“If you’re waking up in the middle of the night because you’re scared, that’s powerful,” says Roger Wade. “As an entrepreneur, it’s that fear that keeps you alive, so embrace it.”
Boxpark’s founder and CEO is no stranger to sweaty internal monologues in the early hours. He experienced plenty of night-time terrors while growing British streetwear brand Boxfresh from a Greenwich Market stall to a multi-million-pound global brand. He’s had many more since, not least while creating his other big brand – Boxpark – a pop-up mall built from shipping containers. Now with three Boxparks under his belt – Shoreditch, Croydon and Wembley – plus a place in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 list, it seems those white-knuckled 2am moments are really doing the business.
The story of Roger Wade’s entrepreneurial career is a white-knuckle ride in itself: since 1989 he has launched two completely separate brands into the stratosphere. His tale contains valuable insights for founders and businesspeople, which we want to share with you here…
It was such an inauspicious start. Roger was fired from his first three jobs – all in advertising – within months, and in the late 1980s decided to travel to New York to lick his wounds. There, he found work as a copywriter, but he was more interested in clothes shopping than crafting sentences. “All of my mates in the UK wanted American sportswear, so during my lunch hours I’d visit Midtown Korean wholesale shops to buy college basketball tops and baseball hats. Then I’d send them back home,” he recalls.
He soon followed the clothes, enticed back to the UK by his then-girlfriend. With no job, he manned a stall on Greenwich Market run by a friend who’d been doing a roaring trade selling his imported US kit. Roger then met two designers and they came up with the idea of printing on blank T-shirts. That’s how Boxfresh – one of the UK’s most successful fashion brands of the 1990s – was born. Over the next 15 years, Roger piloted his company brilliantly and rode the crest of a wave before selling to Pentland Group in 2005 for an undisclosed sum. “I built up Boxfresh from a market stall to a multi-million-pound brand with a turnover of around £20m,” he says.
The idea for his second business, Boxpark – which has no direct relationship to Boxfresh – came a few years later. “In around 2010, I could see that independent shops in Britain were dying,” says Roger. “Every high street was becoming the same. I wanted to create a home for independents. That was my starting point. I love containers and I love industrial design, so a community of businesses in shipping containers seemed like a good plan. Containers are portable and low cost. So that’s how Boxpark Shoreditch came about. Boxpark Croydon and Boxpark Wembley soon followed.”
That’s a precis of how Roger founded his two brands – Boxfresh and Boxpark. Now let’s dig deeper to find the entrepreneurial gold because this is a story full of it. Over to Roger…
Insight 1: “The mantra I’ve lived by for 20 years.”
“I’ve used just one mantra for years. A guy called Ted D’Cruz once said it to me when I was running Boxfresh in my late 20s. At the time, Ted was one of Britain’s most famous brand consultants. We’re friends now and when we recently reconnected, I said: ‘Ted, you know that thing you told me 20 years ago, I’ve lived my whole life by that!’
“The mantra is this: ‘You’ve always got to be special to your customer. If you’re not, you won’t exist.’
“To be successful, you’ve got to touch customers in a way that no one else touches them. So, if you’re making streetwear, that means your customers say: ‘I’ve got to buy Boxfresh; their clothes are amazing.’ If you run Boxpark, it means your customers think: ‘This is a truly brilliant experience. I love it here and I’ve got to come back.’
“Thanks to that way of thinking, I’m always asking myself: ‘What are the reasons that the customer is here?’ I’m always putting customers first and centre. That’s what I think it takes to be successful.”
Insight 2: Do something you love. Find your wave and surf it (don’t swim against it)
“One thing I’d advise any budding entrepreneur is do is to build a business around something you love. But if you want to make money, the easiest route is to find the point where what you love links to a trend that’s growing. That’s what we did with Boxfresh in the ‘90s. I followed my heart. I was into streetwear, music and clubs, and I saw this colossal rebellion against high-end fashion. There was a massive music movement – hip-hop in the early 80s and rave in the late 80s and early 90s – and we exploded off the back of that. Kids wanted something different to traditional fashion. We just gave them what they wanted.
