From Setbacks to Success: Thomas Vosper Shares His Journey on Resilience, Reality & Entrepreneurship

In this episode of Your Mind Your Business, host Carina McLeod chats with Thomas J. Vosper, author of Historic Pub Crawls and former eCommerce professional, for a raw and inspiring conversation on the realities of building a business.

🚀 What You’ll Learn:
💡 The truth about entrepreneurial resilience—it’s more than just hard work.
💡 How to silence the noise of comparison and focus on your own path.
💡 Lessons on overcoming self-doubt, setbacks, and the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.

Thomas opens up about his journey—from being made redundant via WhatsApp weeks before lockdown to co-founding an AI tech company and pivoting to self-publishing a No. 1 Amazon bestseller. With 200k+ social followers and collaborations with brands like Heineken and Uber, his story is a testament to grit and creativity in the face of challenges.

🔔 Don’t miss this unfiltered discussion packed with actionable insights and real stories of resilience. Subscribe now for more candid conversations on Your Mind Your Business.

To find out more about Thomas and Historic Pub Crawls, see links below:
https://www.instagram.com/historicpubcrawls/
https://www.youtube.com/@HistoricPubCrawls
https://www.tiktok.com/@historicpubcrawls
https://www.facebook.com/historicpubcrawls/

#MindsetMatters #EntrepreneurialJourney #HistoricPubCrawls #CorporateToStartup #BusinessLessons #InspiringConversations #EntrepreneurTips #EntrepreneurMindset #EntrepreneurPodcast #Entrepreneurship #Resilience #YourMindYourBusiness #BusinessJourney #KeepItReal

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Transcript

We judge ourselves and our most intimate private moments of our failures that people don't even see. And we immediately judge that against the curated, edited, filtered version that someone puts up to make themselves look successful on social media. And that's just not a level playing field. Welcome to Your Mind Your Business, the podcast that dives into the real grit of entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Carina McLeod, entrepreneur and fitness fanatic.

And today, we have a special guest, Thomas J Vosper, the author of Historical Pub Crawls. Close enough. Historic Pub Crawls. That's the one. Oh, there we go.

And I'm at anything other than a fitness enthusiast, by the way. Right? My walking is a fair distance, but it normally incorporates between 12 to 15 pubs in a particular day. Fantastic. Well, you've already introduced yourself slightly there.

So do you wanna share with our audience a bit more about who you are and where you're at right now before we hit rewind and go to the start of your journey? Yeah. Of course. So, you know, by, I suppose, profession over the last 20 years, I've been an ecommerce guy. We obviously met each other at Amazon what feels like a lifetime ago when there was, what, about 300 people working in the UK.

But over the last year, I self published a book on pub crawls for my based on the routes that I ran for my birthday with my friends and family, and unexpectedly for me it became a number one bestseller on Amazon. And within the space of the last year I've managed to accumulate about 200 something 1,000 followers that, seem to like a very average looking dude in a blue hoodie and yellow shoes walking around. About 700 pubs across the country and sharing them on social media. I love the fact that you've been able to do something that you're passionate about, and that's actually turned into something bigger than you had imagined. Yeah.

I think it's crazy. You know, just last week, I was filming one of the most famous pubs in the country, the Rover's Return in Coronation Street, with all of the cast and crew behind the scenes. And I'm like pinched myself. Like this is just this is bizarre. This was a hobby.

This was a thing that wasn't even a thing, by the way. It just became this, yeah, like this this juggernaut that seems to keep going, which is fantastic, by the way, because and I'm sure we'll come on to it. But, you know, pubs are, often the heart of communities, but they're really struggling at the moment. And they have done for a number of years, really, since COVID, probably before, but really definitely since COVID. And so it's great to kind of shine a light on those people and those places and all the communities that they're at the heart of.

That's awesome. Well, firstly, congratulations because I think that's amazing to be able to put your passion into something that ends up not only being successful for yourself, but also, as you say, shining the light on other businesses that might be struggling right now. So I wanna hit struggling right now. So I wanna hit rewind. I wanna go back to the start of your journey.

