Carl Saxton-Pizzie trained as an actor and worked in tv before founding a sustainable grocery delivery company, Wholegood, in 2007 (with a van and £500). Wholegood is on track for £30m in revenue and employs 160 people. This is a small business success story, a start up in the “old economy” but very much touching “new economy” ideas such as sustainability and delivery services. You can find Wholegood products in most UK retailers, Ocado one of the largest examples.
We talk about Carl’s entrepreneur journey, what acting taught him and the importance of sustainability and purpose. I ask him what he wished he had known in 2007.
Carl thinks over some of his best ideas and worst ideas including why organic coconut water didn’t work out and how brilliant his non-plastic packaging is.
We discuss the importance of mental health, resilience and managing and why story telling is important.
What it might mean to have a great career, why trucking is under rated and who the fastest packer is.
We think on the plastic bag tax, minimum wages and being scared of failure.
We chat on how being an actor is a kind of “classlessness” but why qualifications can be over rated.
Carl ends with his career and life advice.
It's so easy to become blinkered with your single vision of what success or your current success looks like that you stop forgetting that there will be other successes. You can get up and you can carry on. You have to be brave and you have to be able to not get lost in the idea that you're currently in. Step back or step out and do something else.
PODCAST INFO
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo
Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh
Transcript (only lightly edited)
Ben (00:31): Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be here with Carl. Carl was an acting star before founding a sustainable grocery delivery company in 2007 called Wholegood. Wholegood Is now on track for 30 million pounds in annual revenue, employs around 160 people and is growing really well. So that's one amazing journey. Welcome Carl.
Carl (00:56): Thanks Ben.
Ben (00:57): So what do you wish you had known back in 2007? There's probably more than one thing, but what's the biggest thing you wished for on your kind of entrepreneur journey?
Carl (01:12): I wish that I'd been more open to-- I wish I'd been aware of how important management and people are to one's business, because I can remember a wonderful friend of mine, Jeff, who kindly built this business plan for me and I remember speaking about management and just kind of saying, well, it's okay, that line can stay the same, cause it'll just be me and it just had this plan that just ramped up and all the time it was yeah, just me. I completely underestimated the skill and the time, all I really knew was how to work really hard. So probably that is what I wish I knew because I just did things in a spit and sawdust, work all night, you know, strategic vision, but just mine and not sharing that and just sure that hard work in a way that my dad would've worked like, you know, as a bricklayer, just every day, hammering away that would create everything that I needed. And obviously here we are 160 people in the business, at 30 million and--
Ben (02:43): You can't do everything yourself.
Carl (02:44): And I definitely cannot do everything myself to the point that now that I've got a CEO running the business. I can even just see what I didn't do as CEO. That's been the biggest learning experience for me now is that I knew that I didn't want to be CEO, but seeing what a CEO does is completely different to the way that I was CEO.
Ben (03:12): That's interesting. I think in business, particularly in small business, there is a lot of talk about founders, CEOs, CEOs who come in and this, and I just reflect when you talk about what you wish you'd known in 2007. I don't know whether they can teach you that. I think about, you know, what can they teach you at school? And there's a lot of stuff they don't really teach you and you can learn some stuff from your parents like hard work and things like that, but they can't really teach you like, well, if you manage a hundred people, you're not going to be the only one or what is management and how do you get the most of people?
Carl (03:46): Yeah, it's so unique for every business that there is absolutely no secret sauce in my opinion, other than bucket, bucket loads of capital. But then on another level that doesn't always create something meaningful. It just creates something that can burn money and I think that there is just no way of knowing exactly what you need, but you just have to be open to learning about what you need and open to the fact that you are going to make a lot of mistakes. You're just going to make thousands of mistakes but the most important thing is to make sure that you are always making decisions and procrastination is kind of what kills it.
Ben (04:33): So quick decisions and new mistakes, try not to make the same mistakes.
Carl (04:37): Absolutely, but just be open to the fact that every day, especially in the kind of business that Wholegood is, we are a heavy supply chain and that is obviously challenging because stuff just goes wrong.
Ben (04:51): So thinking back to the early start of your journey, you've been very successful as an actor. Do you think acting--
Carl (05:00): Well, I'd been successful. Very successful feels like [Inaudible:05:05]. But yeah, I definitely, it was my career. Wasn't it? So, yeah.
Ben (05:09): Because I guess as a joke people say, oh, well, actors and entertainers don't really learn anything else useful for business, but I don't know whether that's true. Do you think because you have storytelling skills, you have communication skills--
Carl (05:20): Yeah, absolutely.
Ben (05:20): --You Have work.
Carl (05:21): And I definitely feel like business on so many levels is storytelling, especially if you're selling. I mean, how can you not learn as an actor? You essentially learn to play all these different parts. You are always pretending to be somebody else. And actually when you're meeting customers and or if you're raising money or no matter who you're talking to, you are always having to tell your story slightly differently because you need to be able to understand almost what that person is going to get. So you've got to kind of manipulate your story to make sure that the people that you're speaking to understand it and being an actor completely got me ready for business to the point that even we used to have classes on how to shake hands.
Ben (06:15): Really?
Carl (06:16): Yeah. Oh, not firm enough, that was a bit too firm, you know, and you'd be there like 11, how was that?
Ben (06:24): Got to show me the perfect business shake.
Carl (06:26): Yeah, exactly.
Ben (06:27): You went to Sylvia Young?
Carl (06:28): Yeah. And I started Sylvia Young when I was seven and went to Sylvia's full time school when I was nine and that completely changed my life and that absolutely made me definite-- There's no doubt that I probably would've had reasonably good instincts for business. I kind of feel like I always had that, but theater school teaches you a lot of tricks and you would on an audition have to go in and hope that somebody likes you within 30 seconds and you've kind of only got three or four minutes to get the job and you need that in business. You can't go in and just start saying, you know, well, this is my plan and just kind of take up 45 minutes of somebody's time. You're going to bore them to death. You've got to know how to go in and perform for that moment and I just see so many similarities with business and acting. It's just really, really similar.
