily.
30:15 Steven Bartlett? By comparison.
30:16 Speaker 00 Yeah.
30:16 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
30:16 Speaker 00 Yeah.
30:17 Steven Bartlett? So you, with Bliss, you start this business, you move into your own location. And then talk to, talk to me about the, the experience of, because that was your first real kind of like business, business, employees.
30:28 Speaker 00 Yes.
30:29 Steven Bartlett? How was that and scaling that business until the point where it was, it was acquired?
30:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it was a fantastic experience. We started quite small. I had a tiny place called Let's Face It before I had Bliss. And I had probably five employees, three rooms. So we had a manicurist, we had a receptionist, we had a couple of other facialists. On certain shifts, we'd have a massage therapist come in. Somebody did the laundry that wasn't me. That was, you know, I used to have to take the laundry out. On Avenue B, I would have to like carry these huge bags of laundry from the facials to Avenue A and like do the laundry at night. Which was also really crazy. If you think back, you could never do this if you were older. This is definitely a nineteen, twenty year old's gig to be working all day and then going doing laundry on Avenue A and Seventh Street and, you know, all night to get the
31:16 Speaker 00 towels done. But yeah, I opened, let's face it, first and had, you know, probably five, six, seven employees. And it was great because it was small enough for me to handle, had, like, I had no experience with employees. So just understanding the operations of a business and scheduling. And I mean, I really rate doing it versus learning about it. And of course, I never learned about it. So I never learned how to go structure a business. I never ended up in business school. I just did it. And then I saw the patterns along the way of what goes wrong when you do this, or what you should look out for. And especially a lot of patterns with people. I think that, you know, being able to recognize patterns
31:59 Speaker 00 is a part of either an emotional intelligence or just some, it's a type of intelligence has been very helpful. And the older you get, the faster you recognize the patterns because you've just been around for longer. And you can see also, I'm sure you've seen this, types of people.
32:15 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah.
32:16 Speaker 00 Yeah. So you know, that type of person. And you kind of can almost suss people out after you've spent 10 minutes with them. You kind of know what to expect or.
32:25 Steven Bartlett? It's kind of what you're describing earlier, but like, understanding something by comparison. So I have the same thing now in business where you, and you just, we're talking about there is like, you've done more experiments when you get older. So you can kind of predict the outcome.
32:36 Speaker 00 Yes.
32:37 Steven Bartlett? That type of person behaves in that type of way.
32:40 Speaker 00 And when you notice this happening, it's probably because of this.
32:43 Steven Bartlett? And it ends like this. So you go, fuck that.
32:47 Speaker 00 Exactly that. It's like, oh, no, here we go. But also, I think there's a, I mean, there's a beauty of having it happen to you over and over and over again, because you realize, oh, here we go again. When this person does that thing that ends like this. Well, the last time it ended like this. Well, I hired this person. It ended like, and it's fine.
33:06 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
33:07 Speaker 00 And so you don't panic as much, right? When you're younger and you lose people who were working for you in your business, you think the world is going to end. And then, you know, very often, it's just different when you hire somebody else, right? And, and usually, the new person will bring something completely. Additive to the table.
33:24 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
33:24 Speaker 00 And so it's actually a good thing, but it takes a long time to get to that point where when someone's quitting, you're going, great, see ya.
33:34 Steven Bartlett? It is like excruciatingly offensive.
33:37 Speaker 00 Or that you lose sleep over it, you know, I rarely will lose sleep anymore if if someone is going because you always also think if they're not really thrilled to be here and working like at top level, then probably they'll be happier somewhere else. And that means more happiness will also come into that spot.
33:54 Steven Bartlett? And when you're young in business, the story you tell yourself about what that person quitting means is just deeply illogical and riddled with like fear and emotion.
34:00 Speaker 00 Yes, and it's about you.
34:02 Steven Bartlett? It's it's personal.
34:02 Speaker 00 Yes, instead of it being about them. Yes.
34:05 Steven Bartlett? And but when you get older and you see these good people go and, you know, come and go, you realize that it is what it is.
34:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's an ecosystem, isn't it? Yeah.
34:13 Steven Bartlett? It's not it's not a fight you could have ever win. No company has ever managed to keep a hundred percent of their employees for a sustained period of time. So so what how did you get to that point to exiting the business?
34:23 Speaker 00 Okay, so well, at Bliss, so we we launched Bliss in, I think, July of two thousand or sorry, nineteen ninety six. So we opened, I had three treatment rooms before that in my little place called, let's face it, and I opened, I think, nine treatment rooms. And then we put a nap room in in the next place, which was called Bliss.
34:41 Steven Bartlett? Right.
34:41 Speaker 00 And, you know, back in the nineties, we didn't have, there wasn't social media. There was no way to really get the word out fast unless you had an article in a magazine. And because
34:53 Steven Bartlett? Really, that really like moved the needle?
34:54 Speaker 00 Oh, Mike, it was a completely different moment. Now, you get a full page in New York Times, right? You get traffic to your website for a day.
35:02 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, nothing.
35:03 Speaker 00 No, nothing, because it's so spliced up, right? Everything is so temporary. Back then, you got an article in Vogue and your phone rang for eighteen months.
35:12 Steven Bartlett? Fuck.
35:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, it was so much easier. However, you had to be good enough to get an article in Vogue. So there were a million people doing what you did, but you had to make sure that the experience that you were offering was cool enough, beautiful enough, desirable, that all of your people were trained well, that the results were good, et cetera, et cetera. And so we were great, right? We gave Great, great service.
35:35 Steven Bartlett? Can I ask you a question on that?
35:36 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:36 Steven Bartlett? Do you think service was better back in those days? Because there was less ability to, because what you said there is like you had to be good enough to get on those very few big, big stages.
35:46 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:46 Steven Bartlett? Whereas these days you can kind of ship products and ship people can pay to be seen much easier than they probably could have back then, I'm guessing, and get an endorsement from a, from a Vogue.
35:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
35:58 Steven Bartlett? So is it?
35:58 Speaker 00 Well, it's not sustainable though, is it? How many times can you pay if actually people don't come back more than once?
36:03 Steven Bartlett? And word of mouth then becomes your, you know, starts to bring to your business.
36:06 Speaker 00 It's still the same.
36:07 Steven Bartlett? Right.
