← The Bottom Line
The Bottom Line
Twenty Years in Business
00:44:25
Evan Davis reflects on how the business landscape has changed since the show began in 2006
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- [00:00]
Evan Davis
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- [00:06]
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- [01:16]
Evan Davis
Hello, thank you for downloading this episode of the Bottom Line with lots of extra content in it. We couldn't stuff into the version that went out on the radio. If you like it, you might want to check out another program we made called Scaling what Turns a Startup into a Success that was recorded in July of 2025. However, for today, the Bottom Line has been recording programs for 20 years. Yes, time flies. Unbelievable as it may seem, we've hit the psychologically important number of 20 and we thought this might be an opportune moment to take stock of how the business landscape has changed since we started getting in 2006. Now, back then we didn't have smartphones, Some of us did have a BlackBerry. Uber didn't exist. People were still going to Blockbuster to rent DVDs. Apart from the digital revolution, which is a permanent revolution really, we've had a financial crash, we've had Brexit, we've had major power instability all around. We saw Russia booted out of the G8, which became the G7 again. We've had a new direction in China under President Xi and, well, we've had a new direction in the US as well. Plus plus, of course, Covid for today, what we've done is we've invited back some old friends, some of the names who featured in the early years of the Bottom Line, to reflect on how the business landscape has changed. Let us meet them first Up. Nicola Horlick, entrepreneur, former City Fund manager, now chief executive of Money and Company, which is a crowdfunding platform. And Nicola, just tell us where you were in 2006 and how your life has changed.
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Nicola Horlick
I'm not sure my life has actually changed that much in terms of work. I'm still largely doing the same thing. I'm very bo. I have diversified, you know, so I've got involved in the film industry actually in 2007. So we were doing scores for movies, we were funding those and then set up a private equity firm in 2011. But my basic job is actually really very similar.
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Evan Davis
Didn't you double in politics? You became a Lib Dem candidate, didn't you?
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Nicola Horlick
Yeah, that was only because I was trying to help try and stop Brexit, which obviously I failed in doing. But, yes, I was the Lib Dem candidate for Chelsea and fulham in the 2019 general election.
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Evan Davis
Well, I think you've kept your yourself busy. Let me introduce our second guest, Robin White. Now, Robin was. You may remember him, he was often on the program. Founder of the advertising agency WCRS, responsible for campaigns like 118118, the Jogging Twins. Do you remember those? And the Future's Bright, the Future's Orange. And Robyn, I think you made more appearances in the early years of the programme than any other single person. But what happened to WCRS? It's not there anymore.
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Robin White
No, it's not. Sadly, in 2006 we were halfway through our lifespan. We' actually, we created a new brand in 2006 called Enjin, which was actually very successful too. But unfortunately my then partners decided they want to get private equity involved with us and private equity came involved with us and basically throttled us. And Engine is gone.
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Evan Davis
What's taken over Engine?
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Robin White
Well, it's something called Next 15 and that Creative Editor has rebranded as House 337.
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Justin Rolatt
Why?
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Robin White
I don't know. Because WCI is an Engine work branding name. You've got a branding company burning its own brand. But I've got other things. I'm doing some charity work, I'm writing a book. I'm here, I'm alive.
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Evan Davis
We should say in your distant past, just for sort of political balance. You were a Conservative Party candidate.
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Robin White
Ronald. In 1986, I stood for Bishop Auckland, the place where that man had his eyes tested. And I got 19,000 votes. But I decided not to go into politics. I decided to do other things instead.
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Evan Davis
That's way before your bottom line phase there. Anyway, way before now. Luxury fashion retailer Kim Windsor is here as well. Back in 2006 you were the boss of Aqua Scutum. Kim, how's your life changed?
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Kim Windsor
Well, I suppose in a way a little bit like Nicola that it hasn't changed dramatically. I'm still passionately involved in brands and the luxury sector. I would say probably more global perspective now. So I'm on boards but from around the world, including the UK. Single mum in 2006 of a six year old. Now he's grown up and so my life at home is much easier. Yeah, I think in terms of business, similar. I love business, I love seeing growth potential. I actually built a business and closed it as well. So in that meantime.
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Evan Davis
But rise and fall, which business was that?
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Kim Windsor
Windsor, London.
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Evan Davis
Okay.
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Alex Cheetle
Yeah.
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Robin White
Right.
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Evan Davis
Our final guest is Alex Cheetle, chief executive of 10 Lifestyle. And 10 lifestyle is a sort of concierge, Is that how you describe it? It's a service where you organize things for people.
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Alex Cheetle
Yes, we have to be very good at organizing restaurants and travel and music, theatre, sport and a few other lovely things for our members around the world, most of whom come to us because they bank with somebody like H UCL, Barclays or NatWest.
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Evan Davis
And interestingly you're someone, you're basically, you're still running 10 lifestyle.