Carl (07:38): I mean, without wanting to sort of undermined it too much, it is just like there is a real art to quite a lot of bullsh*t. You've just got to know how to bullsh*t your way through things.
Ben (07:49): Well, I guess that's what's selling, cause you're selling dreams, stories, all of those types of things as well as [Inaudible:07:55].
Carl (07:55): Yeah. Because when I first started the business every aspect of the business that I would be selling didn't really exist at that point, it didn't and also half the time the product didn't exist. I'd be selling it and then trying to get it in time from France or Spain or wherever.
Ben (08:17): Well, I guess that's the other half is that you knew you could get it or you were like, I'm sure I will get it.
Carl (08:22): Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Absolutely. It definitely wasn't complete bullsh*t. It was just part bullsh*t. But if you look at some of the stories that businesses tell, and you look at kind of what people are raising money on, I feel like there was quite a lot of integrity in [Inaudible:08:45].
Ben (08:47): Well, I guess that feels like the other half because you mentioned it with your dad as a brick and air and your mom working hard as well because you promise someone something and then you have to deliver and you're going to constantly deliver and that is actually a working hard aspect. Is that something you had an instinct for or had from your parents and family or?
Carl (09:08): Yeah, I can't let people down. I mean, that's definitely and that is definitely ingrained in the spirit of Wholegood. Absolutely. If we promise a customer something, we will do everything that we can to deliver. That has been easier said than done during the pandemic but during the pandemic, we doubled in size, we doubled in people and we definitely put double the amount of work into the business.
Ben (09:41): And that comes from you kind of, as the leaders, like well you are doing everything and then this is where I think people think about that founder or that CEO founder as driving the heart and soul of a business.
Carl (09:53): But you know what? I can completely recognize that now, but a couple of years ago I wouldn't have, and I can recognize that now because we employ so many more people now that you can definitely see that there is a determination and a spirit in the business that definitely does come from me owning it.
Carl (10:15): But then also what you tend to do is you start to attract or people that potentially aren't like that might tend to leave or fall away. So actually you start to be attracted to certain cultures. I think that sometimes historically the failure of that has been that I've tried to work people too hard because I work too hard or I did work too hard.
Ben (10:42): Interesting you said that cause that's a little bit without saying we are as big as him, but Elon Musk has that. He says, I work people really hard, but I expect I will work harder myself. Just if you're working 20 hours and sleeping on the factory floor, that is not what a typical person is going to do, which is what Musk ended up doing for a lot of time and therefore burns people out because no normal person can do that.
Carl (11:05): I mean, I feel like all of that resonates in a completely different universe that doesn't, you know, yeah maybe I did that, but I did it for like 300 billion less. But yeah, it definitely feels like as the people increase, actually, then what you can do is there's a spirit to what you're doing and there's an energy to what you're doing, but actually then you need to start creating a mechanism underneath it that supports people and that looks after people. And I definitely feel like our new CEO Martin Sandler, really has that skill. He understands what looking after people looks like while making it very clear maybe what business expects--
Ben (11:54): Accountability.
Carl (11:56): Yeah, absolutely.
Ben (11:57): That makes me reflect kind of almost going up that level. What do you think the story of Wholegood is? So when I've seen it, I've thought of it as having sustainability at its heart, which I always thought was really interesting. This idea that you don't let the customer down, you've got great products, sustainable and you deliver, and I guess that was kind of its thinking from the start, but maybe you'd say, what was your story? What would you say to people? What would you say to people now?
Carl (12:24): Sustainability was at the core of why I started it. I started selling organic food because I mean, it's changed a lot over the past few years in terms of what is available in fresh produces, but they were real polar opposites at the time, there was just conventional and organic and I chose organic because of the fact that I was a big fan of eating like that. And I think that that's why sometimes it's important to be in a business that you do deeply care about the product that you are selling. It makes it a lot easier. So absolutely sustainability has always been at the core. I suppose though that what's changed so much is that sustainability made us quite niche, but of course sustainability is now mainstream, right? And the products that we sell are mainstream and we were pre-packing organic fruit and vegetables in 2010 and organic cotton net for no other reason than I thought it was the right thing to do and I wanted to not use plastic. Now, we are in this phase where we are obsessed with taking plastic out of the supply chain, not always for the right, you know-- Sometimes I think there's a place for plastic, but--
Ben (13:56): Because it can help lengthen the life of fruit perhaps.
Carl (14:00): Absolutely, but the problem is that there's no really good infrastructure in the UK necessarily to cope with the recycling of it or there's too many different plastics in the supply chain. But when we started to pack fresh produce in plastic free packaging and we really, really started to push it from 2017 we're still one of the few companies that used the type of packaging that we use in the UK. It's just incredible that big multiples are still not doing it and it can only be about price. I mean, it really is because it's bloody expensive to do it, but again, we've always put that sustainability first and then then had to kind of unwind, well, how are we going to make money out of this? How are we actually going to make profit?
Ben (14:57): Well, you say it's just price, the other thing I reflect on is vision. You did it earlier and you did it for a purpose and the right thing. Yeah, and it makes money still, but the bit which comes first is vision. So I actually would put that as visionary. Maybe not like putting a car on the moon or whatever it is that--
Carl (15:19): Yeah, like a visionary while being completely skilled, yeah. Like a really nice thing to do for everybody, but yourself cause for so long we didn't have ways of applying labels to the net and stuff. So, you know, we used to spend hours and hours sort of sticking a label on a cardboard tag that we had tied to the net. I remember doing that for a customer in Bayswater and thinking, oh, this is absolutely it. This was kind of in 2009, this is the future and we would be tying these labels on thinking, oh, at some point we'll find a way of doing this automatically and they never paid us and they went bust. And it was just like, oh wow, we spent nights tying the labels onto the net and they didn't even create a very successful business, but then that changed with [Inaudible:06:32] and that's when things started to and we'd learned a lot or, well, me and no one else had learned a lot. Me and a couple of drivers had learned a lot in tying the label to the net and now of course it is automatic and it is faster, but there's still a lot of-- It's not fully automated and that's what's quite nice about it as well.
