Gymshark CEO: How I Built A $1.5 Billion Business At 19! Ben Francis

if we go right back to the start i had a vision i had an idea and i was so passionate about it i just want jim sharp to be a truly iconic great brand a leader in culture and helps inspire people around the world that was a period of great self-reflection for me what am i bad at what am i good at and i decided to lean into my strengths in the early days i'd have gone i'm introverted shy you know and i'm not good at people management but i didn't want to identify with those

things you should be able to look at those things and try and solve them everything came crashing down around me because because there was nowhere to hide like that definitely hit me and it definitely hurt me and i really felt like i was carrying that burden honestly just keep trying and keep trying and don't be afraid to fail i think that's so so so important i've never met anyone who was genuinely successful that wasn't hard working [Music] ben francis the guest that you requested again and again and again he is the founder and now the

ceo of gymshark the global gym brand worth billions and billions and billions that started right here in the uk founded by ben who was in his early 20s and who is still in his 20s now as he's leading the global brand all around the world with 900 employees this is a conversation i have honestly looked forward to for a long long time because there is nobody else in the uk like ben that has built such an iconic company that you see everywhere that has maintained its integrity while they're still in their 20s ben's net worth

is probably pretty close to or over a billion dollars and remarkably he's one of the most humble individuals one of the most introspective self-aware people i have ever met a really good guy and if you're someone that someday might want to follow in his footsteps or you want to build a business or just pursue the thing that matters to you the most then this is the conversation for you i can't wait for you to hear this so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo i hope nobody's listening but

if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] ben when i look back on my life i only in hindsight have managed to start piecing together some pieces that have enlightened me to why i became the person i went on to become and why i had the interests and skills and all those things and also like the insecurities um when i look at your early years back in bromsgrove at school i started to like connect a few dots but i wanted to know in your own sort of self-assessment whether you you can now see

any patterns from your early years that you would consider an anomaly that caused you to become the anomaly you are today um so so i i think i had two sort of really lucky moments so the first one was at about 14 years old i think it's about 14. you know when you do work experience yeah so everyone just sort of work experience at school um and the work experience that i did at that age was basically with my granddad and what my granddad would do is he would travel around the midlands um and he

would lie in furnaces so furnaces big ovens basically where you would stick airplane parts in it would heat them up loosely speaking and then what he would do was go around and fill them with either ceramic fiber or brick so i basically did work experience with him did a bit of labouring and i would be sort of on the sort of uh cement mix of the drum and i would basically pass him cement or um he would teach me to like push in uh ceramic fiber or labrix or whatever now it wasn't actually the work

that was important as such other than the fact that it did teach me hard work but it was more the fact that they were they were long days and through those days we would have conversations that like to be honest in hindsight probably not too many younger kids would have been exposed to um because it was it was all about like the risk that he took in the business and the intricacies and so on he would just talk to me about that and i'd ask him questions and stuff and that there was one particular job

that he did that he told me about and it was it was building a furnace to be shipped off to germany and he'd basically risked pretty much everything he had on this one particular job and he told me about all the worries the concerns the you know the worries that he had in terms of you know keeping you know the house for my nan my mom her sister um and at the time it didn't really i don't to me it was just a story that my granddad was telling me but then as i grew up

and then i started taking business risks of my own i do remember thinking oh yeah but my risks are nothing compared to his so i think that certainly helped and like i said just learning that hard work i think watching my mom's worked in the nhs my entire life she was incredibly incredibly hard working i also got fortunate at school because i did so i did my gcses and i wasn't i didn't do particularly well i was sort of like a d is student sort of like pretty average i ended up getting into sixth form

i was super lucky and one of the classes that i took then was a b tech and i t and that i don't know if you remember the b text you had a levels or b text i'm not sure if it's still like that in the day and loosely speaking then a levels were you'd study you do an exam and b techs were course work or practical work to do it or tech in a practical way from for a btec for me was amazing and that was a huge moment because through that btec i learned

how to use photoshop dreamweaver illustrator all of the like the nuts and bolts that actually i ended up using to build gymshark so the combination of learning those bits of software alongside the fact that watching my grandparents and my parents work incredibly hard the risks that my granddad took to build his business all of those things i think certainly helped me when it came to starting up the businesses that i started what does that say to you about the type of learner you are though that it was the practically practical yeah yeah and that's been

evident even today right because i remember you saying in a conversation you had that um one of the real privileges of your job is you get to go and learn from the experts in your inside of your business so jim sharp was started in 2012 and for the first few years it was sort of like i mean it was me and a bunch of mates basically and my brother came on and we sort of started to build the business and everything revolved in many ways around around myself and then as the business started to grow

it became clear to me there was a genuine opportunity right and listen we were doing well we could do decent revenues and so on but there's a difference between doing well and doing i don't know a few thousand pounds in revenue to oh wow this this could go into the hundreds of thousands or the millions and as the business grew i then started to realize that i needed to surround myself with great people um so that that really helped and i think i got lucky at the start as well because the people that i then

surrounded myself with helped the business grow so i was sort of positively reinforced as well from an early age doing that where did those people where do those people come from i've always wondered this because you yeah last time we spoke and in subsequent interviews you've always cited those people like steven who was the ceo of jim shark and others as being really really instrumental and they almost felt like they were like mentors yes they were yeah so how did you join them so i'll tell you what happened right so and this is this is

interesting as well so maybe i don't think this is probably spoken about enough as an entrepreneur particularly of a growing business you'll know this as well as me not only do you have to wear loads of different hats on on a daily basis but people don't talk enough about the fact that during the growth of the business you have to completely change who you are as a person not only because you're developing and you're trying to improve but because the business is a separate entity from yourself and the business requires different things of its founder

or chief exec depending on the size of the business so in the early days and i don't know how to put this in the nicest way possible but i think i was a bit arrogant right it was a bit like this is my baby i know where i want to take it and i'm going to drag it there and i don't i don't really care what you say because this is my vision and that worked to a point right i had i had a vision i had an idea and i was so and i still

am so passionate about it and then all of a sudden i don't know how this happened i think it was just it naturally happened through just asking questions i've always been quite inquisitive then sort of you start surrounding yourself with you know with great people and um i would i would go to the gym right and i would find like a guy called paul who's like the business guy and i go and ask him questions and stuff and all of a sudden when you surround yourself with those people you realize this whole thing of i

don't care what you say i'm going to do what i want anyway that doesn't work or it works for a period and then they disappear so then i realized that i then can't be arrogant single-minded moving where i want to go i need to retain a bit of that right but what i need to do is one learn to work with people and more importantly learn to work with great people so that happened and i met paul at the gym um and that was just for asking questions paul introduced me to steve because steve had

previously worked at reebok um and that sort of fitness sports where sort of thing um made sense i ended up meeting a guy called niren who worked in uh like a local company and funnily enough actually on that oh um i hadn't so i'd met anyone when i was a kid i don't know i was like 13 14 years old or something and then we just sort of never kept in touch we went to uni and whatever and there was a point where i was really struggling with something i can't remember what it was it

was something to do with like selling things online and i knew that he worked in another e-commerce company so i sort of messaged him i think was on facebook at the time high near and long time no speech you might have picked your brain on a new on a few things he ended up coming in advising us greatly and then he ended up joining the business so i think looking back i think one i think i managed to learn the ability to really sell the vision of jim shark but secondly i think the single thing

was just asking questions like i would always just ask questions of anyone whether they're in the gym and i know there's people right there in the gym that i've asked questions too that probably rolled their eyes and thought oh god here he is again but i just want to get on with my workout but i was i was that person just asking questions i think that's really unappreciated about you it's because because when i was looking through as i was saying like when i was doing the research and you're trying to find these threads throughout

your story this one thread kept coming up in my mind which was like ben is really like an insatiable learner he's always trying to learn even in that you did the conversation with uh jake humphries on a high performance and at the end of it when he asks you know you know about the worst things about your role you basically flip it and say i'm like the luckiest person on earth because i get to learn from the best people in the world a lot of people like if we think about the impact that being like

a really keen learner has on someone over 10 years it's just like an unfair advantage if you and then i i reflect on the world of warcraft thing as well and i'm like connecting these dots i'm like a lot of people don't get obsessive about world of warcraft where you're building and you're learning and you're competing tell me about this world of warcraft thing because i only saw a couple of lines how old i was then i was at school i just listened i just loved it i thought it was great i loved so the

three games i loved i loved world of warcraft i loved call of duty modern warfare and um gears of war and those are like the games world of warcraft was the one that i think i played for the longest period and the thing i loved about it was it was open world for one it had like its own economy in it so you could like learn a trade and like you know do things sell things on the auction house but you were working with people from all you were playing with people from all over the

world you had to learn sort of teamwork the other thing that was cool about it was there wasn't really one so you had like different like classes of character right so one was like a like a warlock and one was like a warrior one was like strong i had loads of health and could protect one would inflict loads of damage on the enemy the thing there was with teams was there wasn't one person or one individual that could do everything there was it was the group that could do everything but you needed like all these

