E1: Sacrifice, Work/Life Balance & Purpose

[Käätö] Kun häljö katoa, on helpompi keskittyä olennaseen. Siihen mikä vie minua eteenpäin. Kun markkinat heilupat, Nordea Private Pankingin asiantuntemus ja oma sijoitusjohtaja, niin toovat selkeyttä kohina keskelle. Siksi valit sen kumppaniin, joka vie minut askelee edelle. Nordea Pisterfi, kautta Private Pankin. Olen Shannon Maldonado, käsintehtyjä artesaanitua teitä myyvän jauji-lahiakaupan perustaja. Valit sen Shopify, koska alustoja testa testani totesin sen ehdottomasti yhdeksi helpokäyttöisimmistä alustoista. Minulla oli tärkeää pohtia kehittymistämme tulevaisuudessa. Kaikki myyntiin tarvittava työkaluut, kuten varaston suunnittelu ovat kätävästi dashboardissä. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu Shopify piste komsi-ustolla. [Musiikkia] Say here's a thing. A few years ago, I was a broke university dropout living in one of the worst parts of the country, alone with nothing but a laptop in a dream. Fast forward a few years, I'm the 25 year old CEO of one of the UK's fast-disgrowing companies and most exciting and that company is called social chain. My world is intense, sometimes crazy, always challenging and always unpredictable. This podcast is simple. Every Sunday, I'm going to share my personal diary with you, and I want to give you an insight into what it's like behind the scenes, being an entrepreneur, the deep dark thoughts that nobody else will share with you, and anything else that's playing on my mind. This is not scripted, this is off the top of my head, and this is direct from my diary. This is the diary of a CEO, I'm Stephen Bartlett, I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Okay, because this is chapter one, I thought the most sensible place to start was with the question, what does it take to be a CEO and what is it like being a CEO or an entrepreneur? And in popular culture, it's been incredibly glamorised. There's been movie upon movie upon movie, which illustrate the plight of a CEO of being, I guess, initially quite tough, but then guaranteed success, riches, partying and happy endings, and that's fundamentally incorrect. And I see this image of what it's like to be an entrepreneur really guiding a lot of people astray, but also leading a lot of people that aren't equipped and aren't fully aware into the lifestyle of being an entrepreneur. And I think much of the reason why I want to do this podcast is to answer some of the questions and to debunk some of the misconceptions about what it takes. I think the first thing that you have to be prepared for, if you want to be an entrepreneur or a CEO, is immense sacrifice. And when I say sacrifice, I don't mean giving up your weekends or not watching that football match. I mean transforming your life fundamentally and sending it in a different direction. I mean five years of uncertainty, pain, immense loneliness, losing relationships of people that you really, really cared about, not being able to form new relationships. And when you do losing those relationships too, because you're just too consumed and you're living your whole life in your head, I mean financial sacrifices. I mean every type of sacrifice imaginable. And those are the sacrifices that I went through and many of those sacrifices I continue to go through in order to fulfill my duties of being a CEO. And as the company grew and we got to the point where we have hundreds of people in the teams, my reason for that sacrifice has changed. I now feel personally responsible for hundreds of people's lives. And that makes me sacrifice more but sacrifice much easier than I ever did before. Being an entrepreneur involves immense sacrifice. I think in the initial stages, you really are saying, I'm willing to give up everything that I am right now in order for this thing that I want to be. And I think that's the most important question to ask yourself, is how bad do you want to be that person? How bad do you want that life? And how bad do you want to be an entrepreneur or a CEO? Because you've got to want it more than you want everything you have right now. Because for the next year, two years, three years, as you embark on your journey, you're probably going to have to sacrifice everything you are to become that thing. And I did. I sacrifice being a very sociable young man that was having fun to going in the complete opposite direction, living in the worst, my opinion, the worst area in Manchester with absolutely no money. And many weekends I would leave my house dressed as smart as I possibly could dress in the search for some food left somewhere by somebody. And that often meant going in takeaways at one point. And my very lowest it meant going into shops and taking pizzas that I hadn't paid for. And that's how bad I wanted it. And in those moments, I had a very, very clear belief as well of the reward of my sacrifice. I completely believed it was going to pay off. And that kind of links me to another point I guess, which is in order to sacrifice, you have to believe. And I 100% always believed. And I think you have to. The next thing is as you grow your company, you have to get used to the unpredictable chaos. And unpredictability can be a great cause of anxiousness for any entrepreneur, because you wake up every day and you have no idea what email you're going to get. And you could get an email. And I did many, many, many, many, many times in my journey, get an email that would make me believe that it was all over. And when you get that email, you have to be built of a certain type of material to keep going in the right direction. I remember many, many instances, especially when I was 18 years old, where the bank