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Alex Cheetle
Yeah. So we set up in 98 and I think we technically part of the dot com boom and I think I might be the last man or woman standing who set up a dot com and ran it all the way through the good times and the bad and happily now it's. It's better than it was in the early days.
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Evan Davis
Well look, we've gathered the four of you here and what I'd like us to do is just each of you have kind of got in mind a change, a development, something that has switched over the last 20 or so years. And Alex, why don't you start give us an idea of something that has altered in the 20 years the bottom line has been on.
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Alex Cheetle
So for me, and we would notice this, it's customer expectation. People in 2006 would call us up and say I want to eat at a restaurant. They might name the restaurant in a couple of weeks time we'd say we'll have that booked by tomorrow. That was fine. Today it better be immediate or certainly within a couple of hours. And people want you to have access and benefits and just a much higher level of service than they would have expected in 2006.
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Evan Davis
So a sort of always on instant return. That's interesting actually. Has that changed in 20 years?
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Kim Windsor
Others of you, one of the things That I was looking at was boards. If you look at the structure of how the leadership of luxury brands has changed. So if you go back to 2006, you were losing one creative director the same time as you were losing one chief executive. It was, you know, similar, but it wasn't very many over a five year period. Now we're losing 15 in six months. So sorry, what?
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Evan Davis
The turnover.
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Kim Windsor
The turnover of creative directors in the luxury sector has just exploded. And I think there's a couple of reasons like prime ministers and it would be, it would be one reason here and one reason here. I think one reason is it's not seasonal anymore. You're not doing work around a season. It is continuous because, you know, social media, because of E Com, it is constant and the expectation for a creative director is huge because they've got to come up, be innovative constantly. And I think the other thing is that a lot of brands see changing a creative director as a boost for a brand. You know, a whole story to be
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Evan Davis
tell, announce the new person and have a big.
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Kim Windsor
Gives you a fresh face. So I think these two things I think have had a big impact.
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Alex Cheetle
It's also because people know what they want and the social competition to get it is massive. We live in a crazy world now where there are genuinely people paying $1,000 to eat in some New York restaurants before they've even ordered a drink or a meal. And we've just had this year more than 10 nights at Wembley of Taylor Swift, Oasis and Harry Styles that would never have happened in 2006. And I think that's largely led by social media. People feel I have to be there, I have to eat there, I have to see this, I have to do this. And so the scarcity factor gets kind of pumped.
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Evan Davis
Is there an experience thing going on here though, Alex, in which basically a lot of consumables, durable goods, things like, I don't know, phones and clothes, they become a bit relatively cheaper. And so some, I don't know whether just people are kind of parking those and spending their money and investing their consumption time in great experiences.
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Alex Cheetle
It's definitely that. But it's turbulent, charged by social media because you can also show how wonderful your life is, show you were at that show or eating in that restaurant. We talk to lots of restaurateurs all the time. They complain because they have to stop lots of people setting up an Instagram photographic studio in their restaurant with the
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Evan Davis
ring light and the.
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Alex Cheetle
Any top restaurant. Most nights you'll see somebody try and play that game.
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Kim Windsor
But Also the audience is so much bigger. Right. You know, back in 2005 and 2006 your audience was relatively small. It was a neighborhood, it was, you know, now it is global. So the competition for that restaurant in New York is now a global competition for that restaurant in New York. So it's a much bigger audience and it's much quicker.
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Robin White
I can see that. And the other thing is that how many of your customers are next gen or alpha gen? Because that group is completely the Gen
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Evan Davis
Z you're talking about.
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Robin White
Sorry, Gen Z?
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Evan Davis
Yeah, Gen Z, the sort of.
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Robin White
Yeah, the younger adults. Yeah, and I think they're called 20 somethings, really the alpha gen, which is like the ones born in 2010. Now how many of your customers are in that group?
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Alex Cheetle
Not as many as you might think. And I didn't think very many at all actually. Different to 2010 because 20 years ago lots of people in 2006 with money. The first people to join a private lifestyle concierge service, which we mostly were at the time, were 30, 35, under 40. They didn't have a family yet. They were earning bucket loads of money in financial services or technology and they wanted to spend it. Whereas today the people with money are 45 plus. I mean really 50 plus. And those concerts, the Taylor Swift, Oasis, Harry Styles. Most of the young people there that we bought tickets for had their tickets paid for by their parents.
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Evan Davis
Interesting. Nicola, your customers at Money and Company, who are your customers?
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Nicola Horlick
Well, they are members of the public. So it's a platform. Yeah, yeah, it's a platform that connects individuals who want a better return on their cash rather than having a cash oyster.
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Evan Davis
But it's very easy to transact quickly and in a way that you. I mean buying and selling shares for example. I don't know whether you've got an app where I can go and manage a bit of my own portfolio, but that whole thing is very much in line with this always on. You can just do it whenever you want, you don't have to phone it broken.