Carl (16:54): We've got really skilled guys in Wholegood that are just super quick at packing stuff with that cotton net. I've got a couple of Packers, we've got a lot of Packers now, obviously, but I've got a couple of guys that have worked with me for years. I've got Norby and Yani, they are machines but there's just a joy in the pace and there's almost an artistry about that. We can't replace those guys because we don't want to put machines where they are. We did buy a fully automated machine once and we named it after Yani. We kind of had it like this vinyl on it, the Yani 5,000. We spent a lot of money on that machine and we replaced it with Yani. So, it just sometimes doesn't work.
Ben (17:36): So actually, that's interesting. I've never heard that on-- So you think there's a limit to automation. I guess if you've got very standardized stuff, you're going to go that way, but actually you are never going to replace all of the jobs and then you'll get, I guess the economic theory is that you get more new jobs. They might not be the same, but actually it's still going to create value. But what you're saying is that there's a little bit of a limit to what--
Carl (17:58): Well, there's a limit for us because we don't use plastic. The machines are created for plastic netting and they kind of sort of throw products into the net, pull the net really tight, attach the label and let it go. The problem is when you stretch a home compostable fiber net, no, because once you stretch it, it stays stretched.
Ben (18:28): And there's not enough of you to invent a new machine. Well, that's your next business inventing machines.
Carl (18:33): Yeah. My new machine will just be how to multiply Yani and Norby if they agree because they packed about 25% quicker than the machine.
Ben (18:47): So that's, I guess, got to be one of your better ideas. What do you think are your best ideas or and also you can contrast this with one of your worst. This is almost a best and a worst idea, because when it went to your Bayswater client that went bankrupt, you thought that's the worst idea. Now it's taken off its best, but I didn't know.
Carl (19:08): Oh, I've had loads of bad ideas. Yeah. I've wasted so much money on bad ideas but--
Ben (19:16): You learned something from them.
Carl (19:17): Yeah. Look, they were good things to do, but they wasted a fortune and then also sometimes the problem was my attention span.
Ben (19:27): But this is what R&D sort of is or experimentation. I mean, you might not call it-- A new type of bag, I guess, is not what you would think of as traditional R&D, like tech style, but it's an innovation, it's a new way of doing things and it could work and it might not work.
Carl (19:41): Yeah. So, one of my big ideas in Wholegood, because obviously we do also sell branded product and we sell sort of more sustainable type foods and snacks before coconut water was a thing I was absolutely obsessed with importing, bottling and selling fresh coconut water and not selling anything in a Tetra pack or so. So I found someone that could supply me frozen coconut water from Thailand. It had to be organic. So I then paid to have it certified by the solar association in Thailand and then I brought containers of frozen coconut water over and we have a high care facility in our first Greenfield warehouse. And then we would defrost it and bottle it and then we would put it through the HPP process, which would extend the shelf life but it would mean that it wasn't heat pasteurized and to make money out of that we had to sell it for 13 pounds a liter.
Ben (21:15): Wow.
Carl (21:16): But it did sell. Well, the only people that would stock it was planet organic and it did sell. I don't know how much it sold. I mean, it was a long time ago, so I don't really remember any of it. All I remember is my new CFO at the time, Rob, sort of came in and within a couple of months, he was like, okay, we need to talk about what makes money and what doesn't. The coconut loses about 20 grand a container, so you might want to stop it. So we just didn't order anymore. I just wanted to try it and I thought it would work but the problem is that by the time we were bottling it and the label, I just got bored.
Ben (21:56): Well, a really good CFO, if you had one at the time, could have just looked at that and gone, well could work, you are going to need a million people to buy your coconut water.
Carl (22:06): I mean, Rob definitely kind of said, you just got to sell a lot more, but obviously in the early days of Wholegood, there was this want to do a bit of everything. So, okay, we'll do coconut water, we'll do hummus and we spent almost half a million pounds building a high care facility so that we could sell prepared organic vegetables. We would sell tons and tons of spiralized courgetti every week when that was a thing.
Ben (22:39): Has that stopped being a thing?
Carl (22:41): I think it stops being a thing because nobody makes it. We could have been the biggest spiralizing company in the world, but everybody got really bored of it. I mean, we had kind of like stainless steel, industrial drills with these little attachments on the end where we would just spiralize courgetti all day.
Ben (23:01): You've invented some brilliant stuff. It reminds me of-- I was in Kyoto many years ago traveling and I met, supposedly he told me he was the last person to make wooden buckets by hand and I bought one. I remember and it cost me like a hundred pounds for a wooden bucket. It would cost me like five pounds in wood now and two pounds in plastic, but it was beautifully made, but [Inaudible:23:28], no one can tell the difference [Inaudible:23:30].
Carl (23:31): Yeah. Yeah. He had a room full of machine made buckets and he would wait for people like you to come along. Yeah.
Ben (23:37): Maybe that was it.
Carl (23:38): Yeah. That was definitely it. But yeah. I've had loads of bad ideas and the most important thing about having bad ideas, the same as having a bad month or a bad week in business is you just got to look forward. The most important thing is that you just keep on moving forward and you try not to reflect too much on all the mistakes that you've made and you just keep on looking towards what it is that you're ultimately aiming to do.
Ben (24:14): And so, that's the other thing which I reflect on. You mentioned sort the people, culture piece, the purpose piece, management and then the looking forward and the learning from mistakes and the thing which seems to loop all of that together is essentially what I might call mental strength or resilience or mental health, whatever you want to call it, but the mindset which allows you to keep going, even though you might have spent 20,000 pounds on coconut water and things are going wrong and then also still invent new stuff, have new ideas, bring new things on and continue to grow. And I think over time I've seen businesses and actually people in business, or actually in all walks of life that element, that mindset call it and the ability to recover from that or not seems to be a really differentiating factor of how well people in businesses do. And would you say that's a unifying thing or is there something else you'd point to?