So we met at Amazon, but I know that you've been on a bit of an entrepreneurial journey since then, so I'm gonna let you share your story today. Yeah. It's interesting when people talk about, like, becoming an entrepreneur or starting a business. You know what? I think it you know, sometimes it's something that I think people do by choice, and others it's sometimes circumstance.

And I've had a corporate career that's been, you know, GlaxoSmithKline and Amazon, and then moved on to Tesco for a while. And then I for a few years worked in startups until that came to a somewhat abrupt end unexpectedly, when 2 weeks before, COVID hit us and we went into lockdown, I was unexpectedly made redundant on a group WhatsApp message whilst I was actually in Manchester. I live in London, so I was nowhere near home. I was at a conference, and this WhatsApp message told us all by group WhatsApp that the company was no more and weren't gonna get paid Wow. Which was, you know, a shocking, shocking way to enter a period of time, if you remember, when people would be packing up their desks on a Friday saying, see you later.

I'm starting my new job on Monday. And then getting a message over the weekend saying, sorry, your job offer has been rescinded. And, you know, no one could get jobs, and it was really tough. Oh, my goodness. That's absolutely crazy.

So I guess that was your fuel to get you started. Well, you know, that's the reality to then say, well, you know, one of the things I used to enjoy at Amazon and I've enjoyed ever since is and I think it's an unspoken talent that I don't think people realize when they think about entrepreneurship. It's actually the hardest part is going 0 to 1. Like everyone's got an idea. Everyone thinks that they want to do something.

Everyone thinks it might look fun. Gosh, the amount of times that, you know, now I speak to people like, oh, I've always wanted to write a book. Go and write a book. I always want to write a book. Great.

I'm covered in tattoos. I'm used to it. For the last 35 30 years I've had tattoos, people would say to me, well, I've always wanted a tattoo. It's alright. But there's probably a tattoo place down the road.

You can probably pick something off the wall. It can be tiny. It could be put it on your body. No one's ever gonna see it, and it'll cost you 50 quid. Like, literally nothing is stopping you from going ahead and doing that.

Yeah. But that's interesting that you say the naught to to 1, because I guess so many people do have an idea. Right? And people assume that putting that idea into practice, although they don't even get round to putting into practice, is pretty easy because that's almost how it's portrayed these days on social media and stuff that, actually, you can set up a business and you can make it a success. Well, I mean, we are preconditioned in social media to always, let history, be dictated by the winners.

You know, I find it, the more I think about our time at Amazon. Ultimately, this really extravagant myth that a geeky Jeff Bezos wound his way halfway across the company writing a business plan on a napkin, and then suddenly working on a door as a desk in a garage. And that became the business it is today. Like, firstly, his he was an ex hedge fund manager. His parents gave him £250,000 to start that.

He wasn't thrown into, like, a pot of boiling water and told to swim out of it. He planned meticulously the area in a target that he was going to attack, and he went to a state where the taxes were very, very favourable for the type of business he was running and the product he was selling. That and he had a garage, by the way. Now I live in London. I don't know how many people are listening that live in London.

I'd love to know how many people even have a garage that they think that they can probably set up to start selling stuff out of. Like, it's just not the real world. And, actually, the real world is that there are 99 people in that that pool or that cohort of a 100 that, you know, it didn't work out. And they lost their house or they lost the marriage or they lost their own life because they just couldn't live with it anymore. And that's the risk that people don't talk about with entrepreneurs.

Because you think, well, I can I can do what if Jeff Bezos can do it, I can do this? Right? If Elon Musk can do this, great. Okay. Does your family own a diamond mine as well?

Like, is your mom a model? Like, good luck. You know? It's very, very different from the reality. I'm glad you bring that up, actually, because, that's what media does.

Right? It makes it out like this story of it's so and that's actually you're taking it another step further back. Right? Before social media, even media in general was just making it out like all the door desk, the kin, all of that about Jeff Bezos of being really successful as a result. But actually, that's not the reality.

No. I mean, you know, you don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. The there was, there was a tale of when we used to work together in Slough, someone in the Amazon head offices ordered a bunch of doors for desks, because that was the Amazon frugal way of doing it. And they ordered them from the US, and they were considerably more expensive to ship over and install than it would have been to have just gone to, like, the office depot spot down Slough High Road and just got a bunch of very generic desks. And, you know, at that point, you're like, well, actually, you know, what reality am I judging here?

