Non-Linear Career paths with Daniel Woodroof

In today's episode, I'm talking to Daniel Woodruff. He's a former professional racing driver. He's a podcast host, he's co-founder of Panda & Social, and he's one of the alumni from Alice Smith School. Let's get into this episode right now. Welcome to the Alice Smith Pot On Purpose podcast. Join us as we delve into insightful discussions and gain valuable perspectives from prominent figures in the field of education. Daniel, thank you for being here and welcome to this episode of the podcast. How are you today? I'm good. Thanks for having me, Simon. How are you? I'm very good indeed. Thanks. Very good. It's great to talk to you. It's great to see you as well. So just for the sake of people listening, tell us where about us in the world you are. I am currently in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and I've never really left, to be honest. Okay, so born and brought up there, went to school there, of course. And when was it that you were at Alice Smith School? When did you start and when did you leave? So I left in 2014, I'm class of 2014, and if I reverse engineer that, I think that means I started in 2001. Okay, and just tell us about your time when you were there in a nutshell. Tell us a little bit about your experience of being at school and just generally how you found education yourself. Yeah, I mean, I commonly refer to my time at Alice Smith as one where I wish I could go back. And I'm not doing that as a hard sell because we are doing this podcast. But I genuinely did enjoy my time in Alice Smith. And I think, particularly as I get older and I get further into the real world, I realized how privileged I was to be able to have an education at a place like Alice Smith, particularly with such incredible facilities with classmates from all over the world. So yeah, I think in short, a very, very happy time. Tell me about any of the teachers that you remember there, any that had a real impact on you in a positive way? Yeah, I think a lot did. Honestly, it'd be impossible to list them all out. But I think there were many moments where I had teachers that really went above and beyond for my education, not just in a kind of educational perspective, but in a kind of personal capacity as well. I had media teachers that were fantastic, that really cared for us on a personal level and were there as people that we could speak to during great times and lunchtimes when difficult moments were going on in our lives. I had teachers that acknowledged we were struggling during exam periods and stayed back with us voluntarily after school to just repeat certain elements of the curriculum again. So I had teachers that went above and beyond, acted like friends at some points, particularly when we got to sixth form and that relationship with teachers got a little bit more informal. So I won't name them and embarrass them or make other teachers feel excluded. But the long short of it is that there were many, I think, that stand out. And there were a lot of teachers that actually were at Alice Smith for many generations. So when I have friends that have older siblings that went to Alice Smith or my own little sister, I think there are some common names that do come up and, you know, they're kind of like legends now. And of course, as a professional racing driver, I mean, that is an exciting career to have. What stage in your life were you when you realised that you had this passion for racing? I had always loved motorsports. It was a shared passion with my family and I. So we would always, you know, make it a family activity to watch Formula One on the TV on Sundays. My first time in a go kart was at the age of 11. And my first race was when I was 12. So I've been in the sport professionally or semi-professionally from, say, the age of 12 and, you know, spent the rest of my adult life immersed into it. So it's been a very, very big part of who I am. OK. And you mentioned about Formula One. Just again, for the sake of anyone listening to this right now, who is a fan of Formula One, it feels like we can't really avoid the fact that Lewis Hamilton has recently moved from Mercedes or announced that he's moving from Mercedes to Ferrari next year. What are your feelings on that? Yeah, very, very big news. I mean, I think to me it indicates more than anything that he's about to reach the end of his career. Right. I think, you know, perhaps there's some elements of him knowing little secrets behind Ferrari's development. I mean, he made a great call moving from McLaren to Mercedes. And ultimately, that won him many world championships. So I have no doubt there's an inkling of that same feeling moving to another team. He must know something. He wouldn't go to a team that's on a downward trend. But I think for me, Ferrari really is where many drivers would like to end their career. He is getting to that age where he would consider retirement. So I reckon he's going to give it two or three good years. And then whether or not he wins a championship, I think he's going to hang his helmet up. Interesting. Well, it'd be good to see