different like facets it's like the avengers right the avengers assemble into this great group individually they're not as strong and again all these lessons i think definitely helped because even when we talk about today jim sharp sort of leadership team that's the exact analogy we use avengers assemble like i don't i don't want a you know a chief of product who is the most wildly intelligent financier or whatever or commercial person but knows brand like it's useful that they have an understanding and respect of those things but we want a chief of product who's really

good at cheap of product right and then we want a chief of brand who's really good at brand and a chief of finance who's incredibly good at finance and then all those people come together to create a team do you notice that like at the start of the company like you're talking about the requirement of specialists there at the start of the company was that very different at the start no to the start if we go right back to the start it is literally a case of we need a group of ambitious individuals that truly

believe in the vision and will essentially do what it takes to achieve that and there are so many corners that are cut along the way because you just have to do what you can to sort of get by and i think the other thing as well as in the early days more often than not especially if you're sort of they call it bootstrapping isn't it when you're not sort of borrowing money as such you you need to find a way around it like if you have 50 quid to do advertising you work out how to

advertise with 50 quid there's no like oh never mind let's go home you just you have to have great problem solvers in the business at that stage um and to be honest the one of the things that as we move through the sort of nine year history of jim shark one of the things that i'm what i'm proud of myself for doing is being able to adapt from that point of view but some of the most difficult times have been that inevitably there are some people who can't maybe make that switch from what was to

the future so that's an incredibly difficult thing to manage as well and that's the sort of thing that like you know what you don't go to business school or whatever and get and get taught how to understand where the level of an individual is or how to have a certain conversation or how to be self-aware enough to know what you sh i shouldn't shouldn't be doing yeah or where my level is so yeah there's a hell of a lot of challenges along the way i can agree more i always say i've said this on this

podcast before but i ended up hiring like just really ambitious people that would like sleep on the floor with me that had no experience and then obviously as the business scales and as you said there like the the challenges of the business become different and you really are looking for experienced specialists especially to lead the key departments and uh i remember that challenge in like year three of now looking at the people that have been so loyal to me and thinking i don't know where you fit yeah anymore because we need you know and it's

heartbreaking but that's where you need self-awareness in both camps where you can sort of have the conversation that says like our relationship is our relationship and i love you to bits however i need to take a step back and i need to build this business in a way that's best for everyone that is going to help grow it so those are the sorts of things that i think you can never truly be prepared for and it's always hard um and yeah it was difficult i started social team with a co-founder you did too as well

from what i understand lewis yeah um there's very little written about why why he's no longer with you i'm guessing i'm guessing from what i've read that there was just a difference in opinion about the future and you decided to go your separate ways yeah and i think to be fair i think lewis was lewis was great right in the early days we would we were literally inseparable and i think there came a point where you're right i had my vision and i think he had his vision and i just want to be clear he's

like i don't think one is better than the other it was just a difference of opinion and to be fair to him he had so many other interests in terms of investment and property and all these different things so lewis essentially left in [Music] i'm gonna say 2014. i could be wrong maybe 2015. the business was found in 2012 i think he left the business in 2015 um and then he basically retained 20 of his shareholding and then in the deal that was last year he then sold out the rest of that and now he's

uh investing and doing other things and were you friends before we yeah we were yeah well so we met in that it class that i spoke about so we met in it when we were 16 17 whatever the first year of sort of post school is college sussex form we met then and then we just went to the gym together and then there was a group of like six seven eight of us that would all go to the gym sort of every day together and had you decided who did what so were you the ceo

and are you both ceos was it just no that so in the early days that never really happened it was just a bit like it was a bit like right this is a list of things that we need to do let's just tackle them as we go there was no organization in those days and i think as the business then got more organized that's when i think that's when our vision started to maybe move in separate directions could that have been why then because there wasn't clear like structure at the start that could well have

been to be fair yeah because that's what you need right you need clear roles and responsibilities um and listen regardless if you don't have that it just it just muddies the water doesn't it what do you think of of having the importance of having a co-founder in the role it plays in those early stages in the early stages i think listen i think it's important i don't know the stats on how many businesses do founded by individuals and not i know i know when lewis left in 2014 2015 the the six months after that was

difficult not too bad it's not in terms of the fact that he wasn't doing x y and z it was just more the fact that like it's just different isn't it and it's this whole new world and it's a bit like like i then naturally well i i then naturally sort of i didn't lean into this as such until later on sort of 2018-ish i then very much became the face of the business in many ways and then it was like if people wanted to talk talk about the business or to the business then they

were coming to myself so um yeah i definitely noticed that and um listen and then i chose to obviously start pushing that on youtube and stuff and then that happened more and more going forward so talk to me about that so first time we met i it was actually on a different series i was running at the time called like everyday entrepreneurs or something and when i met you at jim shark's office i did notice that you were very nervous very different from home that was about 2015 wasn't it that was in the early days

yeah so hopefully you can see the change that's happened in me from then yeah 20 times differently and that so that was the period that was a period of great self-reflection for me and that was when i was literally going right what am i bad at what am i good at and what's my choice so actually around that point i'd split the two out good bad and i decided to lean into my strengths i did that for about three or four years and then i was like right now i'm really comfortable with my strengths i

know what i'm good at now i'm going to lean into my weaknesses and i'm going to become good at public speaking i don't know people management all these other things so the yeah when we met i was definitely a lot more nervous um i i it's so fun because i i literally remember meeting you and i obviously had this this idea of meeting you this young guy has made this killer business whatever whatever whatever i was my anticipation was that you were going to be like loud and like really whatever and you were so quiet

and i could tell you when you were nervous about the conversation um and i would never have guessed that you're totally different now yeah and which i think is incredible because it's just like two for me it's like very very different people and it's a testament to your growth yeah but i was i was really really surprised and i want to share that because um it i think there is a lot of people listening young entrepreneurs or people that want to that think you know how you are now is how you will be and there's

no there's no development or no and this is the thing where i think what what you need to do again even more i think i think everyone should do this whatever field of work they're in or whatever but particularly as an entrepreneur because i feel like as an entrepreneur everything's just amplified right your your wins are bigger your losses are larger again um your weaknesses are you know are exposed because you are exposed to the business and the world in many respects but what you need to do is you need to write down like your

character traits the best example would be and this is one that i'm currently working on right is people would be like i thought i'm messy or i'm always like oh i'm always late i'm messy what am i like and it's a the conversation for me is a bit like okay you're messing you're always late but those things should be up for grabs right you should be able to look at those things and go don't roll your eyes and say that's just me because it's not or it doesn't have to be because if i'd have done

that in the early days i'd have gone i'm introverted shy not good in front of cameras terrible at public speaking and i'm not good at people management but i didn't want to identify with those things i didn't want to say ben is that because i didn't want to be that and i think everyone if you can somehow i i don't i think i was lucky because i was surrounded by great people right so it's definitely easier said than done but if you can try and not identify with those things those parts of yourself that aren't

maybe ideal and you can again look at them in a logical manner as you would any other problem in life and try and solve them so i'm not good at people management fine who's the best person i know that is i'm going to go and chat to them i'm going to pick their brains or even better i'm just gonna watch them because some people learn from just watching some people learn just by watching and so steve for example who's the who was the ceo at jim sharp previously we didn't have that many steve teach me

how to people manage steve teach me how to public speak like we didn't really do that but by him doing it i just watched him and i understood the traits or the things that he would do that helped him be great at that and then i just basically learned them and tried them and tried them and tried them and eventually got reasonably good at doing those things one of the things linked to that that i always say is um there's no self-development without self-awareness and like i i still to this day i've spoken to a

lot of people on this podcast i have no idea how you make someone genuinely self-aware and when i was and when you're talking there about sitting down and writing a list of my goods and bads how do we know that our own like delusion and our ego isn't writing that list on our behalf i mean you could ask someone else to do it the the first really the time it hit home for me and it was like a ton of bricks on the top of my head was i did a 360 feedback so anyone that

doesn't know what a 360 feedback is you this i could i'm sure you can find it online if you google it but basically you ask the people around you to describe you and it like prompts you as it goes so ben is i don't know x y and z those people fill it in anonymously then it comes back to you and you have this like thick bot of paper that basically fully describes yourself and i actually did this in it was around when we met so around 2015 and i had it and i printed it

off and i read it and i was so upset and annoyed and i remember thinking this is not me and i took it home that night and i it was just um erratic hot-headed arrogant um poor manager all these things from your employees yeah and it's one of them like the so the first thing and completely natural is who said that i'm gonna find him right that's the first thing now fortunately it's anonymous you can't do that and that would be terrible anyway but then i read it i took it home um left it on

the side and i think i don't know what i've done i've gone to the gym or whatever else now my other half who's now my wife ended up reading it and i'd come home and i'd seen her literally just finishing it on like the last couple of pages and i was so angry right i literally grabbed it off and i said mine don't read it like it's not even me anyway is it like left her alone and we carried on with that day and then like later on she was i said um i said the

same i said that was a load of rubbish wasn't it that's nothing like me and then she said she said that's the most you thing i have ever read and then it was like that was it it was like i i didn't even say anything i just i remember like everything came crashing down around me because because there was nowhere to hide like she knows me more than anyone and like i can kick and i can scream and i can say no it's not true but in my heart of hearts i knew it was true

