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- [00:00]
James Watt
Foreign.
- [00:06]
John
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the uncensored cmo. Now, regular listeners of the show will know that one of my favorite brands of all time is Brewdog. But what they may also know is I got fired from that brand after only three months. In fact, the last time I met today's guest, James Watt, the founder of Brewdog, he was firing me. Now, since then, I've gone on to create this podcast, and I thought it'd be a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with James and find out all about what made Brewdogs a success, why he fired me, and also what he's doing now, which is a fascinating new venture. This is a great episode. You'll enjoy it. It is packed with so much good advice about being an entrepreneur, but also how to market when you have a limited budget. There are so many lessons here from Brewdog, you'll love it. James Watt, founder or captain of Brewdog, as you describe yourself, welcome to the show.
- [00:53]
James Watt
Yeah, thanks for having me.
- [00:54]
John
Now, I must start with the question that listeners are probably going to expect me to ask you, which is, why did you fire me?
- [01:00]
James Watt
Wow. First question, get with the big one. So at that time, the business just didn't need a cmo. And I've done so many amazing things, but also made a lot of mistakes. And one of the big mistakes that I made was trying to build out this C suite when the business just wasn't ready for it and the business just didn't need it. And it didn't need it in most of the positions, but the position where it didn't need it most was cmo, because I was CEO and. But I was also cmo and I wanted to do that. So essentially, when you was there, we had two people strike to do the CMO job, and the business just wasn't ready for a CMO.
- [01:32]
John
A hundred percent. 100%.
- [01:33]
James Watt
I'm not sure what your perspective.
- [01:34]
John
No, that was exactly my perspective as well. And I remember, it's funny, actually, I remember when we sort of parted company, you had this amazing phrase, which I still use this day, which is this only works if. And it really stuck with me that because you had this relentless desire to work out well, set the ambition really high. Only works if. And I remember, actually, I actually never presented this to you, but I wrote a presentation for you. Actually, I think when you let me go was like, our relationship would only work if in these circumstances. And I sort of diagnosed that, you know, because. And you had an ability to be visionary and in the detail, a level I'VE never seen anyone do before, you know, which is incredibly impressive. And I think it's kind of part of your success really, is that ability to be completely raised the bar and also understand what needs to happen tactically at the same time.
- [02:20]
James Watt
And I think that's just so important. And I think unless you're in the detail, you can't make good strategic decisions. And I think the further someone is from, like the day to day, the more difficult it is to do that. So I used to spend loads of time, like working shifts with the team, like putting pints behind the bar, working night shifts on the Canon line, like being out there with the customers at the events and like just working in the business. And it just gave me like such a better perspective. So I made decisions every day that affected all over three or four thousand people. So do that without knowing what it's like behind the bar, insured it on a busy Saturday night without knowing what it's like doing a night shift on the Canon, like up in L. And you just can't make good quality decisions.
- [02:56]
John
You really live that as well. I saw that up close. And one of the other things I used to love is how when you made a decision, you'd have, was it like 2000 or 3000 equity for punks you had in a kind of a face, Was it a Facebook group?
- [03:08]
James Watt
It wasn't a Facebook group. It was actually. It's a website that we built and we've got up to 10,000 of them there. And it's just an amazing kind of focus group for the business. The business Overall has got 227,000 equity punks, which is like a whole new business model, which is fantastic. But the equity punks are the kind of beating heart of our business. Our biggest fans, our harshest critics. Being able to get amazing feedback in real time from our most important customers was amazing. And I think with so many businesses and so many ideas, you have the idea, that idea then meets reality and it's never how you envisaged it. And the poor businesses just kind of plow on regardless. The best ones make adjustments, micro adjustments, tweak things, and the thing that ends up winning is seldom the thing that you launched. And. And I think the best business is the ones that can adjust things in real time based on feedback from actual customers, from actually what's happening. So it was amazing to have that connection with the community.
- [03:59]
John
I mean, that's something a lot of businesses could learn from because you kept the distance between you and the customer so small and Even as you scaled, you found a way of basically getting feedback at a very big scale, actually. I mean thousands, as you say. Whereas most companies would commission six weeks worth of research, by which time you've missed the boat.
- [04:16]
James Watt
Right.
- [04:16]
John
And you were like on it straight away.
- [04:18]
James Watt
But I think that speed is so important as well. So I'm sure you can remember, but we always used to say we like to count time in dog years. So if a normal company takes a week to do something, we want to do it in a day. If a normal company takes seven months, we want to do it in a month. And because you have to adjust, be flexible, be nimble, be adaptable, you have to then work at speed because otherwise you're just slow and legacy and kind of borderline incompetence, like being close to the action and then moving at speed were both so fundamental for us.
- [04:44]
John
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. I remember that because you kind of set the bar very high in terms of ambition. You know, you then set the timeline very narrow. Both those things force you to think differently, don't they? You have to invent a new process to do it. You can't do the way things are normally done.
- [04:59]
James Watt
Yeah, and that goes to the core of the philosophy. And that philosophy was if you combine ambition with a constraint, you can unlock a new way of thinking, a new way of doing things. And I love the combination of when you face a constraint, increase your level of ambition because that's how you can find completely new ways of doing things. It's like any startup, any scale up, if you do things the way they're supposed to be done, the way your competition done, you've lost 95% plus of startup scale up. Businesses fail and they fail because they try to be many conventional versions of the bigger companies in that space. So for me, very ambitious constraint in terms of finances, resource, people, whatever. But then like so find a way, think down the problem. And that what you mentioned was like, how do you reimagine something? We can, if so as opposed to we can't do that, that's impossible. We can do this. If we reimagine this, we can do this. If we reallocate this resource, we can do this. If we turn this thing on its head. And every single breakthrough that we had, and we had so many, was when we had to do something completely different and find a solution that just didn't exist.
- [06:08]
John
I love that so much. One of the early examples actually, which I often quote to people, is how you actually raise money in the first place to even get the business off the ground. So just for anyone who doesn't know a bit of the backstory, just explain how you set the business up and how you ended up financing it.