36:07 Speaker 00 It's all the same. Like today is the same, it's just split into different stuff. But if you can't keep that customer for more than one, two, three transactions, you might as well go home.
36:18 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
36:18 Speaker 00 Yeah. So you.
36:19 Steven Bartlett? Your days are numbered.
36:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, you gotta figure it out at the beginning. Like what is going to be so much better? How is it going to be that much better? How are you going to deliver it consistently, right? Make sure that she is never, or he is never disappointed, or they are never, right? Disappointed. And you, you have to look at, I mean, if you look at acronyms, right? This LTV to CAC stuff, which I hate thinking of it that way, but, because it's humans, right?
36:44 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
36:45 Speaker 00 It's like, well, how many transactions is this person going to come back for three years and be a loyal customer and order stuff from you six times a year? Or are they going to order once and go, eh? Like, it has to be pretty compelling.
36:56 Steven Bartlett? When you look back at why you were successful in that business, is it because of that attention to detail?
37:00 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah. In Bliss? Oh, my God, yes.
37:03 Steven Bartlett? How extreme are you?
37:04 Speaker 00 So extreme, extreme, extreme, extreme. I mean, everything from how you laid on that table to what the sheets smelled like, to how you bolstered their knees so that the backs of their heels, when they were lying for a facial for 60 minutes, the backs of their heels wouldn't ache because their knees were elevated the right way, to the wax that you put on their hands, to how much you massaged them, to the responses that you would give. And we trained everybody in terms of the customer says this, it's all about them, right? It's about making them feel good, not only, you know, their face, their body, whatever you're treating, but mentally, right? It's not about you. There are no complaints. You don't whine about anything.
37:46 Speaker 00 It's all about making them thrilled, feel great about themselves, look great. They should walk out of there feeling like.
37:55 Speaker 00 We had, literally, I think the testament to it, when you think back, is crazy loyalty. So people would come in for their facials and say they came in on Tuesday night at seven. Evenings, of course, were always booked. We closed at 10, but so you only have like a 6:30 to 8, or 8 to 9:30, or you know, you kind of back it out, usually an hour and a half for a facial. So really, there were only two evening slots unless you left work early, and then there were three evening slots, 10 rooms. That means you got 30 people in in the evening. Other people, they want to come in, they got to like make an excuse to their boss and come during the day, right? Or take a day off work to come for their facial, which people actually did. But people would book their spot every month for two years, right?
38:39 Speaker 00 So that they wouldn't miss it. And if they had to change, they would call and say, could you swap me with somebody else because I don't want to miss it? Or they would have a friend book a different slot, and then they would swap with their friend. And so we had a waiting list of people who just wanted to come in. And we were booked every day, all day, for like probably a year in advance for those 10 treatment rooms. But we would keep a waiting list, and if we didn't get people in, now this is the day, no email, right? Okay, there was not email.
39:10 Steven Bartlett? I thought you got no emails when that was like.
39:11 Speaker 00 No, there were no emails. Yeah, so you had the phone and you had your computer booking system, but you couldn't just mass email everybody. So we would literally keep a list of people who were waiting for appointments. And at the end of each day, if we didn't get them in on a cancellation, we'd call every single one and apologize. And then tell the, so at seven o'clock, somebody would start the sorry calls. We'd call them the sorry calls and you would just call.
39:37 Steven Bartlett? Whose idea was that?
39:38 Speaker 00 Me.
39:39 Steven Bartlett? So Mike, you have clearly very, very high standards.
39:43 Speaker 00 Yes.
39:43 Steven Bartlett? For detail.
39:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:45 Steven Bartlett? How do you police that amongst people that might not have the same high standards?
39:48 Speaker 00 Well, they're not my people.
39:50 Steven Bartlett? So you'd fire them?
39:51 Speaker 00 Well, they would probably be better elsewhere where their standards were more aligned with the business that they were working for. I mean.
39:57 Steven Bartlett? Bureaucratic, aren't they?
39:59 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, you you hire people, then you see if they can operate in your, I mean, look, if you're the Olympic hockey team and you've got a goalie who's terrible, they can't stay or you're not going to win, are you? So it's not about firing them. It's like, is this a team member who belongs on this team? Yeah, fire, I guess you would say, yes, you would fire them. You would try.
40:19 Steven Bartlett? How uncompromising were you about the standards?
40:22 Speaker 00 Very uncompromising. I mean, we also wrote thank you notes, right? So every person who came in for a treatment, whether it was eyebrow wax or a manicure or a facial or a massage, the person who did that treatment had to write a thank you note and it got posted out that night.
40:34 Steven Bartlett? If you weren't uncompromising about those standards, those little thank you notes, that apologies, you know, for the waiting list.
40:40 Speaker 00 Well, then they knew we were still thinking about them, right? So they thought, I have a chance. They haven't forgotten about me. And we were grateful that they were waiting to come in and pay us money. I mean, they're giving you a paycheck, aren't they?
40:53 Steven Bartlett? Do you think you'd be sat here now if you hadn't been uncompromising with the standards in Bliss all those years ago in nineteen ninety six?
40:59 Speaker 00 I think you know the answer to that question.
41:04 Speaker 00 Of course I wouldn't, because it, you know.
41:07 Steven Bartlett? Compounds, right.
41:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, it compounds. You just know what good looks like. And then you know what people respond to and that people want to be treated, you know, with respect and, you know, with gratitude, right? You're a customer, you're handing over your hard earned money to somebody. They better be grateful and that also keeps you going every day. It just, there's so much science about gratitude and how just starting your day with thinking, wow, I'm so lucky, right? I'm thinking about those things that you're lucky to have. I think I've always operated businesses with that idea of I am grateful that people come to me to buy something or they trust me with their face, right? Or they'll get up at seven o'clock in the morning and pay me forty dollars to teach
41:53 Speaker 00 them an aerobics class in their living room. I mean, they could be, they could be sponsoring so many other people, but they're sponsoring me and isn't that so generous of them?
42:04 Steven Bartlett? If I were to ask you on that.
42:07 Steven Bartlett? If I were to ask you, and this is tough to do in hindsight, but I think we're all capable of doing it. In that period of your life and those early moments and really throughout your career, what is it about you that made you successful? I mean, I've picked up on one, which is really high standards. The other one I've picked up on, I picked up on the minute you walked through the door, which is you're just a very pleasant human being. And I'm like, all of these things, if they compound over like 30 years, you're going to get to a really good place. But is there anything else within, you know, some people are visionaries, they are, you know, whatever. Is there anything else where you say, do you know what, that's probably a trait of me that made me successful?
42:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, I connect the dots.
42:41 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
42:42 Speaker 00 In new ways. So that, if that were to be kind of my thing.
42:45 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
42:46 Speaker 00 It's about, have you read the book? It's called Originals by Adam Grant?
42:50 Steven Bartlett? Yes, I know.
42:51 Speaker 00 Yeah. So someone gave it to me. Actually, the art teacher in my son's school gave it to me and said, this sounds like you. And I read it and I was like, oh, you know, when you think you're special?
43:02 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
43:03 Speaker 00 And then you read a book and you're like, nope, I'm not special because everybody he's, he's got it down. Like every chapter is like, oh yeah, this is me. Oh yes, this is me. This is me. And he talks about in the book about how you become an expert in your area. Right? So you are very deep in expertise in one particular area, but then you're very curious about all this other stuff, which is me. I scan everything, right? Whether or not I'm really interested in it, I got newsletters coming out of my eyeballs and I just kind of scan and I'll click on things. And sometimes I'll just force myself to read something that I have no interest in at all, just because there might be something in there. And, and I think from doing that, I find new ideas.
43:44 Steven Bartlett? That's what creativity is, isn't it?
43:45 Speaker 00 Yes.
43:46 Steven Bartlett? I think.
43:46 Speaker 00 But you have to feed it.
43:47 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
43:47 Speaker 00 It's like top of funnel, mid funnel, bottom of funnel, right? And so if you don't have enough top of funnel, you dry up at the bottom where, you know, there's nothing that comes through. And then being able to kind of edit a good idea from a mediocre idea, right?
44:01 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
44:02 Speaker 00 But I guess if you come up with a lot, so the more you feed the funnel. Then the more stuff you have to look at and then being able to know which one is the one that is actually going to resonate with enough people that it's actually a business. Because a lot of people, I think, can be quite navel gazing in, oh, I have this idea and people will care.
44:19 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
44:19 Speaker 00 So I can also be quite brutal with my own ideas and just go, who cares? You think about it for a couple of months and then you have to be able to not fall in love with your own ideas, kind of like with writing. So writers will say, a really great writer is like, you can't fall in love with your own words. You need to be able to go into your writing and just chop it out, right? Just so it's succinct and you like, you can't love what you did, you have to hate what you did. And cut it all down so that just the crispy parts are there. And I think it's the same with ideas. You can spend a lot of time on stuff that nobody cares about. And so you have to be able to edit.
44:58 Steven Bartlett? So interesting. I completely agree. I think about the successes I've had in my life and it was just a process of like multiple sources from multiple disciplines. Pull one little dot, as you said, from those different disciplines. And then when they come together, so it could be like cryptocurrencies, music and my knowledge of social media. And then you come together and you go, oh, together it makes something new and interesting and valuable as a, these three different points of inspiration. I was going to ask you the question when we were talking about that, I was like, can you teach someone in your experience to be better at thinking of good ideas?
45:31 Speaker 00 I think you can provide the environment.
45:35 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
45:36 Speaker 00 Right? But not everyone's going to be able to do that. So there is going to be a cohort of people who just don't think of new ideas and they're probably really good at other things. And that's okay, because the world needs all of them, right? It's like Switzerland, like they, you know, some people are plumbers, but they still make a hundred grand a year and everybody's happy. So if we put people in the right seats on the bus, there's such a position and that, of course, is management, isn't it? It's trying to find when someone has talent, but not in a particular area, you make sure they're doing the right thing.
46:07 Speaker 00 But I think you can. You see this a lot in business school. Not that I've been there, but I've sat on a lot of panels with people who are entrepreneurs, and they're entrepreneurs because they have done a business plan. They've done a business model. They've modeled out what if, you know, we can do this. They haven't come up with, oh, wait, just like you said, if I connect this and this and do it this way, or, right, then I can make this happen. They've, they've said, well, I've gone to Harvard and now I'm going to model out this business plan. And I think if we do this, that we can make, oh, look, it's a profit.
46:42 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
46:43 Speaker 00 And so there's two ways to come by it. And I guess both are valid. And especially these days, the, there's so much money in the universe that people will invest in so many things that you could actually get to a, a good result by just putting a business plan down. You're having tons of money.
47:04 Steven Bartlett? And having gone to Harvard, which is much easier to get money.
47:07 Speaker 00 Yes.
47:07 Steven Bartlett? Being in Silicon Valley and being a white male.
47:10 Speaker 00 All that kind of stuff. Yeah. So it works.
47:14 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
47:14 Speaker 00 Is it full of passion?
47:16 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
47:17 Speaker 00 I don't know. Maybe if you're passionate about making money, that's a passion. It's not my way to do it because I just have to be passionate about whatever it is I'm making or selling or, you know, whatever. I think I'm improving. If it's improving people's existence, then I'm passionate about it. And it was like so amazing to be at Bliss and have people coming in and walk out the door after their treatment, feeling like so happy. And you could see it, right? And they just had such a great time and you thought, well, I'm responsible for that. And what a great thing to do all day. And then the same with beauty pie, right? Is wow, people open up these boxes that they get delivered and it is like, it's like a fairy tale.
48:02 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
48:02 Speaker 00 And it didn't cost them much so they can treat themselves because everybody needs a little lift once in a while. And to be able to get this incredibly deluxe stuff for such a, an affordable price, you know, every time one of those boxes opens up, that somebody is just feeling thrilled. And that is a reason to like show up in the morning, right?
48:23 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
48:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
48:25 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, one of them sounds like a really sustainable, fulfilling, intrinsically driven journey. And the other one sounds a bit like, yeah, like, you know, the pursuit of trying to get rich, which is is harder to sustain, quite honestly.
48:35 Speaker 00 I think so, on the hard days.
48:37 Steven Bartlett? On the hard, I was gonna say, you know, it gets excruciatingly difficult.
48:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
48:41 Steven Bartlett? So one day, there's gonna be many days that it's you'd probably quit if you weren't just truly just living for it.
48:47 Speaker 00 Obsessed.
48:47 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
48:47 Speaker 00 Yeah.
48:48 Steven Bartlett? Regardless of remuneration. But speaking of money, you sell this at some point.