and that was the moment i realized i have to change i have to improve i have to develop and if you're talking about becoming self-aware i think that was my moment so incredibly true how our partners know us yeah and they they can be the most hurtful but as you said completely accurately said they're like my girlfriend said something to me i might on the surface be like oh yeah but then i go back to my room and i'm like oh my god like once your egos had like a couple of seconds to chill so

you get this list of feedback i remember doing the 360 thing with my team as well um and i remember the same feeling like who the [ __ ] said that like and trying to work it out like looking over looking at everybody like i know it was you yeah it's my assistant um so you get that list of things back and you can see areas where you need to improve and you agree you say okay right i'm going to start listening what happens like how do you go about improving on those things because a

lot of them are so like deeply ingrained in you from decades of your childhood or whatever and especially when you're a winner when you've been successful in one thing it validates you it almost appears to be like validation of everything so what do you do then what do you do next yeah you're right so that's the dangerous thing and i think that's why i was so fortunate because jim shark for the most part not entirely had been very successful until that point so it was difficult for me to go well wait a minute i can't

be that bad right but yeah i think the the thing with robin where she literally put it on me that that was the moment um so what i did then and i was actually watching it was a garyvee video that i was watching actually so what i did was i had the weaknesses which were both self-defined but defined by other people i also have my strengths because by the way that com your strengths come back with a 316. no one reads them you only look at the weaknesses right but there is a list of strengths

in there somewhere um and i realized that my strengths particularly at the time were around creativity around product around brand around marketing around understanding the industry the customer and so on so i was you know i was mulling the idea do i work on my weaknesses do i focus on my strengths and to be honest i don't really know the answer to what the best way of doing this is but i decided through i think it was a gary video to focus on my strengths and i said right you know what i'm going to do

i'm 20 whatever it is 3 24. i'm purely going to focus on my strengths now and that's when i went into a brand role a product role a marketing role everything that was front end and creative at gymshark i completely lent into that was when steve came into the business steve became the ceo so i was sort of like the responsibility of maybe some of the week the areas i was weaker at finance ops management that was then like moved away from me and i purely completely innocently focused on that that was your decision yeah

it's a pretty amazing decision it was heartbreaking as well because again it's one thing moving yourself out of a role it's another thing moving someone then into that role who does it really good um and like i'm looking at them i'm like you're way better than me and i just have to like know that and make honestly i think i use that as motivation to one day be as good as that that was the that was the inspiration i think maybe because i was young i knew i had time and i think that helped um

but it was heartbreaking because the other thing as well is that doesn't mean to say exclusively everything steve did for example i thought was right it just there was things that he did well i thought maybe i wouldn't do that or i would think differently and sometimes he would be right and sometimes he would be wrong but what i can't do and this is the weird balance right because i'm founder and i am like a majority shareholder of the business so ultimately i have control of the business there's no point in me putting him a

ceo and then just overall in what he says he's in the ceo because he's the best person for the job and i have to trust his judgment and opinion and and it's that weird balance of that and i never and i never have to this day played what we'd call like the shareholder card i've never come in and gone this is the way it's going to be just because so yeah then i was fortunate enough to watch steve learn from steve and and that really helped him and this was the beginning i think of the

period where i was sort of becoming a ceo because i i started off as the chief of brand right so the business was smaller at this stage i can't remember the the exact size or say 20 30 million in revenue maybe and i managed the creative the imagery the videography the athletes and sponsorships and all these different things the events and that was cool because i just i got a real detailed understanding of all those things like really detailed i was in the nuts and bolts of everything um funnily enough it then happened again a

guy called noel came in who was way better than me and he came in as the chief of brand so again i'm sort of left a little bit high and dry i was ceo now i'm not chief of brand now i'm not um you brought him in as well yeah so he actually came in and reported into me but it was clear within uh i don't know a year or so that he was better so i vacate the seat he comes in and he's done a great job since then i think after that i did

i think it was product for a little bit which was great fun oh sorry i did marketing which was great for the marketing is all that's what it says in the tin right all the marketing all the ads you see online everything that comes with that and that was great fun and i learned a lot there i traveled the world i spent time with facebook google's all the partners like that and i learned a hell of a lot there did you feel a bit lost at this point um because having gone from ceo to brand

to marketing typically when an employee in my company does that i i tend to get the impression that they kind of know that me being moved around a little bit like a chess piece and it's like they don't feel like they ever fully own something or that yeah so i've had that but i've had i had that for five or six years because then then it was it was brand into marketing into product there was tech for a little bit um i've moved around a lot so this this ceo role is it's the first genuine

home i've found since sort of running the business back in 2013 2014 and and why why why did you so you've recently announced that you're now the ceo i think it's been roughly about four months yeah since you uh you kicked steve out and evaded evaded the office and slammed the shareholder card on his desk and told him to do one i'm joking um but since you've sort of regained your position and made the decision with steve um that you wanted to do the role again yeah what was the thinking behind that because a lot

of founders when they own the business it's doing really well it's flying they know that they're in terms of the financial ins incentives they're going to do just fine and they can have a really easy life and i've seen it happen they just step back yeah they just tiptoe out the door and let other people do the hard graft why did you want to step back into the hardest role of all so first and foremost i think like i said i've done all these roles and i've built up to a point where i sort of

thought i won't be able to do it and i think the fact that so steve came to me two years prior to coming to the job and he said if you almost like i think you can do this so that was a huge vote of confidence because we'd had this wasn't like an overnight thing right this was a two-year build up from the first conversation steve had to me that's and his conversation was i think i've taken the business to a point where i can which is which was great uh that he would be so

honest and open about that and then we had a two-year period of okay like are we gonna bring someone in from the outside or ben are you gonna be able to do this role and you know again similar to what i did in 2015 is these are the things that i now need to do to be good enough to do in that role um so there was a long almost warm-up handover whatever you want to call it to that now the other thing i would say is the business today is a very different place to

where it was like i don't know what the numbers are but prior to steve we were maybe 30 30 employees now we're 900. we were one office in the midlands now we're several offices around the world so it's a very very different place but doing the chief of brand when the business was this big and then product at this big they're markets in it this big and tech and so on having the intricate understanding of those areas not every area of the business but many of the areas has really helped as well one of the

things you said is that your link to that is i'm scared of being someone that can only just start the business and not run it yeah what do you mean by that i so i i'm this i'm so proud of the fact that i've found a gymshark i am it's it's it's so great but i don't want i don't want it to be a bit like ben founder of the business and that's all he did like i want to do way more than that and for me with my personality and the way i'm built it's

i think it's a it's a bit it's a far bigger challenge for me to run jim shark at the scale it is now as a chief exec than it is to start the business right like there are so many business that businesses that are started that die after year one after year two after year three after year four and five for me i'm proud of the fact that i founded the business i'm proud of the fact that i've worked in the chiefs roles but to be in the front seat in the ceo role a business

like jim sharp moving forward is one is the most exciting thing in the world for me it's the biggest challenge that i could possibly like go for and like for me that's exciting like i want to aim high both for the business but also personally for myself as well and like you said at the start i love learning that doesn't mean i sit there reading books 24 7 but i love learning and being amongst it and there's no better role for that but the apparent downside to that role is that you then the box stops

with you yeah which means when there's problems when there's crises they stop with you and you could sail off into the distance you'd get a really big boat with your shareholding uh in the company and you could just relax and just maybe you know chill out maybe even invest in some stuff and you know you and robin can have a great life yeah why not because it's like you're choosing stress and long hours and busyness over um i think robin probably asked me the same question regularly if i'm honest um i genuinely love it i

love the people that i work with and you're right there i i do not have to do this job there are there is no two ways about it i do it purely because i absolutely adore it and i want to challenge myself and i want to be the best version of myself possible when i have genuine ambitions to be a great chief exec of this business one day i don't think i'm anywhere near there now and it's a bit like you know someone has to be a great ceo in five 10 20 years time so

why not me and i'm always ambitious on behalf of the business more than i am myself right so i'll always put the business first because it is my baby and i've been there from so in the close in the early days going to the first events like looking at having no money in the bank because of the risk that we've taken so the business for me always comes first and the people within the business always come first but personally i'm also ambitious for myself as well who is um hurricane ben hurricane ben that would have

been the the ben that would have been described prior to my 360 feedback so that i'll give an example right so there would be a particular product that i didn't like and my opinion would be just direct brutal and probably not take into account other people's feelings or thoughts and that's not to say that everything that you should do in business should always be you know stepping around people's feelings because i definitely don't think that's the way but equally like don't be a dick and there was definitely times in the early days when i was

a bit of a dick and you and so what happens now in terms of how have you learned not to be a dick uh learn to give feedback examples with feedback empathy understanding why people do certain things like understanding the fact that like you know no one is perfect certainly not me nor anyone and pretty much never have i seen someone go out of their way to like damage the brand like people are doing things for good intentions no one's designed a product in a particular way because they you know they want to see the

brand negative negatively affected no one's posted on social or done something in particular because they want to see the brand negatively effective it's essentially a difference of opinion so i think like understanding that and being aware of it whilst i'm giving feedback i think it's important what i'm in your because i have this a lot as well what are the some of the character traits you see in people that work with you in in your organization that you you don't like so don't lie you don't like so if you because because if if i asked