- [06:22]
James Watt
So business was set up in 2007. Myself and my best friend Martin, we set up with two humans, a dog, and a big mission to make other people's passionate about fantastic beer. As we were, set the business up with £20,000 of life savings, £30,000 bank loan, and a derelict dystopian fall into pieces shed in a godforsaken industrial estate in the northeast of Scotland. Cobbled together secondhand equipment, some old dairy equipment, some plastic tanks from a local garden center because we ran out of money for steel tanks. Filled bottles by hand, capped bottles by hand, slept on sacks of malt in the floor. Both moved back in with our parents because we couldn't afford to pay ourselves. But set out two humans, one dog in this kind of big, big crazy mission. Kind of bootstrapped it. For the first couple of years, business was going nowhere. Everyone told us, make your beers cheaper, make your beers with less. Don't call your beer stupid names, don't do this. But we were determined if we were going to fail, we were going to fail doing something that we loved and we were passionate about. And we kind of stuck to our guns. And like throughout the journey of the business, everything we made was selfish. We made the beers that we wanted to drink ourselves and we hoped that enough other people would want to kind of enjoy those beers as well. So we kind of bootstrapped it for the first couple of years and then we decided to do something completely different. And this was unheard of. In 2009, we decided to offer our community, our customers, the chance to buy an equity stake in our business. So we launched Equity for Punks, where nobody even knew what equity online crowdfunding was. And it's been so fantastic for our business. We built a community of 227,000 equity punks every day by cash. And we were able to create a business model that shortened the distance between ourselves and the people who enjoy the product that we make. And I work with so many consumer businesses at the moment, and everyone can make the winning formula in consumer so, so complic. And for me, it is unbelievably simple. If you can engage your community better than your competition, you're going to win. That is it. So if you've got a consumer brand, all you need to do is engage your community and work with your community and shorten the distance. It doesn't matter about your meta ads, it doesn't matter too much about out of home campaigns. It doesn't matter about all these things. What matters is how can you engage your community. And so many times I work with confuse community and audience and they're fundamentally not the same. So I'll ask them, what do you do with community? And they say, oh, I've got 20,000 followers on Instagram or whatever that is an audience. Like what do you do in terms of engagement, in terms of shared mission, shared passion, build together two way communications. How can you make them feel ownership of what you do? So for me to win in consumer all about community.
- [08:55]
John
Yeah. Something that often surprise people when I chat about Brewdog. You're so famous for building the brands that people forget the product is very, very good. And I remember in my experience, kind of working with you was like the obsession you had with the quality of beer. Now, I don't know if I remember this quite rightly, but I think when I did my induction, you got us all to try to punk IPAs, right? And then you asked us to kind of describe the notes and what we think and rate them and all this kind of thing. And then you do the rug pull, which is, it's the same thing two weeks apart, you know what I mean? And the obsession with freshness as well, as an example. But I think people don't understand how the lengths you. And you also master Cicerone as well, which a lot of people won't realize, which was one of only, I think 14 in the world at the time. I mean, I think I looked at about 28 of them now, but like that's a very rare kind of accomplishment. So how important was the obsession as well with the quality of the beer itself?
- [09:48]
James Watt
Oh, I mean, pure maniacal obsession. So both myself and Martin, why were we doing this? Why did we build this? We absolutely love fantastic beer. And we were looking at beer had been demonized, bastardized, commoditized by the big companies spending so much money on advertising, marketing, trying to convince people that this kind of watered down fallacy was what good beer should be. And we just love and adore beer and love making fantastic beer and love making other people passionate and excited about beer and showing them, hey, beer doesn't need to be this kind of mass produced, lowest common denominator lager. You can have an amazing, hoppy, fresh, bitter, piney, fruity ipa. You can have a decadent, opulent, imperial stout that tastes of chocolate in coffee. You can have the kind of sharp snap of a kind of Belgian sour fruit beer. You can have the kind of refined elegance of a perfectly made lager. And taking people on that beardy journey of discovery with us. And we would always say we live and die by what's in every single can, by what's in every single bottle, by what's in every single keg. And the biggest thing that determines the kind of destiny of the business is the beer, is the liquid. And we just did so much to focus on that. But the business at its core is just a obsession with fantastic beer and making the best beer we possibly can and then sharing up with as many people as we can. Yeah.
- [11:10]
John
And I remember every employee does a beer server training where you have to describe all the different types of beers and how they're served and everything else. I remember. I think I've got 96% being absolutely chuffed to bits with that as well. But it's fascinating. I mean, once you get into it, it's just Absolutely. And also the. The other thing I observed as well is the investment you made in the quality control equipment to make sure that was. I mean, we're talking millions of pounds, I think, in terms of that bit of equipment. And it just struck me the obsession with making sure the end product is always delivered at the level we expect it to be.
- [11:41]
James Watt
Yeah. And, like, so grateful to be able to do that for almost two decades because we just, like, love beer so much. Like, it never felt like a job. It just felt like this kind of huge explosion of our hobby, of the thing that we used to kind of do at home that we were able to kind of build and just kind of share that with. With loads and loads of people. But, yeah, every single day, just like a pure love and obsession for a fantastic beer. But, like, obsession and, like the detail of the fermentation profile of how we manage kind of oxygen interest. Because, like, beer has, like, three big enemies. Light, oxygen, heat. So how we manage that all the way through the process, we build a huge chilled warehouse, we invest in amazing quality equipment. Fantastic quality team. So much time spent in beer tasting, which so many people think it's, like an amazing job. And it is. It is fun. But, yeah, just their relentless focus on liquid itself. Yeah.
- [12:28]
John
And it comes through kind of in every facet of the brand as well. I mean, something that always sort of, you know, amused me, but was your annual general meeting, which you completely rebranded and, like, you know, that's a. It shows how you viewed the mission and how you made One of the things I think is fascinating is how you saw everything through the lens of making, you know, being obsessed about craft beer. So the annual general meeting was basically 15, 20,000 people having the best party ever.
- [12:56]
James Watt
Amazing. So we did all the business stuff that we had to, but. But then amazing beers, fantastic beer tastings, fantastic guest producers from America, New Zealand, all over the planet and some resilient music and just like the best day outside of Christmas or maybe even better than Christmas.
- [13:08]
John
Yeah. Now also describe how the breakthrough in terms of retail because winning your Tesco listing was a big moment, wasn't it? Very early on for the.
- [13:17]
James Watt
It was indeed. So this was back in 2008, business was going nowhere. I was selling cases, maybe five to 10 cases a week out the back of my beat up Volkswagen Golf at local farmers markets and kind of local pubs and we sent some beer to a Tesco beer competition and I kind of, kind of forgot about it. Got a phone call eight weeks later, said, hello James, just to let you know, you finished first, second, third and fourth in this Tesco beer competition. So I was like, okay, that's kind of fun. So flew down to London, went to Chesant, which is where the Tesco headquarters were at the time. They've now moved to Wail and Garden City, which is so much nicer. But went to Cheshant, met the Tesco team. Ian Target was the beer buyer there, sat down with me and was like, James, we love these beers. You've won the competition. We want to put these four beers in 400 stores nationwide and we can sell 2,000 cases a week. I sat there with my best poker face on and didn't mention anything at all about the fact this was two humans and one dog filling bottles.
- [14:13]
John
Oh, this is that early.