48:52 Speaker 00 Yeah. So in 1999, we had quite a few interested buyers.
48:56 Steven Bartlett? Is that three years after?
48:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
48:58 Steven Bartlett? That's quick.
48:59 Speaker 00 We were great.
49:00 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I could tell. Three, selling the company three years later, you know.
49:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, at my, at the age I was, was quite hilarious. I would have been thirty.
49:08 Steven Bartlett? You were super young.
49:09 Speaker 00 Yeah, thirty when we sold it. So I sold 70% to LVMH.
49:13 Steven Bartlett? That's nuts.
49:14 Speaker 00 It was nuts. You know, we had a few different, large cosmetic conglomerates kind of circling around.
49:20 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
49:21 Speaker 00 One came in and gave me a big presentation and they had champagne ready and we're talking about how they put me in a studio by myself and I could just be creative. You know, this, you're talking to a girl who does facials and waxes people's legs. Do I want to go to a studio by myself? I mean, my favorite thing was knowing I'd look at my list of who was coming in that day and it was like, oh, I get to see this person, this person. That the joy was all the people, right? So they, oh, we're gonna give you a loft and
49:48 Speaker 00 right. And then we had another one who came in and said, we want to turn your spa into a spa under this brand name, which I thought, why, why would you buy it if you, yeah. And then there was LVMH who flew me to Paris on the Concorde.
50:02 Steven Bartlett? No, they didn't.
50:03 Speaker 00 Yes, they did. And took me out for lunch.
50:06 Steven Bartlett? Textbook LVMH.
50:07 Speaker 00 It was, it was quite fabulous, though. I have to admit, it was a wow. And it was hilarious when I got back to Brooklyn, when I flew back from Paris on the Concorde. And it was the middle of the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn. So I'm in a taxi from the airport going back to the spa, although it was a holiday day. And I was going, we had redone the floors and I was going just to make sure that everything was dry and move the furniture back into the place. So I'm. I'm on the subway because I couldn't get a taxi to take me all the way in because the West Indian Day Parade was blocking Flatbush Avenue. And I was on the subway going towards my Prince Street stop and there was Coke spilled all over it, not Coke, but you know, like
50:45 Steven Bartlett? Coca-Cola.
50:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, Coca-Cola spilled all over the seats and drunk people everywhere. And I'm standing there going, I wonder if I'm the only person on this subway who was on the conch.
50:54 Steven Bartlett? This morning.
50:56 Speaker 00 This morning. I thought, yeah, probably, probably all those other people are in their car services.
51:01 Steven Bartlett? No.
51:02 Speaker 00 It was pretty funny. So anyway, they were the most interesting. They loved the business. We were kind of hot at the time. They were looking for American acquisitions. I think they had moved Sephora also into America at the time. So they thought it would be kind of a good partnership and, and you know, the price was right. And I thought, well, I've been starving for, since I moved to New York, right? Every month it was kind of like, do I have enough money to pay the rent?
51:26 Steven Bartlett? No, I mean.
51:27 Speaker 00 Yeah. And I just thought, well, is this going to happen again? You don't know. You don't know if you'll ever be offered like a, a big chunk of change like that. So.
51:35 Steven Bartlett? And you a hundred percent own the company at this point.
51:37 Speaker 00 Yeah.
51:37 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. So you, and you didn't raise money outside capital. They bought 70% of the business for tens of millions, we'll just say, right?
51:44 Speaker 00 Yes.
51:44 Steven Bartlett? Unbelievable.
51:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, I know.
51:45 Steven Bartlett? I mean, you could have just stopped there, right? You could have just stopped there and.
51:48 Speaker 00 Oh, my God, I was 30. What, what are you going to do?
51:51 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I know. I'm a hypocrite because I, yeah.
51:53 Speaker 00 Yeah. You're not going to just stop there where you're going to go like stand at your fridge all day?
51:57 Steven Bartlett? But I mean, most people will just land that one big bag in their life. If they're lucky, if they're extremely lucky and in the minority. But then you went again and you created a business called Soap and Glory, which a lot of people will know in this country.
52:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, it was big.
52:10 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
52:11 Speaker 00 Soap and Glory was big.
52:12 Steven Bartlett? Really big.
52:12 Speaker 00 At the time, you know, it was, um, if I was, I was reading a lot of newspapers and there was a lot of collaborating going on between kind of designer brands and, you know, the high street. And I thought, wouldn't it be fun just to kind of make a, a really great brand that has, we couldn't do at drugstore prices, you can't really do high quality, like super high quality product and sell it at a drugstore price when you're going through the retail food chain because there's all the markups, right? So you, you had to try and make really like. I'd say, I won't say high quality, but good quality products for a price point and make
52:53 Speaker 00 them really fun. And I just thought, you know what, let me try doing something that's using all the puns. I'm a bit of a writer, so I love to write copy. And so it was all about making the products kind of fun and, you know, good quality for just the right price to kind of, you know, be mass. And I launched in Harvey Nichols and it was actually quite a good success, but Harvey Nichols only has Knightsbridge and then a few other stores around the country. And I knew I wasn't gonna be able to make much of a splash just being in Harvey Nichols on a few shelves. So Boots came to us and said, you know, would you like to roll out into different Boots stores? That was really interesting because I thought, this is gonna be amazing. Oh, my God, we're gonna go into Boots, we're gonna make like
53:34 Speaker 00 millions. And I remember, I think we were in 300 Boots stores and you just, for some reason, you just think, okay, if it's in Boots, right? Every brand you see in Boots, you think, oh, they're making a fortune.
53:46 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
53:47 Speaker 00 And I remember we launched and I think that the first week, I think we did $300.
53:54 Steven Bartlett? Oof.
53:55 Speaker 00 Yeah. And then I couldn't figure out why. So I go into my local Boots and it's on the bottom shelf.
53:59 Steven Bartlett? Ah.
54:00 Speaker 00 And so that was, they don't reset the shelves for 10 months. So you start just thinking, oh, my God, I'm gonna be making $300 a week for 10 months until they reset the shelves and I fight my way to the top.
54:14 Steven Bartlett? I need to get back into just the gap there. In that period, though, when you've you've left Bliss and you're, you're not doing anything now. You have a lot of money, so you don't really need to worry about the bills or the rent anymore, anything like that. I just, I'm just intrigued because I've
54:26 Speaker 00 I took a month off.