Carl (25:12): So for me it was always a challenge of there was never much balance and I think that when you are working really, really hard it's very difficult to almost sort of-- I don't know how people are able to work really hard without affecting themselves really negatively mentally. And I don't think that I was set up-- I didn't have the tools to cope. Definitely not. So for me, just working flat out was also a big distraction as well from my mental health, because it just deteriorated and got worse and worse as I worked harder and harder and harder.
Ben (26:10): And so you just had to discover those tools along the way as well.
Carl (26:15): Yeah. I don't think I've got those tools yet but I definitely, you know--
Ben (26:20): You're better.
Carl (26:22): Yeah look, it's different now. And there when I started the business, I didn't have kids and now I've got three. So, you pretty quickly get your sh*t together when you've got children and definitely for me, I just did not have the coping mechanisms. So I just drank and then eventually you get to a point where you're kind of like, well, this definitely isn't working because that takes you to a whole new level of low. And so, actually things probably did improve when I stopped drinking six years ago and being completely sober for the past six years definitely allows you to then learn other ways to cope that are maybe a bit more beneficial, like exercise.
Ben (27:23): Is that the time the line of kombucha came in?
Carl (27:30): No. Do you know what? We sell lots of drinks at Wholegood but I just drink water now. Just so boring, but it's just because I can never believe it, I just-- I'm always a bit cynical apart from a few kombucha, there's this LA brewery one, this hops one.
Ben (27:52): Yeah. I don't know about hops one.
Carl (27:53): Oh, it's in a bottle and I like it cause it's ambient. So I don't have to remember to always keep it in the fridge, but like it's just genius cause there's a kind of the hops thing, there's some kind of memory there of beer something but it's not hard to find it.
Ben (28:15): I tried the non-alcoholic gin the other day. It was actually pretty okay and also a non-alcoholic negroni, which was also pretty okay. So, they're getting there.
Carl (28:26): But for me, I don't know. It's a bit like the whole meat free thing. If I'm not going to eat a sausage, I don't know if I need to replace it with something pretending to, or well, not pretending, but a different kind of sausage, I'd probably just rather eat more vegs and that's where I get really, for me, with all of the different drinks, it just explodes my mind a bit. So I just default to water.
Ben (28:55): Tap water.
Carl (28:56): Or fizzy water. Carbonated water for me is--
Ben (28:59): I love tap water, London tapped me. But I had this the other day, I ate this vegan hot dog and it was really tasty, but I was thinking, you know what? This is so tasty, this is not good for me either. This is as bad as a normal hot dog. If I want to be healthy, I should only be eating a salad.
Carl (29:15): There's no doubt that, you know, if it's helping people to go more plant based and it means that the supply chain is more efficient then, okay, it's a good thing. But I would still, you know, for me, I would just be a bit more purist about it and obviously for Wholegood people should just do more veg.
Ben (29:39): So what do you think people most underestimate or misunderstand then around running a business? You underestimated the management time particularly starting up Because I speak to people and I get the sense they really don't know what it's like to run a business at all and I guess it's strange cause everyone works in these world, but most people I guess, are working either in big business or they've got a very specific role in a business and they don't realize this overarching thing about what it takes to run one.
Carl (30:11): I don't think it's that important to know before you do it. What is important is to be able to adapt and change because when we started Wholegood, the first year we turned over like quarter million quid. You just don't need to know what you need to know when you're running a 30 million pound business. And I'm sure that will change in the future, but--
Ben (30:34): But would it get in the way actually?
Carl (30:35): Well, yeah, yeah, definitely. We wouldn't have bothered. But the key is to just make sure that you are able to adapt and change and remain open to those changes because it's going to be very different every year. The biggest struggle or one of the biggest challenges, especially growing a business as slowly as I've grow mine, kind of, okay, we're in a good place now and the growth is actually--
Ben (31:11): The average is 2 million a year on revenue now from 2007 to near.
Carl (31:17): Yeah. That's true. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. So maybe that's okay, but--
Ben (31:22): Pretty good.
Carl (31:23): But you know, obviously now the jumps are happening a lot quicker and we are engineered for that now. But yeah, it's that constant ability to change and one of the difficulties for me, even as we employed more managers is sort of, it's quite easy to outgrow them quite quickly cause somebody that's coming in to run a an 8 million pound business is probably pretty different to someone coming in to run a 30 million pound business. My current CEO would've just laughed if we had offered him a position in an 8 million or 6 million pound business because it's probably just not right for their skillset. It's just not big enough.
Ben (32:10): This is a really interesting thing you see with companies and then as you go bigger, there is a time for CEOs to jump off and sometimes, well, like Elon Musk, he seems to gone all the way to like a trillion, but it's actually very rare to have someone who's good at small to large, because like you say, the skill sets change. Some people change with it and have what it takes. But I actually think maybe most don't and also most fool themselves and might fool themselves either way. So I've seen people from big business think they can go and do a startup and in some ways they have some of the skills, but in other ways they have to unlearn a lot of things or they do things which the business is not ready for and then it falls flat on its face.
Carl (32:52): Oh yeah. I definitely think that must be so much harder when people, you know, or they raise the right amount of money and it's a brand and they're able to get that scale into the brand. For me, it was completely different because I was building my own supply chain ultimately and for me definitely 30 million is where I'm at, I'm off. I am not the CEO.
Ben (33:20): You're still growing the business?