- [14:14]
James Watt
Was it that early? Yeah, just the two of us. So I signed a contract with Tesco that was due to start in four months time with no idea how the hell we were going to be able to make that much beer. They were at 2,000 cases a week. We could maybe make 200 tops. So got back, chatted with Martin is like, we've got good news and bad news. We've got this amazing contact with Tesco. Amazing. But we've got no idea how the hell we're going to make this much beer. We just don't have the equipment, the space, the people, whatever. So we went to our bank at the time, which is bank of Scotland, and said to guys at bank of Scotland, look, we've got this amazing contract with Tesco. We're a young up and coming company, but we need £150,000 for small bottling line, fermentation tanks so we can get going here. Go. Just laughed us out the bank. It was 2008, the worst time in history to ask the banks for a loan. Global financial crisis and it was like, James, you're not paying your existing loan back. There's no way we can give you this money here. So undeterred, we went to the bank across the street, which was hsbc, sat down with the business bank and team at HSBC and told them our bank, bank of Scotland just offered us an amazing finance package for £150,000 for a bottling line, fermentation tanks. We're a young up and coming company. We've got this contract with Tesco. We're going places. We'd love to work with HSBC if you can match this deal, we are going to shift all of our bank into you tomorrow and then see what we can build together. And for some crazy reason HSBC gave us the money. We got the bottling line in, we got the fermentation tanks in. The first beer came off the bottling line two weeks before it was due to go to Tesco. The Tesco listing worked really well. We kind of built our business from that as a starting point. So it was very much kind of fake it until we make it and just don't accept no for an answer. That is incredible story. Find a way, find a way.
- [15:59]
John
That's a really incredible story. And what was the impact that Tesco listing on the brand in terms of presumably like being international listing? Lots of people, because this is early days of craft beer as well. I think people forget that actually back then craft beer was quite a small category, wasn't it?
- [16:11]
James Watt
It was almost nonexistent. It was non existent. Yeah, it was non existent back then. So everyone thinks you hit the shelf in Tesco. Happy days, job done, success. It never happens like that. So for the first two years of us being in Tesco, the goal was to sell six units per store per week. And that's what we had to sell to stay in store. For those first two years we kind of sold between kind of four and five units per store per week. So for two years the only reason we didn't get delisted was because the buyer liked us. We should have been delisted because our rate of sale was so slow and it was too early. Consumers in Tesco just weren't ready for punk IPA with explosion of hoppiness and bitterness and in attitude. So we had two tough years. And like all the businesses I work with today think when they get the supermarket listing, the job's done. That's when the job starts. The easy thing is getting it on the shelf. The difficult thing is getting enough consumers to take it off the shelf. And that's what you need to focus on. So we stayed in the game by the skin of our teeth for two years. And slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, sales started to pick up. We got up to kind of 6, 8, 10, 12 units per store per week. Then all of a sudden, when you do that, the conversation isn't about maybe being delisted. It's how can we give you more stores, more distribution? Then Sainsbury's come knocking on the door, then Mortisens come, then Asda come, then Waitrose come, and then you can build. But the first two years in Tesco, sales were slow. We hung on for dear life and just hoped it would kind of build some momentum if we just kept making good beer.
- [17:39]
John
That is such a good lesson. I did. I did analysis, actually. I was at Britvic of the top 20 most successful soft drink launches. And the headline in my report back to the board was, it takes on average seven years to get an overnight success. Honestly, it's crazy. Exactly what you described. It's like the first three or four years, you're right at the bottom of the table and almost doing nothing. And it's a survival game.
- [18:01]
James Watt
But I almost think the vans that I see get too big too quickly, just fall so. So quickly as well, because they're not built in a solid F foundation. So it's almost the way it's got to be. But like every overnight success is like 10 hard years in the making.
- [18:16]
John
It is such a illustrator. I did a here's the top 20 after year one. Here's the top 20 after year 10. There's no correlation between the two. And the ones that are successful after 10 years would be nowhere near the list on year one because they typically focused on a small part of the market and really owned it and built this community and law follower base. The ones that went mass straight away, like 90% distribution in six weeks, this kind of thing. They couldn't repeat it the following year because they'd gone too far beyond the demand that there was for the brand.
- [18:48]
James Watt
Here's an insight that I love sharing with the businesses I work with, kind of based on that as well. So the CEO and the CMO by nature are always the first to get bored. So a CEO or CMO, you live this, you read your brand. 24, 7, take our beers. At best, we account for 0.1% of our customer headspace over the course of a year, and that is absolute best scenario. But my headspace, my CMO headspace, my team's headspace were 100%. So brands get bored of things way before the consumers. And it's so interesting because by default, nature entrepreneurs restless. They want to innovate, they want to change things, they want to drive. Building a great brand is mind numbingly boring because you need to be painstakingly consistent over an extended period of time. And a lot of people give up their opportunity to create a great brand because they're not disciplined and consistent enough over a long period of time. It is boring. You need to be on the same message, on the same pitch, with the same packaging, the same design for a decade. And who gets bored? Not the customer. The customer doesn't get bored. It's a cmo, it's a CEO. Let's change things, let's change packaging, let's change our position. And what's our positioning for this year, what's our positioning for next year? What's the market focus? It needs to be the same and that gives people the opportunity to buy into something like CEOs, CMOs. Be consistent for a decade. You're going to be so bored, but you're going to be so much more successful.
- [20:14]
John
I couldn't agree with you more. And I've experienced on the podcast, actually, same thing, three or four years of, you know, modest numbers and then, and then you wait long enough and then do the things consistently and then it takes off. Yeah, exactly that. I'd love to get to the marketing because obviously this is fun, right? And genuinely, I'm not just saying this, but I quote Brewdog so often because of what you do. But you said something earlier which I think is almost the key to it, which is constraint. Because the best things you did were not with big media spend. In fact, you almost did no media spend, didn't you? And to what extent was that constraint almost the reason why you had to do such bold activity?
- [20:51]
James Watt
Absolutely. So we were tiny in an industry dominated by behemoths. Behemoths with huge, huge market and budgets. If we played the game conventionally, we've lost before we've even got out of bed on the 1st of January. So we knew the only way that we can stand out in this industry is to do things radically different, to do things in our own terms, to wear our heart and our sleeve and find a way. And this was a test we always used. Find a way to make £1 work like £10. And if I'm investing in market, and because I'm tiny, if one of my market in pounds doesn't have the impact of at least 10 Heineken, Budweiser, Stella pounds, we have lost. So the other test we had was, would or could another beer business do this? And if the answer was yes, we're wasting our time because they could get that same return. So we had to find ways of doing things that gave us an exponential return versus a tiny marketing budget, which means you have to push the boundaries, do things which are different. Edgy, sometimes a bit confrontational, sometimes a bit provocative, but things that kind of shock and jar people into thinking differently. And all of that has got to come back to a mission, a passion, a point of view and authenticity. And if you do that, you can have a phenomenal, phenomenal impact. And everything was kind of designed okay. Tiny market and budget. How can we maximize the impact that we have in terms of growing our business with this tiny marketing budget?
