NotOnTheHighStreet.com Founder: Rapid Success Lead To My Darkest Days - Holly Tucker | E92

Key Takeaways

early twenties i was diagnosed with a brain tumor that was the first knock down holly tucker ex-ceo and founder of not on the high street holly's story is mind-blowing we go and pitch the idea of not on the high street to the land of vcs who would tell us that it was lovely that us women wanted to create a crafts website but really there was nothing in it and i just said well we're actually going to change the face of retailing funny enough it's not craft website we tried to build a marketplace with no tech experience but we knew what we wanted and so we found someone who built the technology that ebay were building in america and we just relaunched and we nailed it how could i smile or laugh i found myself becoming a different version of me one of the lines at hollandco is bringing colour to grey and i think i was turning grey holly tucker ex-ceo and founder of not on the high street one of the uk's most loved brands but a real pioneer in its space at its time holly's story is mind-blowing how she rose from someone that had no experience didn't have huge amounts of capital at a time when women in business especially women in tech had it harder than anybody else she built an online tech company that went on to be worth hundreds and hundreds of millions but her story isn't straightforward it's riddled with pain divorce heartbreak turmoil and having to reinvent and refine herself time and time again the fundamental life lessons that she shares today and that she unpacks for us are life lessons based on problems that we're all going to experience in our lives it's a real joy to bring you this conversation and i want to thank holly for her openness her intellect and her incredibly inspiring personality without further ado i'm stephen barlow and this is the diary of a ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] i always start in the same place in this podcast because i think it provides the greatest amount of context on a person so i i'm i'm somewhat sort of bored of asking these questions but they're so incredibly foundational to who you went on to become because everything from you know the start of your journey till now proves that you are clearly an outlier in every way so tell me below the age of 18 what were the factors that went into making that person that went on to become this person well um i was nicknamed holly hurricane and that was because i couldn't wait to get to the next stage so when i um you know turned i think it was 12 i persuaded my dad that i needed to get a job in a pub cleaning it so he would wait outside in the car park at five o'clock in the morning i don't think i'd do this for my son by the way anymore but he would wait outside the um the pub and would um pick me up after my shift i went on and then i just continually worked when my friends weren't working i um decided that you know i needed the first mobile phone you know one of those bricks i think it was one to one i think that it only worked in the m25 and um and so i was just continually pushing it to be grown up or to be out of childhood i think and so why um because i was in i think and still am today incredibly excited by life i i really wanted to juice life and i was ready to work and i think work has always been um an incredibly important thing i remember at 15 um becoming an intern for publicist advertising agency um on bake street so as my friends would spend the summer out in the you know getting up to mischief no doubt i would be traveling up to bake street to spend my summer working and i did that when i was 15 16 and 17 and it actually and ended up being on the day of my a-level results my mum waited around the corner and i went for a job interview on the same day i was getting these a-level results in the morning and i got a job as the junior junior team maker at publicis advertising agency ra and that i now call my sort of university of life um and then my mum got me in the car and we went to pick up my a level results where i thought up until about a year ago i got a d in business studies i actually got an e and that was just ironic because that was the moment i started work i celebrated my 18th birthday in the office and i've been working ever since i'm 44 now and so i think that that says a lot about who i was i was just so eager to be in the big wide world um i remember my parents going on holiday and i was living at home and i mean again if my son ever did this to me i just um rented a place with some friends in halston because i was working um in in bake street um and just moved out i just packed up the car and drove the car and text my parents to say mom dad i've moved out um i'm living in holston which they weren't necessarily thrilled about um at what age i must have been 18 yeah 18. um so that is how that has been me i was dyslexic didn't find out um for my exams i am definitely someone who has to work hard to achieve um and always been creative so that has been a constant in my life i studied art uh at a level and i created this huge sculpture that they had never had someone do before called tom dick and harry and they actually cast it in bronze and had a crane pull it out of the art studio and had to take the windows out and that it's still there today at my school um because i i always go for it i suppose um so yeah that was me you know but i'm so when we say before the age of 18 you know i was in an office at the age of 18. um all my friends went to uni um and as i said i did this university of life thing um that work ethic was it at all influenced by your parents when you say you're excited by life but was there an example set by your parents about work ethic um i think you know i was always fascinated by my father's role he was a financial a cfo at general electric and he traveled the world and i was always fascinated with what he did my grandparents all had you know their own businesses and i was fascinated by that my mother had a small business um when i was younger i think that always you know how we get our money was always placed um we didn't have you know we weren't we were fine but money and where we got our money