emailed me and told me that they would not let me open a business bank account. And so I went to another bank and they told me that I would not be able to open a business bank account. And they went to another bank and they told me that I would not. And after going to three or four banks, I genuinely believed, because my credit rating was so poor, I would never be able to start a business. And that was a small thing in the early days. And then in advance two years, the company's going, well, we've got 50 members of staff, and you get an email from your investor saying that, I don't think you meant to send me that email, Steve. And I think, what the hell is that? That's just 6 a.m. in the morning. And then I get another email from another one of our clients saying, "Did you mean to send me that email?" And what happened was every single client you have, and every investor you have has been sent a malicious, very, very tailored, abusive email to them personally from your business partner, Dom's email address. And in that moment, not only do you question whether you've lost your investors, but you question whether you've lost every client you've spent the last two to three years building up. In that moment, you've got to be made of a certain type of material. And then even further on in the company, in the first year when we had some financial uncertainty, there were moments where we genuinely weren't sure how we were going to pay the bills. And you've got payday coming up, you've got bills approaching, and there's total uncertainty around how in five days time you're going to find six figures to pay your bills and to pay your wages. And that uncertainty and the anxiousness is something you take home. It stays with you on the weekend, stays with you in the bathtub in the shower on the way to work, on the way home at night at 1 a.m. in the morning, and you have to live with that. It stays in your head when your girlfriend turns to you and she says, "What do you want to do this weekend?" You don't want to do anything this weekend because your mind is consumed with the issues, and many of these issues are things that you can't tell anybody else. That uncertainty, that continual 24/7, 7 days a week, 36, 3-6-5 days a year, anxiousness is something that entrepreneurs, CEOs have to learn to live with. And that's why I've referred to it as developing your own calm within the chaos. You cannot predict the bullshit, but what you can predict is bulls. Verustin pyöräily vaatteita valmistavan Ornottin vuonna 2013. Mielestäni parasta Shopify saan se, että voimme harjoittaa liiketoimintaa ilman teknistä osaamista, voimme hallinoida yrityksen taustajaristelemiä ja frontendia sekä myydä verkossa, vaivattaa. Jos Shopify olisi pyöräilyvaruste, sollisi mielestäni itse polkupyörä. Sillä asiat hoidetaan ja meidän liiketoiminta me hoituu Shopify's. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu, Shopify piste komsi vustolla. Aloitetaan. that Ilmainen gokelo shopify piste gum si volstoll. And the second thing which I touched on a little bit there on that point would be you spend your whole life living in your own head and it's a very very very lonely place. Because of the issues and many of them you can't speak to anybody about, sometimes you can't even speak to your business partner about those issues, you spend your whole life living very very deep within yourself and often I remember my girlfriend turned to me one day and she said, "Even though you're right next to me, I feel completely alone." And I think that perfectly summarises how you'll make people feel, probably for the next few years of your life, or potentially all of your life as a CEO and I've not managed yet to figure out how I switch off around romantic partners, around family, around anybody at all. And it's something that I'm continuing to work on but I've certainly not figured about out yet. And lastly, linked to the unpredictability and all these other things I've mentioned above, as a CEO your number one issue at all times is people. Really, that's the only thing you agonise over and you are continually provided problems by and as our company grew and hit the hundred mark and then went on and got bigger and bigger, the amount of people and the amount of people problems you have to deal with also scaled in relation to that. And so one thing you cannot predict is someone in your business is boyfriend or girlfriend dumping them. You can't predict them going through mental health issues or you can't predict them being injured or going through serious issues at home or losing a loved one. These are things you cannot predict but these are things that as a CEO, as a responsible CEO you should and have to care about. And what happens is not only do you have your own problems, your own people problems in your own life, your own relationship issues, your own family issues, for a CEO like myself that really, really cares, really genuinely cares. You inherit the issues and the challenges and the personal problems of everybody in your business. And that is a challenge as well and it's a challenge that I've volunteered to take on because I do care but it's something that at a young age is a challenge to deal with and there's fortunately something that I've almost survived it. As the company scaled from one to 20 dealing with 20 people's personal issues but then also work issues was challenging. As it got increased then I developed this thinking about my own car within the chaos and that allowed me to deal with people problems despite the fact that it was scaling at a rapid rate. Number two in my diary this week is about work life balance and something I've seen in the comments