Will King

Thank you. It's a delight to be here and thank you for investing some of your precious time to come and hear me talk about, you know, shaving, which is kind of a bit perhaps mundane and boring. But nonetheless, it's a growth business and perhaps why I founded it many, many years ago, having been made redundant, was I wanted to have a certainty in my world of  then redundant uncertainty.

And the time we live in right now, sadly, is one of the most uncertain times I've ever experienced.

Winding back to, say, 2012, when we had the Olympics, we didn't have the idiot Boris Johnson in government. We hadn't had Brexit, we hadn't had Donald Trump. We hadn't had the madman Putin going into Ukraine to try and reassert Russia's sort of position in the world. The world was a much kinder, I think, collaborative and perhaps stabler place than it definitely is now.

Now, you guys the age as you are, you'd have been probably pre-teen in 2012. It may not resonate with that as much as I do, but certainly when I founded my business in 1992, in the teeth of recession, when interest rates on my mortgage were hitting 13%. And you now will be looking at interest rates trending towards 4%, been very low for many years to do with the economic instability of the world. We live in uncertain times and it's unlikely for the foreseeable that's going to change.

But as my hedge fund brother would say, who's just bought Coventry City Football Club. So if you want to earn a lot of money, make a lot of money, work with money and perhaps go into the hedge fund world of money making.

With great instability comes great opportunity.

And a lot of the huge successes in business have come out of the back end of recessions when cash is tight.

You need to bring your creativity to the fore because often the imagination and your behaviour in solving problems, it's not how much money you have to throw at it.

It's who the clever person is in the room who has an idea.

And I'm sure there would have been a singularity of person who had an idea to develop into with a cohort of programmers, what's become chat GPT, which is now transitioned over a matter of weeks from being very much a techie thing that a company called Open.ai did for free on the internet to potentially being one of the biggest disruptors in terms of knowledge and humanity and its progress. 

And I'm sure - hands up if you haven't heard of chat GPT? That's nobody. And that's astonishing.

And we'll go back shortly to where I was with the Internet when that came along in 1994.

https://www.company-name.co.uk/ - and nobody knew what that was.

Nobody had a clue.

Genuinely, it was an Internet Daily Mail.

It will never catch on.

And of course, in your lives you'll only have lived with the internet.

And I've been fortunate enough that my working career has straddled that. So I've gone from writing letters and posting them to Mohammed Al Fayed, who owned Harrods, to get King of Shaves listed in 1993 to obviously now it's all online, it's all tech, it's very different.

But I won't get ahead of myself.

We're talking, obviously, about innovation.

And, you know, innovation is clearly the lifeblood of almost everything in the world. You have evolution is constantly innovating to keep us alive.

It's how we come to be.

It's getting better and finding solutions to where perhaps they haven't been such good ones.

And I guess how I normally introduce myself is, hi, I am Will King I shave lives.

That gets normally a quite a laugh from the audience, depending on how into me they are or they aren't. 

But we've and my products have touched over 17 billion faces now in 30 years, and we have innovated and disrupted in a space.

Whether you're familiar with what King of Shaves is or does, when we launched, we were unique. And nowadays what you now view is a beard oil that came out of the shaving oil.

You know, I invented, you know, 30 odd 30 years ago.

So I'll run you through some innovation pieces, touch on hopefully some nuggets that you can take away.

But before I start, I'm going to see if anybody knows the answer to this question. There is a prize if you do. Hands up if you've heard the proverb, curiosity killed the cat?

Does anybody in the audience know without looking at your smartphones what the second line to that proverb is?

Only because I did the workshop this morning.

Okay,

That's funny.

So the second line is satisfaction brought it back.

Now, very few people in the audiences I've talked to over the last 2 to 3 years, from big business events to awards ceremonies, when I drop that in.

I have what's called a trait curiosity.

I wonder why things are the way they are.

So in our front row, we have one lady sitting there who's been looking after me throughout the day, and then we have an array of people and how they're ranged out, why they're think, oh, why of people second to the back, right to the back.

Okay.

Or right to the front.

And I might wonder why Portsmouth logo is purple.

That's come from somewhere.

Yeah. And I love trying to understand why things are the way they are.

And if nothing other from this talk, I would love you to embrace just being curious about stuff.

Because that's how problems get solved and that's how ideas come to reality.

Wondering why there isn't or there wasn't, for example, in the nineties, a low cost airline.