54:27 Steven Bartlett? Okay, one month.
54:28 Speaker 00 Yeah. It wasn't enough.
54:30 Steven Bartlett? That's not a long time.
54:31 Speaker 00 It wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. I took six months between my last sale and figuring out what to do next. Six months was better.
54:41 Steven Bartlett? One month, one month. So in that one month, what are you doing? You're doing.
54:45 Speaker 00 I went on holiday to the south of France.
54:47 Steven Bartlett? Okay, so you go on holiday to France, then you come back and you're just straight into it?
54:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, just, you know, ideas. I mean, I always have ideas. So I'll be walking down the street, I'll get an idea. So you kind of jot them down. And then the ones that keep bubbling up to the surface, those are the good ones.
54:59 Steven Bartlett? I love this. I read about, I read about you talking about this because it rang so true to me because we all, people like you and creative people generally will get.
55:09 Speaker 00 And you.
55:09 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I don't want to bring myself into, I'm trying to be humble here. People will get lots of ideas lots of the time. And the process in which you decide which ones to go is, and which ones should just be disregarded, I find fascinating. And I've only been able to understand it in hindsight, why I pick certain ideas and why I just let other ones go. But how do you filter out the ones that are worth pursuing and the ones aren't?
55:34 Speaker 00 Okay, so there's something I call the so what test?
55:37 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
55:38 Speaker 00 So you ask yourself, so what? Tell yourself your idea and then ask, well, so what? And if you cannot explain why you would want to do that, or why anybody should care in one sentence, it's not a good enough idea.
55:53 Steven Bartlett? Nice.
55:54 Speaker 00 Yeah.
55:54 Steven Bartlett? But you also let them sit for a while, right?
55:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, because there's so many. You have to. The ones that are just sort of average, they just, they go away, right? And the good ones kind of stay at the top and you think, I've got to do that. I've got to do that. That's really good. I would buy that. Of course, here's the other cheat, right? I only sell stuff that I would buy. So I can't, you know, it would be difficult for me if I'm trying to create a business centered around something that I don't want or have a need for. I don't know if I would be as good at it. Super easy to do beauty pie because I love beauty products. I love candles. I love supplements. I know all the good labs. I've worked with them for 30 years. I know where to get the good stuff. I'm going to buy it anyway. I would like to buy the high quality stuff. I don't want to have to pay retail.
56:40 Speaker 00 Okay, so obvious that one, right? With FitFlop, it was I could not find a pair of shoes that actually felt comfortable on my feet. And I love, you know, I love fashion.
56:53 Steven Bartlett? I can't believe how many businesses you've started and how many of them have done so well.
56:57 Speaker 00 It's not that many.
56:58 Steven Bartlett? It is.
56:59 Speaker 00 I have one more. I have one more, but it's not, I can't tell you, I'll kill you. Can't.
57:03 Steven Bartlett? Soaper Duper?
57:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, that also.
57:06 Steven Bartlett? Oh, you forgot about that one.
57:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, but actually that one is taking a hiatus because our supplier shut down during COVID. And so it was, yeah, well, it's still around, except our supplier shut down. And so we have to reformulate everything.
57:21 Steven Bartlett? So Soap and Glory is a business that even I know, and I'm not, you know.
57:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, you're not a cosmetics guy?
57:26 Steven Bartlett? Well, you know, well.
57:27 Speaker 00 Because at Christmas at Boots. Oh, maybe you'll be, you can be a beauty pie, beauty guy.
57:34 Steven Bartlett? But no, I knew, I know the brand.
57:35 Speaker 00 Yeah.
57:35 Steven Bartlett? It's a very, very well known brand, so.
57:37 Speaker 00 Because we used to take over that week before Christmas at Boots. We would literally have hundreds of thousands of those big pink bags that people would be able to buy for a really crazy deal. That was also, I guess, a learning, just seeing like how much people love a deal.
57:54 Speaker 00 And every, it was almost every year that we would be this sort of Christmas bumper bag. I would see women leaving boots with like three on each arm because they were buying them for all of their friends.
58:05 Steven Bartlett? When you think of that business, why was it successful? And what was your, what's your sort of emotional memory, recollection and memory of that phase of your life?
58:16 Speaker 00 Gosh, that's a, another deep question.
58:18 Steven Bartlett? All of these are deep questions.
58:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, okay, so, well, emotional recollection, I mean, it was great to be able to build something new. It was great to be able to build something that was popular in a different country. Right? So you didn't just do it in America, you also could do it in the UK.
58:31 Steven Bartlett? Like Ronaldo.
58:32 Speaker 00 Yeah.
58:34 Speaker 00 Maybe I'm not so good with the ball, but it was exciting to do something mass, like at mass price points, because you could reach more people. So more people could afford the joy that you were trying to bring through that product. So that's always really nice, because having something that's only affordable. Well, I love high quality things. The exclusion of people that comes along with a luxury price point, I don't like so much, right? So the idea of luxury for affordable, of course, is the, also the holy grail. So building, it was, you know, building Soap and Glory was also a real experience in terms
59:16 Speaker 00 of learning how to deal with a retailer who really had a monopolistic grip on a country, right? Because Boots was the power, you know, the all powerful. And so that was a real learning curve.
59:29 Steven Bartlett? How big did Soap and Glory get?
59:31 Speaker 00 I think we sold, we were selling probably a hundred plus million dollars of the stuff a year through Boots.
59:39 Steven Bartlett? Fuck, that's a lot of money.
59:40 Speaker 00 It was not bad. It was, it was bigish. It was bigish.
59:43 Steven Bartlett? Bigish.
59:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, it was big. I mean, it could, could be, it could have been bigger.
59:47 Steven Bartlett? Could have been bigger.
59:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, it was great. For me, I don't, you know, what's the difference between like fifty, a hundred, a hundred?
59:53 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, same.
59:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, you just, it's like, after you can pay your rent and eat and buy as many t-shirts as you need, you know, your life doesn't change that much, right? But you want to, you want to bring out more and see how much you can do and see if you can offer even, yeah, better stuff.
1:00:10 Steven Bartlett? So you sold that business, I guess, to Boots?
1:00:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, in 2014.
1:00:16 Steven Bartlett? 2014, not so long ago.
1:00:18 Speaker 00 It really wasn't. No, it's seven, seven years. Yeah. Yeah, they really wanted it.