was always spoken about so i i very quickly realized you work to live so that's what happens and so if i wanted to go out i needed to work for that money so that has just that was always part of me so you know maybe that just led to me just continuing to work because that meant that you lived and um so yeah so i i think that but my work ethic you know again we were talking off air you know i give it my my all you know i lose myself in my work um it is me and so that's an interesting thing as you get older so you you work at publicist until you're 20 years old i i yes i worked there until i was about 21 years old and then i got head-hunted to move to conde nast uh meantime i managed to marry my childhood sweetheart again uh hurricane holly was in a hurry uh so i bought a place i got married um i need some more context here so your childhood sweetheart you met him when he was we were 14 14 yeah yeah okay you're both 14. yeah yeah and we got married uh at 21 and um divorced by 24. and so it was an incred my early 20s were a very very difficult period of time of my life because i had built up since i was 18. you know i had built up this life in this world and of course you get married then right and you know you're gonna have children and you've got a property in chiswick and you know you're all there and then sort of life pays you back or gives you i don't say pay you back that's the wrong way gives you an interesting lesson which is be careful to be in a hurry all the time just because you want it and you can get it doesn't mean it's right and so we found ourselves as natural human beings developing in our personalities and things and realizing that we weren't destined to be together forever um meantime i was diagnosed with a brain tumor and that was fine it wasn't fatal um but it had a lot of side effects so at quite a young age at sort of 23 24-ish i was dealing with a lot full-time job um all these sorts of things and i again i look at my son who's about to turn 17 i think all right wow holly you were young to do all of this so in my early 20s a lot of things changed for me um and i had to slow down i had to lose full-time work i had to become freelance i had to concentrate on my health i had to get divorced um and so yeah and that was the first knockdown i would say i've had two of those in my life um and that was the first one and it was pretty painful you find out at 20 through 24 years old that you've got a brain tumour how did you find that out i was just very poorly i put on a lot of weight and i was uh just not functioning correctly and in the end um with all pushing it because also also a young girl going to the doctor and pushing it with all the scans we found out but as i said it was it was livable with and um you know and that's something that's fine um but it caused just a huge amount of turmoil and um that's not to say i think my marriage would have ever lasted anyway but it just created turmoil and i now think back to how tough your early 20s are you know i don't think i would repeat them um i think it's quite a difficult age you're meant to be grown up you're just still a kid i'm trying to work everything out at the same time yeah absolutely well especially you the situation you'd put yourself yeah exactly exactly yeah but you just think the world's against you and now i just realized it was a it was a great kick up the butt and so you go into freelance work you're you're separated from this partner you've learned the lessons there hopefully yeah um you've understood the situation with your health yeah you didn't have to have an operation no no you couldn't have one no yeah i was i asked that particular question because i actually found out last week that one of my one of my best friends has a brain tumor and i and i was intrigued by the array of emotions that you felt in that moment and i asked that question from a supportive friend standpoint as how you support someone that's that's um found that out i think she's 24 24 and she found out that she found out two weeks ago that she's having she had a brain tumor and they put her into an operation the next tuesday wow because of the severity of the situation so she's just come out of the operation last night oh i really wish her well i mean mine wasn't you know it wasn't that serious so you know that was something that um i was very very lucky about but i think one of the things was is that i had to find you know twice in my life i've had to find out who i am again because when you pull your identity into something else that's not yourself or or it becomes your identity i think we all do that in relationships sometimes you know that you are married or you know that's what i did as a young girl so then when it all fell apart who who who am i and that was a really difficult moment for me and slightly the thing that saved me was going back to my creative roots you know if i hadn't gone to the university of life i was going to go and do an art degree so creativity sort of saved me and i i went on to you know create vegetable wreaths which again i just always think you know the story needs to be sexier than the vegetable race but there it was and i i built this wreath and i went down to my local high street to try and sell it and i was just freelancing at that time in publishing but this was allowing me to be creative in the evening why vegetable wreaths though um you know it it was just i needed to be creative i love i love interiors and i've always you know at the age my 14th birthday present was a subscription to the world of interiors um so you know that has just been something i have to have a creative environment to exist in so my home right now as a shrine to not on the high street i had to move house to get bigger and bigger homes just to hold what you know you can imagine um what i'm surrounded by and so um that was just glorious for me you know why not um i just did it and then that was this path that just opened up to me because i realized that i needed to sell these things because i was going to obviously become a millionaire you know for reinventing the wreath because that's what need was needed in the world and i realized that actually there wasn't any local fare that