my team if i said to them what are some of the things that steve doesn't like from in terms of character perspective okay they would they would know i feel like they would know because and so to be fair i don't get too much of this but i just don't want people to agree with me because like i want to be challenged all the time like for me we want the best outcome i don't care if it's my opinion or your opinion i want the best outcome and if my idea is crap tell me it's

cool it's fine i will not take it personally so i don't want people i don't want like you know the whole thing of a yes man yes person whatever you want to call it i think it's not to say that i don't like it but i know that individuals that really struggle with change don't tend to do well at companies like jim shark if you just want a nine to five that is going to be consistent and stay the same then it's definitely not the right place for you because it's so rapidly changing not only

because of the business itself but because of the world that we're in like 10 years ago facebook was only small snapchat didn't really exist instagram barely existed um shopify was very small like the ecosystem in the world that we play in was completely different so change as well i think is important yeah i can completely agree and uh i've i've heard a few of your friends and people within your team describe you as being a bit of a perfectionist as well in terms of having a high sort of attention of detail is that do you

consider yourself to have to be a perfectionist i don't know i don't think so i definitely don't have a massive attention to detail i've got the attention span of a nat really um i try if if it's something that's really i don't know something that just like aligns with me then i'll i can obsess over it for months on end um if it's something i don't find particularly interesting i have to use every ounce of strength of every cell in my body to remain focused on it like i find that really difficult i don't know

if i'm a perfectionist i'm probably not the best person to comment on that i wouldn't say so i don't i don't look like a perfectionist i'm a bit scruffy and i you know i sort of that's interesting meander for those that can't see ben now he's wearing his um it's all jim shark right other than the shoes right yeah exactly that um and you wear this outfit a lot yeah you pretty much look pretty the same every day yeah why because speed efficiency just simple no messing around i don't have to sit and think about

i don't know what am i going to wear today or i don't know anything like that it literally just goes if it's simple comfortable and i like it one of the things you've started recently as well as your vlog online um and if we go back to when i that day that i first met you and i i could tell that you you know you were nervous in that context and the guy you are today two questions for you yeah um did you did you do some sort of um did you have professional support in

developing your ability to speak so fluently and articulate your ideas so well um and then we'll move on to chatting about why you're doing the vlog so i so there's two things so public speaking one in front of a camera two in front of an audience or whatever you want to call it to uh to a group i found those as two very different things and it's weird right because if i so steve would be great in front of an audience or struggle in front of a camera i was fortunate my other half robin was

a youtuber so she's brilliant in front of a camera and she taught me how to work in front of a camera basically not through uh i don't know i don't know it was just through brute just keep going keep going stick it for a camera in front of me the first vlog she recorded and edited the whole thing um so she taught me how to sort of work in front of a camera i did have public speaking lessons and that was massively life-changing for me and the um going back to that list of of things

by the way when i said about these are the things i'm good at these are things i'm bad at one of those things was public speaking um and this is why i'm such a massive advocate of making a list right because public speaking was one of the many things on my list which was a weakness but i didn't then immediately go and draw out a plan i just had that list and i said i know i think i had it as my wallpaper on my phone public speaking is something i'm bad at and then i

was at an event or something i remember what it was i think there was an event at gymshark and i'm chatting away to people chatting away chatting away and said hello i'm ben how are you have a great day you know what do you do and someone said i'm a public speaking coach and then all of a sudden i've gone boom light bulb i'm terrible at public speaking you're a public speaking coach i was like can you teach me and and that's literally how it happened but if i hadn't have sat there done that work

and written it down it probably would have gone gone on right i probably would have said okay enjoy your day i'll see you soon it's lovely to meet you and then i had public speaking lessons i did i did actually um shopify actually put me on a public speaking sort of camera thing which was cool then i did some here back in the uk and just slowly worked it and and then the thing that really helped me was just and i wouldn't probably do this now due to time but he was just saying yes to

things just saying yep i'm gonna do it and you know what i'm gonna make a fall on myself i'm sure there's some footage somewhere of me sweating and shuffling around a stage somewhere like falling over my words and being terrible at it but you know that's just a necessary evil to get get good at anything really what did the public speaking lessons was there like key principles or key exercises that that you felt actually moved the needle for you was there anything there that maybe someone listening to this that's a really bad speaker might be

able to steal there's a um there's a few bits so there's one that that they told me and there's a there's a quote i've said online i think it's a winston church or quote whether it is true you know you see all these quotes and whether or not they're true or not there's one where he it says um i'm just preparing my impromptu remarks which is like obviously impromptu remark is a quick sort of like thing that you've sort of made up on the spot and that really stuck with me because then i know a

lot of other people do this as well is when we're talking about a particular subject now i'm fortunate because i've i've done so much of this i've got like all these different sentences and phrases and things that i can draw on but in the early days it's like so ben you're going to talk about you're going to publicly talk about the jim sharp story now historically even though i knew the gym shot story inside out because i was there um i'd struggle with that so what i do is i prepare phrases sentences words reminders in

my head so if someone said i don't know talk to me about the first event it would just sort of roll off the tongue and granted i probably wouldn't do that any anymore but in the early days that got me over that hump of that nervousness that frog in my throat i don't know where to start because that's the main thing is once you've started it's fine right it just goes but even just having that first sentence of oh the first event was body power and we did this and this and this and then it

yeah that that really helped me that's so funny because that's exactly what happens from practice isn't it you'll know that now just go back to it exactly i you know when i i do a lot of interviewing interviews and stuff too and there's like keywords trigger story so if you said to me um rejection i'd be like oh yeah you know and then it's just the same old and that and that's so funny because that's ultimately what you're saying you're yeah and coaching so yeah so first and foremost preparing impromptu remarks whatever you want to

call it prepare stories prepare things like make sure you're well prepared and generally you want to if you're not very good at it like for me i had to over prepare i had to prepare you know this many things for a conversation that was this long um and then the aim of that is to become comfortable that's the main thing and that was really that was the biggest difficulty for me become comfortable so now i'm super fortunate you could put me on a stage in front of a thousand people and i would i mean it'd

be a bit peculiar if i wasn't prepared but you know i'd be fine i'd be comfortable because then once you're comfortable what you do is you buy yourself time so then if we're on stage and you asked me a question five years ago i'd probably like panic and answer as quickly as i can with whatever whereas now i'm gonna process it think about it and then come back with a response because i'm comfortable and like i think the stages to all different types of learning and that was it for me one preparation once i'd done

that i'd learnt to be comfortable and then i learned about you know different things as i go on and you know so this has led you to now because you know what you're i watched your videos back then and maybe this is why i was surprised when i met you because you're on your videos i genuinely thought you were amazing you could take ten thousand hundred and twenty three that's why yeah i watched your videos on youtube i was like this guy's an unbelievable speaker oh no and then i met you in person and it

wasn't that you're about like he's a shuffling mess no it was so the crazy thing is you weren't a bad speaker and your stories were amazing but it was i could just tell you were nervous yeah and that was and that's what you were speaking today about being comfortable some people are just naturally comfortable and that's and that's cool and i think that but that's the main thing and i do think for whatever reason i think it's probably maybe we're not taught it maybe it just doesn't feel natural if you can and by the way

if you can speak publicly if you can speak to cameron if you can speak to groups that is so powerful so powerful it's untrue why should you drink fuel we're going into the fourth quarter of the year diets are dropping off we're becoming lazier and lazier and what tends to happen when when our diets dip and we we start to become less um compelled to go to the gym is yeah we get out of shape we start to feel low energy we start to binge eat bad things and fuel is the antidote it's nutritionally complete

so you get everything you need for your diet in a drink you get your 20 grams of proteins you're going to get your 26 vitamins and vitamins and minerals it's low sugar high in fiber it really is the cure to a lot of the health issues that we see in our personal lives but in wider society if you've never tried it all i'll ask you to do is give it a try and if you like me then you will like the world berry ready to drink you'll like the mac and cheese which is just selling

like absolutely crazy unsurprisingly um you like the cinnamon and you like the banana flavor those are my recommendations i know a lot of people love the chocolate flavor let me know try it get yourself healthy and send me a message on instagram tag me on instagram as well on your stories if you do try it out because i i sometimes upload those tags and let me know which is your favorite flavor can't wait from you you now run what was voted i think 2016 2017 one the fastest growing company in this country it's still one

of the fastest growing companies in this country it's worth billions and billions and billions um and you've decided that you're going to vlog inside the company this is not what ceos do ben they don't you don't see them you never get to you know like think about all the big companies it's very controlled pr yeah why why do you think that matters because if we go back to me on the inside working with my grandad and being able to learn about those stories that eventually led to in many ways the gym shot we see today

i think i would love to be able to provide that to other people around the world particularly here first and foremost it can be done right so you can start a business in the uk whatever in in this world online and it can become a unicorn in under 10 years and if you don't want to you don't have to go and borrow a load of money you don't have to highly leverage yourself if you're a problem solver you're open-minded and you're self-aware it can be done and i think one that i think that's the first