“As an entrepreneur you’ve got to look at patterns and see what’s going to be the next big thing. There’d be no point trying to grow a business based on selling into independent retailers alone today. Online fashion is a different story – that’s where I see growth. You’ve got to identify what the trend will be and grow with it.”
Insight 3: Content is king; traffic comes next; finances follow
“This is true in retail, but I believe it’s right for other sectors too: content is king. You have to be fantastic at content. If you don’t have somebody in your organisation driving your content and making sure it’s brilliant, you won’t exist. Boxpark’s content guarentees the quality of the tenants, the quality of the events, and the quality of the environment. For an online publication like CLIC.co.uk, it’s the quality of the interviews, the quality of people you’re talking to, and the relevance they have to your customers.
“However, you can have the best content in the world, but if you have zero traffic, it’s no good. You might have the best retail development in Britain, but if it’s in the middle of nowhere, no one’s coming. You might have brilliant online content, but if you’re not creating online traffic, you don’t exist. So you’ve got to promote your organisation. You need somebody who focuses on pulling great traffic to your amazing content.
“Finally comes the bit we all tend to get absorbed in – conversion. Once you’ve got brilliant content and pulled in traffic, it’s all about converting that interest into sales. Many businesses get so wrapped up in the conversion that they forget about the other two elements: content and traffic. If you forget the importance of content, you won’t create a great business.”
“Nowadays there are too many accountants and sales-focused people running businesses. Last week I was at a conference called, ‘How to Overcome the Retail Apocalypse’. I said to the accountants and investors in the room: ‘If you really want to stay ahead, you’re going to have to embrace the people who can feel change, the people responsible for content, and the people responsible for traffic. Yes, have business people involved too. But don’t start complaining that it’s really tough in retail if all you’re worried about is rental yields. It’s tough because you don’t understand the customer. You can’t resolve it with a spreadsheet; you resolve it by being special to the customer.”
Insight 4: Learn from your mistakes, welcome change, and don’t worry about being scared
“Over the years I’ve been most successful when I’ve embraced mistakes, change and risk. Doing that is what keeps you alive as an entrepreneur. If you don’t confront those things – and the fear that comes with them – you won’t resolve issues, improve or evolve. There will be times when risk paralyses you – when you have a young family, for example – but I equate it to racing driving. In that sport, fear is the worst thing that can happen to you. The moment you start worrying about risk, you begin to lose your power.
“With Boxpark, most of our success has come from mistakes and problems. Those mistakes would not have happened if we hadn’t taken risks. We built Boxpark Shoreditch in December 2011, and the London Olympics arrived in 2012. All the big independent brands joined us – the likes of Etnies, The North Face, Oakley – they all came to Boxpark. However, after the Olympics, they all left us, and we had 50% vacancy.
“That was the best thing that ever happened to us because it led to innovation. We started to really promote Boxpark via weekly and monthly pop-ups, as part of a co-ordinated marketing strategy. We improved our data capture and built up our social media following. We reinvented ourselves by thinking about what it takes to run a successful development. We went from an incredible launch to the lows of losing 57 brands, to then building it back up.
“In the first five years we focused on retail. We were trying to buck the online trend and it wasn’t working. Then, in 2015, I did the sums. If we carried on doing what we were doing, we were going to need about 20 Boxparks to break even. But the food and drink side of the business – the bit we’d added as an afterthought and hadn’t even planned – was a different picture. It was growing organically and thriving. That’s when, in 2015, we started to focus on food, drink and leisure. And that’s what has led to our success and growth.
“The point is, we found our success by mistake. By resolving issues – mistakes of our own making – we came up with new business ideas and creative solutions, which then led to business growth.”