And we're all guilty of this, by the way. You know, we we judge ourselves and our most intimate private moments of our failures that people don't even see. And we immediately judge that against the curated, edited, filtered version that someone puts up to make themselves look successful on social media. And that's just not a level playing field. And we have to be very conscious that that's how we see ourselves and that's what we see of other people.

I love that you said that because that is that's really the reason why I set this podcast up is because, as you say, it's quite easy to compare yourself against someone, especially when you're going through those tough times. But when you're comparing yourself against someone that actually really doesn't exist, that's even more of a deeper problem. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

And it's and it is, that kind of overnight success is is years of work. I think one of the things that I I I really feel, like, quite passionate about pushing against is when people talk about kind of really following your passion and being relentless. Because I think that's actually really toxic now. Firstly, I don't think that you should be relentless to some extent. I mean, relentless is still Amazon, by the way.

You know, relentless.com still opens up the Amazon website. Right? That was gonna be the original name of Amazon. That's a hot take. Relentless was gonna be the name.

If you type in relentless.com, you'll open up the Amazon homepage. Really? So if you wanna know what type of organization that is and the mindset behind it, they use relentless as Oh my goodness. The URL. But, I'm digested.

But, you know, we're often told, particularly, so before I was an author, which is crazy because I left school at 17, you know, I was running a VC backed startup. And that raised 1,200,000 in an environment that was incredibly difficult, particularly as a first time founder who's never raised money before, didn't have the network to raise money. It's, you know, the statistics technically meant that it was almost impossible for us to even exist. Somehow we did. We existed for nearly 4 years.

It was amazing. Not always fun, and we'll come to that, but it was it was amazing. But you're often told, you know, 99 get through 99 no's until you get to the one and just follow your passion. And actually talking about those no's, there's very rarely people that say, well, hang on a minute. Like, you know, if, like, 99 people are saying no.

Like, maybe you don't wanna get to the 99th person. There's no value in getting to the one at the 100 that says yes. Like, there's a time and an opportunity cost here that, you know, is probably not reflective of the effort that you're making. And so no one kinda says, well, you know because we were saying you've gotta be relentless. You've gotta be pushed through, pushed through the nose.

Well, actually, there's a balance somewhere where someone whether it's you or someone needs to say, well, you know, actually just what are we doing here? And then the other thing is passion, and I don't really get that. Because if you ask a kid what they want to do, they want to be an astronaut. And, and like, spoiler alert, like, if you're listening, you're not gonna be an astronaut. Like, just not.

Like, just not. Like, almost no one is going to be an astronaut. Like, in our lives, no one none of us are gonna go into space. And so it's not really following your passion. I think it's following what you're good at.

Whether you know that you're good at that, or whether you stumble into something that you're good at, and then all of a sudden that thing that you're good at becomes your passion. That's kind of where a journey to run a business, be an entrepreneur, try and be a leader, try and bring people along with you into that journey, get people excited what you're doing. That comes because you are good. Don't know whether you're good on purpose, whether it's accident, but, like, you're good.

And then that becomes interesting, and then it becomes fun, and then it becomes a passion. And people can feel that, I think. Yeah. Definitely. And that's a it's a good way of looking at it.

Because I mean, I started off by saying, oh, isn't that great that you have a book and it's something that you're passionate about? But then I guess there's a different way that you can look at it as well. Yeah. There's a different way about it being a passion versus I closed the business after letting a team of very, very talented people who'd built something that was amazing go respectfully and with plenty of notice and found myself going, now I probably need to sort myself out because, you know, I've got a family and a mortgage. How am I going to deal with that?

And, and I probably could have spent the next year trying to find, a job. Maybe someone would have hired me. I don't know. I'm really Aggie, and I don't like having bosses. That doesn't normally lend itself to being particularly good.

Maybe a lot of people who run businesses maybe feel similar to that, that they want to be their own boss. And I thought, well, you know what? I I run a pub crawl for my birthday with my friends and family. The thing I love about that is that everyone looks forward to it, and it's a real mix of people from different parts of my life all coming together with me kind of being the glue in the middle of that. And I and I love the way that they all mingle.