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Nicola Horlick
Yeah, it's completely changed how it used to be. I mean in the old days you had to have your own stockbroker, you had to have a stockbroking account and so on and that has totally changed. And you can just go online and you can sign up to a platform relatively easily. Obviously you can do all the anti money laundering checks, scan your passport and probably within 20 minutes you can set up an account and actually start trading.
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Evan Davis
You can buy shares in American companies, British companies, it doesn't really matter. It's all available on the. That is itself very much in line with what Alex is saying. Something's changed there.
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Nicola Horlick
The small side has changed very, very dramatically in terms of how people actually manage.
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Evan Davis
Well, let's move to you, Nicola, talk us through. I'm giving you each a kind of one big change that you've observed. Let's hear yours, Nicola. I think we've dealt with the sort of customer side. Let's hear yours. In the way financial services in the
- [12:33]
Nicola Horlick
last 20 years, it's changed dramatically, obviously changed an awful lot in the previous 20, 30 years, because we went from having people on the floor of the stock exchange in London running around with pieces of paper to it all becoming automated and nobody on the floor of the stock exchange and everybody just dealing either through email or phones and it's become even more automated over time. So you now have algorithms. Traders will have an algorithm that's looking for certain, what they call flags and that will then tell them we must buy bp. Because these three things have now happened. And instead of employing people who did English or history in the city, they now have physicists and data analysts looking at huge amounts of data and then trying to work out what those flags, what are the things they're looking for that are going to mean that a share price might go up and down and then on the other side you've got a huge amount of money that is now indexed. So instead of people trying to choose BP over shell, they're just owning the
- [13:37]
Evan Davis
index, owning a little piece of all the companies, of all the companies in the index that invest in everything.
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Nicola Horlick
And that's very cheap. So you don't pay much in the way of fees, which is one of the ways reasons that it's attractive to people. And in many ways that's quite a good approach, I think because actually if you look over time, the big gains that people make is by choosing American equities over European equities, or UK bonds over Japanese bonds, or the dollar over the euro. You know, it's what we call the asset allocation decisions.
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Evan Davis
It's not British Airways versus Lufton, really.
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Grainger Advertiser
No, no.
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Nicola Horlick
I mean there are a handful of very, very talented people who are good stock pickers as. But the main change in the last 20 years is this massive amount of automation and also algorithms making decisions. And I suppose it's a sort of forerunner of AI in a way.
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Evan Davis
Yeah, yeah. I mean it has changed a lot. We should say it had been changed. This is just continual change because it had been changing in the 20 years the 20 years before. What I want to ask the others of you, though, is do we think financial services are better than they were in terms of these, particularly these kind of asset management types of do we really think we have a more efficient financial market in the sense of investment allocations are more efficient, that the decisions being made are smarter? Because I think some people worry that the rise of index funds and algorithms has made the decisions less smart than they were when you had clever people making judgments for us.
- [15:06]
Alex Cheetle
And we're listed on the London Stock Exchange, and we see the money coming out of the bottom end of the London Stock Exchange, partly because it's going to foreign markets, it might be going to America or elsewhere, and partly because it's going into exchange trackers. So there are very few people picking stocks of companies that are less than 2 or 300 million market cap. And that makes it less liquid for us and more of a challenge to get noticed and have people want to buy our shares.
- [15:32]
Evan Davis
That is very striking, I should say it is very striking how the FTSE over the last 20 years has almost doubled. The S&P 500 in the US has gone up almost six times.
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Nicola Horlick
The decline.
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Evan Davis
The diminution in the sort of financial muscle of London versus the us, Something has happened there.
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Grainger Advertiser
Yeah.
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Nicola Horlick
And also the London rise is very recent.
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Evan Davis
Yeah.
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Nicola Horlick
Very, very long period where the market didn't do anything at all. And it became a very weird market, very dominated by financial services, meaning the big banks and also oil companies and then a whole lot of sort of weird mining companies. So it became a very odd index and it still is a bit odd, I would say. And, you know, what we don't have is the technology sector that America has, and that accounts for that huge difference
- [16:22]
Evan Davis
in performance between the US and the uk. Well, look, we've discussed a bit of financial services. Kim, give us a bit more on what you think has changed on luxury goods.
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Kim Windsor
Well, I think one of the things for me is also the structures of boards, because if your consumers now become global, and we've talked about it being a continuous 247 requirement and the engagement is constant. So I think from the board structure down, you have to think very carefully about who becomes your customer. More companies have the chance to be global and therefore they've got to think very carefully about who they have on their boards and do they have people that have got experience? Because the way business operates in Asia, you know, I'm on an Asian board, is very different to the way business operates here is very different to South America, is Very different to America itself. So if your business is growing globally across all of these markets, to actually employ people who have got some expertise and knowledge, whether it be in the finance side, whether it be in the engagement side, whether it be in the front face side, you've got to think very carefully about it. And I think some boards have done that very well, and that includes some of our own. I remember when I was trustee of the Natural History Museum, you know, we opened up an international set of trustees because we realized 50% of the visitors were from abroad.