sort of like step for me let me come at that one then because i know because i i know what people are saying they're saying ben no that's you know it's called good or well and good you saying that because you've done it but i can't i can't do it i'm i don't know what you know and i'm uh i don't you know i don't know anything about computers and it's all well and good you saying that but you were this is what people say because they said to me well you were lucky you know

you're timing and by the way i was incredibly lucky massively lucky you're good and that would be completely right um and listen i would completely understand that but for the for some that want to then that to me is is a proof of when it can be done now i am very well aware of the fact that i was very lucky one in the people i've met two in terms of timing so fitness was on the up right in the early 2000s all over the news was obesity right to rise in so fitness was on

the up because people were encouraging people into the gym and fitness um direct to consumer came out of nowhere people were more comfortable in the sort of 2010s than ever buying things online right in the early 2000s people were weren't that comfortable buying online from a company they had never heard of let alone one from right another country abroad but number three we had social media those three forces converging at the point where jim sharp was founded is completely and utterly look and i do understand that but i'm also aware of the fact that there's

loads of those things happening elsewhere in the world right now that you know probably aren't being completely taken advantage of so i am aware of the fact that it's luck but i also think as well in me doing this i'd like to think that regardless even if you don't want to start your own business which by the way is completely cool like and i'd probably say in many respects that's probably a good idea because it is very difficult to do this um i still think there's lessons that can be learnt and i love the thought

of people being able to take something away from the gymshark story and create something called of their own it also gives you this weird type of defense because you can see that so many ceos have been attacked because they are in essence i think what we're talking about here is being like a glass box ceo or the old model of being like a black box ceo yeah where your image is painted on the outside by your marketing or pr people and no one ever gets to really know you'll see inside you've taken this really glass

box approach where if someone writes something bad about you ben i can like well i've seen 65 interviews of him and i've seen his vlog so i have my own reference point to know that that's actually not him and some ceos out there like elon and these really public ones have that and then zuckerberg hidden a k for the last 10 years and in 2019 he announced that he was finally going to start doing interviews because of how everyone just thought he was this emotionless robot because that's what the press said yeah um and it

is this this incredible defense mechanism that i don't think people really appreciate yeah and i think i can also empathize i mean listen what zuckerberg has done is like on a completely other world to what any pretty much anyone else has done certainly myself um but in the early days of gymshark i didn't want to be clustering myself on social media by the way i didn't want to be on youtube i wanted to just knuckle down and focus on building the business because remember i didn't know what it would be at that point it was

only when people started asking for that that i then decided to do it so i do also understand the idea of just knuckling down and focusing on what you're good at but you're right the problem that comes with is other people get to control the rhetoric or the language or the description of yourself and we're seeing that in the uk a lot of big companies in the uk that are being attacked at the moment you don't know whether the articles are true because you don't know the person they're talking about and um that's why i

literally have a picture in my office over there reveal on smoking's uh joint on the joe rogan podcast because for me and this is going to sound like [ __ ] bonkers like that's the ceo i would want to be is where i cry on jurgen's podcast smoking a joint and for everyone to know that that's how open i am and yeah much the reason why i started this so the pandemic comes around um talk me through how it was being a ceo throughout that because one of the really remarkable things is you didn't follow

anybody you didn't no we didn't so i wasn't ceo at the start of covid i came in in august but the so that was interesting so we we were lucky again because we were completely set up the zoom everyone has laptops we're you know we're a digital business so working from home thanks to our tech team and in the investments they made from a systems perspective it wasn't like tough i know there are other companies that not everyone had a laptop and so on so that i couldn't imagine where to start there um and we

had that moment where so what we have is because we have we have an office in hong kong we have offices in the uk we have offices in the us and we literally saw because kovid sort of came from the east to the west didn't it and we saw hong kong closed right everyone went into lockdown and there was this bit where i know i was thinking never happened here never happened here until it did right and then boom locked down everyone working from home and um i was in what was i doing at that

point i think i was just finished opening marketing and i think i was moving into product at that point and the moment that caught me which was within like 24 hours of being locked down i was lucky i have an office at home i shut the door i've got a desk and i can just work through that and when i'm finished i can close the door at the end of the day i was chatting to someone and they were like they were in a studio apartment in birmingham city center and their partner was making their

breakfast behind them and they were sort of like like balancing their laptop on the work surface and it was all just i remember chatting to her and thinking okay this is going to be really just really tough for some people from a professional perspective and then i'm chatting to my mom who worked at the qe in birmingham city center uh hospital in selly oak she was telling me about what was going on there and i was like it was very i became very aware very quickly that this was a big thing or it was going

to be a big thing um so yeah managing through that was was really really really tough um listen commercially the business did okay like people were shopping online and it you know there were more people working out from home they were cycling they were running that side of the business did well but managing hundreds of staff around the world working from home mental health making sure that we're supporting them through complete uncertainty was definitely difficult and where did you learn then so having seen that member of your team on that ironing board in that studio

apartment where did you land on this whole remote working debate um what is jim shark what's that what's your injury so we we i mean listen there are people at jim sharp that work remotely and it works for them and that's fine personally i'm a little bit old-schooling i'm in the office pretty much every day unless i'm you know out at meetings i just love to be in the office um that doesn't mean it's right or wrong i'm sure i would probably do a a day maybe a month or a quarter working from home if

i need to like work through things because when we did work from home i found that i finally got to my to-do list which was useful and i'd never really got to that previously we're sort of open-minded there are some people that remote work it makes sense for them um as long as it makes sense for the business as well as them that's cool personally i like to be in the office you you have this big amazing office in the uk especially i mean you have a few but the one in birmingham yes sully hall

is a tremendous new like newly built campus almost that he's built um what role does that play because i'm i'm in the camp of i love the office as well and i think it's i think it's more than just a place where you come to do your work i think it's community i think it's culture i think it gives especially younger generations who haven't figured out their lives you have an opportunity to learn meet people get married um so what like how do you see the office and and have you set parameters for your employees

as to we're working on it now that's what we're trying to work through um there are some people that are on remote contracts so they choose to work remote there are many the vast majority are on contracts which which means they're based in hq um personally you're right the whole thing about like i said earlier being able to watch steve right was massive for my development so if i'm a youngster that's coming in to work at gymshark i want to be in the office i want to learn and i want to grow and i want

to be around people because that's not to say you can't learn on zoom i think you can and i think there's great utility for zoom and i think there's areas where it's really helpful and useful but if i'm a young product designer i want to be around designers and i want to be able to be inspired and i want to have that conversation i want to be able to share ideas in the moment rather than having to jump on slack forward slash resume jump on a call and so on hopefully they're free so yeah for

me i like i said i like to be in the office i think it's it's a great place to learn and and the office for us and which is why we're investing in this campus and this larger office is it is it's a hub of jim shark when you're there you're in it we we work together we eat together in refuel many of us go and lift in the gym after together and it builds that genuine community in the build in the uh in the business one of the things you you know when i hear

your story um no matter where i look it it does feel like you're just incredibly good at dealing with [ __ ] like it it appears on the surface that you're just incredibly good at dealing with the hard times um and it also kind of appears that other than the one moment you told me about where you the website went down and you had to write out the apology notes and stuff but there's really not been a lot of like chaos and i'm like every every day is chaos that's why tell me about that part

of it i don't know where to begin like in terms of like starting the business we there were several times we invested everything we had on a particular event or a particular product line um covid was tough it's like what when the business the business is growing at the rate that we're growing even just making sure that we've got enough stock to fulfill the forecast for the following year is it's tough to manage and work out moving from you know zero to 900 staff in nine years that's so hard and it's like every day hard

because in many respects when a big problem comes in and it just hits you in out of nowhere you look at that problem and you try and solve it whereas people forget about the everyday nagging problems of making sure that like the majority of the people that currently exist in gymshark weren't in jim sharp 12 months ago so the majority of people in jim sharp maybe aren't as aware of the story or the way that the business works or or haven't been truly immersed in the culture both because they haven't been here for a long

time but also because we have been working remote for so long so those problems in terms of making sure that everyone is truly bought into the brand are really important because when you've got a team that big we want to make sure that they're working efficiently as well steve said that um the former ceo said that pressure is a privilege to you so i think it's true do you think it's a privilege for you as ben or do you think it's a privilege for everybody i think it depends on what the pressure is right right

i'm sure there are people in this world that are under a lot of pressure that certainly doesn't feel like a privilege but in the context of jim shark is a privilege like we all choose to be there we're all a part of something really special something that i really believe this i think i do think books will be written on this story and i think maybe if we do what we think we can maybe like there'll be programs and movies too because it is so unique and so special so within the context of gymshark i

do think pressure is well and truly a privilege for us when i when i reflect on early days of starting my business there was a lot of unknown unknowns a lot of things i wish someone had just told me sooner or a lesson that it took me three or four years to learn when you look back at some of the things you wish you knew sooner that would have maybe even put what is a phenomenal business even further ahead what are those things that come to mind i'm interested in interested to hear what you think

but for me given my skill set we didn't invest in the foundations of the business early enough i i was going back to being arrogant at the start i didn't really respect what maybe the ops or finance people of this world did i the the foundation elements of the business to me were nowhere near as exciting or fun as the front end element of the business the product the brand and the marketing so i think if we'd have better prepared ourselves for that from a like i said data ops finance all these things i think