- [22:11]
John
Now, now, some brands have an occasional hit, right? They'll do something, it catches on. It goes something that I was always impressed with. You had so many of those moments. Like, you know, when I started thinking about this, there's a long list of ones which are the ones that stand out for you, that had the biggest ROI in terms of what ones are you most proud of?
- [22:30]
James Watt
I mean, so many of them. It was always just like, amazing because we didn't have to answer to anyone and because we could move at speed. What I loved was idea. Monday morning, fuck it, and Tuesday, we're like live with these kind of crazy things. Like, in that amount of time, the tank was iconic. We drove a tank through the streets of London to announce the opening of Camden. We actually got that from a website called tanksalot.com, so if anyone's looking for a tank, tanksalot.com, we projected ourselves naked onto the House of Parliament. We made a beer at the bottom of the ocean. We parodied Vladimir Putin. We threw taxidermy cats out of a helicopter with parachutes over the bank of England. We did all these kind of amazing things. We took the ratings of our biggest competitors and turned that into like an out of home kind of advertising campaign, which was kind of so kind of honest and kind of ballsy and kind of opened people's eyes to what was really happening in beer. We made the strongest beers on the planet. We made a 32% beer called Tactical Nuclear Penguin, a German company, made a stronger one. We then made a 41% beer called Sink the Bismarck. In response, they made a stronger one. We then made a 55% beer which we packaged in taxidermy. So it was Stoats and Squirrels it was packaged in. And that was the strongest beer that had ever been made that exploded. And then we got such a backlash for that. We then made a non alcoholic beer for a joke. First ever non alcoholic beer. We called it Nanny State and it was our best selling non alcoholic beer for a decade. So, yeah, just like so many of the things that we did got people speaking and we also had this little test. It's like, if we do this thing, is somebody going to tell their friend about it in the pub? And also it's like, let's try and, like, do good things and have a positive impact. So one of my favorite things that we did, we made and donated almost 2 million pounds of hand sanitizer with our distillery during COVID We donated that to the NHS and to Frontline workers. Also during COVID one of my absolute favorites was we made a special beer for Dominic Cummings.
- [24:30]
John
Did you.
- [24:31]
James Watt
I didn't spot that one. It exploded. So it was when he broke the.
- [24:36]
John
Lockdown rules, the eyesight issue.
- [24:38]
James Watt
Yes. So he drove to Barnard Castle and his reason, which is comedy gold, was to test if his eyes were working.
- [24:46]
John
Well by driving down a road.
- [24:48]
James Watt
Yeah. So we, on the morning, I think it was like a Wednesday morning, we said, okay, we're making special beer to commemorate this kind of mayhem and chaos. And this was like lockdown. Everyone at home, nothing to do. So we posted kind of four potential beer names on Twitter. So one was stay at homes, one was comings and goings, and the other one, we let our community vote as to which one we should make was Barnard Castle Eye Test. So we made an IPA called Barnard Castle Eye Test. We launched it that evening. We blended some beers together that we had intact to create this completely new bespoke beer. We launched it that evening. We crashed our website. We sold 2 million cans in the first. 2 million. 2 million cans in the first 24 hours.
- [25:30]
John
Everyone's, of course, at home in lockdown. This is perfect. Oh, that's brilliant. I didn't. I didn't see that one. That's so good.
- [25:37]
James Watt
So just being able to, like, do something different and like move at that speed and like zero budget, zero spend, market and market. And it sold kind of 2 million units. I mean, Some of the kind of more basic things that we do, but I think it kind of underpins the stunts. And so many companies come to me is like, how can we do marketing like Drew Dog, like I'm a estate agent in Northampton. It's like, well, you can't. It just, it just doesn't work. But so many companies try and do the stunts and like the stunts for me are the tip of the iceberg. If you don't have the authenticity, the integrity, the product passion, the business, the community, all those things underneath the tip of the iceberg, the stunt is going to look fake, it's going to look shallow, it's got like Die Hard and you're going to have no impact at all. So those are the fun things, but without that amazing foundation, they just don't work, they don't resonate. And I think the reason they worked so well for us, we had the community, the passion, the engagement, the buy in, the transparency, which meant the stunts kind of really push the business forward. Whereas if you don't have that, I think the stunts kind of push the business backwards. And some of those kind of bits I would kind of class is like the foundation of that. Like every year we do a prototype challenge. We'd make four beers, we'd sell them for a pound a can on our website to our community, tell us which of these four beers should be in our range next year. And amazing beers like Jackhammer 5 Yen came from our kind of community prototype challenge. We'd let our community pick where we open new bar locations because, like, those are the customer. So all that community engagement, things like your AGM when like 15, 20,000 people there to celebrate the business and fantastic beer, having that strong foundation meant the stunts worked as opposed to. If you don't have that foundation, I think they can play negatively.
- [27:17]
John
You're spawn. That's such an important point. So if you break it down right, you've taken a position in the market as a punk rebel, so you got the positioning that you've also invested in. You know, in this case, 10, 15 years of using your packaging to tell jokes and represent you.
- [27:32]
James Watt
Right.
- [27:32]
John
But the other bit as well is that your ability to react live to what's going on and get to market while it's still hot in terms of culture is really. So you know, that Barnard Eye Test 1 is an example. One of my favorites, which I'd love you to talk about as well, is the Elvis foundation, which I just think is one of the funniest explain what happened because I Think if people understood the context. This is utter genius.
- [27:57]
James Watt
So Elvis Juice, actually our best selling beer in America, which is, which is fantastic. We made 6.5% West Coast IPA called Elvis Juice. We spiked it with blood orange and grapefruit to kind of like amplify those flavors that we had in the Chinook and the tannin hops that we used in there. Like amazing, amazing beer. So we decided to call it Elvis Juice. We launched it within two weeks. We got a letter from a legal firm who represents Elvis's estate, which owns the name Elvis. And they said, you can't use the name Elvis for this beer. And if you do, we need a license fee for every can, case, bottle, keg that you, that you sell. So damn it, what we, what are we going to do here? So, undeterred, myself and Myron both legally changed our name to Elvis. I sent them a letter back asking for a license fee because they were using mine in Martin, now Elvis's name on all of their music. So I was legally Elvis for a week. My email address was elvisedudog.com. my grandmother hated it and insisted I change it back to back to James. But yeah, we legally changed her name to Elvis. Ended up in a court case in the uk. We won the court case. We were allowed to call it Elvis Juice and no license fee in the UK for this.
- [29:10]
John
Is the letter available in public domain? Because it's very funny.
- [29:13]
James Watt
The letter uses the name of pretty much every Elvis. All shook up.