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Evan Davis
Boards have globalized, I suppose you would say, because the companies have continued to globalize.
- [17:47]
Kim Windsor
Yeah, they can. Because, you know, you can be on a board and not have to turn up. You know, if there's six board meetings a year, you don't have to always be at all six. I mean, I would highly recommend to try and be on as many as you can, because the breakout sessions are important, but you don't have to be. So, you know, you could do four and not six, and you could. The other two could be online. So all of these facilities just weren't there 20 years ago. You have the choices now. You have access to some really good people from around the world.
- [18:16]
Robin White
Yeah, it's really interesting. But also one area of boards is the arrival, the composition of the board. I mean, 2006, there were far fewer women on boards, so I think that's a big step forward. The other area is neurodiversity and racial diversity. That's, again, a big area of change. I'm quite happy to talk about that. I have a bipolar diagnosis. Most people in business still aren't happy to do that. So we need this neurodiversity, we need this racial diversity, we need this gender diversity. This is making the boards better today than they were in 2006.
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Evan Davis
I'm sure it was around as a thing in 2006. The board should have women on the boards.
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Robin White
And diversity was much smaller.
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Evan Davis
It was much smaller. But I do think the globalization is very interesting because I was just talking to someone over the weekend. I've got a board meeting in. In Burundi or somewhere. I mean, you know, you're kind of, wow, that is. I don't think that would have happened 20 years ago, you know, flying out.
- [19:10]
Kim Windsor
No, honestly, what you contribute to those boards is, you know, is very important. And possibly, you know, I sit on a Hong Kong board, you know, the Peninsula Hotel Group, and, you know, you can add things. We were obviously opening a hotel here in London, so, you know so much about the world they're coming into and, you know, they're brilliant at hospitality and that, you know, etc. But having some other markets sitting around the table can make quite a difference, as well as different expertise.
- [19:39]
Alex Cheetle
I think we've got a big advantage here in the uk and particularly in London. Because we're such a diverse country culturally, we found it quite easy to expand. We're in Brazil and Australia and Singapore and Japan and loads of markets around the world. And that's not felt very difficult because we know people from all those countries as our neighbours and fellow citizens here
- [20:01]
Evan Davis
in the uk and it might have been harder for a Japanese company to do that in quite the same way. Yeah, yeah. So we do have that advantage. Okay, so we've had a kind of customer changes, expectations rising. We've had financial services changes of the way technology has paced that up and altered financial services. We've had boards changing. Robin, you're last in our sequence. Come on, what's changed? And you're the marketing guy around here, so you've got to take. You've got to make it marketing themed.
- [20:29]
Robin White
Well, the arrival of social media is by far the biggest of all the changes we've talked about so far. It covers in every single sector that we're talking about. And in 2006, you were a year to go before the iPhone developed. You had had one year of Facebook. And now you have a situation where Generation Z, Alpha Gen, they're on their screens for five hours a day compared to television, the old guard, four hours a day, and they're one of the BBC's in trouble. So what you've got, it's not just technology, it's a new engagement process. And when you look into it, it's quite surprising because much of the old ways of marketing are still the winning ways of marketing. Despite the arrival of social media. Most of those social media brands, they're not actually very big, they make a lot of noise. Just compare two ends of the spectrum. Many of us can remember Coca Cola, I want to buy the world of Coke now. The equivalent of that. You won't know this. I was surprised. It's called Liquid Death. It's a branded drink in America, it's in a tall can. And that in five years has got to 1.8 billion value.
- [21:38]
Evan Davis
A drink startup.
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Robin White
A drink startup, or as Coke is already in America, is out selling it, $8 billion to one. So the old guard is still winning. You know, some of the brands that we launch are much bigger than these brand pitting mitts.
- [21:52]
Evan Davis
But liquid death isn't the case. Feature of that that it's just water,
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Robin White
it's just a tin of water. And it was invented by an ad man.
- [21:59]
Evan Davis
I mean, so it is extraordinary that you can take tin of water and then make a billion dollars.
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Robin White
But not only that, because it's use social media to create it. It was an ad man in a company we tried to buy actually in America many years ago. What this guy came up with was this whole notion that I want to do something that's completely different. Yes, it's a can of water with a bit of stuff inside it. He created a Viral film for $800 creating his brand concept. And then he had 3 million people looking at this film. He then took that to the money people. But he didn't use private equity, he got investors and out of that it created this brand which seven times more expensive than ordinary water. So you can start to see that it's a more complicated story than social media rules the world. But it's true that when we launched our brands like orange Back before 2006, social media didn't exist.
- [22:52]
Evan Davis
No, but I mean, I just wonder, Robin, you think of the classic ads, Coca Cola like to teach the world to sing or whatever those ones are, or the future's bright, the future's Orange. I can't believe. In fact, it's partly from watching a few bits of Bob's of the World cup and you see some TV adverts, you think, God, I just don't really see TV adverts anymore because I just don't watch that kind of TV anymore.