Insight 5: Rely on instinct; not data
“Today, I see lots of businesses relying on numbers and quantitative data to find solutions. What I say to them is they need to learn from the fashion industry. There was a revolution in fashion when River Island promoted its designers and merchandisers to senior management positions. Other brands followed. That didn’t use to happen. Before that, business people ran those companies and, as a result, they were slow at innovation. But the CEO of River Island during its incredibly successful period was Richard Bradbury, a former merchandiser. Why was he so successful? Because he understood product and relied on instinct.
“So, for me, entrepreneurial success is about embracing your emotions and trusting your feelings. When you truly believe in your instincts, you are most effective.”
The big lesson…
Roger Wade’s entrepreneurial success – springing from his uniquely intuitive approach – is both inspiring and educational. No matter what line of work you’re in, there are lessons to be learned from his ideas and his story…
His concept, that mistakes and fear essential parts of entrepreneurship because they are intrinsic to a process of improvement and development, is particularly striking. So, too, is the simple yet effective way that Boxpark’s founder thinks about his business: content is king, then traffic, then conversion.
So, the next time you wake up in the middle of the night sweating about a risk you’re taking, or a mistake you’ve made, take heart. It means you’re thinking, learning and getting better. And it is that uncomfortable process that gives you a higher chance of finding growth.
If there’s one big lesson from our interview with Roger, it’s that, mistakes and problems – when you face up to them and respond boldly and correctly – lead to success. So, embrace it.
Any discerning gin drinkers will already know the compelling Warner’s Gin story. Corporate behemoths would pay a fortune to have that amount of authenticity. But the funny thing about authenticity is this: it can’t be bought or copied. If you try to do either of those things, guess what? It disappears faster than your Friday night G’n’T…
It’s not about having gleaming offices, hiring tons of staff and shouting about how successful you are. These can be the trappings of ego-trippers. Effective entrepreneurship is more often about coming up with an idea, proving the concept as cheaply as possible, and scaling it as quickly as possible.
Why do some brands fly? What is it exactly that makes the ‘feel’ of a product or service so instantly enticing that it attracts customers like a magnet? To find out from someone who’s built one of the most successful UK brands of the past 10 years, we interviewed Juliet Barratt, co-founder of sports-nutrition brand Grenade. The company she and her husband Alan launched in 2010 has spent five consecutive years in the Sunday Times’ Fast Track Top 100 and was valued at £72m when the couple sold a stake to Lion Capital in 2017. Currently, Grenade is the fastest selling health-food snack bar in the UK.
Here’s how they built it, in the words of Juliet…
Lesson 1: Become experts in your niche
“Before launching Grenade we ran a sports-nutrition distribution business selling other people’s products. From this, we gained extensive knowledge of what sold well, what sold less well, what people liked and what they didn’t like. This gave us invaluable insight into what kind of product to create, including its look and feel. Using this knowledge, we were able to start planning our brand ideas and developing the IP from 2006 onwards – four years before we actually launched.”
Lesson 2: Be distinctive and memorable
“One crucial thing that we discovered early on is that people found it really hard to remember what products are called when they stepped outside the gym or health-food store. Consumers are bombarded with brands and adverts every day. We decided it was absolutely critical to create a distinctive brand. It wouldn’t matter what language you spoke, or where you were in the world, you’d instantly know our product by its look and feel. That’s why we came up with the Grenade name and spent a lot of time and money developing our grenade-shaped container. More than anything else, it had to be memorable if it were to stand out on the shelf.”
Lesson 3: Be edgy but not offensive
“There’s a difference between being edgy and offensive. Lots of brands have launched and thought, ‘Let’s be rude, swear and try to offend people’. I don’t think that makes a good brand in the long term. It might bring you short-term sales and make people notice you, but I don’t believe that consumers will ultimately buy into you. We’ve always said that we simply want to stand out while still being respectful to everyone. If people love us, then brilliant. If they don’t, that’s fine too… just as long as they’ve noticed us.”