Carl (33:22): Yeah, yeah. So I'm in charge of the growth now, that's kind of been what I've always been in charge of and then by default, I've also been CEO. So I've had to look inward and try to control it. But once it gets to this size, you've got to have someone who really knows what they're doing. You've got to have someone constantly looking inward because if I'm looking outward and growing the business and looking for new opportunity, which is everywhere at the moment you just can't do both. And so, actually having somebody that's really good at mechanics is just a blessing, you know? So, I think it's just so difficult to get the timing right. For me, it's come at a time because while I acknowledge that there is so much growth in Wholegood, we've expanded into enough warehousing now to more than double the business. So we are in that, we're in it, it's fitted out, it's all running at four degrees and we just got to fill it with product. But while we're filling it with product, we really need to not drop the ball operationally.
Carl (34:36): So that is absolutely the right time for me. It's also the right time for me because I'm older. I want to enjoy my work a little bit more and I enjoy growing thing and I love employing the people that we employ, but I don't necessarily want to look into that all the time cause it's exhausting and it's exhausting especially when you've gone through so many different highs and lows of growing a business from small to medium. You definitely don't want to-- there's definitely cupboards that you are almost scared of opening because historically you haven't liked what's fallen out. What's great when you've got someone new coming in is that they're just going to walk in and open all the cupboards and nothing's going to trigger them when they open them. Oh, oh, okay. Yeah. There's a dead body or there's a problem. That's fine. I'll deal with it. Whereas--
Ben (35:37): That's my job now.
Carl (35:38): That's my job and I love it. Whereas for me, I would just be like, okay, I'm going to keep all of those covers locked and just look forward.
Ben (35:48): Cause growing is my thing. Yeah.
Carl (35:49): Cause growing is my thing, whereas actually you've just got to-- It must be so difficult for different founders to know when to step aside in an operational way but yeah, for me, it's been so easy.
Ben (36:08): Catalyze together. Well, that makes me reflect partly because of what's happening over the last couple of years, maybe on your insights into what's happening with supply chains and maybe some thinking about is there something you think this country could do better? And maybe that could roll into the thought of is there something that the government could do? Cause I have a sense-- I don't follow politics that much, but the government hasn't really done that much for small business.
Carl (36:38): They've done nothing much.
Ben (36:39): And the supply chain still seems to be a mess. So it'd be interesting to hear your view on what's happening and what would you do? What could you do?
Carl (36:48): One of the biggest issues-- Okay, yeah, we're a food business, right? So supply chains are different for all different types of business. But if you just take the supply chain in food, there is no doubt that, and this is almost why I wanted to have my own supply chain and not try to outsource everything. It's constantly being undervalued. The supply chain is constantly undervalued. Even now, if we're speaking to a customer that might have multiple stores, they'll want to understand why the price is the price and it's almost like the wheels that get it there is magic. But even if you look back to the grower supplying us, there has never been an acknowledgement of how much it costs to deliver and who is delivering it. The lorry guy that is doing it, the lorry driver that is delivering the goods has chosen to be a delivery driver, but then realized that there is zero out there for them in terms of resource, in terms of stopping and having a shower or having, you know, these guys are traveling for days and no one gives a sh*t about how they live.
Carl (38:08): So, it's been so undervalued that obviously once COVID hit and also people were beginning to reflect on their own lives, yeah, who would want to go in a lorry and drive the way that they had to. So there's no investment. If you wanted to attract people to drive lorries and to take that as a career, which is a really respectful career, why isn't there the investment in-- If you go into a service station, I live out of London now and I have done for the past few months and sometimes I'll pop into the services on my way out of London and in the evening the lorry park is completely full and there are lorries kind of tailing up into the lorry park. So there's no way that they're all going to get a shower or they're all going to-- it's really, really difficult. So the whole thing from the rates that we pay for transport and Wholegood would've been guilty of it. We would have always been looking at trying to drive the prices of transport into us down, but the problem is is that it comes from this place of we have this really force economics around food where food has just been sold too cheaply for too long and now it feels like at the moment with inflation where it is and post the pandemic, maybe the opportunity is now sort of almost passing because as inflation becomes towards double digits, actually now it's going to be difficult to correct anything cause everything's just going to get really expensive.
Carl (40:00): But hopefully once that levels out, it won't then be a race back down to the bottom because it's definitely the supermarkets that drive that, because that is the biggest economic factor in a lot of food in the UK is that people are expecting prices where there are extremely thin or no margins or negative margins. And then that puts a pressure on the independent market because people have this full sense of what things are worth. I mean, I can never believe how cheap bananas are. What happened in that supply chain for this banana to still be so cheap? We really undervalue all of that and that's shown also in the food waste that we create as well. We just do not value the growing, the picking, the energy in shipping and the person that ultimately delivers it to you. What a phenomenal amount of energy to go into something that is then prepacked and thrown in a bin.
Ben (41:05): Yeah. I definitely get that from my mom and even before my God mom, and things that you don't waste that food, because it was such a large part of what you spent your income on. You just would have to be very, very, very, not clever to be wasting that. And then, like you say, because you think it's only 50 p or 20 p, you don't even think about it, we waste it. I was intrigued though in the things essentially you were saying, if you want to attract lorry drivers, we would need to make the career seem good and we would actually need to put in services and things so that their career could be good and there's other bits in the supply chain that would be that. And I don't see any policy doing that and I guess I'd be a little bit unhopeful that that would happen. So we had probably the most stressful time in the last two years that we've had arguably for a generation and I don't see those conditions getting better. Do you see something more hopeful there or is it going to take something else? But what could it take? If the supply chain had cracked through the pandemic people would've starved. So I don't know.
Carl (42:17): Yeah. Well, it's really hard, isn't it? Because obviously we're not lorry drivers and we don't know, there might be some places that are better than others, but there's no doubt that okay, more money is being spent on transport and drivers are getting paid more but again, you just worry about when does that get reversed out or when does that start to get replaced with technology? There's obviously more economical ways of transporting things that you could imagine in the future, but while there's people in lorries, you would hope that it's going to get a bit better for them.