- [23:14]
Robin White
Well, the young people don't.
- [23:16]
Evan Davis
So those big blockbuster ads must now be a thing of the planet.
- [23:19]
Robin White
No, not true at all. You know, for example, one brand which we helped develop was Warburton's Bread and we changed it from doing 30 second TV commercials. The old world like you just described, we actually brought in celebrities for a little bakery in Bolton, you know, all those celebrities. And then we ran that in three minute chunks, which is big blockbuster ads. And then we got people to send those ads onto their friends. So we had 4 million audience with conventional media and 4 million audience of social media audience.
- [23:50]
Evan Davis
But the ad was a kind of creative masterpiece.
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Robin White
And if it was just a commercial 30 second, it'd been a waste of time. So we've had to change the way we think, change what we do. But it's actually a melange. And the exciting thing in the future is how you blend those two things together.
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- [25:09]
Evan Davis
Kim, you wanted to say something?
- [25:11]
Kim Windsor
Well, I would like to add the e Commerce because I know social media is like, yeah, huge impact, but the whole e commerce thing is equally a massive impact. And you know the time of your launching. The bottom line. Roughly around then, I was helping Natalie Massenet with Net A Porter, right?
- [25:30]
Evan Davis
Yes, indeed.
- [25:31]
Kim Windsor
Now, Natalie, when she was invited to fashion shows, if she was lucky, she would have a seat at the very back of the room. And if not, she'd be standing because nobody understood what was Net A Porter. I mean, most people thought it was a charity anyway, but she was back row. And then how that has changed. I remember going to one of Susie Menke's big conference of the iht, the International Herald Tribune. It's a massive fashion conference held in Paris. And a couple of the very big luxury houses stood up and said, we will never do retailing on e commerce. It's not for us. It's not exclusive enough. And of course, they'd spent fortunes invested
- [26:14]
Evan Davis
in property, in shops, beautiful shops. Yeah.
- [26:18]
Kim Windsor
And the last thing they wanted. And of course, they always have prime spaces because if you want a Louis Vuitton site, you get a prime space. But I think it's changed so dramatically, you know, and you know, all of these e comm sites are now definitely front row, along with influencers, along with the celebrities. It's a complete change, the combination of the two together. I mean, not much different in terms of timeline has really driven so much change across so many parts of our life.
- [26:49]
Evan Davis
Yeah, no, that's definitely true.
- [26:50]
Alex Cheetle
I think social media has also had a knock on effect on trust and also on hope. These are kind of big concepts, but in 20 years, 2006, most people I've run into were really bullish about the future. They were absolutely loving it and that was partly because they were feeling richer and they could see that things were going to work out well and today we don't have that. And that's partly because for all the economic reasons of younger people not having such a good economic outlook, but it's also the impact of social media, where social media spreads and sells more advertising space by creating more kind of fear and mistrust that has a knock on effect for how people feel. I'm quite struck. I travel the world all the time, we've got businesses everywhere and in the uk people think it's us, we're miserable. And actually good news, everybody's miserable and everybody, most people think it's only them. And you know, that's something that's gonna have to change.
- [27:49]
Evan Davis
It's really, really interesting that you say that, but I mean, there is something which is a little more European, Alex, that has I suppose grown in perception in the last decade, which is something happened between about 2008 and now in which our productivity, our ability to just do things better year after year slowed down and so we've just had less growth post crash than before Britain, perhaps a little bit more than most other countries. We had a big financial services sector. But come on, Nicola, that is a massive story.
- [28:22]
Nicola Horlick
Yes, although that was obviously a bit later on. But Brexit has been an utter disaster despite the efforts of many people like me.
- [28:32]
Evan Davis
I don't want to litigate it here, but I, but certainly there are people
- [28:35]
Nicola Horlick
who, I mean, I think the thing is the whole issue has been slightly clouded by the pandemic because it's very easy for people to say, oh well, a major reason is the pandemic. But of course the pandemic affected everybody, all other countries. So it wasn't just the uk. During the Blair years, everybody talked about trend growth in the uk, GDP growth as being two and a half percent. Pram.
- [28:58]
Evan Davis
Yeah.
- [28:58]
Nicola Horlick
The UK has not done as well economically as it really should have done over the last 10 years.
- [29:04]
Evan Davis
It has become more solidly European in its performance though. Interesting. It has not done worse than most of continental Europe in the last, in the last. Germany hasn't done so Germany's Done. Germany's had very particular story around. Its industries have all been somewhat supplanted in China, the Depression, if you like, that you mentioned, Alex. People don't seem that much happier now than Perhaps they were 20 years ago. We might say it's because we're always looking at social media and becoming envious of everybody else's, you know, lovely holidays and lovely houses. Or it might just be that there's somewhere the trajectory of improvement that we're on seems to have slowed down and we just.