There had been a low cost airline before Skytrain.

People old enough in the audience will remember Freddie Laker trying to undercut British Airways.

You had Virgin come along to try and take on British Airways by being a bit more rock star with Richard Branson.

But air travel was still pretty expensive.

But then within a matter of years, you had EasyJet happen, you had Ryanair happen and you had Go happen, which was bought by British Airways.

And for many, many years, you then had incredibly low cost travel available to everybody for, you know, a few pounds.

But why did that happen?

You know, it wasn't there and then it was.

And that's because somebody out there, whether it is Stelios, who I know or I've met the Ryanair guy.

He must have thought, Hmm.

Wonder why.

What are the economics?

Oh, if you make a bit less profit, you fly a few more people, you might be able to get a lot more people travelling.

And that low cost airline industry, which I'm sure you will all have flown at one time or another, was born.

And curious minds they, they're interesting people to hang around with, you know, just why things are the way they are.

And for me, I think I studied engineering here.

I should have been a yacht designer.

I failed my A-levels, I came to Portsmouth, I did Mecheng.

It was very hard work.

My maths wasn't so good.

I graduated, I scraped a 2:2, but I put the shift in, you know, I did the hours, but went into advertising sales after that.

But my final degree project was to understand the phenomenon of supersonic air curvature phenomenon called the Callendar effect.

Now, hands up any in the audience who know what the Callendar effect is.

I'm expecting to see zero. 

Right hands up if anybody in the audience knows what the Dyson Airwrap hair curling tong looks like or is. That uses the Callendar effect.

How that's been designed, the digital motor inside it spins up to 20,000 revs a minute - very clever bit of digital motor tech.

Air comes out then the outlet, which is flat, air sticks to it. It's what's called laminar airflow.

That airflow sticking to it sucks in your hair, curls it around the tong, pull it out.

That gives you a £400 hair curler.

And that callendar descriptor I had not heard until Dyson introduced the Airwrap four or five years ago.

And I've met James Dyson. I've been to Malmesbury, where the R&D centre is.

I'd studied that and perhaps had I been more curious as to the application of supersonic laminar airflow attachment to curved surfaces and my thesis on it, I might have been the next James Dyson 30 odd years ago.

And I think in talking with you guys where you're at the start, let's say, of your journey as young adults, I'm trying to compress in, I guess, my life learnings into a very short window.

But be curious.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

And be also just be receptive to stuff.

A lot of people I meet, they have, there is opportunity there and you might walk up to the door. Some people might never see if it's open.

May well be.

If it's not, oh, well, door was not open.

I cannot go through it.

But if it happens to be open or perhaps somebody has left it ajar, or perhaps it had a no entry sign on it and you walk through it.

You might walk into somewhere which may be very sliding doors moment in your life.

And life is very few what I call sliding door moments.

People who you meet, the career you take off on, the country you live in, the friends you're with.

There's only a half a dozen really big, big directional moments in your life that shape where you're likely to be and be open to them. And I think you should all give yourself a round of applause for at least coming along this evening and hearing a 57 year old chat about shaving the world with a tiny little shaving oil.

So give yourself a bit of celebration that you've made the effort.

Many don't. 

Yeah, and success in business it's it's I won't say it's being the last person standing, but running a business, it's like running a marathon sprint pace. Yeah, you have to be fast, especially when you're start-up or small, because unlike big companies which have huge momentum of like supertankers, very slow to get going, but very difficult to stop, change direction.

As a small company, you need to have a huge amount of momentum to overcome inertia.

And I used to talk about if you're a fly on a and I used to have a Range Rover hit a fly on the windscreen - fly is dead. The Range Rover is only doing 80 miles an hour, sorry 70 miles an hour of course, under the speed limit.

However, if a fly is doing 18,000 miles an hour, like in space, it will blow up the car.

So that velocity that you should, if you can, impart into your life that will give you a really good running momentum.

That's difficult and it's quite irresistible when it gets going, but you've got to do it.

You know, I'm still here today.

I didn't need to come here.

The guys have kindly asked me to come.

Often people just give up.

And just go away.

And I think where we were successful and continue to be, I think, relevant in the world of shaving, whether it's being more responsible as a brand is that at 57, I'm still as enthusiastic and passionate as I was at 26.

But maybe that's because I have not had anyone telling me what to do for 30 years.