dream shop would have grown far quicker and i mean in terms of especially with what you guys did particularly social change you were ahead of your time in that in terms of bringing all these pages and channels together and almost packaging them up for different businesses and brands so you must have struggled with that as well oh my god my answer is the exact same as yours it's just i was exact i was exactly the same guy i thought that the thing that would move the needle most was what i did and what i knew

and then it wasn't until you hire one really great person and you go [ __ ] oh that's that's what good look and look at all the things i don't know and i i think it took me two maybe three years to realize the importance of really great talent yeah and that my skills and my talents weren't actually going to matter that much especially at 700 800 people business yeah the um i think great people are amazing we did a trip uh to fiji years and years ago and it was the first time i got

to spend time with harley uh shopify holly finkelstein and uh toby wow at shopify so like these are like some top top entrepreneurs and there was there was a load of other people there i remember sat i didn't even barely say anything i remember listening to them and i was thinking to myself jim sharks like uh or the people or the certainly even me i felt like i was like a local football club player these are like premier league international stars they were like another level compared to what i was and we were in the

business so to be able to see those when you see a great operator like look at zuckerberg people just look at zuckerberg as like a guy or elon or whatever these people are going to be so efficient and frighteningly intelligent and adaptable and resilient that you without meeting them i genuinely don't think you'll be able to fathom it i obviously haven't met them having met people like harley and toby they were on another level to anyone that i'd met before um and they're like they were just like us at one point right they've had to

work they weren't just born hyper resilient super intelligent open-minded and blah blah blah maybe a little bit in terms of intelligence but a lot of the skills that we see from them they had to learn and they had to work on that was massively inspiring so i yeah i think you're right i can't stress enough how important it is to just try and surround yourself with great people but i was i was lucky right that trip most people don't get to go on trips like that they don't get to have their their eyes opened um

but there's still there's great people in every community every gym every whatever you can you can definitely find them i completely agree again i i um i came to now learn in the businesses i start and i say this to my teams all the time in flightster and third web that we are basically a recruitment company we're like never forget that the most important thing here and the thing that is behind and initiates every decision is a person a talent obviously it's bound together with culture and a vision but fundamentally um it was actually one

day i read on somewhere that the definition of a company on google and in the oxford dictionary is actually a group of people like that's what they said as a company that's it means a group of people yeah and i started thinking about that in fact it's like a football team it's where we are starting 11 and in competitive industries and we're all in competitive industries i start thinking about it like a football team like this is the guy i've got up in left back or right wing against my competitors guy or woman and i

started thinking [ __ ] hell fundamentally i just need to be the best talent as steve jobs says the best talent scout in the world and i wasn't until this chapter of my life later on like it's too late yeah until too late and the for me i think like in terms of getting so you can talk about getting great people becoming self-aware becoming the best version of it yourself that you possibly can be and even that all of those things if you did that incredibly well that by no means guarantee success all that does

is increase the likelihood or the probability of success even then you've got a fairly slim chance because like i said so many small businesses fail and that's the other thing that i think anyone starting out or whatever all working the business needs to understand is that failure is inevitable don't be defined by your failures it could be an operation in the business it could be the business itself it's inevitable that it's going to happen all you can do is do everything within your power to minimize the likelihood of that happening talking about doing that which

is within your power you've managed to seemingly avoid um the the toll of business getting to you my business partner's been very open on this podcast about how the stress of business made him anxious and then he suffered with depression and then he became in his own words basically like a functional functional alcoholic um it doesn't seem to have touched you in the same way i mean have you ever experienced anxiety or yeah i've listened i've definitely struggled there were points where again when i was first sort of i felt like i was first going

out on my own um in 2015 there have been periods where uh you know social media maybe has turned on the business and myself it's definitely been really difficult at times there's been points where social media turned on the business so we there was a there was something that happened last i think it was last year or the year before where someone at gymshark on the channel on the on the social channel basically commented back to someone um i can't remember exactly what we said but basically it was around a blue lives matter you know

you had the sort of black lives matter someone commented uh something on our page saying blue lives matter and someone at jim sharp basically commented something sarcastic back to them um which to be honest was it it probably just shouldn't have been posted and then at that point that i think that whole group of people started to converge onto gymshark um and then before long they then started to converge onto me and i had thousands of comments thousands of messages death threats everything you can imagine um and that that was in that definitely hit me

and it definitely hurt me and i really felt like i felt carrying that i felt like i was carrying that burden at that point talk to me about that and so you the world piles on because of something someone else has done on twitter whatever we won't go into that too much but the world piles on you're going on your phone that's popping off your people are probably texting you your family this is the worst part you're family checking yeah and it's like you just don't want to look at your phone yeah and that's that

like i said that was really difficult for me really tough um did you feel anxious you felt that sense of like i felt horrible i felt like you have a lump in your throat you feel sick you don't look at it yeah then you don't want to look at your phone um i i struggled with that but i think i had support at work and there's a quote that i've heard no no was the one that told me about it and the quote goes something like to whom much is to whom much is given which

is tested i think it's roughly like that and i do think about that a lot i i'm in this role i'm in this job and i'm so privileged and fortunate to be here i've worked incredibly hard but i am fortunate and inevitably much has been given to me so much will be tested of me and that to me is one of many and there'll be more in the future that will happen again and i have to be well aware of it and open to it and understanding of it what did that moment teach you i

think it's it was a so that was a bout of resilience so going back to what i said earlier every day i feel like i have to be resilient in terms of having hard conversations in terms of challenging people in terms of you know trying to move the business forward in the right way whereas that was like boom you need to be resilient now because the other thing as well that again i'm sure you will know this that happens and i'm feeling terrible as it's happening but there's still a business with hundreds of people that

need help support you know all these things so i can't like i can't just shy away and feel sad for a week or at least it can't appear to be like that i mean i can feel those emotions i can process them but ultimately the business comes first and i have to support the business and the individuals within it and that was that was an interesting challenge for me to face because again i can't just mope around the office i come into the office and i'm it's to me it's like it's like a game of

football i'm there to perform to deliver and i you know we want to win we want to create great things and i don't want to let this thing rightly or wrongly sort of drag me down two questions then how do you handle the situation with the employee that posted that comment which ended up getting you piled on and you know felt at least like you were being cancelled they had no bad intention so yeah they stayed at the business and now they they do an incredible job they were a great person so i i really

don't believe in cancer culture i think especially when uh people do things by mistake and this certainly was a mistake and they learned from the mistake and now they're a better stronger more educated and informed person because of it and i think that's um that's the way it is like i that what you can't have at gymshark or anywhere you can't have someone that fails particularly with good intentions and then you just move them out of the business because what we're trying to do is we're trying to create change we're trying to create progress and

a great business and if every time someone failed you just move them out the business then all you'll be left with is with a group of people that have never failed and that's dangerous so yeah they're still in the business and they're doing great work and the other question was when you go home that day and robin's there what's that like uh she's incredibly supportive i think she gets it because and this is this helps as well because she has had time online she did do the whole youtube thing and the social media thing so

she does understand what it's like so she's um incredibly supportive did you rant to her did you so that's probably something i'm not very good at i'm not i don't talk about my feelings massively i'm not that sort of person i don't know why i don't know it's just if i look at the way my dad is my grandparents are the males that around me growing up they're very strong individuals they're very like i wouldn't often hear them talk about feelings which is fine and it's cool i get it it's probably not the most optimal

solution and i'm learning to do that but um it's given me great resilience it's made me strong um definitely made me mentally strong so yeah i'll i'll chat to robin i think she'll try and pry information from me and i'll i'll chat to her does she does she succeed i mean my girlfriend does the same my girlfriend is the the ultimate person in my life of trying to make me express how i'm feeling emotionally and again like you said naturally it's not my default state especially it almost makes me feel uncomfortable like i'd love to

sit here and talk to you about how i am completely open and in touch with every single feeling that i'm feeling i wish maybe that's something i need to work on but that certainly isn't true i i do understand and i process those feelings i'm definitely not as communicative as what i probably should be on those things i like to sort of internalize them and process them without talking about them too much we we've seen obviously in headlines and stuff around mental health and men in particular not talking about the feelings the adverse consequences of

not sharing your feelings the other thing which i learned recently is from patrice evra when he came and we talked about toxic masculinity and again his he was telling me his girlfriend was the one who um helped him open up his feelings because he was very you know growing up on the streets of france drug dealing trying to survive et cetera um the risk is it becomes a generational cycle you've pointed to the fact that it probably was a generational cycle for you um death prob definitely was for me i've never had my dad express

a feeling in his life so now you're married and you know one would assume that there's going to be kids at some point potentially is that something you think about like the uh i don't know i mean listen if i had a kid i would definitely want them to tell me about how they're feeling because i'd rather know what's going on than not so yeah maybe that is something i would push with them robin certainly will yeah robin will yeah um and the other point on the kid thing it just triggered something i've been thinking

about lately in my life is how present are you gonna be i i'm i'm gonna be honest i'm scared i'm scared because um if things carry on as they are now i'm like sometimes i forget to walk my dog and my assistant does it for me and when i when i have kids i don't want to be that business guy that's never ceased his kids i want to be president in their lives i want to take them to school pick them up again like you know so do you think about that yeah change you might