- [29:41]
Nicola Horlick
I think part of it, Evan, is globalization, isn't it? You know, because in the old days I used to manage lots of very large pension funds. So Coates Viola was a good example of one that I managed. And they had textile mills all across the north of England and into Northern Ireland. And they had two big customers, BHS, which doesn't exist anymore, and Ms. And when you used to go into MS, there were big signs everywhere saying 90% of everything you buy made in Britain is made in Britain in this store. And that simply is obviously not the case.
- [30:15]
Evan Davis
Nine percent. You'd be lucky. Yeah, exactly.
- [30:18]
Nicola Horlick
And all those mills have closed down. And then what happened to the people who worked there? They went from having jobs in the same mill for 40 years, getting a gold watch, getting two thirds of their final salary as a pension, and now they're part time security guards and wife works in a nail bar or whatever. They don't have any job security, they don't have any benefits, they don't have any pensions. Their local shops have all closed down. You know, this is the problem and this is why we have seen our politics develop in such, my view, worrying way, because people feel very badly off and there's a lack of security, financial security.
- [30:58]
Kim Windsor
I've got to come in here because I was Marks and Spencer's in that massive change of 1990-2000, bringing in suppliers from all over the world. And it wasn't for price. I know people think about that now, but that's very much more about today. But at that point it was for product innovation, it was for fabric innovation. We were very limited in the UK that the creativity and the innovation of some of our fabrics and product wasn't as fast as was going on elsewhere.
- [31:27]
Nicola Horlick
But for whatever reason it still resulted in those mills closing down.
- [31:31]
Evan Davis
No, I know Ms. Is just one tiny part of the process. I mean, it was absolutely ubiquitous.
- [31:37]
Kim Windsor
But I do wonder if it tells us something about industry because. Because if you're not creative and you're not innovative and you're not looking outwards then unfortunately you can't just keep relying on getting the contracts in. You can't keep relying on getting the salary bill paid. So I do think parts of the world, there are elements of the world where they have maybe through a difficult period have actually invested more in creativity and innovation. I mean you look at the whole wellness sector which is on fire, you know, and you talk about America, the west side of America is leading so much of that activity and they get behind it and the innovation that's coming out of there is superb. AI, I agree with you. Thank goodness there's some really good people here that are actually really going to have a big say in the future. So I think innovation, creativity, these things are absolutely fundamental to protect industry.
- [32:32]
Evan Davis
Nicola, you mentioned globalization. It might be that we had the peak of globalization because companies did offshore their manufacturing, put it into China and then maybe into other parts of Asia when China was becoming crowded itself. But I wonder whether that in this last 20 years we've seen that peak, the whole Trump backlash and tariffs and the pandemic supply chain resilience has become a thing that just was not mentioned 20 years ago. Now resilience is much more important than efficiency.
- [33:01]
Nicola Horlick
Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I think one of the great lessons of the pandemic was we need to be more self sufficient in lots of different
- [33:08]
Evan Davis
areas and energy now seems to be. The people are saying the same.
- [33:12]
Nicola Horlick
Yeah, energy, I mean, but we've known that for decades and decades and decades and yet we didn't do enough about it quickly enough. I mean, you know, nuclear reactors, look at France, France is in a much better position than us.
- [33:25]
Evan Davis
I just want to hear from the rest of you. Nicola made a very big point really about how the economic system for many, many people has changed, which is less pension provided less security, often lower pay. And what went wrong that the expectations people might have had 20 years ago about a slowly growing salary or wage, about a kind of a pension and security. What went adrift over the last 20 years that we're not able to offer people what they had then?
- [33:58]
Robin White
Well, one thing I would say to that is that young people want to start their own businesses, they don't want to work in big corporations. And I think this is a wonderful thing. I think this is energy and creativity in young people. They don't necessarily want big salaries but they want to have more pleasure and fun possible contributor. And I think that the enterprise culture, it's with this younger generation, they are the future and hopefully I'll be coming up for the 30th programme, but by then that'll have made much more impact there.
- [34:29]
Evan Davis
Definitely a lot of old style jobs have gone. We've made ourselves richer to some extent by buying the goods that those workers would have been making from somewhere else in the world who may be able to make them cheaper for us. So we've got a little bit more money to spend on services or other things. But somehow it doesn't seem to have made our society feel more at ease with itself or feel like it's firing on all cylinders. Instead it feels like a lot of people are a bit economically adrift while others have got the washing machines, clothes and other things that they want. And I don't know whether it's really made us feel like our economy is working better, even though sort of rationally it's like, well, we can buy the goods more cheaply from China. Let's go and do that. Which has been the big trend.
- [35:15]
Alex Cheetle
We found that in our business. We set up serving wealthy people and we knew in 1998 that the next step would be to move into the mass, mass market and that next step never happened. We've carried on looking after the wealthy and then the mass affluent because the middle class, the middle, middle class and the lower middle class just don't have very much disposable wealth. And we didn't see that coming 25 years ago. And then certainly after 2008, they haven't got richer, if anything, they've got poorer. This huge group in society. So businesses like mine aren't going after them.