what happens there. It really will be. Meanwhile, let's just bring it back to school for a second. So if we cast your mind back to when you were at Alice Smith School, how did you get that balance right between racing and your academic work? Yeah, so that's very, very tough. I think it's something that many racing drivers, not just racing drivers, athletes in general struggle with. Right. I think in an extreme end of the spectrum, you get athletes that just completely drop school and decide to focus 100% on their given sport. And I think a lot of that is driven by a lack of flexibility by the respective academic institution. I think I was very lucky that Alice Smith was very, very flexible with me. They appreciated that while I was traveling around the world, I would miss a lot of schools. So I think particularly during my GCSEs, my attendance wasn't great, but I had a head of key stage, the head of year, heads of respective departments sit down with myself and my racing manager at the time. My mentor, he would come into school and we would all have meetings to basically outline the curriculum, bits of homework, my racing schedule, when things would be due, and the reality was just from the age of about 15 or so, when I did start traveling overseas for racing, I was doing homework on flights. I had extra bits of reading to do and because of that and the flexibility they provided me and the extra support, I managed to get through my GCSEs with decent grades and still race. Amazing. Amazing. It's incredible that you're able to fill in those moments in time with doing the work that you should have been doing at school. So tell me about some of the countries then that you were visiting during that time. Yeah, so from about 15 to 16 in particular, mostly around Asia, I was between Macau, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and the odd race in Europe. We had a race in Portugal for the World Championships. I did a race in Italy where I was teammates with Max Verstappen and he did kick my bum as an understatement, which I feel better about now because he is in fact the world's best. He's doing okay right now, isn't he? So yeah, yeah, just okay. So I think getting beaten by him isn't so bad now. And then for how long did you carry on doing the racing? Yeah, so I started when I was 12. The international racing kicked off when I was about 15 to about 17. And all of that was in the form of go-karts. So I was in World Championships or Asian Championships. When I turned 17, that's when I progressed to Formula cars. So a picture of what a Formula 1 car looks like, you know, open wheels, they kind of look like an airplane with all the wings. But think a couple of steps down. So I started in Formula BMW at the time, which has now evolved into Formula 4. And then I progressed to a championship called Formula Masters, which has now been renamed to Formula 3. So they've, you know, in recent times, they've really helped the kind of naming conventions to make it a bit more simple, F4, F3, F2, F1. Back in my day, the names were completely different. But in essence, I progressed to Formula 3 at the age of 18. That was also when I unfortunately had to stop due to financial constraints. But from that moment on, my involvement in motor sports has really revolved around training drivers as a driver coach. And I'm kind of dabbling my toes in the realm of driver management now. Clearly, you're passionate about racing, Dan. How did it feel to have to stop when you were 18 then? I mean, I was distraught. I don't think there's any other word to use, really. This was something that I had convinced myself would be the reality of my life for at least many decades ahead of me. I took a gap here. You know, my education, everything really revolved around having a successful career in motor sports. So when it started to not pan out the way I thought it would, particularly over something that at the age of 18, I thought was as fleeting as money, as fickle as money, as unimportant as money, a very naive view that I had. Yeah, I struggled a lot. But I think those challenges have really shaped who I am. And I don't think I would have traded those experiences for anything else. So that was about 10 years ago, then. What happened next? Yeah, 10 years ago. Wow. Thanks for the reminder. Sorry. So I think my life has gone through many, many pivots from then on. I really did have this mentality of screw it and do it. I didn't know what I was passionate about after motor sports. You know, even in high school, when you were told to write a creative essay in a foreign language or a creative essay for another subject like PSHE, I had always done something regarding motor sports. It was all I ever spoke about. But after the age of 18, when that professional career died, I had absolutely no clue as to what I wanted to do nor what I was passionate about. So it really has been a decade of pivoting and trying absolutely anything until something sticks. So I got into TV hosting. I was a TV host on Fox Sports doing racing commentary. I then progressed to have my own travel adventure documentary on Discovery