section on my YouTube channel and in other places and on my Instagram is people being concerned that I promote a lack of work life balance. And I wanted to be explicitly clear about this thing because it's something I've been thinking about for a while. I do not promote a lack of work life balance. It's simply just my reality and what I do with my vlogs and with my Instagram and with everything that I put out is I'm documenting and do my very very best to give you my truth. And my truth is that I work seven days a week virtually every waking hour in those seven days. I don't switch off but it's important to know that in my mind people who come to me with the work life balance argument don't understand my relationship with work. They are using the traditional construct of what work is and sort of painting me with that brush but to me my work is totally different. I love my work. My work is my hobby. Work is where I go to relax and when you love your work so much and when you're sad at home playing video games on a Saturday and thinking God I can't wait to get to work. It's not work. It's life right? It's my fun. So imagine me going to you and and you're doing something you love doing and me saying Christ you really need to do more of stuff you love doing. So I'm sat there thinking you just don't understand. You don't understand my relationship with this thing. It's not work life balance. It's life life balance. And I genuinely believe not only do I love my work but I also believe in hard work. I believe that people who get to high places and are successful in what they want to do whether it's an athlete a gymnast an entrepreneur a chef a pianist they put in hard work. I don't know a case study of someone not of someone being wildly successful that didn't work hard. I believe in hard work and when I love something I'm willing to give it and I'm willing to give it every waking hour of the day. And fortunately because I'm a single male that has virtually no commitments that has very little sort of attachments in in sort of like romantic relationships. I'm able to work every working hour and finally the last point in my diary is about relationships love and friendships. Okay so starting with relationships generally and I'll talk about family relationships and friendships and then I'll get into the thoughts I've been having on romantic relationships. First and foremost my relationship with my family is fairly distant. I don't know anybody outside of my immediate family so I don't know who my cousins are. I don't know who my grandmother or grandpa parents are. I know some of them have passed away but I don't know if they all have. I've not really met them and I wouldn't know them if they walked past me in the street. It's just the way that my family were. My mum and my dad never really had a connection with their family so I don't know their family. I only know my immediate family which is two older brothers and one older sister and my mum and my dad. And for context my mum and my dad growing up had a terrible relationship. They're still together but they screamed at each other while my mum screamed at my dad. For hours and hours every day and that's all I knew. And so growing up my idea of a relationship when looking at my dad sitting there being screamed at by my mother was very very negative. So it wasn't until I was twenty one years old, twenty two years old in fact that I even had anything that resembled a relationship. It's my belief that although I've not had relationships and I'm really not good at keeping relationships whether they're romantic or friends or family, it's my belief that relationships really do matter. And I was listening to a TED talk the other day and it was talking about what makes us happy. And it's this study conducted over 75 years on thousands of men, rich men, poor men and they studied them every year basically until they died. And what they found out of the course of a lifetime was that the single most important thing. The single most important thing to health and happiness and all of the above was relationships. Not just any relationships or the quantity of your relationships but really the quality of your relationships. And they can make a clear distinction between those that had good quality relationships and those that didn't by looking just at their health. And it made me really really think and when I watched that TED talk it really made me re-imagine and rethink my perceived or my opinion of relationships. I think I've always thought, you know what Steve, you're good on your own, you don't need anybody else, you don't need friends, you don't need girlfriends, you don't really need family. But I've come to learn that I do and I've made a much more active effort to stay connected with my family but also to try and build a little bit of a close relationship to my friends and this is something I'm working on. I live a very very very solo life. I'm a, as I said the world has lived in my head but I spend most of my time alone. I always have and I've always been happy to do so. And on the romantic front, one thing I've always done because my parents showed me a model of relationships that were so negative is I've always ran from commitment. At any point when any girl dating back to when I was 12 years old showed any interest in me irrespective of whether I liked her or not I would run. I would make excuses as to why me and this girl couldn't be together. I would look at the bad parts of her. I would try and find holes. I'd find any excuse to get out of there. And I did that my whole life. I did it when I was 12, did it when I was 16, I did it when I was 18, I did it when I was 21, I did