- [35:50]
Evan Davis
We've had a lot of different themes coming into this conversation. I think people will recognize them all. The one that none of you've mentioned since 2006, so much change in the way we relate to each other in the workplace, isn't there? I think stuff that went on in offices 20 years ago would be straight to HR, some case review, managerial action. No, isn't that. That's a massive, massive cultural world. That's one way of framing it, if you want to put it like that. But definitely the world has changed.
- [36:26]
Alex Cheetle
I think people in our business, we used to finish up six, seven, eight o' clock at night, maybe have a couple of drinks in the office and then because you'd had a couple of drinks in the office, I'll go out for one more. Suddenly it's midnight and everybody struggles into work the next day, but does get into work the next day and then they've all got a story and a shared relationship and all the rest of it, that doesn't happen anymore. Even the young people in our office tend to, if we have drinks at work, they'll often go home. Not to a secret pub that I don't know about. They'll often go home at 8:39. And those kind of late night adventures don't happen. I see that with my own children. They don't. Many of their friends don't drink at all.
- [37:09]
Nicola Horlick
Yeah, but I mean, a lot of the things that were happening in the workplace, I mean, 2006 isn't that long ago, but it was still a time, certainly in the city, where there was an awful lot of sexism. And actually, probably in about 2006, I remember being in a meeting discussing bonuses with two guys, and we were just discussing one particular person who happened to be a woman. And they said, well, we don't need to give her a bonus because her husband's an investment banker.
- [37:40]
Evan Davis
So, you know, I don't think you'd get that now. I mean, look, you probably would get it now, but it would be.
- [37:45]
Nicola Horlick
I've been a man, you know, I might have agreed with them, you know, so because I was there, she did get a bonus. But the point is these things had to be stamped out. I don't. I don't agree that women are properly remunerated.
- [38:00]
Evan Davis
Robin dismisses it as woke. But actually, Robyn, it's not right for bosses to be bawling at people.
- [38:06]
Robin White
There's all sorts of things that are completely inappropriate and should be stamped out. On the other hand, I think there are some things which are acceptable and are now being jumped on. So I think the world, you know, it's a halfway house, in my opinion.
- [38:19]
Evan Davis
I mean, it is true also that maybe people slightly tread on eggshells sometimes around colleagues. It's a pity if they don't relate to each other, Alex, as you say, because they don't go out and they don't have a drink. I don't know, they may not go
- [38:32]
Kim Windsor
out for a drink. But my son, he's 27, and they go and play, paddle off to work, you know, or they go and, you know, there's. There are other activities, you know, if it's light enough, it's cricket, whatever it is, but I think it may not be drinking. I agree with you that that has been a complete change from our time. But one of the things, I also think I do a little bit of mentoring, you know, people approaching, and actually I've noticed quite a change. It used to always be entrepreneurs or, you know, People starting off new business needing help on the priorities and clarity of such. I get quite a few people now are in bigger businesses, but because of the different way people are working, they're not getting the guidance, they're not getting that moment to sit and chat. Maybe it could have been over a drink and actually throwing ideas out or asking for a little bit of guidance in business. And they're coming in there saying, look, I'm getting confused because, you know, I really want to be doing this, but I'm being pushed over there. Should I keep going over here or should I move over that? Can you give me some support? In which direction? You know, these sort of questions which you would normally debate with your manager or your director or at a table, you know, two or three of you
- [39:39]
Robin White
say, I think that's a very, very important area to touch on, which is that mentoring. And, you know, I think probably all of us in different ways do mentoring. And I set up a charity called the Ideas foundation where we mentor young people in disadvantaged background trying to get in the advertising industry. So I think we have actually, since 2006, the whole mentoring has become a very big thing and a very good thing. Yeah.
- [40:02]
Evan Davis
But I think working from home has put aside all the other kind of changes in expectations of workplace behaviour. Working from home has reduced the spirit of a team in a shared mission, hasn't it? And that might have had an effect on.
- [40:18]
Nicola Horlick
I think it's very problematic in terms of training people and, you know, imbuing young people, the right ideas about how businesses work and mentoring within the workplace and if you're working remotely. And also the fact that a lot of young people live in, you know, studio flats or whatever, and they're sitting on their bed working, I don't think this is great. And, you know, some sectors, like financial services, a lot of people are now being told you need to come into the office at least four days a week. But I'm the chair of a charity where we allow people to work from home three days a week, you know, so. And it's a very large charity and employs nearly 500 people. So, you know, for some people it's great because they may live a very long way from London, they don't have the cost of traveling and the stress, especially in heat waves and so on. But I just wonder what the impact overall is going to be in terms of career progression.