Channel, which was a great experience. I then got into event management. I got into consulting, which took me to countries like Thailand, to Singapore, to Australia, and ultimately in the US where I had a very opportunistic moment where I then started my creative digital marketing agency that I run now called Pandan Social. So it really has just been in 10 years full of unexpected twists and turns where I've just said, "You know what? Why not? I don't know if I'll like it. I don't know if I'll hate it, but I'll just give it a shot." Tell me about Pandan Social then. What's that all about? So Pandan Social started when I was on a consulting job in the US. Particularly, I was focusing on corporate turnarounds for a boutique consulting agency. So what that really means in short is we take companies on the verge of bankruptcy. We come in as a team of consultants that get embedded into the company and we try to flip it back into profitability. As the youngest consultant, I was put on all things marketing, so partnerships, digital marketing, on-ground marketing, et cetera, et cetera. And I really found that my workload burnt me out. I was really, really struggling. I feel like digital marketing is one of those things where particularly people that don't understand it feel like is one, very easy. Two is very relatively unimportant. And three is something that any young person can kind of do, whether or not they've got experience or not. And what that meant was I was in charge of social media strategy, social media content, creation, and curation across multiple pages. I was in charge of advertising. I was in charge of creative design. I was in charge of sponsorship. I was in charge of press releases, creative writing, et cetera. So I was a designer. I was a writer. I was a strategist. I was an account manager and everything in between. And I was doing on-ground events. And I was working between the US and Malaysia and working between different time zones. And I got burnt out. And what I managed to do was I managed to convince the company to give me a budget equivalent to the salary of one American worker. And I said, with that budget, I can hire you a team of people in Malaysia and I can outsource that work. I can improve productivity. We can get a better quality of work and it can free up my time to do more important things on the ground. So I was very lucky that they took that kind of risk on me. And what I did was I took that money. I called up my best friend from my racing days, who coincidentally was a freelance videographer and video editor. So he was also in the kind of creative realm. And I said, let's start a company, 50/50. You helped me run things on-ground. I'll do lead generation and look after this client over in the States. And with this money, let's go hire a designer and an advertiser, a digital advertiser. So myself and my co-founder, Brandon, we didn't take a salary for a year and a half. And we basically use that money to fund these two salaries on the ground. Brandon was in charge of getting more clients locally in Malaysia. And from there, we just kind of organically grew this agency with essentially no capex from our side whatsoever. I think the only money that we put in was to incorporate the business in Malaysia. And then all the other kind of operating costs were obviously covered by the retainer that came in from this client. So it was opportunistic, not once at any point did I feel like, wow, I'm really passionate about digital marketing. This is really something I want to do. And what's my exit plan and what's my growth strategy? I just saw this opportunity and I said, you know what, why not? And I'm very lucky I took that naive risk because it's brought me to where I am today. Dan, some people, quite a lot of people tend to go through school and then they think, right, okay, I'll leave school, I'll go to university and then I'll get a job working for a big company like, I don't know, KPMG or someone like that. It strikes me that you're not that kind of person that you like to create your own future by carving out your own space, by doing your own thing and not just kind of falling into doing what everybody else might do as a kind of like a default. Is that fair? Yeah, I would say that's fair, particularly now. I don't think I had that perspective of myself when I was in high school, nor when I started pandan. I think this is something that I've maybe realized now slightly later into my entrepreneurial journey. But I do think there were elements of me weighing those considerations, particularly when deciding not to go to university. I think Alice Smith is a fantastic institution, but particularly when I was there, it was very much geared to pushing students to either study in the UK, Australia, or the US. There was borderline, no one that didn't apply, let alone didn't go to university. I think dropping out halfway is a stereotype and is a completely different discussion, but deciding not to go at all was almost completely unheard of. And I think that's something that we jointly struggled with at the time. I'm very pleased to say that