Screw It Just DO It with Alex Chisnall

"The minute the website launched, two days later, we had an order for 20,000 and that was very much the pivot because that became very full-time, very quickly. Emile and I were both in the kitchen all day, every day for about 3 months, and in the evenings to keep our cash flow afloat we were working as Secret Cinema selling the gummies, with the help of a couple of friends. It was this very vicious cycle of wake up, make, pack, go to an event, be back at 1 am, do the same thing, until we could get the 20,000 out and then we could structure what the business would look like." On today's show, I chat to Melanie Goldsmith, Founder of Smith & Sinclair, founders of the World's first alcoholic sweets and the UK's first edible fragrance. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, Melanie has won Natwest's 'Every Woman' award in 2018 and has also been a winner at the National Business Women's awards and The Great British Entrepreneur awards as well. Smith & Sinclair are the founders of the alcoholic gummy and are on a mission to make 'adulting', as they say, more fun. They create innovative products and experiences that range from patented alcoholic cocktail gummies through to effervescent tablets you can drop into prosecco and turn into a mind-blowing cocktail. What started out as an ice-breaker for events has scaled to a lucrative 500% growth trajectory and ambitious plans to launch in the US by the end of the year. Pretty incredible story, I hope you're going to enjoy this interview as much as I did. I met Melanie back in 2015 at a Virgin party and she has no recollection of me being in the photo booth with her, she probably thinks I had far too many of their alcoholic sweets.  Anyway, more information about their story and about all things #Screwitjustdoit, including our upcoming 3rd birthday party which we're celebrating with a live event and some very special friends, head on over to the Facebook page for #Screwitjustdoit and you'll be fully up to date.

Successful entrepreneurs F.O.C.U.S Follow One Course Until Successful. If you're anything like the typical entrepreneur then you've got more ideas than you know what to do with. The problem can be that we get distracted by shiny new objects and are forever not following our original business idea through to it's logical and successful conclusion. We're forever launching new products and services, or even a new startup business or three. On this week's solo episode I want to talk you through a useful exercise to get clear on your your one big idea. We'll work through what you're passionate about, and what skills you have acquired - and exactly where the two merge and result in your potential one big idea. We'll then list out the pro's and con's of each potential big idea to find out which one of these is going to be Your Big Idea, generate income for you and be the one that you F.O.C.U.S Let's StartUp!

"America has the bones of many British businesses, strewn across it, failed British businesses...because at that stage when he was doing business, it was a massive logistical challenge but obviously these days with technology it's been made a lot easier. We were talking to people and they were saying "well, it's going to start with a four", as in, four-hundred thousand dollars, it'll be 50% bonus on that number and what we worked out was you weren't guaranteed to get someone very good for that amount of money. It's not very difficult for a company to get rid of someone after working for them for 15 years, with two weeks notice, that's the type of thing that will happen. Sometimes, you'll hear people that have been in the US, they'll say things like "it was kind of different because we'd have lots of meetings and everyone smiled and said lots of positive things and then nothing happened" and he decided that he would Air BnB when he first got there, so, he Air BnB'd for a couple of months and he chose Harlem and he didn't leave his apartment at night for 3 months because it was too terrifying. Then in the first year, we did $2million of sales, that was pretty clear then that it was a big opportunity." We all know that the transatlantic trading relationship is one of the most successful on Earth and everyday goods services worth millions of pounds are exported and imported across the Atlantic. Thousands of British and US firms have already invested in, or are finding their way towards, successful transatlantic growth. So British American Business have put together a series of events titled 'Accelerate' which showcases a business and invites other businesses with similar growth aspirations to listen, to ask questions and to learn, to enable them to accelerate their own growth.  In the first of these events, I chatted to Richard Townsend, Co-Founder and CEO of Circus Street, an online school which teaches companies how to do business in a digital world and upskills teams at scale. Richard believes we're just at the very start with what is possible when combining technology and education. I spoke to him about the realities and pitfalls of expanding and transforming businesses across the Atlantic. In this episode, we talk about: talent, and how to obtain it facetime, meeting people 121 product, and ensuring yours in the best in its class and referrals, making sure that you're maximising every opportunity You'll also briefly hear from Emanuel Adam, he's Executive Director and Director of Policy & Trade at British American Business, who are the leading authority in the UK for transatlantic trade.  

What's the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unecessary? In episode #126 I talk about the one thing that stands between you and your goals. The one thing is about getting extraordinary results in every situation.  No matter how success is measured, only the ability to dismiss distractions and concentrate on your one thing stands between you and your goals. The one thing is about getting extraordinary results in every situation. Having just re-read the awesome book 'The One Thing' by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan for the umpteenth time, I thought it about time to share it, and my thoughts with you. This one is the Game-Changer. Let's StartUp!