1:00:23 Steven Bartlett? And how did you feel when you, when you, when you, they made the offer, you accept the offer? Did it feel again like the, was it, was there a loss of orientation in your life?
1:00:32 Speaker 00 No, because.
1:00:33 Steven Bartlett? Oh, here we go.
1:00:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, at the same time, I have Fitflop, right? So my footwear brand is also big-ish.
1:00:40 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I've had a bunch.
1:00:41 Speaker 00 We're going to bigish again. You know, sixty five countries. We sell a lot of shoes.
1:00:45 Steven Bartlett? Could be bigger.
1:00:46 Speaker 00 It could be. And it's gonna be bigger. And yeah, and so I sort of had one thing to still grip onto and to really focus on and to make sure that that quality and and dream about what kind of product we're gonna produce for the next season. It's all kind of the same, right? It's product development and then rolling it out and trying to learn, you know, given that feedback loop that you get from from the product that you're launching.
1:01:12 Steven Bartlett? Remarkable. Um, your your partner is also an entrepreneur.
1:01:15 Speaker 00 Yes, yeah, he does now. Costa Rican, um, eco tourism.
1:01:22 Steven Bartlett? How how is that, working with, uh, not working with, how is it to have a partner that's also in the field of entrepreneurship? Because you know what it is? I'm gonna ask you a question here because I'm super curious and maybe you can help me. I've always wondered if as an entrepreneur, it would make more sense to be with an entrepreneur or someone that just does nothing, sits at home, just, you know.
1:01:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:01:44 Steven Bartlett? Nice and simple.
1:01:45 Speaker 00 Being there.
1:01:46 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
1:01:47 Speaker 00 Uh, well, it depends, I suppose, on your appetite for risk and if you have risk anymore. So if you've already managed to, um, you know, sell something and you have a little bit of money in the bank, then having two people going out there and risking it all is okay, because you have something to fall back on. I think certainly having a partner who understands what you're going through day to day and will listen to you. You know, we talked about being able to see someone. It's so important to have someone who sees you and who can understand what it might be like for you on a day that's really hard and offer you that kind of support. Um, my husband is great with that. Like he, I couldn't ask for somebody who supports me more.
1:02:28 Speaker 00 And he does the stuff that I, you know, necessarily don't want to do in terms of that family stuff. And we pick up the the different, um, programs, I suppose, really beautifully together because he'll take care of some stuff and I take care of other stuff and.
1:02:41 Steven Bartlett? And when you come home, are you good at sort of compartmentalizing the work stuff and then like switching off and being present with family?
1:02:51 Speaker 00 Maybe not always.
1:02:52 Steven Bartlett? I appreciate the honesty. I'm not gonna tell any day.
1:02:56 Speaker 00 I don't know if you can be, right? Because sometimes work is really interesting also, right? So I've got two teenage boys, right? They sometimes come out of their rooms, sometimes not. And so sometimes I'll be on social media, chatting with customers, right? Giving them advice, telling them what to use on their skin. It's actually, it's quite social as it is social media. I go home at night because I'm hoping they will come out of their rooms and I can spend time with them. But we have dinner and then they usually go wanna, you know, play video games because all their friends are on video games. So if they do come out of their room, you know, at some point, I might be in the middle of something. Am I really good at just turning that off and saying,
1:03:40 Speaker 00 I am here for you, young man? Not always, sometimes. But sometimes what I'm doing is actually more interesting than talking about the basketball game that, you know, the NBA blah, blah, blah, or whatever it is. And I'm maybe not the best at switching attention gears, but I'm trying and I'm mindful of it.
1:03:59 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah. Is it something that you think you want to be better at?
1:04:03 Speaker 00 Yes, absolutely. Yes, more of that in the moment, right? Really trying to live just that moment. There's a great podcast. Have you ever listened to Making Sense with Sam Harris?
1:04:15 Steven Bartlett? Yes, once or twice. I'm a big Sam Harris fan.
1:04:17 Speaker 00 Me too. Yeah, so it's, you know, it is about, okay, you're here right now and live it. And if you could live every moment over again, because you wanna get one shot. He, you know how he has this little daily, there's like a little daily thing that pops up and you can listen to. And he was talking once about how you have one opportunity to live this moment. And you have one opportunity to have an interaction with someone that is this interaction. Like make it good, right? And just thinking, well, I can either.
1:04:47 Speaker 00 You know, look at this as an opportunity and a gift, or I can be down and negative about it and you just choose. So I try as much as possible to choose, even if I have, you know, cranky teenagers or whatever work thing going on, to choose to really be positive about the fact that I'm given the opportunity to live that moment.
1:05:09 Steven Bartlett? Do you ever worry that you'll regret being so busy and missing certain things?
1:05:18 Speaker 00 Always, don't you?
1:05:19 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I do.
1:05:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, of course. Yeah. Especially with the kids.
1:05:22 Steven Bartlett? Mine's with my parents a lot. I think, God, my parents are getting old. And I think, I'm gonna, at some point, I'm just gonna keep it fact, my parents are gonna die and I'm going to think to myself.
1:05:32 Speaker 00 I wish I would have spent more time with them. Yeah, the deathbed test.
1:05:36 Steven Bartlett? I literally wrote down the deathbed test in my notes. Yeah, I forgot to ask you about that. Tell me about the deathbed test.
1:05:40 Speaker 00 Oh, the deathbed test is like, what are you going to, on your deathbed? Think back and go, God, I wish I would have done more of that. Or I wish I would have tried this. I wish I'd tried that. And so if you live, this actually was something that, I think her name was Tina Johnson. She was the CEO of Saks Fifth Avenue. And I remember having a meeting with her and she said, you know what? I just always use the deathbed test. It's like, I don't want to miss my kids, you know, this particular event or ceremony, right? You will kick yourself if you miss the grade five graduation. That is always going to be more important than your conversion rate.
1:06:16 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. I wrote an article actually called Deathbed Thinking, which is quite strange. When I, when I saw that you, you had this thing called the deathbed test. And it was inspired by Bronnie, Bronnie Ware, who was the palliative nurse in Australia, who interviewed people as they're about to die.
1:06:29 Speaker 00 Yeah. And what they wish they would have.
1:06:31 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, done with their lives.