Lesson 4: Maintain your authenticity
“To spread the word about Grenade, we recruited a team of ambassadors who love what we do and were keen to shout about us. We didn’t pay them; we just gave them product. They really bought into the Grenade world and helped us to grow. Word of mouth from people who genuinely love what you do is more valuable than celebrities being paid to stand there and say: ‘I use this; it’s great.’ Consumers are savvy and can tell when they’re seeing paid-for PR puff. Someone with 5,000 followers genuinely loving your product is, for me, worth more than someone with 100,000 followers being paid to say they use your stuff when in reality they don’t. It’s easy to sell someone a product once. It’s much harder to get them to buy it again and again. If you mislead people or make ridiculous claims, that makes your brand less authentic and therefore less magnetic.
Lesson 5: Look everywhere for inspiration
“I’ve always loved brands. I used to go into duty-free shops and spend an hour looking at the designs of the alcohol bottles – even though I don’t drink. It’s so clever that companies can sell what’s basically the same liquid for anything between £10 to £1,000 a bottle depending on the brand. When building your brand, you need to look at what other brands are doing. You also need to understand what your target consumers are buying, what music they’re listening to and what they’re wearing. All that information helps you to build your brand in the most effective way.”
Lesson 6: Align your brand with your personality
“It’s far easier to build your brand if you genuinely believe in it yourself and identify with it personally. If you spend time trying to portray a brand that’s not ‘you’ – that doesn’t fit in with your passions and interests – it’s going to be really difficult. It’ll be almost as if you’re lying to yourself and your consumers. If, on the other hand, your brand is a true reflection of you, you’ll enjoy your work much more and your customers will find it easier to relate to you and your messaging. We’ve also always been careful to never dilute or change our branding just to follow a new trend. We’ve stayed true to our vision which has meant that our brand has kept its identity and always remained authentic.”
Of all the insights above, Juliet’s second – “focus on being distinctive and memorable” – is probably the most important. By creating a brand that stood out in the right way for its target market, bursting off the shelf and leaving an indelible image on people’s brains, Grenade’s founders were able to blow the doors off the market and grow at explosive pace. When it comes to brand building, standing out like a beacon – in a way that appeals to your particular market – is one of the simplest and most powerful strategies available. But, it’s probably a combination of all six which have propelled grenade to such success. How many of these six are true for you and your brand?
Moneypenny is the biggest and fastest-growing company of its type in the world. Founded by sister and brother Rachel and Ed Reeves in 2000 from a £10,000 investment, it provides call-answering, digital switchboard, live chat and tech based communication channels to 225,000 clients around the world – from small start-ups to Google-sized corporates. These impressive facts, plus Moneypenny’s entry into the Sunday Times Best 100 Companies to Work For list, encouraged us to contact Ed and Rachel in the hope of hearing their insights. How have they and their team written a multimillion-pound global success story on a blank piece of paper?
A few days after chatting with Ed, we remembered two things above all else. One: Moneypenny’s first hire – Lynn – still works for the company: in 20 years she’s gone from having zero colleagues to more than750. Two: Ed and Rachel’s success is based on a single, simple recruitment strategy that he fell upon after making several bad hires. More on that soon…
With hundreds of people working at Moneypenny’s head office in Wrexham, it’s easy to assume that the business is a fancy call centre. However, that’s not it. The company not only appears in the Best 100 list, but last year attracted 3,500 job applications. “We have a waiting list as long as your arm,” says Ed. Something special must be going on. But what?
Ed offers the first clue: “When starting out, we looked at competitors and asked ourselves: how can we be better than them? We realised that the answer was to recruit extraordinary people. If we did that, we’d retain our clients and stand out. We knew our clients would buy into our staff rather than buying into us as founders, or into our marketing. So, we set out to recruit stunning people. We wanted extraordinary people to define our business.”
That makes sense, but it’s not unusual – almost every business sets out to hire the best. How has Moneypenny stayed true to that ideal over such a long period?