"When we sold that business we actually retired. We went on this phenomenal holiday to Thailand and Malaysia for 6 weeks but after a matter of days, we were both really bored. We were in the pool in Malaysia and we just said "look, we know, we've got to do Grenade now" and the rest is history. It was meant to be a hobby, we were meant to be able to do it from wherever we were in the World but it very quickly turned into an obsession. This isn't a sob story...Grenade was our baby." Really enjoyed this chat with Juliet Barratt, Co-Founder of sports nutrition brand Grenade. They launched during the last recession during 2009/2010 with just £27 in the bank then sold for £72 million to Lion Capital last year. Juliet left as of the 1st January and she's now doing a lot of giving back, working with the Princes's Trust, Virgin Unite, working with some start-ups as well. Whereas her husband and Co-Founder Alan is still the CEO of Grenade. Grenade has over 50 staff, it retails in more than 80 countries around the World, is a market-leading sports performance and acting nutrient brand, incorporating a wide range of innovative high-protein and low-sugar products. They've been named as one of the UK's fastest growing companies and have been featured in the Sunday Times Fast Track Top 100 many, many times. What's the secret to their success? Well, you'll have to listen to this episode to find out. Things that we talk about include: timing, why there is never a perfect time to launch a new business brand, making yours distinctive and memorable investment, with connections recruitment, with longevity in mind partners, and working with yours and also, pink Grenades I start up by asking Juliet why she decided to start a business, what her motivation was, and where they think they could have taken this brand from day one.

On a personal level my why is to provide better opportunities and a better life for my two girls. On a wider level still, its to help everybody live the life that they want. On their own terms. To be in control of their destiny. If they so choose. I guess you could call it a Screw it, Just Do it attitude. One of the challenges that we have is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get our voices heard above the noise that's out there on social media. Did you know that there are now more than  2,000,000,000 websites 2,000,000,000 Facebook Users 500,000,000 Linkedin Users 500,000,000 Blogs, 260,000,000 Twitter Users 111,000,000 Instagram Users 23,000,000 Youtube channels Yet only 550,000 podcasts... You can see where I'm going with this one so I'll let you finish the sentence. Creating and growing this podcast has completely changed both my business and personal life. And it's also the fastest growing form of media. I believe there's a massive opportunity here for you. In the same way that everyone was told that they had to have a website, a blog, join social media, create an app...the next big opportunity lies in business owners starting their own podcast. So I've put together a completely FREE book which you can download called the Podcasting Secrets Blackbook which you can download from:https://screwitjustdoitacademy.com/squeeze-pagecmodczmo It will help you:   🎧 Understand the technology and tools needed - I'm a not a techie so if I can do it..ANYONE can 🎧 How you can use podcasts to promote you and your business 🎧 How to actually record and publish a podcast - again far easier than you think 🎧 The Do's and Don't when it comes to podcasting -from someone who's already made all the mistakes for you - me!   What else would you be like to learn about when creating, growing and monetising a podcast? Let me know if I can help 🤨   ⬇️Let me know by emailing alex@screwitjustdoitacademy.com ⬇️

"Instagram's actually terrible at connecting people in the offline world. And, it really is a photo contest. It doesn't really matter how knowledgable you are or how qualified you are as long as you're taking nice pictures, that's how you're going to grow your influence, and so we're basically saying "look this is total BS", on myCrew, we're championing people of influence versus "influencers". We're saying, on myCrew, you're going to build the real influence and the more you do, the more sessions you host, the more people you attract and the more sign-ups you get, and actually, people showing up, the more prominent and influence you're going to get on our platform. And that's a pretty powerful sale for the people we want to attract." On today's show, I welcome Greg Drach, Co-Founder of the world's first social platform for fitness, myCrew.  myCrew was created by the brains behind the world's largest social running club, Midnight Runners, and global internet phenomenon Dubsmash. Having witnessed both the transformative power of social running and technology's ability to connect and unite, Greg, along with Christian Dörffer and Daniel Taschik, decided to bring something different to the fitness scene. Now, the app, which is available from both Apple and GooglePlay stores initially launched in London with 5,000 active users. With myCrew, you'll select your city (with new ones being added regularly) and immediately have access to locally-hosted runs, workouts and more. Once you sign up for an activity, you can chat with those attending, organise the details and get ready to move. Greg's now based in Venice Beach in the States and he told me how he believes in the power of running to motivate, to connect and inspire people.  On today's show, the two of us talk about: Accountability Reinventing your Social Circle Where to connect with like-minded people online How to build influence However, we start up with Greg telling me how he came up with the idea for myCrew.