- [29:21]
John
Yeah, the letter's conversation. Anyway, anyone listening and watching, go check that. Is the letter available to read?
- [29:27]
James Watt
It is. It's online. You can google it. But I think everything. So my, my hypothesis, like, every business gets the same amount of good luck and bad luck over the course of a decade. Every business gets the same amount of good takes and bad rakes over the course of a decade. And so many businesses when they get a bad break, they don't look at the possibility of like, how can we turn this on its head? How can we turn this into something that's positive for our business? And I often say the businesses I work with, like, the time to be worried is if no one is copying you, because if no one's copying you, you're doing nothing of value. So it's so we've had so many, forgive the pun, so many copycats kind of all the way through the journey. And a couple of years ago, Aldi, as they do, launched some fake beers. They had anti establishment IPA and punk IPA Blue. They had found lager packaged up like Lost Lager. They had Memphis Boulevard for kind of Elvis juice. They had a spin on Dead Pony Club, Dead Hamster Club or something. I don't know. So what do most companies do in that situation? They write a snarky legal letter to Aldi and hope that Aldi kind of stopped selling the beers. We thought, okay, let's kind of play them at their own game. We decided to make a fake Aldi beer. So we made a beer that looked. Used all their logos. We called it Aldipa. We launched it on our website. People went crazy for. I think we sold, like, half a million the first day of this fake Aldi beer that looked, like, perfect in all the Aldi colorways and logos. Aldi then got in touch and said, we actually love this. It's really cool. Can we list it in store? So the fake Aldi beer.
- [30:56]
John
The fake Aldi beer's in Aldi.
- [30:57]
James Watt
The fake Aldi beer is in Aldi. Will sell, I think, 5 or 6 million cans today of the fake Aldi beer. They ended up listing it in their Australian Aldi stores. They kind of loved it so much as well. And it's just like, something that most companies would see as a challenge, like, always try and, like, reimagine everything, like, try and find an opportunity where others can't. And that's what we did with that beer.
- [31:16]
John
I love that so much now. Occasionally it backfires, doesn't it?
- [31:19]
James Watt
Yes. Yes.
- [31:20]
John
Every now and then it backfires. The one. Sorry to bring this up. The one that as well.
- [31:25]
James Watt
The one. I mean, there's. There's a few. And, like, happy to speak about. Because, like, yeah, our strategy was we have got to push right up to that edge, and that's how we maximize our impact. And if that is your strategy, it's inevitable that sometimes you're going to go a little bit too far. Sometimes it's not going to work. And that definitely happened in the cage, too.
- [31:43]
John
So the golden cans.
- [31:45]
James Watt
Yes.
- [31:45]
John
Am I right in saying, did you have to buy them back and did you spend all that money like, I spent? So just describe what happened, because you get a big golden can. Promote Willy Wonka style. Willy Wonka golden cans.
- [31:58]
James Watt
Willy Wonka style golden can. We were so excited. People loved it. The golden cans looked absolutely amazing and we were moving at speed. I thought they were solid gold. They were plated gold. We actually put out across all of our social media channels, my social media channels. We put out about 25 posts and tweets about the gold cans. I think in two of those 25, I mistakenly said there were solid gold cans. 23, the post, totally fine. But in two of those, I said there were solid gold cans when they weren't solid gold cans. I said the value and the value is right. But I said there were solid gold when. So, honest mistake. I got mixed up with the supplier. It was a tiny amount of communication, but then we had people unhappy because, hey, these are not solid gold cans. So to make sure that people weren't unhappy, anyone who wasn't happy, I bought the gold can back from them. So I think I end up spending close to half a million pounds of my own money. And I've got.
- [32:54]
John
It's just personal money, as in your.
- [32:56]
James Watt
So I didn't want the company to lose out because of my mistake. I didn't want to impact team bonuses or other things. So personal money, half a million pounds. So I have got a cupboard in the office up in Scotland with a lot of gold cans that I own and don't know what to do with. But I felt so bad about the stake and I wanted to fix it myself. I think if you do make mistakes, you've got. You've got to own it, you've got to put your hands up. We've got our dap over the knuckles from the. From the esa. But I did make a mistake there. I said they were solid gold and they were plated as opposed to solid gold. So I did my best to fix that.
- [33:25]
John
That is an expensive tweet.
- [33:27]
James Watt
That is maybe one of the most expensive tweets of all time, like an expensive typo.
- [33:31]
John
Although it does remind me, you almost had an expensive bank fault, didn't you? As well, when you.
- [33:36]
James Watt
When.
- [33:37]
John
This is something I'd forgotten about. But when you sold a stake in the business, tsg, didn't the money go to the wrong account?
- [33:44]
James Watt
It was the longest four days of my life. So we sold the stake in our business to TSG in 2017. And it always been my goal to build a unicorn. Like all my heroes are kind of my business idols. Like, I wanted to build. Build a unicorn. That's what I was focused on. That's what I wanted to do. So it was a kind of big moment for me, like building. Building a unicorn. So we got a amazing valuation and as part of the deal, myself and Martin both got a chunk of cash, which was nice as well. So I got 50 million pound part of that. And up until then, no money at all to kind of speak of. So the money gets transferred into the lawyer's bank account. And then from the lawyer's bank account, it goes to my bank account. So my lovely assistants gave the lawyer our bank account details. That was Monday, Tuesday morning in the office, bright and early. And I'm kind of sitting there as you do. It's a bit cliche. Just kind of push and refresh the bank account. Like, I want to see what it looks like with these.
- [34:35]
John
It's not cliche. I'll be doing the same.
- [34:37]
James Watt
Refresh, refresh, refresh. And then like 10 o', clock, nothing there. Okay, the money's coming. Get to lunchtime. Okay, money's not coming all the way through the Tuesday, the money's not there. So I think, okay, it's a big sum of money, maybe it takes longer. Get to the office, half past seven Wednesday morning, get to nine o'. Clock. Okay, let's still money out there. Where the hell is this money? So get my assistant to contact the bank. And 10 minutes later the bank, the bank calls me and I instantly know something's wrong. Just with the kind of tone of the bank manager's voice. And he's like really solid. Sorry, Mr. Wat. The bank details that you gave us, you were one digit out. So the money has been sent not to your bank account, but to the bank account details that you've sent us. And then he said the sentence which is like burned into my memory. And just to manage your expectations, we're going to do all we can, but there's no guarantee we're going to be able to get this money back for you. And like, they just like picked me off, off the floor. It's like a decade of work. The thing that I wanted to achieve all my life, like financial security for like me and my family gone because of like one wrong digit in a bank transfer. I'm like, what? Like, surely you can get. He's like, no, you can't.
- [35:44]
John
And wasn't it a Russian bank it went to just to make it even more.