i could go and sell it so again if you dream it up you can make it happen so i created the first chizz at christmas fair with 200 stalls so that i could get the best store you say that like it's so simple because a lot of people a wouldn't even they would have had the reef idea and never done anything about it and then when they realized that they couldn't sell it anywhere they would have never done anything about that as well but there's clearly something that underpins that perspective that okay well that doesn't exist so i can create that and yeah well that doesn't exist i'll create that to support that that's my dna that's what i'm doing now holly and coats what i did at notton high street i don't just because it doesn't exist doesn't even bother me it's actually just part of the fun of building i'm i'm i love building i love it about the risk um well what risk because um you know what was going to go wrong there people weren't going to come to the fair i knew that they would i knew that they'd like my wreaths because they were good i didn't see risk you know i i i just went into it and i created this event and it kicked off it was amazing sold all my wreaths hated wreaths by the end of the thing was not going to have that career but now i was going to have a fair career i was going to put on events so i quit my job um and told my dad who's my be my cfo not in the high street and his cfo at holly and co and just said right that's what i'm now going to do and so i delivered all the wreaths got rid of that out of my household and i then um created these events and put on 20 events around london with small businesses and that was almost you know again a pretty bad existence because i was on my own putting on these events it was you know pouring with rain one day you can't control the weather you can't control the football being changed you can't do anything but what it did do is it made me realize um my total love for small businesses and what they create because i curated all of those stalls and i could see that there was absolute hidden treasure that no one else had discovered before and so the town hall roof i suppose was the prototype to not on high street i want to i want to go back to something you said a second ago which was about that moment where you kind of lose orientation your marriage has ended because i just think so many people listening to this either have gone through that are going through that or are going to go through that moment where they have a significant life change which completely makes them unanchored from what their like purpose is and who they are and um i'm fascinated by how long that process lasted for you and what advice you'd give to someone who because i experienced it a little bit when i like left my business or actually the first time i experienced it was when someone made me a really big offer for my business and then i went home that day and like mentally spent the money and i thought well then what who am i yeah who now like yeah because your whole identity was attached to this business so you might say like what advice would you have for someone um that's going through that sort of like loss of direction because there's been a significant life change and they they don't know you know who they are or which way to go anymore well it's actually something that now i have a word for um whereas at the time it was a sort of process when i consult with small businesses um and i i don't now do one-on-ones but um in my book for instance it's called a brand heart and it's basically i believe that a business has a heart and everything has to come off it you know that's the pumping organ that everything should come back to now you as a founder need to understand what should go into that heart and it actually should be made up of you so i think what i did was i went back to so what makes holly exist what makes holly alive and through that process which was about a year um and my second one which will come to probably you know lasted two or three years was um creativity was one um discovering um creative folk um my the my community who was i meant to belong to um building entrepreneurism um all these elements were coming through i was lucky um in my life at the end of the first this year i actually met my partner who's been my partner for 18 years and i got married and locked down so now he's my husband um so i was lucky to find somebody um and he did a lot of cheerleading for me you know sort of because when you're in that place you don't really um you don't have a perspective on anything that you can give anymore and so i think that's another incredibly important thing is to surround yourself with people who adore you and are willing to tell you what makes you um what makes the sun shine out of you you know what that is and so i was lucky to have that but that brand heart like the who is holly just cutting it up into five pieces and say okay if there were five things i've got to concentrate on to bring to restore me what are they um but it's a pretty painful process what role does patience play from in all of that process well none at the beginning i mean zero patience hurricane harley i mean do you want to mean now i've got a little bit more you know actually i'm enjoying that getting older and just having a slight um listening more um not running so fast um and picking up the cues along the way which i think i probably missed the first time around so i'm actually really happy to become more patient i mean we'll put it in perspective you know i'm you know i i'm uh very ambitious so but i am actually learning to listen um to listen to the world a bit more and even even though you've cut your heart into five pieces there to dissect who you actually are um that doesn't necessarily mean you know the the path as in in terms of like the business idea that's going to get you get you there or the career but you you know the fundamental principles of what you're looking for yeah and then what you need to do like experiment do something yeah just well actually that's not what i did for not on the high street but it is what we've done for holly and co because um that was the you know that's the point isn't it you learn