1:06:32 Speaker 00 Have you seen also on social media going around, I think I've seen it on Instagram, but you see some elderly people and they're taking pictures of them with like, yeah, what is your advice, right? And it's always very simple. Be nice to everybody.
1:06:45 Steven Bartlett? Obvious stuff. Yeah, yeah.
1:06:47 Speaker 00 But you just think, well, yeah, because you got to live with yourself. And, and it's the deathbed test, looking back on it. But actually, your deathbed test, Sam Harris would say, is probably taking place every moment of your waking existence, right? I wish I would have been more polite. I wish, because if you're not, you have to then live with how you feel about yourself and that. Is more important than anything. So this is a mini, a micro deathbed test taking place every moment, I would argue.
1:07:18 Steven Bartlett? I was looking at a couple of things that you'd said, and one of them was about your motto for life, which is about choosing yourself and not waiting for anybody to choose you.
1:07:25 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:07:25 Steven Bartlett? What does that mean?
1:07:27 Speaker 00 Well, you know, you can wait around for someone to tell you that you're the one who can do it, or it's your turn, or you can just do it yourself, right? You're the one who is going to tell you that you can do something. No one is gonna pick you out of a line and say, hey, go. You have to put yourself out there. So I remember I have this fantastic friend, his name's Emilio Sosa. And he actually worked when he was a budding fashion designer in New York a long time ago. And he worked at the front desk at Bliss for a while. And it was just his, you know, like actors would work at a restaurant. He was like the cool guy at the front desk at Bliss. And, um, and he designed a few ranges and, you know, they weren't always commercially successful, but he was just the coolest person around.
1:08:12 Speaker 00 And I remember I lost touch with him for a little while, you know, a few years, because he stopped working at the spa. And when I found him again somehow, because again, this is pre email, right? I found him and he came over for dinner. And I said, so what are you up to? And he said, oh, I'm designing costumes for Winter Marsalis. And I've been on tour with Celine Dion and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And I said, Emilio, what happened? And he said, you know what? I woke up one day and I just thought, I am worthy. And that was it, right? Like that was the moment it moved for him. He just had to decide that he was talented and worthy of all of this success. And then he had it. And I think it's the same for so many people that they just aren't convinced.
1:08:55 Speaker 00 Now, you might just be born convinced. I see some people who are born convinced, right? And they don't necessarily have the experience or the merit to back it up. And then there's some people who've just worked for it. And after you do that much work and you are, you know, your expertise is at a level where you actually. Are convinced because.
1:09:14 Steven Bartlett? You've got evidence.
1:09:15 Speaker 00 You've got evidence. And then there's when you're on the cusp, right? Where you just have to decide so that you can get more practice to become that one. But at some point, you know, you're on that fence, you got to decide. And then you take yourself there. So that's what it's about.
1:09:34 Steven Bartlett? Because when you were describing your different business ventures, there was a moment when you described your clients moving to the Hamptons for the summer. And like business drops off a little bit and you you said so casually, so I decided to go and do a beauty course to find out how my like that moment. I think is probably the most pivotal, difficult, special moment. Because you made a decision in a new direction.
1:09:57 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:09:57 Steven Bartlett? That is like, it sounds so simple. The way you just like glossed past it. I was thinking that's pretty profound. Very few, everyone gets stuck in what they do.
1:10:04 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:10:05 Steven Bartlett? It seems. And the certainty of this, the comfortable certainty of that wherever they are. To make, just make the decision one day that I'm going to go do a beauty course to find out why acne skin is the way it is. And so if I can do something about it is, is the, for me, the pivotal, unique thing.
1:10:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's actually, you know, good observation.
1:10:23 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I was gonna stop you on it, but you just glided past it.
1:10:26 Speaker 00 I never, I never thought of it that way, but you're right.
1:10:28 Steven Bartlett? It's like almost how dare you. I'm like, people don't do that.
1:10:32 Speaker 00 Well, you do when you're 20, right?
1:10:35 Steven Bartlett? They don't.
1:10:35 Speaker 00 Well, listen, from what I've read, listened, heard, et cetera, that the new skill that everyone's going to have to have is not to be identified by what you were doing for the last 10 years. Because there's so many, there's so many jobs, right? So many careers that will just be gone. And so we have to train the next gen who's coming up to not think, well, I'm this.
1:10:56 Steven Bartlett? Labels.
1:10:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, you have to be ready to say, well, that doesn't exist anymore. I'm going to pivot or I have to go get retrained. And not to have your identity completely wrapped up in what you do, right? It's more about your ability to morph and learn. And so being this lifelong learner is so important.
1:11:18 Steven Bartlett? When you think about yourself going forward now, you know, you've got, you're working on multiple businesses at the moment, Beauty Pie being your main event, I believe.
1:11:24 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:11:26 Steven Bartlett? What is it? What is it you're playing for now? Because, you know, you've got the money, you've got the reputation, you've got wonderful family. What are you playing for now?
1:11:36 Speaker 00 Well, happiness and stimulation, right?
1:11:38 Steven Bartlett? And how'd you get that?
1:11:39 Speaker 00 It's a, it's the community. I have a small family, so we're four. And then I don't have, I have two sisters and my mom. And then extended, you know, cousins who I don't really connect with that much because they're in Western Canada. And so for me, being able to have this community of people who, okay, yes, they happen to shop for me, but they're quite fun. And most of our customers are of the same spirit. It's like having hundreds of thousands of friends. And so they're out there chatting about the latest thing. It's just, it's like a social club a little bit. And we happen to all buy beauty products and be really excited when the next thing is launching. So I read a quote once, it said like, for people who have multiple marriages, it's like the first time you marry for love, the second time is for money,
1:12:24 Speaker 00 and the third time is for companionship. And so I'm probably on companionship, but I want to do it really well. Because it is, you know, it's a lot of fun to be able to provide this to so many people. And that love that you get back from it, if you're doing it well, is, you know, quite a nice, quite a nice feeling to, to have every day.
1:12:47 Steven Bartlett? So is this your forever business?
1:12:51 Speaker 00 That's a really great question. I don't think, I never think of things in, you know, forever.
1:12:57 Steven Bartlett? Really big check over there in the drawer.
1:13:00 Speaker 00 It'd have to be really big.
1:13:01 Steven Bartlett? One billion dollars.
1:13:03 Speaker 00 Not big enough.