have to make because we don't have kids i haven't thought about it massively i think um there was a few things so steve advised me he said be there for the sports days he doesn't i don't think he means be there for the sports days i think he me it's like a thing like be there be present and be there when the kid wants you to be so that's something i would definitely like to do i don't know my dad worked away a lot as a kid and i don't feel like i was adversely affected

by it maybe i'm wrong maybe i have been um but it's not even when i said when i started traveling and being away for long periods of time there was periods where i'd do 30 40 50 flights a year and i'd be away all the time and that wasn't like abnormal that was like my mom was like cool with that she gets it's fine my dad would work a lot in like the states in europe and stuff and then my mom would look after us so i'd go and stay with my grandparents for a while

um again i'm not saying that's optimal but i i was i felt like i was fine growing up i i actually spoke so i've got uh i'm working with a new ea called zoe who's absolutely been life changing for me like genuinely life-changing and she has two kids and we were talking about it actually the other day um and we sort of we do this thing we monday morning first thing we look through the calendar for the week and then she sort of made a bit of a comment she was like are you still gonna

be able to do this if you have kids um and and i was sort of like is that a loaded question like you asked are you telling me that i won't be able to do this and um what helps having zoe is i think because she has kids she knows what it's like i think she'll help me manage it as it comes and then her thing was no you won't be able to work like this but if we plan for it and we work things out then we can work out a way to make it

work which is great i'm sure robin will be happy with that as well if i'm in the ceo role which i hope i am i'm not going to be at home every single day at half five monday to friday it's it's it's just one of the things that comes with the job there's been a lot written about what the future of jim shark looks like a lot of speculating a lot of guessing as to what route you're going to take a lot of people at this point probably would have already sold the company to a

bigger nike or an adidas or whoever it might be what can you tell me about the future of jim shark so my ambition is to make so so in canada you've got lulu in the united states you've got um nike and drama and in germany you've got adi and puma so first and foremost i want jim sharp to be the british fitness brand right i want you i think it's really cool so growing up i grew up not far away from the rover mg factories in longbridge um it was a really cool british brand unfortunately

it didn't end or i mean mg still going it didn't end probably as they would have liked um over in sully hall jaguar land rover uh cool british but international brands uh burberry aston martin like bentley and rolls royce like these are so cool and i think i love the thought of a brand that was grown here he's headquartered here but he's a truly global brand and i think that's really really cool i love the thought of that um now emphasis on the fact i want jim chart to be a global brand we we sell

into like the entire world at the moment like a lot of the the revenue and the customers and the community of gymshark are international the uk is a small um area of that now because of the growth we've seen in north america europe and so on so my ambition is for gymshark to be a truly truly global brand and one of the most iconic brands in the world i think that's so it's so cool the thought of jim sharp being a truly iconic brand a brand that's sort of like like genuinely pulls people together and

inspires people to be the best version of themselves both physically and mentally and he's in many ways the like the manifestation of this journey that i feel like i've gone on from joining the gym and trying to improve myself physically and then mentally through the business and so on i think that's really cool but ultimately i want it to be one of the most iconic brands in the world and then however you structure that in the back front whatever you do to make that happen i'm almost like channel agnostic i just want jim sharp to

be a truly iconic great brand that is like a true leader in culture and helps inspire people around the world 10 years time we wake up jim shark is a truly iconic british brand globally you've done it now what i'll be really sad i'll have nothing to do um no i'm not sure at that point i don't know it's so funny because your answer there is exactly what gary vaynerchuk said he said he was like that would be the worst day of my life oh when he um when he buys the jets i don't know

um isn't that funny the thing you aim for will be the saddest day of your life is scary isn't it but will you i don't know how you would put a pin in that like if gary bought the jets he owns the jets yeah how would you put a pin in the fact that jim shark when did gymshark become iconic it's true like when when does that tipping point happen um you'll have to let me know if that happens i think that's so that's a really interesting point there because what it what it actually says

is that all the fun is actually the journey and if you do want to set yourself up to never have that awful day then create a goal that like they say the best journeys are the ones with no destination and so you're right this is uh there's no day there's no measurement of that it's a continual process and also at times you'll get things pop the world will change and we all might go to the metaverse yeah and that's going to be a whole new challenge for you to maintain the position so like through the

yeah this that is mental we were talking about the other day about how just how much the world's going to change in the next 10 years and then going back to the start about someone that's starting up so once he's considering starting a business or or anything like that is like that becomes easier or it happens with change and like looking forward the amount of change we are about to see is unfathomable i am convinced of it it is going to be crazy and the opportunities will be huge you have 900 people roughly now right

how do you turn a 900 person company uh in a new direction really hard what are you doing from like in a very practical sense to set the team up for so in terms of nuts and bolts we'll have something that we call a brand book which is brand guidelines this is what we do this is what we don't do we'll have a strategic page which says these are the core things that we want to do these are force or strategic initiatives that sit outside of the day-to-day outside of what you might see that jim

shark are currently doing and then we'll basically put resource behind those initiatives um to basically see what happens some of them might fail some of them might win i'm not sure um that's a really boring way of explaining how we do it and is there like a cultural thing as well around like some you know because so many companies they get big doing one thing yeah web two let's call it you know social media whatever it might be and then the world changes and because they are so big as you've said it becomes actually their

biggest weakness yeah especially in advertising like in our industry the reason why social change did so well was because the incumbents were all into like billboards and tv yeah and radio and it was like a mindset thing they couldn't change fast enough which gave us this window like you've described macro factors with this surfboard we surf in and we'd capitalize on them the moment yeah um is there a mindset thing a way that you speak to your teams to make sure they're like mentally well no but like i said as people are joining the business

and coming in we're super we make them aware that this is a place where change is inevitable and oftentimes you don't even know what that is right like the biggest problem jim sharp will experience in the next five years we've got no idea what it is and one day whether it's tomorrow or in two years or in four years it's gonna hit us and blindside us in the head and knock us for six and we'll have to adjust adapt and change to deal with it um and we've we're aware of that we talk about that

a lot we we do talk about change and we try and like prime everyone to be prepared and ready for the fact that things will change like on a day-to-day basis things change from structures to the way that we want to you know achieve certain things and sometimes they can be difficult but ultimately that's a lot easier to deal with but i think those things happening the constant change of a growing business creates a culture of a culture of change when these things do happen i'd like to think we're in a reasonable situation to deal

with it and we are agile as well with thin we're like we don't have like 900 people's a lot not compared to some of the larger competitors they have thousands and thousands and thousands of employees all around the world they have lots of different distributors they have lots of different stores like hundreds if not thousands of different moving parts all the right all the way around the world today jim shark is in his most basic form a website one website and that is where you buy jim sharp from speaking of change then um the high

street shut down this year fortunately as you've described you're in a good position because you are a direct consumer yep um and why have you never opened up a store on the high street why have you always you know stayed away from that just time resource there are in a fast-growing business you will you'll you'll have to say no to so many things because if you said yes to everything you would end up just watering your business down it would end up just being you know it would be too gary used this term we spoke

to him the other day he said you never want jim char to become a vanilla boulder just you don't want to become vanilla right so it was it's purely down to a down to a resource thing historically so if i look at what we would coin as offline jim shark's been heavily involved in offline since day one the first ever blow up of the brand was through an offline event um and then we did expose around the world and we spent every single penny we had flying around the world now in our early 20s doing

these events then after that we wondered are there people coming to the event because of to see jim shark or our people happen to be at the event and they come to gymshark so we thought how can we find out how many people really want to come and see gymshark we actually did a test in covent garden we wanted to do a one-month story in covent garden uh two weeks in cove it happened and we had to close the whole thing um i'm massively inspired by different businesses and what they do off in their offline

so i think the opportunities on the high street are massive would you ever well we will at some point um so touchwood we are i'm hoping in the next sort of few days to be able to sign a lease on a store um in london our first ever store would be a flagship and it will be a hopefully a community hub for jim shot our first ever perm permanent offline store hub whatever you want to call it this is so early in the process like i said we haven't even signed a lease yet so um

fingers crossed that will go through we're just working through that now and again we've got a vision of this being a a true gymshark community hub that's so interesting because that really does feel like the future of the high street really experienced base not somewhere you're going to buy and sell things but truly experienced based and community-centric because as well what we need to think about is what we're trying to build here is a brand and what we don't want is something that is purely based on utility and what i mean is i don't want

people to buy gymshark because it's quicker cheaper and easier like i think we should try and be those things to a degree but it's not purely utility thing if you want that go to amazon right amazon will give you everything that you need rapid cheap and that's cool and i love the business i shop from them all the time but for me gymshark is a brand and it is a brand and it's a feeling and it's that badge of honor that you wear it's that that that dedication to self-improvement both physical and mental and to

do that we need a community and that's the wider gymshark community the people that follow us all across instagram snapchat you know ticks off all these different channels and then the events have always been the culmination of that community when you're there and it's just like everyone's there and they have these sort of inherent um like similarities and they've got that same mindset and it's such an amazing place to be so we thought what if we could do that permanently which is what hopefully this store will be when your brand gets bigger and brands you