i you know from not on the high street holly and co i have learned i don't want to do it all again as i did but not in high street so i don't want a final destination when you take vc money on you have some final destinations that you you know you've turned right and not left so always your course of direction will be to the right with holly and co what i loved was not not having that and also being able to um you know when people said so what is holly and co i could barely explain it i didn't have an elevator pitch i didn't want to fall into that actually i think that is the beauty of what i was looking to do but i did have a brand heart i knew that we had that i didn't have the final destination but i have the coordinates of a few places i know to go and i know that i am you know i know the direction i'm heading i always call it like an anchor you know i've got an anchor in the future i've got the rope that i'm holding and that rope will change change it will pull me to the right and left but i am anchored um yeah and um and i'm enjoying that that's what i'm really enjoying so i've got a we've got to go through this um this uh not in the high street story because i when i was reading um about your journey up until this point and the experience you'd had in you know working on you know creating a a market or affair for for these small businesses and then to go from there to trying to create a e-commerce site in the year that you did i thought was just madness and i think about entrepreneurs coming into the den and um one of the questions i always ask them is like have you got tech experience yeah who's who's got the technical sort of competence within the team show me what you know yeah and from looking at what your journey opened to that point you didn't have any of that stuff yeah no none how beautiful is naivety well yes delusion it is awesome you know i look at it you know before when i was in it in it you know i thought oh my gosh there's so many things that we need to have done before now i look at it and i think could i just bottle up that naivety and just take a swig of it every single day you know naivety is the thing if we had known really that we were creating one of the first marketplaces in the world you know at that point in time there was ebay and amazon amazon was still selling books ebay had you know your socks that you got for christmas and the you know the title was one two three grandma's socks um uh etsy hadn't launched yet um we were basically looking at uh you know like many businesses start a human problem that we were experiencing and thought we could create a solution and all we needed to do was take all those small businesses that were under my town hall roof and just put them on this thing called the internet and then wouldn't it be great if you could shop from you know lily bell and shop from the letter room and put it into one basket well of course okay well we got 20 grand so let's build a website for 20 000 pounds and we found someone who could do that big watch out there and funny enough three days before launch uh we realized that they couldn't do that you know that there was no checkout but because again there was no experience we had already told the whole world with a microsite that was counting down the days to launch and all the press that we were very able to get um that we were launching on this specific day the third of april so this 20 grand where did that come from well the the startup um that sophie and i had so i i uh the story is that basically after your local fare had a three-month-old boy called harry um with my now husband frank and i realized that i couldn't ignore what i had witnessed when you put a group of small businesses together that are like-minded and bring together discerning customers there's something that happens there the high street was dying and i needed to do that but i knew i didn't want to do it alone after your local fare which was my fair business i couldn't do it alone so i just wrote to my old boss sophie from publicis so she was my boss saying you know i basically don't think there's anyone else on the planet that has the into my yank you know is able to rewrite the english dictionary um and can be that person and so i wrote to her and i still got the email and it says you know i want to bring everything that's not on the high street together but i had a terrible beater name and uh 24 hours later she said yes because she was that customer too she wanted to find the curious the discover the small businesses and things but i had a three-month-old baby that wasn't going to stop me and so we went on this journey to build it and as i said you know we tried to build a marketplace with no tech experience or retail experience but we knew what we wanted and so we um pulled together a few savings we were both with young children our husbands were working to pay for the mortgage um we got a loan from a bank very small loan and we remortgaged our homes slightly both of us so i think we came to it with about 80 000 pounds thinking that we had contingency in there i mean everything and funny enough uh we didn't have enough money but we launched on the third of april with no check out to our shopping site um why was there no checkout well because funny enough ebay couldn't even build a multi-partner checkout with one basket you know no one had yet actually done that technology so and i remember naively calling you know calling ebay just picking up the phone to ebay thinking i don't know who i'm going to get through to ebay hey hi is that the cto you know that stuff you're building there's any chance uh i could have it too because we're dealing with a company in cornwall who uh has led us down um so we didn't you know this hadn't been built yet this this this functionality and so we launched we called it a press preview and we just pivoted and we were uh on something called daily candy which was huge at the time we were on the daily mail front cover all this sort of stuff it was great so we got all the traffic but no one could check out um but you know as mother lions that we were and i always liken businesses to being a parent something that in my latter years was frowned upon by