I've not had a boss for 30 years. I've been able to do what I want to do for 30 years.

I haven't bought a tie.

I've got a shirt with razor blades on it.

I come in my charity shop jeans, my off-white vintage trainers, chatting to you, to you about shaving lives and innovating. 

Nobody has said, Oh, Will, you've got to wear that or you have got to say this or you've got to be that.

And I think if nothing else in my life journey so far, I mean, how amazing is that?

Yeah, it's been tough at times for sure.

Where you have had to raise money or deal with unpleasant issues or resolve pensions or go to the press about Gillette doing dirty tricks, turning my razors round at Sainsbury's that I got into the Times. It's not always been easy but I've been able to do what I want to do for 30 years.

And then with regard to owning your own business, you have shares in it, you have equity in it. I still have a good shareholding in King of Shaves. Me and my brother Doug - we have the two largest shareholdings.

When you're in a business, you want to own over 50% of that business, ideally 100% of it if you can, because the value is in the ownership, it's in the equity.

So in the past, I thought I'd never want to be a wage slave, just work to live, I guess.

But nor is it a live to work. 

It's a balance.

So. I've come back as CEO because we're like 30 and I thought, why not?

I'll be badly behaved, I'll get into trouble, I'll put some stuff out here. I'll re-engage with the buyers who are all very young people in their late twenties, early thirties.

Now, why not?

Why not?

I mean, I've just been Caribbean, had a villa in Grenada sold that, own that, built that in 1999.

I had 23 years of having a villa on the beach in Grenada.

I owned a yacht 1999 to 2002.

I was commercial 76 on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, signed up for that 2005, paid $250,000 to shave Richard Branson's beard off in space.

All of these things I've been able to do because nobody has been able to tell me you can't do them.

And then with that comes a responsibility that you do the right thing. Yeah. 

You don't be a dick.

You don't be horrible.

You embrace reciprocity.

Give and take.

I was fortunate - both my parents were teachers.

Hence the guys at Portsmouth, you know, they'll have a sweet spot with me in terms of chatting with you guys, because I believe if one of you takes away a nugget, a -ness, I like -ness - happiness and a worthwhileness and everybody has a -ness to them.

Yeah. So uniqueness.

And if they can build on that, you know, that's hugely valuable.

So just to jump back, I did not like shaving.

I was made redundant.

I wanted to solve a problem.

I wanted to be my own boss.

I'd studied engineering.

I knew oil lubricated - Body Shop was a big thing in the early nineties.

Anita Roddick was a huge campaigner of her time for ethical behaviour and beauty.

Ended up randomly being bought by L'Oreal.

Never a fix that was for L'Oreal trying to be more inclusive with regard to, let's call it Generation Green.

It's now owned by a company in Brazil Body Shop.

But obviously I didn't shave with engine oil on my face.

I read about aromatherapy and oils. I read that you had a carrier oil.

You had a blend of essential oils.

If you mix them in a nice proportion, they could be good for your skin.

And when you came to shaving, which is all about not getting scratched with a very, very sharp razor blade, you might not get razor burn, rash or pain.

And incredibly, nobody had ever done it.

And I only, I guess, did it because I had a problem that I wanted to solve and I had a knowledge of basic engineering and oil lubricants.

So I created this little pack here.

This is the only one I understand remaining.

King of Shaves, central shaving oil, tiny pack, natural oils, all very recyclable.

And that went up against my only competitor, which is incredible, which was Gillette.

At the time Gillette had no competition in shaving.

It was sold to Proctor and Gamble for $57 billion in 2005.

So imagine that little Will with his little shaving oil out of his bedroom, he's got it listed into Harrods by ringing up Mohammed Al Fayed and then listed into Boots by repeatedly telephoning Fiona Kemp, the buyer and going up and down the M6 to Nottingham.

I got it listed on the bottom shelf at Boots in 250 stores at £2.99.

The Gillette guys have come along. What is that random shave oil? Buy this or oh my God, it's this. What is it? 

Irrelevant - move on.

Gillette make all their money in razors and blades.

But it was.

It basically just - we were the original disruptor in changing behaviour, giving people optionality and then showing others that they could compete against what you think is uncompetable businesses.

And as I said in my talk with a group of students earlier, we went through some case studies.

One of the guys I inspired was Greg Jackson, who's the CEO and founder of Octopus Energy. And hands up if you've heard of Octopus with the cuddly octopus?