know many brands have kind of fallen foul of this it's it's really hard to hold on to the brand piece right there yeah what's your strategy towards as you scale all around the world what's going to happen right is if i walk into my gym muscle works down the road and everyone is wearing gym shark i might be like [ __ ] that i don't want to be that guy right like yeah and then your brand is almost doing a lot of work for you on the ground because of the scale so how do you

hold on to that core specialness i think well first and foremost i think so jim shark it's still quite a niche brand in the sense that we're not doing sportswear right you won't see people on the football pitch wearing gymshark you won't see people on play like on the basketball court wearing gymshark gymshark is built to be worn in the gym like granted you know there's odd bits to sort of to and from stuff that i'll wear in the office or and in the gym as well but i think by staying true to that core

by focusing completely and early on building the best gym product whether it's clothing whether it's accessories whatever it is we might create down the line i think by doing that i think we can um we shouldn't water our brand down too much and you know that specialness because you've been there since the start so if i remove ben what happens in your honest opinion if i was to remove you from your business whereas what happens to your business in 10 years time i think it will continue i'm not sure who would immediate like being four

months in i'm not sure who would immediately step into the role probably the best argument would be steve but we we've got a proper management team like we've got like our chief of product is infinitely better than i will ever be at product achieve a brand is infinitely better than i will be the commercial team that we've run across international and now they're both way better than me but there's a specialness with a founder because they they can see all of the dots they've been there for 10 years and they can see why this truly

from day one why this brand is special like i genuinely believe no one can even in leaving my business i'm going to be honest i know the specialness my business has lost it doesn't mean my business isn't going to make great revenues for the next five ten years but i know that there's going to be a loss in vision and culture and like specialness that um it's hard to replace yeah and is that this dude maybe i don't know because i know that a lot of people like to work in the business because they're so

close to it like it feels like you're in a movie like it genuinely feels like that because we'll sit at lunch and we'll talk about like the stories of jim shark like we'll go and lift in the gym after work with just random people that have just joined the business and maybe maybe that would disappear i don't know you're right in terms of the commercials of the business wouldn't change the brand is so well run and the vision the plan is so robust like they'll present brand plans for the next two years to me and

i'll just sit there nodding and that's amazing that's really that's really amazing that's like a testament again i know you're gonna give give the credit but that's that's what the promised land for all founders is to be to build such a team that you're effectively redundant right and you've done that i wanna i know that there's gonna be a lot of young entrepreneurs watching this and i know that they typically ask me the same question so i want to ask you just a couple of them before we wrap one of them i get a lot

is you know there'll be someone listening to this they've not got any money yeah um they want to start a business they don't have an idea but they want to start a business what would you say to them they're going to you don't have an or money yeah but they want they want to be an entrepreneur i get this a lot so the first thing for me would be to find out what you're truly truly passionate about because for me when i started gymshark i made two fitness apps beforehand i made two fitness apps both

failed miserably i made a little fitness social network failed miserably a little fitness sort of forum that failed miserably and then jim sharp was it i wanted to be involved in the industry more than anything i wanted to be involved in fitness because it changed my life it was the thing that got me from being a d student to an a student literally that was the thing that changed my life the discipline yeah the discipline that i learned the structure the fact that if i was tired on a monday the gym doesn't care go in

and lift it doesn't matter and most importantly that if january 1 i joined the gym and i left five days a week every single week by december 25 whatever i am better than i was a year ago that that those lessons to me were massive because previously i didn't really realize that and i do this thing in school where i would be like i'd work try really hard and i get a bad grade and then there'd be another thing that i wouldn't try out and i'd get a really good grade and i just it didn't

mean it didn't add up to me so for me i was in love with the industry and and fitness was and is my passion and that carried me through some of the difficult times because i remember the difference it's made to my life and it's this inherent passion that drives me every day so if you've got no idea or money just lean into that community whatever it is it might be boxing it might be golf it might be videography it might be motorcycles or bicycles or whatever lean into it because inevitably there will be an

opportunity especially now because of this new social media world that we live in there's a massive there's so much room for people to create brands so yeah i would just lean into whatever your passion is it's so true because look you can waste a ton of time procrastinating and falling into indecision by trying to guess and as you said there i read that gymshark was actually like the seventh apple website you created so you like leaned into the industry did this process of like failure and exploration and stumbled across the winner right like and you

have to fail one of the if you're a young entrepreneur just do not be afraid to fail just all names out of boxes ideas out of boxes aside the likelihood of an individual starting a business and that one being the one that strikes gold is ridiculously low what we've got to remember is you could start 30 businesses and you are still more likely to fail than you are succeed so just honestly just keep trying and keep trying and don't be afraid to fail i think that's so so so important and everyone i've met by the

way from the people that run businesses that are 10 times bigger than jim shark to every entrepreneur that i've met every business person every successful person in sport in business whatever where they've started a business or not every single one of them has failed time and time and time again and i think then people look at the the final product and just assume that they've just they were either this incredible human who had was born this way or and it is just never never ever the case more often than not the all the most successful

people i've ever met are all winging it they're all literally just working incredibly hard and they're just giving it their best shot i'm gonna ask you one more on this point i think that was a superb answer as well because it's just incredibly true i am the other question i would i'd get a lot from your entrepreneurs is something like you know they're in a job at the moment and they've got an idea so this is an example where they've got a business idea that they want to pursue um but they're just you know they've

heard you say that they want to pursue it but there's something holding them back and they're you know i know you get this a lot as well yeah probably most conversations what you say to those people well i think if if it's your passion then i think you should jump in the the other thing i would say and this is i think this is this is a dangerous thing i do see people online in quit your job jump in go and do something and it's a bit like personally i'm thinking no don't don't quit your

job it's fine like like i i i worked at pizza hut for whatever i can't remember what the amount was it was four or five pounds an hour and jim sharp was doing hundreds of thousands in revenue the utility of having a job whilst running the business is huge one because you can earn money to survive so you don't need to remove but you know you don't need to remove money from the business so two you can then reinvest all the profits that you can make in that business if you just and two by the

way if business number one fails you've still got your job you try number two number three number four and i think whatever it is find your passion i genuinely don't think it's a good idea just to jump out of your job just on a whim there are some people you'll hear about the one in a million that succeeds and congratulations more power to you i'm super happy for those people but you don't hear about the 99 that ended up quitting their job and it didn't go as well as what they would like and then they

ended up having to go back and find a new job so use that job as a superpower as stability and invest the money you earn from that job in the business and just keep trying try and try them and hard work where does that feel what's the importance of it because there's a there's a narrative i talk about this podcast that hard work is maybe a little bit the narrative you see online from like the hustle porn stars a little bit toxic yeah but would you be sat here without hard work oh definitely not no

it's that combination of hard work alone is definitely not enough you have to work hard but you also have to work smart there were periods where we were finding out ways to manipulate google in a way that got gym chart to the top which gave us huge revenue for next to no cost right that was smart work but there were days when we would work 12 14 16 hours sewing and printing t-shirts every single day there are days like that now where i just we just work and work and work to get the job done

so exclusively hard work won't solve your problems you definitely have to work smart but i've never met anyone who was genuinely successful that wasn't hard working we have a new tradition on the diary of a ceo i've heard about this oh yeah okay they told you okay so um the previous guest writes a question for the next guest and this is the first time i've seen the question i don't know if people believe when i say that but um their question to you is what is the greatest gift that another human has given you oh

that's intense yeah i didn't see that coming what is the greatest gift that another human has given you i'd have to i'd really have to think about that the first thing that comes to mind would be time because i really so there's so many people that have given genuine time to me to like teach me take me under their wing robin time to support me emotionally my parents time to you know teach me and bring me up grandparents the people that i work with every day um so yeah it would definitely be something around time

i love that and it speaks to i think your understanding of the importance of time as well and i think being a ceo you quickly learn oh yeah very quickly you learn that time is a finite resource and um every second is planned i'm really careful about how i spend my time and i want to spend it the most effective and productive way i possibly can yeah well thank you for giving me your time today because you know you're one of the you're really you're a real anomaly as i said at the start of this

conversation in the uk for so many reasons i mean the business you've built as an anomaly as you've described like to have a brand like that that's reached such scale from the uk from a from a guy that was 20 and you're still in your 20s now right um is just i mean there's not another example in the uk right it's just it's staggering and i think you've done this tremendous service in doing the public speaking training you did and really putting yourself out there because now everybody gets to see this this person and also

you're one of the most relatable people i've ever met in every way um which means that you're just by doing conversations like this by putting yourself out there you're empowering 18 year old steve bartlett's or the future you know ben francis to to that they can too and when it's relatable and when you're a guy like you are and when you're so like i wouldn't say self-defecating but more like when you're so humble it just feels like um whatever position the listener is in on this podcast they they have a way out of that potentially

unpleasant situation so thank you so much because it's uh honored to have you back on and to observe your growth over the years it's been super inspiring for me thank you very much thank you quick one can you do me a favor if you're listening to this and hit the subscribe button the follow button wherever you're listening to this podcast me and my team use that as an indication of whether the episode is good or not based on how many new followers and subscribers we get thank you so much [Music]