the vcs because actually i do believe that when you have that spirit of a parent you can lift a car off a child when you're a founder and literally you're launching a shopping site with no checkout what are you going to do and so we found someone who in two weeks built the technology that ebay were building in america um and we just relaunched and and we nailed it did you run out of money in those early yeah yeah totally we ran out money we launched in the april and we're running out of money in the july um because funny enough technology costs a lot of money especially when it's never been built before and um and so we had to go and raise money and that was one heck of an experience because if you want to take yourself back to 2006 when we know one percent of vc money right now goes to women what do you think the statistic was then so we would pack up our personalized bags we get on the tube no money for taxis we would knock on the doors with meetings you know that people knew someone who knew someone and we go and pitch the idea of not on the high street to the land of vcs who pretty much a hundred percent would tell us that their wives did the shopping in their household and that it was lovely that us women wanted to create a crafts website but really there was nothing in it and i just said well we're actually going to change the face of retailing funny enough it's not a craft website and that continued right up until the christmas and we were now paying our staff on our egg credit card checkbooks we were my parents remortgaged their house twice uh sophie's parents uh lent us money i mean it was dark dark days i mean not in the high street was definitely on its last breath but the issue was it was working you know it hadn't been working up until that point we used to have a bell that you would ring when there was a checkout of 30 pounds and we were taking 10 and this bell would ring every second day and we were just thinking my god this is just hell but just as we were really running out of money the bell just kept on ringing it was happening because it was christmas and people wanted great gifts um so that was an extraordinary journey but one that ended well because we found someone who understood what we were building um and by the february 2007 we got our first round of investment how long did that take to find that person so from when you realized you had to start fundraising to the point when you the money hit your bank let's say well it must have been uh eight months um but when we were pitching it was just before christmas and i remember just telling them we hadn't got our first set of accounts yet you know we were there and i remember my father being in the pitch meeting and um you know we were putting what we were doing there obviously avoiding the conversation that we were paying the staff with our credit card checkbooks you know like everything is fine oh my gosh that you know it's like every time you raise any money the graphs only go you know through the sky and how you're going to do it will work it out but it was an amazing moment and uh tom tightman who was the investor had just written the first check for lastminute.com and he saw what we were trying to do and he actually saw the power of female uh female purchasers and that whole world and so um we did the pitch and he he you know he played with rc he basically said that's great thank you so much and we packed up and we left and my father said i'm so proud of you both knowing that not in the high street just died that we hadn't got the money and it was finished because where our homes were on the line it was it was finished and just as we pressed the bell for the elevator he said actually do you have a moment and he bought a bottle of champagne and and that was it our destinies changed but that was how close we were um but you know we definitely turned right that meant we got our first vc fantastic and then um you know we started building not on high street and it was growing very very quickly was it ever going to fail in your view i know you came close but was it ever going to be not at all never isn't that funny never never never you know at the same time that we were running out of money i was buying every single euro for the whole world so we couldn't pay for the heating so we had coats on between you know 9 am and 2 that was the coldest period in our office and then the because the whole building was being knocked down but we just kept our office so we had no boiler no heating but i was still buying the urls across the globe and and to this day i think it's one of the most fantastic businesses um but never would it fail ever because you know you as a parent you know if your child had any issue would you not think that you could overcome those issues absolutely and that's the resolut resolute that you need to be in business it's why i call not in high street my first business baby holly and co my second i love them as if they are my children um and they will get my my full attention what is your favorite flavor of heel jack berry my favorite flavor of fuel is banana berry used to be my favorite flavor and i saw someone tweet the other day they said um because puel is now in tesco's but the only flavor in tesco's is the chocolate flavor they were sort of demanding tesco's put the um the berry flavor in because that's steve's favorite it's not my favorite flavor is clearly banana now those are the ones i look for the most what does huel do for me i mean i've talked about this extensively but for me i get that a nutritionally complete diet in 60 seconds and in the world i live in that is a that is a remarkable thing and this is why even before they became a podcast sponsor i was buying heel to my office um every single week you know and the funny thing is jack who's the director and producer of this podcast he tried cure once he was like yeah yeah the guy is addicted to hill he's a fiend for you now because once you see the impact it has you understand the convenience you understand it's nutritionally complete for me it's life-changing and that's why hula is a bit of a it's a bit of a cult once you try it you can't go back you just said there that you know the company was