He founded that because I was his inspiration when he was at P&G and we were the topic of conversation with Gillette.

Well, how do we, what do we do about this guy King and his move into razors and blades that has made us discount our razor handles by 50% to try and kill his brand.

And that came out of this singularity of a shaving oil and it came out of me as an individual solving my problem, which was razor burn.

And I was my own case study.

I didn't have any knowledge of marketing a product.

I had no idea how big Gillette was.

The Internet did not exist.

It was all done on fax and microfiche, and you had to write to people and they would write back to you because it was pre email.

And it was a moment in time that will never come again.

But often life is timing and you never know when that timing might hit you.

And that goes back to being always aware of doors that might open, opportunities that might present themselves.

However, however random they are, and weirdly and ironically, fast forwarding 30 odd years. My brother Doug, who's just bought Coventry City Football Club, bought it, paid off all its debts, is 100% owner of it.

Fortunately, they're called the Sky Blues.

Fortunately, we had a guy called John Terry, a famous footballer some of you might have heard of played for Chelsea and England back in the day.

He wanted to be the next David Beckham.

David Beckham had signed a deal with Gillette. John Terry's agent rang me up. Didn't know who John Terry was by the way because I'm a sailing guy.

And said, JT would like to be brand ambassador for King of Shaves.

Incredible.

But now my brother's bought a football club, so all of the fans think King of Shaves is going to be their shirt sponsor next year and get rid of the horrible sporting bets company that they have on there - because all the fans hate that.

Betting companies on sporting shirts -don't like that.

And that's, of course, above my pay grade.

It's my brother's decision what he wants to do.

But wouldn't that be the most surreal thing that we end up as a shirt sponsor on a on a leading football club, which would normally cost you millions, but maybe my brother will give it to me for not millions?

Who knows? Probably will not but let's see.

And returning to the uncertainty of all of this, with uncertainty comes opportunity.

And you've got to be alert to what's going on in the world.

And as you come out of your study here.

Whatever course you know, you're doing - whatever life outlook you're looking for.

You know, you've got to want it to be the best one for you and you to feel really good about it and passionate about it and have a satisfaction of doing it. Not just - do I really have to get up and really have to go into work and really have to do this?

I really don't want to do it. And I've met many, many, many people over the arc who said, oh, if only I'd done what you've done.

And I'll say, Well, you didn't.

Well, what do you say?

I said, Well, you can.

A lot of entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs are now in their middle ages, in their forties or so, because they've become dissatisfied with their life to date trying to do something better.

Now, you guys are not in that cohort, but you definitely are in one that can shape the future narrative.

Which, you know, I'll be long dead by the time you guys get to my age.

The world needs a lot of help and work on it.

And I know the University of Portsmouth are involved in shaping some of that, whether it's around plastics and whether it's around the impact, for example, of plastics, single-use plastic in the world we live in.

Which has been and was a massive, massive thing and took us to innovate into having refillable shaving gels which cut down on plastic with lovely aluminium that goes back to aluminium when you melt it like gold goes back to gold.

Ali goes back to Ali.

Wonderful.

We were able to cut down on our plastics use, but we thought,oOh, everybody will embrace that and they will love that. And they're all very Greta Thunberg-ish thinking now.

This is pre-COVID into COVID 20 - 19/20.

The world.

It's a climate crisis.

However, what has happened with recent events in the world, especially driven out of Russia and Ukraine, is that you've now got a huge compression on pricing and the cost of living crisis.

And the fact that silly Europe only had one gas pipeline into it supplied by Russia

and 66% of Europe's energy came through, said Nord Stream One pipeline,

which Angela Merkel signed off back in the early eighties.

And clearly, if Russia cuts off that pipeline, Europe has no heat.

This is a problem.

Now that ramification has focussed people's minds, but as well as focusing people's minds, it's taken them away from being friendly and collaborative to now being like using energy as a weapon.

And those impacts sadly on our delightful, very substantially invested in refillable project for King of Shaves and also in a project called Code zero which to zero out bad. So this is metal, aluminium and a simple shave stick refill in a cardboard box, which we were very proud about.

Very analogue, but nonetheless very, um, plastic.

That took us into a brand called Above and Beyond, which uses a micro plastic free substrate made from wooden starch moulded in the UK. It is a lip balm.