Ben (42:59): Yeah. And then anything else causes people to talk about regulation, is there too much health and safety? Is there not enough and I guess the other aspect which we touched on a little bit is access to capital. I mean, I really don't see, this is something the government says, oh, we're funding this and that. I don't really see it flowing to small businesses a lot. Banks and gatekeepers are not terribly helpful and yeah, I'm not sure whether the regulations made it easier for small businesses. I guess the problem is you need to have good faith actors. Right? So if you have bad faith in small business, yes and regulations obviously stop bad faith happening, that's their point. But it really seems to hamper good faith businesses. I don't know if you have--
Carl (43:45): Yeah. And also the challenges where you, you know, if there's capital available, where do you spend it in terms of like, you know, if you're trying to make something more sustainable or better you're still very dependent on what's around you. Even if there was a huge amount of money to spend and invest into electric vehicles, just for a cleaner environment and better driving experience for the driver. We are looking at these beautiful electric trucks. Great for the driver, great driving position lower to the curb. So less impact in terms of getting in and out of the vehicle, just a better experience but they're 330 grand and if you invest in that, I mean, we're lucky-- It's a company called Volta and they're doing this great kind of truck as a service, which is kind of like contract hire really, but like a monthly fee for this electric truck which makes it more affordable. But then there's infrastructure challenges. Where are we going to charge it? We've all got electric cars, obviously at Wholegood and we're very lucky to have 25,000 square feet of solar power powering a fair amount of the warehouse, not as much as we would like. But when you charge your car in London, the charging bay is only big enough for a car. How are our 26 ton or 18 ton electric trucks going to pull over and charge halfway through a journey?
Carl (45:36): So even that doesn't look-- There's now charges for taxes that are exclusively for taxies, great. But where are we going to charge--? We are hopefully running a trial in the autumn where we will run one Volta truck for a month where we are going to charge it. And even just in terms of we've got five warehouses all on the same estate in Greenford, there is not enough power in any of them to get a really juicy charger. So, there's always going to be some kind of energy deficit in our fleet because just the infrastructure cannot cope.
Ben (46:19): Someone told me the answer was going to be in lamp posts that actually--
Carl (46:23): Lampposts for cars, but they're trickle charges. You need to get so much charge into-- I mean, they do that in Westminster where you can plug into a lamppost, but it's only going to get you to the shops and you don't need the shops because [Inaudible:46:38] can deliver it to you on an electric bike.
Ben (46:42): Yeah. Electric vehicle. That's much better. Okay. Well, I thought maybe we do a little small section of underrated overrated. So I'll give you two or three things and or you can sort of pass or make some sort of comment.
Carl (46:55): I mean, everything is underrated again, but overrated in my opinion, but yeah.
Ben (47:00): We'll see. We can see why. So underrated, overrated, comment is like plastic bag tax.
Carl (47:09): Underrated. I think it's been brilliant.
Ben (47:11): Oh, there you go? Look, we found something.
Carl (47:14): Yeah. Although I do find myself carrying about 30 items out of a shop to not use that bag or not pay the 20 P for it.
Ben (47:25): Has done what it's done.
Carl (47:27): It's been successful.
Ben (47:28): Was unusual for me.
Carl (47:29): But what did the plastic bag manufacturing guys do? Did they see it coming? Have they all gone bust? Have they made something else? I'd like to know the story of what they have done.
Ben (47:44): I don't think it was ever really a big part of their business and actually someone's told me, it is also-- Like, if you think about plastics in general, both straws and bags, so tiny, like 0.1, not even. So it's a little bit of a signaling thing. It's so useful to sort of do, but actually that's not where your main plastics probably--
Carl (48:05): Okay. So the dude that was making plastic straws, didn't have to quickly start making paper straws, you say? They just focused on the other plastics.
Ben (48:12): Yeah. 99.9% of what they actually do.
Ben (48:19): Okay. Minimum wages, underrated, overrated, or any comment?
Carl (48:27): Minimum wages. Well, hang on. I don't know what--
Ben (48:29): So minimum wage legislation and I guess the minimum wage or the living wage of where we are now. They are good things, underrated?
Carl (48:36): Yeah. I mean, we've really struggled to pay it. I've got to be honest about that.
Ben (48:40): Well, that's a bad thing for business.
Carl (48:43): Well, no, but again it's so right. It's very hard and it's very important to not think in business that you-- because it's so easy to think, oh there's always another thing coming like NI rising in April. You're like, oh, God's here's another cost cause obviously there have been a lot, but there's no doubt that it's expensive to live in London. I've moved out of London because it's so expensive. So if we want people to live near our warehouse and work for us, we have to endeavor to pay them--
Ben (49:24): The limit wage.
Carl (49:27): Yeah. So, I think it's great.
Ben (49:30): Although I guess the people who think it's not good would sort of argue, well, if you got a thin margin business, which wouldn't exist, so all of those jobs would go because they would exist on, I don't actually even know quite what the numbers are, but would exist on eight to 10 pounds, but could not exist on 10 to 12 pounds.
Carl (49:52): Sure. But at that point, I think that it would only be fair for them to argue that if they showed what they were on and their top tier management were on.
Ben (50:02): Okay. So yeah.
Carl (50:04): It becomes very gray, doesn't it? If the margin is that thin and it puts you under that level of duress something's got to give. You're going to have to increase your margins because otherwise, essentially you are saying that you are driving towards that idea that we get things made overseas because it's essentially labor that is not paid enough and it's practically slave labor. So, there has to be some sort of moral ground eventually, doesn't there? Where you just sort of say, that is just not enough.
Ben (50:43): Yeah. I think pure libertarians do go that, so that's their argument. But like you say, there is--
Carl (50:50): But it is tough and all of that has been tough, especially during the pandemic as well.
Ben (50:57): Well, I also sometimes say-- I look at it in cafe businesses that sometimes they maybe should just be a social enterprise, right. Not every enterprise needs to make huge amounts of profit to exist. So, if you pay a living wage, you wash your face, maybe there's a little bit of [Crosstalk:51:13].