And I mean, if you're gonna hit 12 pubs during the day, you're gonna become each other's friends by the end of the day. And so I thought, well, I'm just gonna write I'm just gonna do the pub crawl because my birthday starts September. I'm working, and then I'll worry about the rest of the stuff after I've had a month off and a bit of fun. And then I thought well I wonder if I've got any of the old routes because I always make this little route in this little booklet. And I found 12 of the previous 15 years, which is why the first book has got 13 as an unusual number.

But I fact checked to make sure all the pubs are still open and rewrote them at to actually start drawing maps and writing directions because I wasn't personally gonna be around to take everyone who bought the book on the route. And, and then people started buying it. Like, I just put it on Amazon, self published, and then people started buying it before I'd done any marketing or anything. It was amazing. That's absolutely awesome.

That's really awesome. The fact that you haven't done any marketing. Well, I hadn't then, but I definitely felt I wonder if I'm onto something. And I thought, you know, again, it's like do you run a business because you want to run that business?

Do you run it because actually you just you you're not a good employee. You don't have a boss and you wanna do something different. And then is that thing that you run something you're passionate about? Or is it something you're good at? Or is it something that you pick and choose and you, you know, you think, okay, I can kinda cover the mortgage for this time or whatever?

Or do you just fall into it? And that was the second time in my life after, you know, running this VC backed tech business that started right at the start of COVID, this was again, like, the second time in my life where I was basically dealt a bad hand and said, well, you're gonna have to make some magic happen here. And to market that, one of the things that, I feel quite passionate I do feel quite passionate about this for any marketing folks listening. It really riles me that, so much marketing money goes into stuff that is data metrics measurable that just funnel straight back into the big platforms, you know, the Google, the Facebook ads. Like, it's just so transactional and transitional.

It doesn't give you any legacy that you can you can sit on as a brand or a business or as a company. And I really feel uncomfortable about a lot of a lot of that. And I think that, you know, just like we're here today, there's a value in content and connecting with people that will exist forever. And so with that in mind, I took I took my copy of my book. So this is one of my early author copies here.

It's all my notes in the back. That's why it's dog eared. I've filmed I've filmed 700 pubs in the last year, which is a crazy amount of pubs. And I walked into the Duke of Somerset just behind, Aldgate station, and I said and I took one of, the girls who was my TikToker, helping me with my last company. And I walked to the pub and said, you're in my book, and I'd love to film the pub.

And hopefully, you can pour me a free pint, and we can stick it on social media, and we'll all be famous. And loads of people will come to your pub, and loads of people will buy my book, and they tell me to do one. Really? Absolutely. I bet that's changed now.

Well, they're not in the next, the revised edition of the book, I'm afraid. How to get yourself out of it. Yeah. But, and so that day we went to 15 pubs, and 5 of those pubs said no filming, no pint. 5 of them said buy your own drink.

Sure, film if you want, but be quick. And it was Dirty Dicks in Liverpool Street down the road where we're recording this. That was the last pub of the day, and the guy behind the bar said show me the book. Show me the book. Oh, that's amazing.

Okay. Drink something all night. That's fine. And it was it was that level of see, that's the passion, actually, by the way. Like, it wasn't my passion.

It was someone else's passion and curiosity and interest that went, oh my god. That's amazing. You wrote a book and we're in the book. Like, I love that. Like, tell me more about that.

I love that. And that was how we ended that day. And, yeah, sure. Now, very rarely do I walk into a pub and they don't let me film. You've tapped into so many different areas there, especially one about resilience.

Right? But if we go back, right, because you mentioned about being, like, given a bad hand a a couple of times and you've got this pre COVID experience, right, where you're just told, okay. You got no job to go back to on WhatsApp. And then you've gone through and set up your own company. It are we able to go back to like that kind of that moment like from you've just received this this message saying, right, no job.

What then gave you that What was it that then pushed you to then go and start up your the your VC business? VC backed business. Well, again, I think it's I think a lot of it comes down to circumstance. You know, I had I had family.

I had children. I had a mortgage. Like, life couldn't stop. It's it COVID didn't matter.