completely out of money but but i i could tell that you also didn't believe it would fail which is a bit of a contradiction to some degree but well because it was just money yeah and you could you could figure that out i don't know how yeah but you know you know money is just this you know okay so if we got the money and the hard bit really is doing the doing isn't it it's building it so i always just knew somehow this will work out i mean of course you have your terrible dark days but i knew it was going to work out how could it not were you on to something and i knew that that level of optimism in upon reflection of your career of the last you know couple of decades how important has that optimism been that just like unexplainable unjustifiable i don't know why but it'll just it will all work out optimism because you've also because because you've employed a lot of people seeing the opposite that sense of like catastrophe you know that catastrophizing oh no we're a [ __ ] you know that kind of oh yeah oh man i've i've kissed a lot of those frogs um yeah wouldn't you say that that's a common denominator you find in entrepreneurs 100 i mean even in team members someone so i've i it's so i say i can't explain it enough i one example i always come back to was um i was flying to brazil and obama was speaking at the same time as me um on the same stage as me just like i'm speaking just after me and i thought well obama's here i'm a speaker he's a speaker can't i meet him and someone that was working for me at the time went oh no i asked somebody and they said no sick as a [ __ ] if they said no ask someone else and just keep asking and then they're like no no steve we've been asking and they just said no so i'll do it then and i i sent some emails and within 30 uh within 30 emails someone comes and grabs me goes come and meet obama yeah and i just think there's always a way there's always a way and your life yeah and my life is testament to this upset this like there is a way or there's a way that's you know what i mean there's a way where i have to work harder you know what i mean and i don't i don't allow for this other outcome which is that oh no we can't i've never allowed for the other outcome ever and it's actually my entire battery is powered by that and i am told i radiate it so when you're around me you get hooked on to that and that's can be a really good thing because it drives people in those dark days when actually the entire world is telling you no and i'm saying yes and so it's an amazing thing and i think that optimism and actually now as i said getting older it's actually i i would say there's optimism and now i also have gratitude that's powering my battery you know i worked out my 40th birthday i have 29 000 days on this planet because i'm and as another golden thread that i'm sure you recognize as efficiency i'm freaking addicted to it so i needed to know so you know this life i just need to schedule this a bit so you know so i've got 29 000 days oh [ __ ] it's not 29 000 days it's 14 000 days because i'm 40 right okay and so that has also led to a countdown till i die so that also has fueled this optimism and and [ __ ] it mentality because if today i am going to change the world which i can it's even fueled even in in a better way actually i didn't have that not in the high street because that was just you know fire fighting and optimum was that that that that fuel but now i think i have gratitude powering that even more and that's been in a beautiful beautiful stage of my life that is amazing and you're right you so you're you're in survival mode and now you're now you've got choice now i've got choice and a bit of you know the battle scars are there and i have an appreciation that you know i can give everything and all but i need to make sure that my time on the planet is also for me too because i do believe i'm here to serve and i've again i can only say that now in hindsight but if i am here to serve i need to also serve myself that sense of by the way i completely um resonate with this um this focus on the amount of time we have left i wrote about it in my book at very long length and you i think somewhere behind me there's a little sand timer somewhere on there there's usually a sound timer i don't know it seems to walk around but because i wrote about it in my book at such length people started buying sound timers and and uploading them online and the whole point of the sound timers it's one of the things that really allows me it reminds me of time it's like one of the ways we can see time happening just by turning it you see your life moving away and it's that important reminder just like get on with it and focus on what matters you mentioned um you now feel like you're here to serve do you think that comes from understanding your own power yeah i think so i think so i i would have found that really difficult to tell you 20 years ago but now um i have been through it and done it and i also know that my optimism helps people and i can see the effects and i can see you know what we brought up and not in the high street was full of it you know i used to have people come in to the office um from other businesses that we would hire they literally could feel it in the air they were uncomfortable with it it was optimistic it was creative it was emotional and they were like this place is so emotional and i'm like yeah and they're like uh we need to stop that and i'm like we're never stopping that and i think that that's what i've realized is that that is what i can muster up you know i i listen to one of my favorite songs is cloud busting by kate bush and when i listen to that song i feel like i'm whipping up a storm and that is my power but what i try and whip up is very positive and good for the soul good for small businesses good for and what are small businesses they're founders with dreams you know i love that and so um that is why i've writ potentially that is now my job description um for the rest of my life is to build something that i can pour that in and be efficient and so amplify it so not build an empire but be really smart and amplify that feeling out to other people and help them there's an irony in that that