The cost of aluminium was so high that every one we sold we'd make a loss on it, which is not so good from a business perspective. But we knew we'd done the right thing.

And then a bigger company, a North American company, got in touch with us saying, hey, we love how you're marketing your A and B, very Gen Z, very unplastic, very on trend for our huge audience. And we'd love to collaborate with you.

And of course if they're $1,000,000,000 company, we will collaborate with them as long as it's a collaboration. 

The big worry is it's a competition. They'll nick our IP go and do it themselves.

But, you know, that's just the risk that you take.

And with the uncertainty that we all face.

Now, let's just say the only certain thing is uncertain.

You've got to be the best at what you do.

My surname is King.

Mum and Dad gave it me.

I did King of Shaves.

When I came to trademark the name, the European Trademark Agency said, you can't call it King of Shaves it infers, you're the best. It's a laudatory mark. It's puffery.

We're not allowing you to trademark it.

You have to be like Budweiser King of Beers because they Anheuser Busch owned the world's largest brewery in North America hence King of Beers.

And I was a bit deflated by that.

And then met a trademark attorney said, oh, okay, we're going to argue at the European Court of Human Rights that they are infringing your human right to not call your product King of Shaves because the name you have been born with you cannot help.

Had you been called Smith of Shaves, you'd be fine.

Not your fault King of Shaves.

And we got that overturned and I was able to register that trademark.

Had I not been able to, the business would have been impossible to scale internationally without trademark.

And that's why you see companies like Coca-Cola or Google or even Lidl and Tesco arguing over the yellow circles in the press today.

There's a huge value in intellectual property, but being a king, you can't be a gnave, you can't be a jack of all trades.

You can't be a bit, Oh, that King of Shaves stuff, yeah it says it's the best, but it's rubbish.

Because the world we live in now, it's everybody knows everything instantly or you can know it.

So there's nowhere to hide.

So whatever, wherever you're going in your life, it's so super mission critical importance that if you genuinely want to be successful in what you do.

Or enjoy and give value back or launch a brand or a product or service.

It has to be better.

Then what else is out there?

Otherwise, you're kind of a busy fool.

You believe in your own hype that you are better and you maybe aren't.

And that is super, super hard now.

Because when I started my business, it was lots of paperwork and lots of writing and lots of forms to fill in. It was very slow.

Nobody knew what you were up to, nor did you know what they were up to until you read about it in the newspaper or on a radio show, or on the TV.

Life was very linear.

Then it kind of happened with the morning newspaper and ended with a 10 o'clock news on the BBC.

Nowadays, life is streamed at you incessantly on so many levels that the attention spans of everybody are compromised shall we put it.

So often in these talks I'll see who's on a smartphone or who is falling asleep.

Hopefully not too many people or who's distracted because that huge amount of knowledge now coming in is it's a bit of a big thing to overcome.

And then the second thing you guys face is let's say you do have an idea to innovate in a sector that you believe there is a market product, market fit or opportunity.

As soon as you start talking about it or posting about it on social or doing a website or this or that or the other, other people can know about it.

And if it's potentially a big opportunity, you might find people coming in who get faster to where you'd love to be than you.

So it's never been easier to set a business up today and to be challenging for a better world with change.

But if it's easy for you, it's easy for everybody else.

And that then comes back to, I think, what will make your idea how you are in your career, what will make them remember you and gravitate to you.

To kind of end on this although I've zigzagged around a little bit, tacked around a bit saying in sailing.

What I do know for me now, you know, there are three, I think, important areas, you know, the first of which is a genuine authenticity and a humanity to whatever it is.

You know, a singularity, a founder, a person, a human that is genuinely invested in it to do with that business.

And I look at some businesses like what Greg's done with Octopus, taking it from, I think,

30,000 customers in 2016 to now 6 million customers having taken on the bulb which collapsed into administration.

He's great Jackson.

He's on the Twitter.

He's very lovely.

He responds to customer concerns on Twitter.

He's the CEO of a £5 billion company.

Yet he's dealing with customers’ concerns and complaints.

Ironically, as is Elon Musk, although he's now the CEO Twitter and owns it and SpaceX and Tesla.

Asking the right question might get the right response.

Octopus has a nice, cuddly pink octopus. It's not a Centrica or a Southern Scottish Energy SSE or a British Gas ripping the pre-paid, putting the pre-payment metres into people who are already struggling with bailiffs, breaking down their doors and forcibly fitting prepayments in there.