1:13:08 Speaker 00 I mean, listen, it's just fun, right? It's fun to create. It's fun to create. So I don't really think about it as what's the end of this? If I, if I find, okay, actually, I've created all the stuff I know how to create. And now I can, I don't know, I'm just chatting with the people. But you know how businesses go through different stages where different skillsets are needed? I'm not your typical, like, great operating person. I need to find that person. I'm not a performance marketing person. I need to find that person. And at some stage, You don't need as much of what I do, you need more of what they do. And so it depends like how much do they need me. But I think just keeping that quality very high is always something that you need a particular
1:13:53 Speaker 00 personality to be leading. So I think that's where it would be hard to replace what I do.
1:13:57 Steven Bartlett? I think what you've achieved is, I mean, it speaks for itself. It's quite hard to believe, in fact, that in one lifetime, someone could have so many back to back successes.
1:14:08 Speaker 00 I've had a few flops.
1:14:09 Steven Bartlett? Well, yeah, I know. And I heard you talk about that. I heard you say, you know, the key to success was failure. But I've not heard you talk about any failures yet.
1:14:16 Speaker 00 Right. Because I think I I compartmentalize them, I learn from them, and then I move past them. There's no point in wallowing. But I do think it's really important. And it's funny, a lot of people will come to me and ask for mentorship. And I'll do my best in the time that I've got available. But what I really think has been, my own mentor has been failure. And and looking at the feedback that you get from that failure and kind of internalizing it, and it becoming part of your DNA. And I really believe that if you don't fail yourself, someone telling you that you might fail is not the same as failing. Yeah, that, you know, you just have to fail once really hard, and you're not going to make that mistake again.
1:14:58 Steven Bartlett? Did you fail once really hard?
1:14:59 Speaker 00 Um, I don't know how hard is hard, you know. My, it's sort of like my appetite for risk. People say, well, that's so risky. I'm like, what?
1:15:07 Steven Bartlett? So can you think of something when you're talking about failure that you thought?
1:15:11 Speaker 00 Really hard?
1:15:12 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:15:13 Speaker 00 I mean, yeah, I mean, sure, we did at Soap and Glory, we did a men's range. It didn't really sell.
1:15:18 Steven Bartlett? Okay, it's a test?
1:15:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, yeah, whatever, you know, was the price wrong? Was the packaging the wrong color? It just didn't fly. Do men really not use that many cosmetics that they're gonna, did they just use their their partner's stuff? Who knows?
1:15:33 Steven Bartlett? But it was an A B test. It didn't knock the wind out of your sails.
1:15:35 Speaker 00 No, rarely does the wind get knocked out of my sails. Because, again, when you're, I think when you're young and you have a profound loss. You take everything with relativity, right? It's like, okay, so what? So, you know, people didn't buy Soap and Glory men's products, but it, does it really matter? On my deathbed, will I even remember that I did that? Probably not. So you can put it into perspective, which is so important.
1:16:02 Steven Bartlett? Do you think your father's passing has helped you put all of the decisions later in your life into perspective and prioritize them differently?
1:16:08 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yes, I think any kind of, you know, grief or really emotional situation that you go through, you become a different person and you can relate to other people who have the same situation or have, you know, a difficult home situation in a very quick way because they see the world in a similar way that you do, that small things don't really matter. And so while we're all doing a lot of small things to kind of push the world along every day, that they're not really that important in the end.
1:16:40 Steven Bartlett? People watching this, you know, there'll be a lot of people that are in awe of you and they'll think you're incredibly awesome, rightfully so. And that can be somewhat alienating, right? Because they can see that what you've achieved in your life and because of your awesomeness, they'll think, you know, I can't, she's just too far away from me. I'm never going to be able to get, get to where she is. So what advice would you give to those people that are, that want to, you know, achieve great things in their career in terms of where they should start, where they should, where their journey should naturally begin in order to achieve great things and become successful subjectively, whatever that means to them?
1:17:14 Speaker 00 Oh, that's a great question. I think, listen, I was started very hands-on, right? I literally gave facials nine times a day, waxed people's legs. And it's the feedback loop and being open to learning. So I'm a real believer of hands-on training. I'm not, of course, I never had a business school training, so I don't know, I can't compare and contrast, but I know that the confidence that comes with learning and perfecting a skill and being able to do it yourself so that if, for instance, some member of your team up, up and leaves, you can take over that and do that. There's a real confidence in it and that confidence kind of allows you to grow and,
1:17:57 Speaker 00 and to put more things underneath you and to feel. I think more generous with your spirit. So just rolling your sleeves up and learning skills, as many as you can, and looking without defensiveness at the feedback that you're getting from whatever it is that you're doing, and then always asking yourself, how can I improve this? How can I make this even better? Is this the kind of feedback that I'm trying to get? It's a giant A B test, right? So life is kind of an A B test. And if you look at what works and keep doing more of that and less of the other, right, it's about making like more good decisions than bad. And being honest with yourself. And yeah, it comes down to something very basic.
1:18:41 Speaker 00 You treat your customers like you would want to be treated. And I don't know if that always floats to the top for people in business and for large corporations. It is always being obsessed with whatever that product is that you're trying to deliver and making sure that you yourself would buy it for the price that you're selling it and feel thrilled. And whatever you're doing, right? You can do it well if you keep those kinds of things in mind.
1:19:11 Steven Bartlett? Amen. Well, listen, thank you so much for your time. And I've taken so much of it, but it's been so inspiring, so unbelievably inspiring. And so I understand the audience that listen to the podcast and what you've shared today is just going to be of just tremendous, tremendous value. So thank you so much. You super inspire me. I feel like I need to go for a run or something or like, I don't know, go find something to improve on. But yeah, just incredibly, incredibly inspiring. And you are such a wonderful, delightful, bright light. So thank you. And it's been a super big pleasure to sit here with you today.
1:19:43 Speaker 00 Thank you. This is like the feel good society.
1:19:46 Steven Bartlett? Customer experience, I've learned. I'm trying to make my customers feel good.
1:19:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, this is very good. I applaud you. Well done.
1:19:51 Steven Bartlett? Thank you so much.
1:19:52 Speaker 00 Thanks for having me.
1:19:53 Steven Bartlett? Thanks.
Previous Moment 24 - Mary Portas on Finding Your Truth When You’re Feeling Lost Next Moment 25 - This Is How You Fulfil Your Potential: Matthew Syed Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