you're talking about whipping up a storm and your nickname's hurricane holly yeah actually i've never even said that before and so yes i like that link that just happened there slightly different meaning now it's not necessarily about urgency and more about i guess just power but yes exactly yeah yeah two different weather types yeah yeah so take me back so that you start not on the high street it starts moving you've got the vc money things you know team is small things are agile typically the most fun times yeah yeah the team was small um myself sophie i hired my sister um who was just going to help me out for a summer uh she still works for me at holly and co so that's been a good 16 17 years that we've worked together now um hired then her university friend her university friend came and coded the site that but you know it's that beautiful moment that you're just literally do you have a pulse and do you breathe okay would you like to come and work for us you know i was talking to somebody the other day um and he said it's that wonderful naivety where you get in a car in the cab and the taxi driver is really really chatty and so you almost go and offer them a job because it's just this moment where you need soldiers you know that's that time isn't it you don't need the skill we need power and um we need energy and we need commitment and we need you not to have a high salary that's the that's that moment in time and so that was what it was and you know we were growing at 2 000 we were trying to keep up with it i call it like that speed train with all the nuts and bolts of flying off and you're you're at the driving seat and there you're going and as you said with optimism that energy is just infectious and so we just were growing so rapidly so we were going from a hundred thousand pounds ttv to a million the next year to two and a half million to six million now keeping up with that and also remember in a marketplace you have two clients yeah i always laugh at people that moan about having one client like try to you know you've got your customers and you've got all the small businesses which by the way you are only as great as their ability to keep up with 2 000 growth some of them are growing at 5 000 because they're the hot product and so it's that coaching of that group of people to keep up with you meanwhile you know the swan to the customers and the swan to the uh partners which we called them partners from day one you know they weren't sellers we were only as great as they they were and that was that beautiful shift that we were creating in this world we were we were respecting small businesses they would get a media pack that cost us way too much i think about five pounds per thing but we wanted them to know how talented they were we curated from day one which now you know uh is a word we use a lot back then it was not a word you know why aren't you accepting everybody and we would be no we're turning away 90 percent of everyone that joins even though they're paying adjoining fee and we're eating baked beans and worrying about the mortgage we're not getting paid a salary we will turn away 90 because one day our brand will thank us for it and it did it very very much did you talk there about hiring and that flipping hiring process at the start which i know very well and i i've joked about on this podcast before like walking into pride and the guy selling the bags was like jonathan a director i was like yeah and then like i had some guy on facebook he's called ash one of my good friends now and he even laughs about it he was on job seekers allowance he'd never done a job in his life i made a marketing director and i was 18 and i was just like [ __ ] it you know like yeah but you're like what's the worst i don't think i think this could work out right imagine if it does work out that the taxi driver is going to be amazing funny enough it doesn't necessarily work out that way almost never so but it's just i think the interview process when you're that naive is literally would you work for me and they go yep fine you've got the job yeah or is there salary low enough that's actually double bonus yeah yeah absolutely yeah it's it's a crazy thing the hiring process has been again on reflection something i'm learning right now to do is that would probably be one of the most beautiful points of building holly and co is my team and investing heavily in the development of each one of the souls that i think are life is with me now not on the high street it was the soldiers you needed the energy and then you get into the next stage don't you where actually those people by very nature can't stay with the business because now you need skill and there's that awful moment where you're having to let people go for the first time and bring in skill and to bringing skill you now need to interview don't you and you now need to be able to know even what the skill is that you're even looking for as you're running at 200 miles an hour and then it goes into that's next stage where you're now looking for the people to run the people who you've just hired you know and that process for me was not something i could spend enough time on i mean we interviewed absolutely everybody until the point that we had a c-suite and um i always remember my father saying that 90 of my role as ceo should have been the people 90 of my role was not the people because how on earth could it be i mean you know you were the next race was happening or we were going international or you know we've decided to double the company in a year and now on reflection when i look at that oh it's the people so with holly and co i've now got a good group of people that i believe are life as and i'm happy to say that because what i believe is that they don't even know how great they are and i'm going to shine their diamond until it completely shines and that's dealing with their personal side that's dealing with their professional skills that's dealing with their whole self um and that is something i'm fascinated by and i think i'm potentially going to build one of the most incredible teams um that i've ever been lucky enough to manage and you've learned those people i just everything you said then