Carl (51:14): Change please, you do the coffee and various other stuff. That is a great way of the people that they employ and the way that they're not for profit. It makes a lot of sense.
Ben (51:28): Yeah. Okay. Underrated, overrated, fear of failure or fear in general.
Carl (51:35): I just don't know what the right answer [is]. So, overrated would be-- if fear of a failure-- Okay, don't be scared of failure. So what is that underrated or overrated?
Ben (51:46): Being scared of failure is that--
Carl (51:48): No, but I'm saying don't be, so is that underrated or underrated?
Ben (51:52): So fear of failure would definitely be overrated then.
Carl (51:55): Yeah. Overrated. Don't be scared of failure. Because ultimately you're just going to go bust. No, but how bad can it get? If you fail in business, nobody shoots you unless you've borrowed money from the wrong people.
Ben (52:15): Then you'd had so many other problems.
Carl (52:16): Yeah. Then that's just the least of your worries. So, no, I just don't think-- I have been scared of failure. It does scare me, but it has taken some pretty big crisis. One of them being this year for me to stare into that failure and look over the edge and kind of go it's okay, it's going to be okay it's going to be okay. And so, you mustn't let that fear stop you, even though that fear can paralyze you so much sometimes.
Ben (52:55): Okay. And then last one on this one would be class, or I guess, particularly working class. Do you think it's not rated enough or people use it as a kind of symbol in status and it's not really a thing?
Carl (53:13): Overrated.
Ben (53:14): Overrated.
Carl (53:15): So I think one of the great things about being an actor is when you're an actor, it's kind of classless, right? So I come from a real--
Ben (53:23): You pretend to be whatever you want.
Carl (53:25): You just be whatever you want, but you always saw actors marrying politicians, or this complete kind of just operates in a-- you are able to just sell through any class and mingle with any person. People are always often interested in you being an actor. So, I come from a very working class background and class has not held me back. Maybe being an actor helped that, but it certainly shouldn't hold you back. And in fact, if anything within Wholegood, it's been really important to always ensure that everybody that we're employing and now that there are 160 of us and it's climbing actually, then you get to really be able to look up what an incredible sort of mix of people you are able to employ and reflect your local environment and reflect what London really looks like and make it classless in an endeavor to make sure that you are employing the right mix of people to ensure that you don't just have this snotty upper middle class management, right.
Carl (54:42): This historical idea of really, really, you know, I've got no qualifications, I have no GCSEs, but I was an actor and so maybe I pretended I knew how to run a business. And many people would probably say at work that I still am pretending that I know how to run a business, but you are able to just ensure that you've got a team that reflects your local surroundings and not be obsessed with qualification and class. Because we don't need a load of people with, I mean, I don't know what my current CEO's qualifications are cause that's not how I made the decision to employ him.
Ben (55:28): Yeah. And I think it works both ways cause I do some outreach and speak to a lot of young people over the year and some people go, oh, whatever it is, X, Y, and Z isn't for me and I'm kind of like, why would you think that?
Carl (55:42): Yeah. How do you know?
Ben (55:43): Yeah. How would you know? Whether that's what you would consider a fancy university or not, or whether it's starting a business, it doesn't really matter. If you have that ambition, you should do it and don't let the middle class, upper class, whatever you call it, tend to think, oh, well we could just go and do it. Working class, I think you should have the same attitude because it's correct.
Carl (56:10): Yeah. But then also as an employer, you don't have to hang onto people needing those qualifications. I remember seeing a job ad for Wholegood, I saw it online and it said on LinkedIn or wherever and it mentioned that you needed a degree in something. And I remember thinking, well sh*t, I mean, like I don't have a degree, I don't have a GCSE and that's my company. How can we discriminate against me? How can we discriminate against people like this? So, I hope it's been removed, but I remember I asked for it to be removed because it was a bit silly. I just don't understand how a degree is going to make you good at this specific work. If I came into this business not knowing anything and I own it, and I've managed to get to this point, there's no guarantees for the future, but we've got this far, I just think that we need to talk to people, understand people, understand what they can do, and then see if we can get them in the business and then make sure that we pay them enough so that they don't leave and chine their skills into something that fits Wholegood. And that is what is really important for me in terms of how do you create something truly sustainable? It kind of should be classless. It should be paid well and you need to look after people and it took me at least 10 years to realize that because I just wanted everybody to work like me and not complain too much. If I didn't complain, why would they complain? Whereas that was just the wrong way of looking at it.
Ben (57:58): And do you think you have any tips or insights into how to hire good people or be with good people? No, one has cracked this by the way, so if you do, this is your next business.
Carl (58:09): For me, it's always been really difficult and I've always been a bit too emotional about it, but I have only ever trusted my instincts, but I would say that that's been good and bad in equal measures so far, other than I would say it's much easier to make senior hires around coffee chat than it is maybe someone that's going to packing in the warehouse cause there are maybe certain skills that you've got to be showing. But it has definitely been one of my biggest challenges, but it's also really challenging when a business is growing fast.
Ben (59:08): Different type of people.
Carl (59:09): Because you just constantly, you know, there are these terrible moments where you kind of look at it and think, oh no, we've outgrown them and that's absolutely fine, but it's really not going to work anymore. And also equally one thing I would definitely say about employing people is do not just constantly promote within your business just because someone's been there for a long time.
Ben (59:36): Right, time based.
Carl (59:37): It just doesn't mean that-- I hate to do this publicly, but let's use Norby as an example.
Ben (59:47): … we can use a pseudonym.
Carl (59:49): Okay. John. John, not Norby. Okay. Fastest packer in the west, phenomenal supervisor. I don't know if Norby is the next CEO though. If he stays there for the next 10 years, I don't know if he's ever going to be the CEO.
Ben (01:00:10): But also that-- Okay, so there are some, because CEO's got to do a lot of stuff, but you should be able to be satisfied being the fastest packer in the west and have a good [Inaudible:01:00:19].