"The January rush happens, every year, in February, people are giving up. How do we fix that problem? Using these 3 things that we've identified, how do we apply that to a product that can tackle that particular industry?  "All of us have jumped on planes and lived overseas and started other companies. Once you've got that passion and bug to try and do something that you really enjoy, it's difficult to put that down when you've really got that great idea, or you think you've got that great idea and trying to deliver it. "I think there's going to be more innovation in the next 3 years in the fitness sector than we've had in the last 30 years. A lot of the stuff that Dan mentioned, Sammi mentioned, technology, it's all coming to a head now and it's going to create some incredible businesses. And I do think there will be a Netflix of fitness, a platform that will be as familiar as Spotify, Uber, Netflix in the fitness sector and we hope we're that platform but there are some other great companies out there who are building some really interesting businesses as well." I really enjoyed chatting to all three of the Fiit founders (Ian McCaig, Sammi Adhami & Daniel Shellard) at their very futuristic studios in Stratford, former Olympic Park in London. We shared a love of fitness, we all attended University at Bath at some point in our lives, so we certainly weren't struggling for conversation. Plus, with Richard Reed on their board of Directors, we had something in common again having featured Richard on this show.  Thus far, they've had over 100,000 downloads of their fitness app 'Fiit', and over 5,000 5-star reviews. They've got fitness influencers like Matt Roberts and Chessie King taking their classes alongside ambassadors such as Fearne Cotton and Binky Felstead. So they're certainly set up for success.  Now, with Fiit, the three of them are trying to solve the fitness industries age-old problem of customer retention. They're taking three fitness trends, fitness influencers and their impact on the industry, think, Joe Wicks and his impact, they're taking hardware and software to gamify your experience, think Peloton or Zwift, and they're taking the rise in boutique fitness, think Barry's Bootcamp or 1Rebel. Now, combine all this with the timing of the technology available, we're taking streaming, 5G coming and they've got a really interesting story to tell. On this episode, we talk: Scaling at speed Customer retention, Building a community Laser Focus Client Avatars. But I start off by asking how the three of them came together to found Fiit...Let's StartUp!

"I love performing but actually, I'm overcoming it now, but I really freeze up and get nervous when I have to talk in public. I like the idea of a performance speech to the public but the free, off-the-cuff, point a camera at me, I just don't become myself. When I performed at the Opera House, you can't see the audience, nice big spotlight, only child here got to be a princess for 13 years, when I wasn't being all the other hilarious roles.    Pietra quite often says to me "I know you want to go to Mars but we've only got the petrol to get to the moon".   I always hated it, I always hated performance. I think that it takes a long time for people to realise what their strengths are.   Ella took me to see a concert of Ladysmith Black Mambazo at Cadogan Hall and that was just amazing but we could see a gap at that moment to fill and it had never been done before so there was no challenge at that point for us, we were just so committed that it was a project that lasted five years for us. It had a setback, it had a pilot phase where it wasn't excepted and carried on, we wanted to do it ourselves and at that point, it grew and then had different challenges again.   We were working on Inala, Ella composed the music with Ladysmith Black Mambazo who Nelson Mandela took to collect his Noble Peace Prize, the legends. She sat around a piano, in South Africa and we took ourselves off there to start this project and she sat at the piano, surrounded by nine Zulu men, at the grand age of 22, and just played her music and they co-wrote five songs in that short time that we came back with and presented to the Director of the Royal Ballet.   He (Adam) sent me a message "Congratulations, that's amazing! The Grammy nominations!" And he text me a screenshot of the nominations that had just been announced and we had been nominated for a Grammy award."   Welcome to episode #121 of #Screwitjustdoit. On today's show, it's my pleasure to welcome the Sisters Grimm, that's Ella Spira and Pietra Mello-Pittman.   I'm all for taking #Screwitjustdoit in different directions, shining a light on different industries, different businesses and this is very much the case with Sisters Grimm.   I attended a British-American Business Christmas lunch, back in December, and I was sat at a table sponsored by Virgin Atlantic Delta and sat right next to me was Pietra and Ella. We got talking and I literally spent the entire Christmas lunch enthralled by an amazing business that they'd put together which is just celebrating 10 years and I thought this would be a fantastic subject for the show.   So, who are Sisters Grimm, what do they do? They're two of the UK's most exciting and successful, original theatre-show producers. They're best known for a fusion of the legendary sound of the African male choral group, Ladysmith Black Men Bazoo, with ballet, to create the Grammy Award-nominated show, Inala.   So Inala sold out the Edinburgh festival, the UK tour performed five times in Moscow at the famous Chekhov international theatre festival, returned to the UK for a sell-out tour at Sadler's Wells. In fact, I believe they sold something crazy 80,000 tickets - think of Wembley and you get an idea of the number of people who have been to this show and they're back again for a very limited run in the West End from April the 30th this year as well.    The music from the show, which Ella composed alongside Ladysmith, was released separately and won a Grammy nomination and then they went on, Ladysmith, to win a Grammy award.    The ladies have been to the Grammys, they've also been to the Royal Variety Show alongside the likes of Ed Sheeran, Shirley Bassey, Simon Cowell etc.  Ella has worked with the likes of Bruno Mars, remixing in his music, and David Arnold, the composer of several of the James Bond scores. Whereas Pietra has danced all the classic ballets as a royal ballet ballerina and her ability as a choreographer and creative director has helped the duo win a 'woman of the future' nomination for arts and culture.    They're celebrating 10 years as the Sisters Grimm, an incredible story spanning many different continents, just been up for an export champion award as well, looking at China, Japan and Dubai this year but they are back in the UK for a limited time   I'm going to start off by asking Pietra to explain exactly who the Sisters Grimm are and what they do and the obvious question, of course, about where that name came from.    Let's start up!    