- [41:12]
Evan Davis
Before we sound like sort of oldies who are grumbling about the way the world has changed, which actually not. I mean, it has just changed in so many ways as we've earned. I want you just each to sort of reflect on how it's going to change over the next 20 years. What's going to happen over the next 20? Come on, Alex. What, what's going to happen?
- [41:28]
Alex Cheetle
Well, I think something that is going to continue, I think, is that I, I do think the rich are going to carry on getting richer. That will mean that there's more investment going into serving them. The services and the products that they get will be better. And that's going to tear apart a little bit more at our social cohesion. It's going to create great business opportunities, not least for, for my business, but, but it's going to create challenges for government and the people as well. And that's something that has me concerned because in the long run we all need a functioning society for business to thrive totally.
- [42:04]
Evan Davis
And in fact, AI I think adds to those worries because you can have a very wealthy class of AI. Creators, developers, investors.
- [42:11]
Alex Cheetle
AIs had a super important impact on fashion in business and fashion in business. Thinking is very underreported. We're all supposed to be very numbers led and data led. But what I'm noticing from my friends, particularly technology entrepreneur friends, is they cannot wait to show off about how few people they're employing.
- [42:30]
Nicola Horlick
That's the thing, I think, because if you think about the old industrial companies which built up over decades, they'd end up employing 70,000 people or something. Something. Now you can create that sort of wealth overall with 10 people in one room and that is the most extraordinary change.
- [42:47]
Alex Cheetle
Yeah, it's fantastic. But worrying for society, you know, the hundreds of people that won't be employed are not going to make great consumers.
- [42:55]
Evan Davis
Kim, what would you look at for the next 20 years?
- [42:59]
Kim Windsor
I think there's another big trend, growth trend, which is the love of sustainability in its widest sense. And you know, even in the luxury sector, you know how slow some of the brands been in thinking about reselling some of their products from the past. I mean, people like Rolex and things do a brilliant job on it, but others don't. And then you've got all the repair and you know, that is now used to be turn your nose up at it, right, and something your grandma did, but now it's actually something that people feel very good about because part of
- [43:31]
Evan Davis
the experience of owning the item is maintaining and repairing it and keeping it going. We did a bottom line on this, Kim, you should have been there to hear it. But no, it's a very, it is a Very interesting thing and you can only imagine it going further. And it's true, my sort of younger colleagues are much more into trading second hand clothes or pre loved clothes, whatever you call them.
- [43:51]
Kim Windsor
Market is really on, you know, really doing very, very well. But also, you know, from a hospitality perspective, talking about AI, you know, with our hotel in London, we've got this machine. This is incredible. This machine is reading how much food is being wasted, right. So, so throwing away excess of, you know, spinach, not enough people are eating their spinach that we put on the plate. But you know, AI can do lots in terms of efficient. It's not just about people, it's also about more efficient.
- [44:21]
Evan Davis
So hang on, that machine is going to tell you we we're over ordering on the spinach and the portion. Yeah, people aren't eating because they're not eating.
- [44:28]
Kim Windsor
So, so cut it down by. I mean it's being tested on, on, on the staff in the staff restaurant to start with. But it, but these are things where you just get more efficient, you do a better job. So I think we have to consider it in the round robin.
- [44:41]
Evan Davis
Do you want to look ahead 20 years?
- [44:42]
Robin White
Yes, I would do. I would say we've talked about many of these things but first of all, obviously AI has a huge role but I think it's the fusion of AI with creativity to create super creativity. And this will be where you do all your work and your research, but you still need the brain to have a creative idea. AI is doing lots of really good things. But human creativity will still be discussed around this table in 10 to 20 years.
- [45:10]
Evan Davis
That I'm sure. Let me thank my guest, Nicola Horlick, Chief executive of Money and Company, Advertising guru Robin White, luxury retailer Kim Windsor and Alex Cheetle from Ten Lifestyle Group. Thanks to them. Thank you for listening. Now join us next week for the Bottom Line Business Awards. We have Best Boss or Company, Best marketing campaign and biggest business blunder over the last 12 months. If you want to to make any suggestions to email us@bottomlinebc.co.uk. the podcast was produced by Sally Abrahams and Nick Holland. It was presented by me, Evan Davis and is a BBC long form audio production for Radio 4. And if your podcast provider allows it, we do appreciate a rating or a review. It helps others find the Show.
- [46:00]
Justin Rolatt
I'm the BBC's climate editor, Justin Rolatt. In the 20 years I've been covering the green movement, I've noticed its evolution has been formed not only by protest or by dire warnings about climate change. But by conflict within the ranks, friends, sometimes enemies, hashing out big ideas that help define what it means to be green.
- [46:24]
Kim Windsor
The anger was justified, that action was not. This would grow to become the number one domestic terrorism threat in the United States.
- [46:33]
Nicola Horlick
We must might lose this fight, but we win the whole war.
- [46:36]
Justin Rolatt
For BBC Radio 4 from Understand 10 fights that made the green movement listen first on BBC Sounds.