it when I was 22, I did it in my last relationship. And it's something I'm trying incredibly hard to work on. But I did manage to form a relationship although it wasn't the best performance as a boyfriend. I found it. my first relationship when I was 23 years old with my PA. Now this was a girl I hired when I first started the company and then a year into her employment. We got romantically involved. It's a fairly long story but she was the first girlfriend I've ever had and I think much of the reason why we came together was because she completely understood my world. Being my PA she gets to see all my inboxes, she really knows me very very well and I feel like that's much of the reason we lasted for so long but she also taught me that it was possible. It was possible for me to have a relationship. Something I never thought was possible and she also taught me that it could make you happier. It could make you a better person, it could make you less lonely and it could be a best friend I guess. So my perspective on relationships has changed in the last in the last couple years and unfortunately that relationship didn't work out. It didn't work out really because of me because I wasn't able to learn compromise or I didn't want to compromise. I'm not quite sure what it is but it didn't work out because of my inability in my opinion to compromise and to give more. I was very very very selfish and I really you know I really don't understand how I'll ever really be able to have a good solid strong relationship when I commit as much as I do to my my professional life mentally and in terms of time. So it's also made me question and ask myself what is that I'm looking for in a romantic partner? What has a person got to be? Who have they got to be in order for them to have a harmonious relationship with an entrepreneur or a CEO like myself? And I think there's a few things. So my last relationship was with my PA. She was super super close to me. I saw her every day in work and she completely understood and it in many respects did work. It did work. And so part of me thinks that I'm looking for somebody that completely understands my world and so I started thinking do they need to work for me? Do they? Are they going to be a PA? Are they going to be an entrepreneur themselves? And I don't really know the answer. Right now I'm seeing somebody that lives on the opposite side of the world basically and she's got her own dingo and on she's acting she's modeling etc. And that's worked out in many respects because it allows me time to focus when I'm here and I'm in the office. And often when I was taking my PA I couldn't focus because if we were had an argument at home obviously that comes into work and some regard and she's meeting with me around the office etc. then I'm thinking about that as opposed to thinking about my work. So now having somebody that's on the opposite side of the world when I'm here I'm focused and when I'm with them I'm focused on them. So I'm trying that out and it's going fairly well but I do think you know how long can that be sustained for before you want that person a little bit closer? So it's a tough one. I really don't know what I'm looking for. I don't know what I should be looking for. The point I'm at now I think entrepreneurs should date people that are incredibly busy and focused on themselves but also understand your world a little bit. I think that's the healthiest balance. The counter argument says find somebody who does not understand your world is totally separate and doesn't get it because then when you go home they help you switch off. They don't get it they don't want to talk about it so when you go home you leave work at the door mat. I don't know I really don't know. It's a journey I'm on at the moment and I'm going to keep you guys updated as to as to what happens there. And lastly the last point I wanted to share with you is the idea of purpose. So there's a few things that happened to me over the last couple of years which have really made me question and try and find my purpose. And this is because at the age of 18 when I had nothing and I was living in a very very poor area in Manchester my idea of why I wanted to be successful was because I wanted money. Much of my reason was money. When I reflect on the things I wrote in my diary at 18 years old two of the points related to having a nice car and having loads of money. Now we've got the 25 year old Steve perspective clashing with 18 year old Steve. And this is the moment where I saw that those two characters and those two motives and agendas clash. It was the minutes someone offered to buy my business and they told us what figure they would pay for the company. And for a moment I went into a few days and a few weeks of reflection and thinking and had a few personal epiphanies and I really sort of analysed in that moment what we wanted to do. It didn't take a long period of time for me to arrive at my conclusion or my answer to them but just being put in the moment where someone says to you I will give you millions and millions and millions and millions of pounds right now it makes you wonder and think about what's really important. And in that moment 18 year old Steve showed up and he said amazing we're gonna buy that Lamborghini you always wanted to buy and we're gonna buy that huge mansion that you kept looking at every week when we were 18 years old living in Mosside in Manchester that's what we're gonna do. And then 25 year old Steve showed up to that same party and he said why do you want a Lamborghini you probably won't drive it that much you spend all your time traveling you like your car you have now you don't need a