i'm not i just agree with it all i agree with every single word because i went through the same exactly the same journey of hiring anybody bringing in skill bringing in a bunch of people that had done this job for 20 years to tell me what to do and i got out the way and i let them run the team and do all the hiring for me but then i also had the reflection three four years in that in fact this whole time what i actually was was a recruitment company and that was my sole responsibility yeah and then you look at all the people there and you go to the kitchen that i i would and i would you'd be getting a cup of tea and i wouldn't know the person to my left how terrible is that and also that you realize when you get that c-suite in because that's what we need to do because we've now got vcs and we need to get the the huge company cos and the cfos and all the seas um i call it um in that they just then recruit the carbon copies of themselves so suddenly you've got an entire organization of many you know of those people and actually my gosh suddenly the pendulum swings so for not in the high street remember we always used to say you know we've got our marketplace hat on one day so that is about trading the site and understanding what customers need and then we've got our retail hat on which is the brand because we're not in the high street we're not ebay we're not amazon we are not on the high street we are that beautiful mix because we know our customer and so that was very interesting because actually what you need and require to be able to curate unique products and unique companies is creativity eyeballs taste all these things that are unable to excel you cannot put you know many times i've been asked can you just please tell me the process between a and z of a great product and i'm like you see you even asking me that my dear means that you don't even understand what makes a great knot in the high street product so that was the difficulty is that suddenly you would get too much of the processing too much of the operations everything was a meeting everything was a powerpoint everything and that room for creativity and life and entrepreneurial spirit started being pushed to the side and that was a very difficult period in time you know we were you know still growing so incredibly quickly um so it was a difficult moment to try and balance that state of growth and tech issues and operational issues and funny enough hr issues when you have enough people um with that need to be what i call truffle hunters now you know people that can really find the most unique amazing small business that will create the next bestsellers did you find yourself at war with the business you created um i i loved it so again if i look at being a parent i loved it but i didn't enjoy them right now you know i found them difficult to live with you know and that's what i would say it's you never lose your love you never lose the but actually what was happening was the process had become so big that the core of what i loved founder titus you know the duracell battery you know that is why founders are unbelievable should never be moved from a business whatever should maybe take a new role that's okay because actually they don't enjoy the role of the operations but that sort of duracell battery when you take it out of a business you know it i'm sure you've interviewed many people that you something goes the customer even knows it everyone knows it and so that was that's just been a brilliant uh lesson for me but also a lesson that i now pass on through holly and co you know holly and co is all about me being vulnerable with the truth and hopefully inspiring other people that when they're growing their small business and they think they're going to hire the next person that's going to be the silver bullet a there is zero silver bullets in business but b it doesn't work without you you know for all your defects and all your faults and all your weaknesses it just doesn't work without you and was there a moment where you realized that you'd have to take a different role within the business yeah i suppose it got to that point where um 200 people five vcs i was chairwoman and ceo um and things were changing you know i was you know 15 meetings a day running to the loo with my pa who would then brief me as i was in the loo on my next meeting to go into my office where it was already set up to be countlessly doing board meetings you know one board mini team would finish and we'd be preparing for the next board meeting um and basically being at at a stage where in any given day did i do anything that i loved you know my new book is do what you love love what you do you know i brought up this business that i loved but every single day did i actually ever do what i loved and there was that moment where i needed to make that decision um and it was a pretty goddamn painful one where i sort of realized i'd lost myself you know i was um i didn't look like i looked today you know i was in the tube dress with the high heels on double spanx on i was a she man you know i needed to be that person i was brought up remember i was 28 when i started i was i was brought up through not on the high street and experience that's all my reference point was and so i knew i needed to dull motion and you know drive this and be this person and um and i think i was probably in reflection tired of not being holly could you feel it yeah yeah yeah yeah but i didn't know at the time like you were just saying i was just in the motion i was a hamster in the wheel you don't know any different you know you just exist don't you and your whole purpose is to fuel everybody else and sort of you you realize that when you're not there things go off the rails and so you have this sense of responsibility and every night i went to sleep um i would lay on my pillow i would have my son as my responsibility i would have my home i was the main breadwinner of our home but i would have the thousands of small businesses that if i go wrong ever you know a lot of them 50 of them relied on that this was their only income their husbands had quit their job you know they were doing million pounds two million pounds a year like this was my r