I very much doubt Octopus would ever sanction that behaviour.

Whereas perhaps a soulless BG would do it, because perhaps it's a little bereft of the authenticity and humanity that's that we need in the world.

And then I have an acronym, Space and Spacer, where I'll come on to the R.

You have got to have a singularity of purpose.

So if you're a cow, let's say you have eyes on the side of your head.

The eyes are looking around for predators that are likely to try and jump on your back and eat you.

Predators, including humans, as well as the apex predators, have eyes at the front because they can move their eyes around, they can detect threat.

And if they see a cow which is looking a bit lazy, they can go over there and nobble the cow perhaps coming in unexpectedly.

So have your singularity eyes on.

And it is very, very difficult to focus on two things at once.

As much as you think you can and I know you'll all do second or third screenings, I know my 23 year old lad who set my screen on Netflix and this on Snapchat, private WhatsApp, this, that, the other. 

Is he genuinely concentrating on one thing? No, he is not.

He's getting a lot of things done.

But are they getting done to the best of their, you know, potential?

Probably not.

But it's so lovely and compelling that you can have something there and then something there and then somebody chatting to you and then you look at it that it makes you feel like you your kind of more look at me and all this.

Humans, humanity wasn't really designed to do that.

It was kind of designed to go out and find animals and eat them and bring them back and stay alive - not second screen.

And it's not a criticism of it.

It's just purely an observation.

If you can as well.

Just carry around an old school notebook and pen.

Always come in useful.

Although I do use the Apple Notes app on my phone, I've got about 2000 notes that I jot down have jotted down over the past five or six years.

Very useful notes app in Apple just to record thoughts little little nuggets that you often forget.

And then just to end in this innovation in the face of uncertainty.

Over the last, I don't know, three or four years we've had this word sustainability enter our consciousness along with other descriptors.

And sustainability is kind of a catch all for companies that are saying we are friendlier to the planet than perhaps our competitors are.

That our products are more sustainable in their packaging or their manufacturing or in their consumption.

And it's kind of a m word for me. It's been hijacked and weaponised by clever marketing people who will have you think Coca Cola is a sustainable brand. Where of course it's using

tons of single-use plastic peaty bottles, of which sadly 92% are never recycled and will be incinerated or landfilled.

Or will go off to Kenya or somewhere in Africa and be picked up by plastic pickers and sold.

As I learned this afternoon as part of one of my talks and I'm much bigger fan of the word responsibility.

So with great power comes great sustainability, said no one ever.

But with great power comes great responsibility.

And re-words are lovely words. 

Words that begin with re - rejoice, reimagine, reinvent, rewear, reuse.

Lots and lots of lovely words.

Words that begin with su - suspicious, substandard.

Kind of not so good.

So in the talks I give whether the industry talks to, you know, my cohort, you know, what's called C-suite level CEO, founder level, or whether they're to younger adults like you. Genuinely be more responsible with your behaviour as opposed to being a bit white washy, green washy, sustainable.

I would ask you to embrace, you know, a responsibility not just to others, but but also to yourself.

And there's nothing better I've found in my life experiences of which there have been many.

Many amazing, many tragic, many good, many sad.

If you are true to you and your moral compass is, you know, aligned.

And if everybody was true to themselves with moral compasses that are aligned, we would all get to where we want to be much quicker, much happier and much faster.

And I think when you look at what's happening with the planet.

Yes, you have this huge earthquake in Turkey, in Syria that's happening happened over millennia.

Perhaps in the future they don't build the shoddy types of building that were built there over that particular fault zone where three tectonic plates interject.

But when it comes to the planet, undoubtedly it's heating up.

Undoubtedly, sea levels are rising.

Undoubtedly, life in your lifetime is going to be changed because of behaviours of, sadly, my generation and generation before me.

But surely being responsible to our planet and to yourselves is the only way forward.

As difficult as you might find that.

And that authenticity and that responsibility and that singularity of purpose, you can genuinely change your world, as I did with my little shaving oil 30 odd years ago, that has brought me full circle to chat to you guys.

And I was like you.

There was nothing special about me.

I worked hard.

I was lucky to have a good, nice parents who were teachers, and they imbued in me a passion to be the best I could be.

In my case be the King of Shaves.

That's it - thank you very much for listening.

All right, everybody, we've got time for a few questions.