“To get there you’ve got to make mistakes,” Ed replies. “By chance, the first person we employed, Lynn, who’s still with us, set a high bar. She had all the attributes of the perfect Moneypenny PA. So, naturally, we thought, ‘let’s find more Lynns’. We looked at her skill set and tried to recruit more people with the same attributes. But the strategy was a disaster. We employed skilled people and had to get rid of them two weeks later because they didn’t have the right attitude. It made us realise that you need to recruit on attitude, not skills. That strategy now runs throughout the business. If we need to train people, we will, but the attitude has to be right to begin with.”
This lesson was huge. It’s not far-fetched to suggest the company’s entire success stems from it. Ed comments: “Lots of organisations do what we do and hire on attitude but, unlike us, they don’t prioritise it. At Moneypenny, if someone doesn’t get through the attitude test, we won’t consider hiring them, no matter what skills they have.”
So, the simple recruitment mistake that – if not corrected – would have led to Moneypenny’s eventual demise is to recruit on skills ahead of attitude. Ed argues that his company’s success is built on doing the opposite – prioritisingattitude ahead of skills. Moreover, he believes attitude to be so vital that it’s the only thing that unlocks the door to Moneypenny; no matter how skilled or impressive a candidate might be in other areas. But what does a good attitude look like? “A good attitude is a determination to bring your ‘A’ game to work every day and enjoying it,” says Ed. “It’s knowing that your clients rely on you to be at the top of your game and appreciating that dropping below that standard is not good enough. It’s also about bringing positivity and fun to the workplace.”
With that clear recruitment strategy in place, Moneypenny focused on getting the next step right: retention. Ed wants happy, motivated staff and believes the best strategy to achieve this is to highlight their value to the business. He says: “I sit down for lunch with every new recruit and explain how important they are. I tell them that if I were run over by a bus tomorrow, not one of our clients would know or care. They, on the other hand, are vital to our clients; they are relied upon every day. It’s vital to get that message across.”
Ed hammers the point home by describing the type of culture he wants to avoid. “I visited a company the other day and it was like an old golf club. The best parking spaces were reserved for the directors; the staff had to park on the street. We have reversed that culture. If anyone’s going to park on the street here, it’s the founders.”
Moneypenny reinforces the ‘value’ message by investing in staff facilities to encourage a sense of community. For example, it has introduced a subsidised office ‘pub’ where employees hang out on Thursday and Friday evenings, taking it turns to work behind the bar. It also runs free fitness classes and has invested £15m to create an ergonomic, modern, efficient new workspace. “When we amalgamated five separate offices into a single space, it had the most dramatic impact on Moneypenny we’ve seen in the past 15 years,” says Ed. “We engineered the space to ensure people mix more and so generate more friendships. If you create an environment that drives friendships, you go a long way to ensuring people are happy. Smiles top the list for retention.”
The final ingredient Moneypenny’s founder sprinkles into the mix is trust. “Trust is huge,” he says. “We empower staff to take charge of their destinies by trusting them to manage their own clients in a way that exceeds expectations. We have mentors rather than managers, and we encourage people to manage themselves. They do this by going back over their emails and calls and scoring themselves. As long as they know what ‘good’ looks like, this method works amazingly well.”
But the whole shebang hinges on Moneypenny’s crystal-clear recruitment strategy. Without pulling the right people into the company in the first place, no amount of trust-building or pub-drinking will lead to growth, success and client/staff retention. That’s why locking out people who have the wrong attitude while welcoming team-players who have the right one is thegolden rule. Moneypenny’s success and ever-growing staff waiting list prove just how effective recruiting on attitude can be.
PROPERCORN’S HQ buzzes with youthful energy. Stroll through the front door, past the doorbell emblazoned with the words ‘Done Properly’, and you find yourself in one of London’s more life-affirming offices. The ‘guilt-free’ popcorn brand’s co-founders Cassandra Stavrou, an ex-ad agency employee, and Ryan Kohn, an entrepreneur since university, tell us how it all began…