On today's show, I welcome Timothy Armoo, the 24-year-old CEO and co-founder of Fanbytes, a mobile video advertising platform helping brands like Warner, Apple Music and Sony reach teams through Snapchat and TikTok influencers.  Fanbytes' campaigns have seen then featured in Forbes, Huffington Post and The Times, to name but a few, with Forbes describing them as 'rewriting the rules of social for generation z'.  Fanbytes is Tim's third company, having started his first company at just 14 and selling his second company at just 17.   So, a big challenge for any marketing team for a brand is reaching and engaging with their target audience. More challenging still, is trying to figure out who is that audience is.    Fanbytes, with its exceptional understanding of generation z, tells brands who they should be marketing to and how they should be doing it.   Snapchat is the platform of choice, along with TikTok, through which search Fanbytes distributes its client's videos ensuring maximum engagement through targeting the right people at the right time.   So, the idea for Fanbytes came to Tim in his cousin's bedroom. He noticed he was always buying lots of new hats and trainers and wondered what motivated him to buy them. His cousin said that YouTube personalities were his inspiration and that's where the idea for Fanbytes came from. They're a company that helps brands to collaborate with influencers, such as those on YouTube.   Tim wanted to build a new advertising offering for the 21st century that will help brands to collaborate with online stars and personalities     A big part of what they do is data, so they built an algorithm that will enable them to measure the influence of the influencers, to see who was perfect for each brand's campaign. More importantly still, they used it to match influencers with brands.   With data being at the heart of everything they do, the strength of the data set up within their USP, and with other similar players in the market, they needed to differentiate themselves. So, they've done that with their real-time data analytics platform which enables them to measure their campaigns in a way that nobody else can.   So, I really enjoyed going up to London meeting Tim at Fanbytes HQ. I found him incredibly knowledgeable, very charismatic and I think you, the #Screwitjustdoit listener, will find this a really interesting and really relevant chat, especially if you are looking to market and to do business with millennials. We talked about many, many things including opportunities in underserved markets. We talked about opportunities which live in university, or outside university education, opportunities outside of people being inherently lazy and businesses being inherently lazy.   I think that you're really going to enjoy this one, let's StartUp!   "So I'm going to say something which might offend some people but I think it's just real talk. At Fanbytes we help brands to distribute their videos on social, so brands come to us because they're trying to reach and engage communities, specifically on Snapchat, Instagram or TickTock and we build these communities and these influencer networks for us to be able to reach an audience in a very specific targeted way. We work with the Kardashians, for example, they come to us to help them promote their show... like it's the Kardashians, that's pretty interesting. The thing is, most brands are lazy. In fact, most people, in general, are lazy. People are inherently lazy. "Can you take that piece of content and use the exact same thing on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitch, Tumblr and TickTock"...like yeah OK, cool. But, if you can essentially change that, that's where you can build something of significant value.   All these numbers are just banded about. I think recently I saw someone describe themselves as a 'nano-influencer' with 0 to 2,000 followers, like, Jesus Christ.   Fundamentally, Amazon is essentially like an online Argos, like an online catalogue. I think the mediums may increase but the fundamentals of marketing still stay the same.   I am not ashamed to say I started solely with the purpose of making money. I was a 17-year-old living in a council estate and I had just really started to discover the power of the internet. To me, this is my way out of being poor."