Carl (01:00:19): Yeah and Norby is a supervisor as well and you know, Johnny, I'm sure that he's paid handsomely for being the fastest pack, I'm sure. But definitely like that. We did way too much kind of let's just promote, promote. Okay, now they're in charge of the warehouse and then they start failing and it's your own fault when you do that, you just think we've completely messed it up for them because we overpromoted and once you've done that, it's so hard to go back, especially for the individual as well. So the relationship just implodes.
Ben (01:01:04): So this is an insight that actually a lot of law firms have not quite done. I think one of the last ones has just removed it. You only get promoted in law firms traditionally by time and it means your great young lawyers leave because they can't afford to wait because they've got better than where their position is and what you get left with is often not what you want.
Carl (01:01:27): Yeah. Just tired and yeah.
Ben (01:01:30): Okay. So final couple of questions, hopes and dreams for Wholegood or your next chapter? 30 million must get to 60 million. Why not a hundred? That sort of thing.
Carl (01:01:44): Look, 60 million is right in front of us. We have the infrastructure to do about 65 million now. So that is just sitting there.
Ben (01:01:53): And still be sustainable in all of that. So you've kind of made a difference really.
Carl (01:01:57): The focus will definitely be, once we try all the electric vehicles and we start to look up, my fear is that we can't really get heavily into electric fleet and more sustainable fleet until we get out of all of the warehouses that we're in now where we've just more energy going into the area …
Ben (01:02:18): Can heating and cooling be decarbonized? That's quite a tricky one.
Carl (01:02:22): It's difficult if it's not already built within your infrastructure. So like we will have to think really carefully and that's why it's great to have a CEO that can be that strategic as well, be able to speak about what we want and how we want to do it and they can go off and start to plan that for three or four years, you know? But yeah. So the hopes and dreams for Wholegood would be to continue growing the way that we have done probably a bit quicker now cause we're ready for it and making sure that we take most of the people on the journey with us now. I think that now that I've got a bit more time to think about the business and think about what we've achieved, I want to make sure that we absolutely resource it properly. During the COVID because just by default it was the same for everybody, we really ran ourselves out. It was really hard to work, obviously not as hard for sort of frontline services, but it was really difficult and people had lots of real personal strain.
Carl (01:03:28): I hope that we can do the next 30 million by being a bit kinder, a bit nicer and really take people on that journey with us and not leave people on the platform as the train leaves the station. I would like it to continue being as inclusive as we've managed to make it now. I really want to propel that forward and I think that that is one of the most important drivers for me, whereas it used to be profit and I'm really grateful that it's not profit anymore actually, because this is so much bigger than that in terms of we are able to start to create opportunity and career paths for people. I never realized how important that would be for me.
Ben (01:04:21): But profit, I think will be a very strong side effect of that.
Carl (01:04:25): I bloody hope so.
Ben (01:04:29): It's one of those oblique things. Actually, you say that about the ironies you once set up about so-called shareholder value. You can't actually make it go up 10% in a month, but you can work on say products that people want and things to buy. And actually it's the same for happiness. You can't really say, oh, I'm going to be 10% happier tomorrow, but you can do things like eat well, do exercise, visit your friends.
Carl (01:04:51): Absolutely. Absolutely. My CFO Rob, would always be saying that my entire life was linked to our monthly P&L. He would just be like, you just can't live month to month like that and actually obviously we haven't done that for some time, but it really is that element of you just have to have a really long term vision and goal of being able to continue to scale the business in a sustainable creative way that has enough money in it to win and succeed. Easier said than done sometimes, but you have to look at the local benefits and the staff benefits and the benefits that you are creating for those staff and the families of those staff otherwise, that is just not true sustainability. If you're putting something in a cotton net, but you're shouting and paying minimum wage to the people doing it or below minimum wage, that's not what success looks like either.
Ben (01:06:06): I think a lot of people are starting to call that stakeholder capitalism, or at least looking to grow the pie of all of your various elements. Last question then, do you have any thoughts on advice, life advice, or entrepreneur advice that you'd like to share from your journey so far?
Carl (01:06:30): Yeah. Do not put your business first, ever. Do not put your business first. I used to put my business first. It made me so sick. It made me so ill. And I think that if you can, you do have to work really hard, but I worked like an idiot. I worked like a hard idiot and I think that you have to-- look it kind of feels so old fashioned and different, cause it's just changed so much now. I can remember being in my warehouse and thinking, oh, I'm just never going to be able to speak to anybody about my mental health because they'll think my business is a failure. Whereas now, people are completely geared up to look after their staff and to look after people's mental health. You couldn't even say the phrase mental health without being worried that an investor or a new customer might judge you too harshly for it.
Carl (01:07:39): So I guess it's different now because it definitely pushed me into a tunnel of being secretly unwell while trying to expand this business. So do not put your business first and ensure if you stop believing in what you're doing and it, and it's also not making money, do something else. Don't be afraid of doing something else and that is so important. We've been really lucky that we haven't had to do that but I definitely feel like in the moments when I've had to think about that cause there have been some that you suddenly think no, there will be other opportunities. It's so easy to become blinkered with your single vision of what success or your current success looks like that you stop forgetting that there will be other successes. You can get up and you can carry on. You have to be brave and you have to be able to not get lost in the idea that you're currently in. Step back or step out and do something else. Don't be an idiot.
Ben (01:08:57): It's not all going to be iced coconut water.
Carl (01:09:01): Yeah, exactly. If your fresh, unpasteurized coconut water business does not work, don't worry.
Ben (01:09:10): Don't worry. There'll be other things. Well, Carl, thank you very much. Wholegood, can get your products, Ocado.
Carl (01:09:17): Oh yeah, Ocado, GetThere, Milk and More. Kind of everywhere, yeah and obviously I would say that everyone in the UK can find our product somewhere. You've just got to look for it.
Ben (01:09:31): Well, thank you very much.
Carl (01:09:33): Thanks Ben.
Ben (01:09:35): If you appreciate the show, please like, and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.