- [35:47]
James Watt
Yeah. So he said you verbally confirmed the bank details. I was like, where's the money? It's like it's got a bank account in the north of Russia. And it was like, can this get any worse? And he's like, we're going to do all we can. If the money is still in that bank account, there's a good chance we're going to be able to recover it. If the money has been moved on from that bank account, it's probably unlikely we're going to be able to get that money back. So then I spent that afternoon, speaking to various insurance companies, I was like, there's no insurance against this. You're household insurance for car insurance. Nobody's insurance. The bank are working. The bank are working. Thursday is just the longest day of my life. No updates for the bank. I phone them every hour. No updates. We're working on. No updates. We're working on it. And my attitude on Thursday night was like, fuck it, I'll just build something again. If it's gone, it's gone. Yeah, we'll just build something again. It was like the building it is the fun bit. We'll just do the fun bit again and see where we get to. And then Friday morning at 11:30, get a call for the bank. They'd managed to recover the funds and it was back in my bank account. But, yeah, absolutely insane. So now you can imagine how many times on every single bank transfer I check the digits are 100% accurate.
- [36:56]
John
It is a big lesson. Big, big lesson.
- [36:58]
James Watt
Obsess.
- [37:00]
John
All right, all right. Sorry to interrupt this conversation. I promise you it's for a good cause. So I've just put a rather large deposit down on a very big venue in central London called the Outernet that can hold 400 people. It's an amazing venue. Now we're going to be doing the very first uncensored cmo, the Calling. Now, what is the calling? The Calling is your opportunity to join us live and be inspired by the world's best founders, the most inspirational CMOs and the best thought leaders. This is one day that will completely transform your career. I promise it will be well worth it. I'm so excited to be doing this. And if you want to find out more details, please go to the Show Notes and check it out. And I really look forward to seeing you there. It's on the 21st of April. Do not miss it. Now, back to the show. Now, you talked a little bit about kind of leaders you admire in there. I know you're a prolific kind of reader of business books and, you know, in the short time we worked together, I remember you kind of, you know, sharing your insights and so on. What have been the business leaders or books that have had the biggest impression on you?
- [38:07]
James Watt
Yeah, amazing question. So the two, that's my kind of most gifted business books. One is the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. And I mean, the title tells you so much like building a business is tough. So many setbacks, so many kicks in the teeth, so many nos, so many rejections, so many sleepless nights. I mean, it is tough. And I think if it was easy, everyone would do it and success wouldn't mean anything. But it kind of puts the kind of toughness into perspective, gives you some great insights that I love. The hard thing about hard things. The other one that I gift most is by Sam Walton. Written in the 1970s, it's called Made in America. And it's the journey of early Walmart that he built from a single store. And it is a story of obsession, of being in the detail, of being focused on his people and about like an unrelenting mission to create something of scale. And he would spend so much of his days, he would just go to the warehouse and spend a day with the truck drivers. He would spend his Saturday and Sundays in the stores of his competitors. And I loved his insight when he visits competitor stores. And it's so easy as a business, every time you visit a competitor store just to pick out the negative things to make you feel good about yourself, just to be disparaging. He would go, he would take his team there. What can we learn from the store? We're not getting nitpick. The negative things, we're going to take the things that they do amazingly well and we're going to use that to make our own business better. He was once arrested in one of his competition stores for lying on the floor with a measuring tape measuring the distance between shelves to the inch and actually got arrested and kicked out. But that was the detail that he would go into. He also had an amazing quote which was share your profits with your people and you're going to achieve more than your wildest dreams. And that's where the kind of genesis of our profit share the Unicorn fund came from. But I just love Sam Walton's Made in America and I love Ben Horowitz is the hard thing about her.
- [39:54]
John
That's amazing. Actually, one book that probably made my top three or five, which always makes me think of you as well, is the founder's mentality. I don't know if you read that as well.
- [40:04]
James Watt
No, I haven't, no.
- [40:05]
John
Oh, you got to read it. So it's a couple of Bain consultants. They looked at founder led businesses versus management led businesses and they saw a wild difference between where founders are still in place versus where they hand over to management teams. And they conclude three things, right? They conclude basically frontline focus, which is exactly what you said. Distance, the customer, an owner's mindset, you take ownership for the action and insurgency, all of insurgency. And those three things. I think you're a perfect role model for those things. And that's had a massive impact on me. I think those. Maintaining those three things are absolutely critical in business. And you can see the difference between that kind of setup and a management one where it's all kind of committees and internal discussion and process and slowness and bureaucracy and all that kind of thing.
- [40:51]
James Watt
I mean, a startup, by default, nature, is a group of people who achieve something they've got no right to achieve. And they do that by working hard, being unconventional, finding insights that no one has, taking something new and fresh to the category. So. And Ryan Chesky's got this kind of great insight for this confounder, Airbnb. So that's like climbing a mountain. It's very, very difficult to climb that mountain. So why get to the top of the mountain and replace the people that are going to climb the mountain, which is like the incredibly difficult thing to do.
- [41:20]
John
Yeah. I mean, what are your feelings about, you know, you've handed over the reins. What are your feelings about that? Because you are. You and Brewdog are so the same thing, aren't you?
- [41:31]
James Watt
Do you know what I mean?
- [41:32]
John
Because you've also had your personal brand and the brand brand are kind of the same thing, aren't they? How do you feel about that moment where you kind of hand the reins over?
- [41:40]
James Watt
Conflicted. I mean, yes, conflicted. But I got to the point and I ran it as CEO for 17 years. And like, 17 years, especially when you count time in dog years, it's a long time to do something. And I love business. I'm obsessed with business. I love Dude, I love the mission, the people, the locations, the beers, like, what we're building. I love everything about the business. But also I always had in mind for myself that I want to challenge myself to build multiple businesses over the course of my career. And for me, the hallmark of an amazing entrepreneur is someone who can not just build one amazing skill business, but who can build multiple. And I just got to that point, where am I going to be 17, 20, 25, 30 years running the same business, which I love and I would happily do, or do I want to start things from scratch, see if I can, like, challenge myself to build other other things. And like, I love. I love building. And for me, there's such a difference between building a business and running and managing a business, which at the time, with 4,000 people. And it's a very different skill set, It's a very different mindset. So again, it's something I thought so long and harder, but I wanted to get back in, back into to build mode. And I'm still a director, I still work with through like still love, love, love the business. But I wanted to, I wanted to scratch that itch. And after 17 years of kind of running a big business, I wanted to work into buildmoto.
- [43:04]
John
And if you were to look back at your. Because the other thing, you know, I observed as well is you were growing a business at an incredible rate of knots and you talked about 4,000 people, right? So instant two guys and a dog and then you end up leading 4,000 people. What are the leadership lessons in terms of how you then manage the, the scale compared to the startup phase?