While you're thinking about a few I wonder if I might start Will by asking.

Looking back, were there any opportunities that you missed that you look back on and one that sort of slip through your fingers?

So, I mean, I think beards was huge.

I mean, that came along after the first financial crash, 2007, when a lot of things changed because Facebook had been invented. Twitter, YouTube.

You could see there was a shift in behaviour of young people then.

And you then had the crash that happened 2007/08.

A lot of people made redundant.

A lot of people then for various reasons, didn't have to shave.

Maybe because they had been made redundant, couldn't be bothered, didn't shave.

You then had many, many years of clean shaven, what's called metrosexuals, very clean shaven.

And then a lot of Hollywood A-listers would come out with beards.

That then went into the whole sort of goodness me Shoreditch and the big beards and the lumberjacks and this and that.

And arguably, what I should have done is a King of Beards range then, but didn't.

But I had the trademark and that now when you look at, you know, let's just take men you know, let's just say a 40% clean shaven, 40% beards, 20% beard, clean shaven. It's not 100%. It used to be 95, 98% clean-shaven.

Only geography teachers had beards and terrorists and bad guys.

And now, obviously, including my son, Cameron, his education has been paid for by his dad shaving lives has a beard.

But there we are. That's his choice.

Yeah. So obviously, we've had huge amounts of products that have worked that nobody really talks about now because they're lost in the midst of time.

And you don't particularly want to talk about what hasn't worked.

But, you know, even in the razor and blade space, yeah, that I raised £20 million to launch into and disrupted Gillette and sold 8 million handles and 40 million cartridges.

Did that work out as I expected?

No, it did not, because these products sadly aren't for sale anymore.

Because the economic pressure of challenging a $57 billion business repeatedly undercutting the margins, it became existential without huge, huge investment.

And for whatever reason, in 2014, I stood down as CEO because I hadn't succeeded in changing that behaviour.

Now there is a silver lining to the story in that the technology we developed for a product called Hyper Glide, which uses a super hydrophilic coating technology, we sold for a lot of money. Not to Gillette,which has since been used it with other competitors.

But there are lots.

I had a range called Problem Solved in Tesco in the early noughties - that didn't work.

A range called Head, that was a hair styling that didn't work.

Without risk - there's no reward.

But I guess I did it knowing that the sales of our baseline products, the preps underpinned my movements into other areas,that we were a little bit more economically challenging.

And before I did King of Shaves, I ran a business called Uncall Brands that sold a then a super hot clothes surfwear brand called Body Glove that was made famous on Baywatch

in the nineties. Pamela Anderson in a body glove red swimsuit.

And that launched and the shops I sold the product to, the surf shops - they didn't pay their bills, so I didn't get paid.

So I had to wind up that business.

And I have written a book years ago, 2009.

How to Build a Great Business in Tough Times.

Some of those stories are in there, but everybody has their failures, but it only takes one success to offset all of them.

But that's all I can say.

You only need one hit record as a recording artist to make your name.

Yeah, you only need one.

But don't let the failures offset you from pursuing the opportunity.

But be sensible as well.

Yeah. Don't be a busy fool.

So to offset risk, it's only knowledge offsets risk.

I mean, you have risk.

Without great risk, there's no great reward. Yeah, that's why roulette is 36 to 1 or 37%, 37 to 1 chance of you getting paid out in a big way. Yeah. It's not guaranteed one.

My hedge fund brother, I guess, would say, well, to offset risk you've got to know everything.

You've got to know what's going on to price into what the risk reward ratio is.

So he made, for example, a big killing in oil or on his hedge fund when he was looking at satellite photographs of farming stuff in China.

And he saw that there were a lot less trucks going to some factories and then put that into an economic model.

And that then basically predicted a crash, which he then leveraged to make a lot of money.

But he needed access to that data and he got access to it.

So it comes back, I think, to the curiosity, you know, why are things the way they are?

You know, why did Europe only have one gas pipeline going into it from Russia forever?

It was about to have two.

No nuclear within Germany don't want nuclear.

What happens if Russia ever cut off the pipeline?

That's never going to happen.

I don't know. I do try wherever I can to reference my parents, mum and dad.

I think there's a second part to that, though.

You know, I'll say there is no I in team, but there is in a leader.

A leader is a singularity.

Clearly, I would not be here without my amazing team, many of whom have been with me over 20, 25 years now.