Alice Smith is much more ahead of that now. I was actually at the school a couple of weeks ago doing a talk on entrepreneurship, and I was chatting with the higher ed team, and they're getting more and more inquiries from students who are deciding to go down a similar path, not going to university, deciding to do their own thing. And I think they're being very, very supportive for people that want to consider both sides of the fence. So yeah, it was difficult. University is extremely expensive. And I think university is a privilege. So I don't think that people should necessarily completely eliminate the idea of them going straight into the workforce. But there are also some people that really should go to university. You mentioned about going back to school to give a talk on entrepreneurship. Tell me why you feel like it's important to give back and to volunteer like that. I think, first of all, I am genuinely just passionate about Alice Smith. I say this to all of my friends. I say this to my partner. I'm like, I want my kids to go back to that school. So I do have this kind of patriotism when it comes to Alice Smith. But I think beyond that, I am just passionate about helping people. It may not necessarily be something that I ingrain into my day-to-day schedule, but definitely when the opportunity presents itself, I'm definitely more than happy to have coffees, calls with people, and, you know, obviously attend lectures and talks like I did with Alice Smith to discuss it. Because I think particularly from a Southeast Asian and Malaysian perspective, there's very little people talking about that. And when you are a British academic institution, I think a lot of the case studies are, hey, you graduate from here and you go on to a Russell Group University. You go on to some of the, you know, Oxbridge or wherever else, like 98% of our kids end up in their first-toys university or something like that. And because there are very few people that have gone through that experience, I feel like it's important to kind of give it back and answer those questions, because I didn't really have those same resources when I was in that position. Of course, you know, you talk about universally like that. You don't need to look far to think about some of the great entrepreneurs in life. I'm thinking about Mark Zuckerberg, for example. I mean, he dropped out of Harvard. So, you know, similar to you, he didn't take a traditional route and follow it through and then go and join a big company. Okay, he did go to university in the first place, but equally, he's carving out his own space in the future. Now, Dan, you mentioned about having your own podcast as well or being on a podcast or being a podcast host. Tell us what that's all about. That sounds good fun. Yeah, so hosting has formed a big part of my side gig career, if I can call it that. So, as I mentioned, I was a TV host. I still do regularly do TV hosting opportunities whenever they do arise. I also do on-ground MCing, so like, you know, launch events, et cetera. And more recently, I've worked with our national broadcaster called Astro. You can think of it as the Malaysian equivalent to Sky. I have a Formula One podcast with them called Suited and Booted. We finished our first season last year, and we've got season two coming up with preseason testing wrapping up in the next month or so, actually in the next couple of weeks. So, yeah, the first episode should be coming out soon. It was an audio podcast last year on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and on their own platform called Shock. But this year, we will have a handful of video podcast episodes as well. So, yeah, that's exciting. Go check out Suited and Booted on Spotify, please. Give us five stars. Follow us. Subscribe. Do all that good stuff. I love the plug for it. We'll make sure we put a link to the podcast in the show notes in that case. And Dan, if anyone's been listening to any of this, I'm just keeping an eye on time, because we're going to need to bring this to a close. But if people wanted to find you online, is it best if they visit Pandan Social website? Yeah, you can reach out on the Pandan Social website. You can add me on LinkedIn. Just search my name, Daniel Woodruff, W-O-O-D-R-O-O-F. My only other very active social media platform is Instagram, and my username is Daniel Woodruff as well. So, shoot me a message on any of those platforms. I'd be more than happy to have a chat. Well, like I say, we'll put a link to all of those in the show notes for this episode. But Dan, it's been great talking to you. Thank you so much for your time. It's been great finding out about your life, your experience of life at school, but also your experience of life after school and how the school shaped you into being that person. So, thank you so much for your time. It's been really good. Thank you, Simon. Appreciate it. So, there we are. That brings us to the end of this episode. If you have any questions at all, then please do get in touch with the school. But in the meantime, thank you for listening to this, and we'll see you next time. Bye for now.