- [43:23]
James Watt
And I mean the speed of the scale at which we do was insane. So we broke the record for being on the Sunday times fast track 100 list of fastest growing companies in the UK for the most consecutive years. So the kind of growth that we had is almost kind of unprecedented and that gives amazing opportunity for team members, but it also, it is chaos, like to double and double and double and double. And I think one of the insights was a lot of people kind of joined the business and expected steady state parks and working environment when this was like a big, scrappy, chaotic startup. And kind of somehow their expectations didn't quite match what the reality was in our, in our business. And that journey, that environment just wasn't for everyone. And I think for me, the people side has always been like phenomenal because like we love our team. We always thought their kind of destiny is determined by how well we look after the fantastic people in our business. And we try to do amazing things like share profits and give shares to team. I give a chunk of my equity in the business to the team. We love to promote people internally, we love to build fantastic careers. But at the same time, like over the course of 17 years, have I got every decision right? Absolutely not. Have I made mistakes? Absolutely. Have I made a lot of mistakes when it comes to kind of people in leadership? Yes. And I think every leader makes mistakes. The kind of hallmark of a good one is what do you learn from them? What do you put in place, kind of how, how do you move on? And at times I hired way too many people that just didn't need because I thought, okay, the way to get us from 250 million to 400 million is with this accomplished, experienced management team. But the business, and you were part of this, that just didn't work in our culture, that didn't work in our business, that wasn't compatible with how we were building things and I think a mistake that I made was kind of looking to change out some of the team to get us to the next level when I would have been far better. Just like, if you're doing it 70% a year, why do you need to change anything? Just. Just keep doing that. And I think it was turmoil for the people underneath the people who come in. I think it was turmoil for the people who come in. I was like so obsessed with control and everything that I wasn't prepared to give those individuals the kind of autonomy to do their jobs. Like definitely kind of mistakes and in learnings on, on, on that side. And I think my kind of key takeaway from kind of leadership and one thing that I learned was got to lead with a fight. And I think one of the things that can help make me become a better leader wasn't just telling people, this is, this is what we're going to do and we've got to this. It's making sure they know why, how does it help the company, how does it help them, how does it help their career development? Okay, this is going to be difficult, but this is what it means for what we can build for the mission. This is why we're, why we're doing this thing. So the kind of note that I always give, give is a. Never ask someone to do something that I'm not prepared to do and help with myself, but always let them know, like, this is why, this is the context and, and just over communicate the. Like, this is why that's important and this is why we're doing this.
- [46:08]
John
Yeah. The other thing that strikes me about you as well is you, your. Your business journey played out in public in a way that it doesn't for lots of CEOs. Right. Because you were early on Twitter.
- [46:19]
James Watt
Yeah.
- [46:19]
John
You know, you got a level of fame yourself personally as well as a business kind of thing, and that kind of made you a target at times.
- [46:25]
James Watt
Yeah. I mean, it's crazy.
- [46:27]
John
I mean, you've had, you've had BBC programs, you know, written about you and this kind of thing. How has that experience been? Cause like that's. Not many people have to face that level of public scrutiny and challenge and exposure.
- [46:39]
James Watt
It's insane. I mean, anyone who knows me and is close to me knows how ridiculous the whole thing is as well. And it's like you just kind of got to laugh because it's like the one recently and had such a terrible relationship with UK media. There was 27 different headlines saying, I ran up 150,000 pound bar tab during my stag party. I didn't have a stag party and I've never spent more than £1,000 in a bar tab. But this is like what's the media? So it's just like the gap between reality and that public perception. I mean it's tough, it's challenging and for me there's always things that you can control and things that you can't control. So it's just kind of double down, tune it out, focus on what we're doing and focus on what we can control. But I mean it's definitely incredibly tough just to read all these things about yourself that are just completely fictitious.
- [47:24]
John
Yeah. And it can be energy sapping, it can distract you from the mission. It has huge consequences. I mean, talking about kind of public Persona, of course it's a beautiful opportunity to move on to what you're doing now. Of course, since you left there because you started up a new business, haven't you as well. Tell me where that idea came from because there's a nice thread, isn't it, to community and how you built the kind of brewdog presence.
- [47:45]
James Watt
So first and foremost just frustrated with where marketing is today and how most companies do marketing. So I think if we look at a few things, look at advertising, the premise behind advertising hasn't changed in over 100 years. It's a one to many approach. Companies spend a lot of money to get hundreds of thousands of views on a thing to hope that something sticks across these kind of mega networks. Now that maybe worked 10, 20, 30 years ago. Now we see anywhere between 4,000 and 10,000 adverts a day. People have become numb. It just the ad block they strip by, it's bots, it's scroll by. So people are still spending so much money on advertising when advertising has lost efficacy. So that's one bucket, bucket number two, online advertising. I think so many companies are way too focused on bottom of the funnel and bottom of the funnel exclusively. And I get that activeness. You can measure it so you can tell the cfo, look, we've spent this and we've got this out, which keeps the CFO happy, which other marketing activities, you know, half your market and budget's wasted, you just don't know which half. But that's led to a position where in this kind of quest for accountability and efficiency, so many companies are spending more and more money in bottom of the funnel and they're spending more and more money to acquire poorer quality customers and they're deploying their budgets. Exactly. The Same way other companies are, which means you can't get a competitive advantage. So frustrated at companies are just so focused on paying to acquire customers. And then if you look at influencer, my lovely wife, God bless her, is not only an influencer, but has an influencer agency. Now influencer is always going to be important, but for me, influencer now plays like advertising. It's lost the kind of magic, the authenticity. People know. They probably don't use that toothpaste, they probably don't use that skin care, they probably don't wear those clothing items. So it gives you visibility, it gives you like this kind of aspirational view. Is it important? Yes. But it's paid media, it's advertising, it kind of goes in the same bucket. So I was frustrated with all of those things. We've got 50% of purchase intent due to come from social media by 2030. So social media is so key. But the brands just don't have enough high quality tools to use in the social media space. And for me, that foundational belief, consumer brand engagement, community, everything comes back to the customer. So social tip. We turn a company's everyday customers into their market and team, we democratize influence. So it doesn't matter if you've got 200 followers in a private account. If you post about a brand you love, you earn money when you post. Business has been live for 16 weeks. We've just passed 75,000 users. We've got brands like Cafe Nero, Nestresso, Marks and Spencer's, Iceland on the beach holidays and some amazing brands using the platform. And the results are absolutely fantastic. And it's a paying customer who buys a product from you at full price, posting. The average reward they get for posting is about £5. So we turned your customers into your most effective growth channel. And for me, the advertising model of one to many is dead. It is all about peer to peer, human to human, strand to strand, trust used to live in these mega networks, it now lives in these tight networks which we help brand owners access in an authentic way.