I guess because they like working with me, I'm not a bad boss to work with.

I talk about what's called delegration - delegate to great people, not just delegation. Anybody can delegate.

You got to delegrate yeah, higher a-plus people.

They take you to A plus plus.

Probably them.

But I do give them shout outs and stuff there.

But often the world focuses on the individual and it's what they've done.

And it clearly it's a collective they it's not what I've done, it's what we've done, if that makes sense.

So not a lot of the the how you shift products now at scale has changed - so hands up for you know who Mr. Beast is?

Hands up if you know who KSI is?

If you know who Logan Paul is?

And hands up if you've ever drunk Prime?

Okay - one person.

Prime is the biggest drink thing since Red Bull.

Coca-Cola will almost certainly buy it, probably into the billions.

It's a horrible tasting rehydrating, energy drink that happens to be stocked by Arsenal.

The kids are all over it.

If you can find it.

It's a hype-driven drink.

There will be undoubtedly competitors to Prime come along.

But Prime, it's the people behind it that make the success, not the product itself.

So really when you're drinking Prime in a red or blue bottle, which takes horrible because I have tasted it.

However, it's the equivalent of you wearing a Rolex or having the latest designer gear or you've got that.

The irony is it's not a drink for a drink's sake.

It's really to YouTubers and the sidemen who've collaborated to come up with an idea that their community that they've spent years and years, I think KSI ten years now, Logan Paul little shorter.

They've got a community of tens of millions of people.

They have an authenticity and drinking Prime is a way to hang with the KSI, Logan Paul guys.

So it's almost not enough now to have a great tasting drink like red, well Red Bull was in the nineties.

Even Red Bull doesn't own it's manufacturing.

Red Bull really sponsors sporting teams, puts on events where when you come to buy and you drink it happens to be Red Bull.

So it's really a media company disguised as a product company.

But the point you raise is very valid.

And when I launched King of Shades, of course we had lots of imitations of shaving oils that came up onto the market.

But their ability to compete with us was less because the internet wasn't as developed then and it was slower and we had a good velocity out.

But it's a very valid point.

But also if you never put it out, you'll never know.

And often you might think others will compete with you, but maybe they will not.

You don't know until you try.

Maybe give it a try.

The main change in the market is that razor blades are much better now than they were 30 years ago.

So when I launched my brand, let's just say razor blades weren't great, our oil made up for not great razor blades.

So the product market fit, i.e. the difference in the quality of shave was very, very noticeable better.

Nowadays, with engineering in razor blades, as boring as it sounds, they are manufactured to what's called Six Sigma, which is a 0.00001% of tolerance engineering term.

The quality, whether it's private label or Gillette don't matter, they're still very good.

So our brand performance in differentiated skin feel is just to say it's same but lessened.

And then we've had people obviously not shaving as much.

So we've had to, you know, to attempt to be relevant to a younger audience, have a slightly different look and feel and vibe.

Talk more about seeing where you're shaving and detailing around your peers and come up with products that are delivering the same feel to the consumer, but try to accentuate that feeling.

And that's very hard.

That's why we're not in cans of shaving foam or gel, because all the formulas are very similar.

Very difficult to have a very good shaving gel, can of shaving gel.

Whereas we've got about 10% aloe in our shave gels, which is much, much, much better.

But you've always got to be reinventing to keep relevant, and it comes back to the re-words.

I raised £17,500 and a half thousand pounds, £7,500 from my mum and dad, from my best friend at Polytechnic at Portsmouth.

£7,500 for management consultant, Herbie.

£2,500 from mum and dad.

Off that investment, I was able to afford to hand fill - took two weeks - my bottle of shaving oil at the kitchen sink that saved me money. I wrote all my copy myself and did all the design on a very new version of what was called PowerPoint just coming out then in, you know, this is how long ago it was.

Off that £17,500 was able to demonstrate enough of a business case that we got lent £100,000 from Barclays Bank.

But back with a government guarantee scheme and the company people bought in the Company Valley was goodness me. £100,000 and within eight years it was worth 20 million.

So we cashed Mum and Dad out at I think in 2004.

But to answer your question, it was friends and family and then kind of friends and family more little bit, then debt. I.e overdraft with a business plan or loan with a business plan.

That was how.

But the less money you have, the more creative you're likely to be.

Do not get sucked into raising lots of money, giving up equity because it will not end well.