Lamborghini what a terrible waste of money it's not gonna make you happy it's not gonna make you happier at all in fact it's just gonna make you poorer and at 18 year old Steve had this idea that things would make him richer but 25 year old Steve knows that things actually just make you poorer and there was this mental clash I was on right move when I heard the figure that they would would give us and I was looking at houses and I was looking at cars but 25 year old Steve was looking through the lens of not caring about materialistic things at all and so that made me reflect and it made me think so if not material things not material things then why are you doing all of this stuff and 25 year old Steve knows the answer to that question but it was 18 year old Steve that wanted an answer because 18 year old Steve thought we were doing all of this stuff a because we wanted to build something big but really it was to quench the pain of starving every fucking day because I didn't have anything to eat and I didn't have enough money to get on a bus and I didn't have enough money to go to another country and I didn't have enough money to have fun I didn't have enough money to get into a nightclub 18 year old Steve his motives when he didn't have those things was to attain those things and he thought that those things might make him happy 18 year old Steve was totally wrong fortunately fortunately 18 year old Steve was already happy but I thought at 18 that the more money you got the happier you got which really is not the case money becomes totally irrelevant when you have enough money to feed yourself and to pay your rent and to have enjoyable experiences then money doesn't scale your happiness and that was a that was a lesson I learned and so again back to this question so what am I doing this for and over the last 12 months two years it's become clearer and clearer for me I think social chain and the existence of a business like social chain has had a tremendous positive impact on the world without really knowing it by creating the working environments we've created we've inspired businesses across the country and across the world to follow suit our culture has changed cultures and our people have changed people we have employed hundreds of young people who without social chain would probably in some cases feel fairly disillusioned and confused about their careers and their lives we've also helped develop people who were shy who were within themselves who were introverts who were inexperienced uncomfortable and they've become incredibly confident super talented young leaders that for me has been the greatest reward of this whole journey it's not been the money it's not been any article anybody's written about me it's been being able to have a transformative impact on people also stretching that a little bit further because we've built such an awesome business I do think so we've been able to inspire other people and this podcast and my vlogs and my Instagram have given me great great purpose that thought leadership that having a platform gives me great great purpose and all the messages I get thousands of messages every month from all around the world from people who have made a change in their lives for the better and in the direction of happiness has given me great great fulfillment and lastly as an entrepreneur it sounds it sounds empty or it sounds like it's not worthwhile but building something building something great that disrupts an industry and that changes people's perceptions on the world and the way that things should be done the competitiveness of it the the Excitiveness the challenge they're having an impact the reaching people the reimagining how the world is That's what we're doing at social chain at the most fundamental level that is what we're doing and That's why to me this isn't work. It is sport. It is incredibly fun and the impact we're able to have by Existing by getting bigger by having a bigger platform and by having more influence Could change the world and that's the bet that I'm making. I want social change to change the world You heard it here first Thank you for tuning into chapter one of the CEO diaries I had no idea where this podcast was gonna go I'm sat in my box of shorts at home in Manchester. It is now 3 a.m. in the morning on a Sunday night Got work in the morning another week busy week ahead. I'm sure it's gonna throw at me a lot more challenges And I'm excited to reconvene with you here on Sunday and talk to you about whatever I've learned this week and to discover some Some new conclusions. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you guys again on Sunday The rest of the crew are going to be able to get to the world for two or three years Thirdly, the relationship between Dubai together comes from the hárdian exchange line. event, Italian exchange lines, confrontation constraints and relatives form each other. A time you had a relationship, opened many households. You have to find a company, neighbor with a discount on your husband. It's a historical event, made by several customers. Related denn fairly by 7 passengers per year. The company is also in the shopping center, and it's possible to make a business with the German technology. It is possible to make a business with the German technology with the French and French companies. It's possible to make a business with the French and French companies. If the shopping area is full of companies, it will be more than just a small company. It's the right way to help the company, and we are also able to make a business with the German customers. The German customers are also able to make a business with the German customers.