- [50:53]
John
So just play this out. So I'm getting my regular iced caramel latte from Caffeinero, which is true, actually, that happens.
- [51:00]
James Watt
Love Caffeinero.
- [51:00]
John
Indeed. So if I was to do a little post going, here's me on my daily commute, here's me with my Caffeinera ice caramel latte, big shout out to Pedro at the train station, that would get paid, that would get paid to do something that I might do anyway.
- [51:17]
James Watt
You would get paid to do that. And for us, that kind of genuine, authentic recommendation from a customer is more important than an advert, is more important than a kind of influencer post. Somebody is eight times more likely to buy something if they see a post from someone they know. Now, you're a bit different here because you're almost kind of influencer now with the podcast and platform. But this is designed for everyday people, everyday customers, when they share something they love, they get paid for posting.
- [51:43]
John
That's so simple as well, isn't it?
- [51:45]
James Watt
It's so simple. So when I had that idea for the business, I wasn't excited about it at all because I thought, this is so simple. Surely someone has done this, surely someone has built this. Then the more restarts that I did, the more excited I got when I realized, hey, wait a second, nobody's done this, nobody's built this before.
- [52:01]
John
And how are you going to protect that idea? Because presumably the social platforms themselves could do that. Could they? Could they try and copy it or.
- [52:07]
James Watt
Yeah, I mean, we work across different platforms so people can post on Instagram or Twitter. We've now got this amazing community of kind of 75,000. It's growing by between kind of 500 and 1,000 per day. And I think we work with the platforms, it's kind of more content for them, it's UGC for the businesses. So the partners aren't also own the ugc. So what does social tip do for a brand owner? So if you're a CMO, why should you care? 100 thousands of views of authentic UGC for way, way cheaper than an ad to. We're an authentic content factory for your business. So you own the ugc, you can use it across your channels, but you can also see what's performed best when the customer's posted. So if you're picking UGC to use, you can see what's done best based on the kind of engagement on that. We also get amazing data and insight into the customers, what are they buying, how they spending their money, and it comes back to that community piece as well. So weaved in your community closer to you. And if somebody is a perfect TED customer, a Strip customer, a Dash customer, Marks and Spencer's customer, and you've put five or ten pounds in their pocket, they feel so good about supporting your business as well because that's going to help that bond.
- [53:16]
John
That's a nice payback as well, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, you're right. Because then they might go and spend it in ms, right?
- [53:22]
James Watt
Yeah, exactly.
- [53:23]
John
Spend my tip on you know, something for Christmas or whatever.
- [53:26]
James Watt
Yeah. If nobody believes adverts, if nobody believes influencers, who do they believe? They believe people they know, their friends, their family. That's kind of close, tight knit networks and everyone has got, has got influence. So it's like the democratization of influence. You don't need to have tens of thousands of followers to be able to earn money. When you post about.
- [53:45]
John
It's the OG marketing of word of mouth, isn't it? It's the most fundamental human kind of.
- [53:50]
James Watt
Word of mouth and for me, word of mouth is the best, the purest form of marketing. And as everything's gone online, people have forgotten about word of mouth. And yet you're 100% right. This is word of mouth, digital and scalable. And it's that simple. It's just scalable, digital, word of mouth.
- [54:07]
John
Now I love what you said earlier. You talked about your Buddha experience. You're setting up social tip and your mission is to be a prolific entrepreneur and build things right. So someone listening, they've got a business idea. By the way, you must get pitched all the time, right? Surely.
- [54:22]
James Watt
I get pitched in the street, I get pitched in the coffee shop, get pitched in the, pitched in the, in the bar. We're like walking about in Camden and somebody was pitching me a new toothpaste a few nights ago, which is kind of fun. But I love, love investing. I've got a portfolio of about 20 small, disruptive, kind of start up consumer goods companies I invest in. I love working with founders and it's something I'm very passionate about.
- [54:42]
John
So advice to somebody pitching, right? So you're looking at an investment, you're an investor yourself, what do you look for?
- [54:49]
James Watt
I love investing in things that I would buy or use myself. I think having built a unicorn in the consumer space, I'm well placed to identify those intangible elements of kind of brand magic that you need. So like the brand needs to be incredibly strong. But this is 80% the mentality of the founder. Like most businesses fail. They fail because the founder isn't resilient, tenacious, determined enough. And it's easy to be on amazing forum when everything's going well. What determines the people who win and the people who don't win? How are you when the chips are down, when your back's against the wall, when everything is going wrong? So 80% of what I look for is the kind of mental tenacity of the founder because that's what's going to ultimately determine where the business goes.
- [55:35]
John
James, that's amazing advice. I genuinely would love to keep talking all day about this and thank you. I know I probably covered about 10% of the things I was going to cover, but I know times against us. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your wisdom. It's great to connect again. And yeah, it's good to see you.
- [55:50]
James Watt
Doing well and I started first sacking you.
- [55:52]
John
Well, thank you. Yes, it all worked out very well. Cheers. John James, thank you. So I hope you enjoy that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it. Now, by the way, I've got a new newsletter so if you'd like to get my thoughts on the one thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter letter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast just launched, Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Corey Marchisoto. She is one of the world's best CMOS. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that it's in your feed. Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast, it would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time.
- [56:46]
James Watt
I guess you get asked a lot.
- [56:47]
John
Like what would you do with a beer or drinks brand?
- [56:50]
James Watt
Now I think drinks wise, there's space for something to be disruptive and premium in the lager space. So if I was starting a beer business just now, what would I do? I would do amazing, amazing lager. But it was kind of focused on the freshness and like freshness is so, so important for beer. So something that was like chilled all the way, something at a four week shelf life in something that was kind of premium and disruptive and different. Like that beer is like more like milk than people think. And like all of our beers are at their best within the first four weeks. But because we play, because we've now got such a skilled business and we're in supermarkets and stuff, we can't really, hey, like we need, this needs to be called and this needs to be consumed in four weeks. But if I was, if I was starting a beer stand again, I would do that. I would have cans coming straight off the cannon line and the cans come off the can line at 0 degrees and put them into insulated cold boxes and they would go straight for the cannon line, get a postage label stuck on the top of them and be in the customer's house within 24 hours, they'd stay cold in this box. So what is the customer getting? The customer is getting beer less than 48 hours. It's cold the whole way. With a four week shelf life, by the way.
- [57:58]
John
Interestingly, like in the, in the time we did spend together, that's what struck me the most, was your obsession with freshness and like drone deliveries within a sort of radius of. And that's the thing I got obsessed about. And your kit that measured the kind of quality all that thing is that make freshness a differentiator, basically, like fresh milk. You all know that milk's much better on day one than day ten, right? Just make it the same thing.