Like, everyone was going through that experience, but stuff wasn't going to stop. I mean, I mean, thankfully, at the time and, you know, this is probably the unspoken thing that I think a lot of people won't admit about COVID. It was probably beneficial to a lot of businesses. The fact that, I could postpone my mortgage for 3 to 6 months and then also not have an uncomfortable conversation with my family to say we're not going to go on a family holiday this year because we can't afford it. Like, it didn't matter whether we could or couldn't afford it.

No one could travel. No one was paying their mortgage. Kids weren't even at school. Like, it was a very different environment, and so everything comes out of the circumstances.

So what goes through your head is very quickly, okay. What's my bare minimum? Like what do I need to do here? Like what do I need to do? And actually, by the way, I feel in an incredibly privileged position that my what I need to do wasn't, oh my god, like I need to get food on the table, or I need, like, somewhere to live.

Like, that was sorted. Sure. Maybe a few bills would slip here or there. I'd have to worry about how I'd manage money and, you know, how much I might spend on the shopping.

But, you know, there's always a credit card somewhere and we could've figured that out. It's very different, if you know what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. Completely.

Completely. So what was, what was that moment then, the pivotal moment for you to were you trying to figure out what you should be doing or because it's very different what you were doing then to what you're doing now. Yeah. It was. But when I started that business, it was very similar to what I had been doing.

We'd you know, I'd spent I'd spent over a decade in e commerce. You know, I I knew retail. I knew retailers. I knew technology. I knew the way that big platforms and marketplaces would work.

So, you know, actually the transition to hang on a minute. I've seen all of this in the corporate life. I've spent 3 or 4 years in a start up environment in a similar area. And then, you know, what do I do next? Well, actually, I can kinda take all of those lessons.

And what would I do if I if I was gonna do this on my own? And I say on my own, I don't mean on my own. There's obviously people around me and cofounders and a talented team all of the time that you need to kind of always come along in that journey. Or not necessarily come on a journey, give you the push or give you the encouragement to start. And there were definitely people at the start of that that said, you could, you know, give it a give it a go.

Like, now the circumstances are here. Like, give it a go. Take what you've learned and just run with it and see what happens. Did you have any ever have any moments where you questioned yourself or had that almost self didn't have that self belief that you could make it happen? Like, every day.

Like, that's every day. Every day. I, today was interviewed by the BBC for probably the 10th time. And I've been on live TV and live radio now numerous times over the last and I felt as I was being interviewed, I was like, oh my god. That's so awful.

I look so stilted. I can feel it. I can feel frozen up. My god. Like, I'm total imposter syndrome here.

You know, like, this is gonna be like, am I like, have you even got enough of this that, like, I'm even gonna be anywhere on the TV tonight? Or you just be like, we can't use that. That guy looks like a robot. He just talks like a moron. And I always get trolled every single day.

And so it doesn't really matter that whether it was, I mean, I did feel it less when I was an employee. I did feel it sometimes there were times when you, you know, you sat in a room with people that you felt were more talented than you and wondered why am I in this room. And it's, you know, it's that kind of myth that everyone says if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. You're like, no. I wanna be the person the smartest person in the room, please.

Yeah. Yeah. I wanna feel like I'm the smartest person. I wanna be the best looking, smartest, most charismatic. I want to be the one that walks in a room and everyone goes, oh my god.

I'm in the room with them? Oh, they're amazing. You just never feel like that, do you? Like, no one ever feels like that, really. Yeah.

Even that person that does that, they don't feel like that either. Is I'm really pleased that you said that. Not that you go you go through that, but I think that's something really important that people don't realize because even you sitting here today, you seem like you've got it you've got it sorted. You're as a you've now gone into being an author. Your books are doing really well.

But then and that's what people see. Right? But actually, you're going through your own journey. Like, you're sitting there on BBC. Everyone be like, oh, that's amazing.

You look great, but you you're just you've got your own questions going on in your head. And one thing that was really interesting that you just said there was you feel it more now you've got your own business or now you're working for yourself as well. How do you manage that? Well, you definitely do feel it more. There's a bit that people don't see and obviously this won't come across very well on, if you're not watching this.

But I have notes. And so I have probably recorded a 100 podcasts over the last 5 or 6 years. And as I said, I've been on live radio. I've been on live TV. I've put out I've filmed in 700 pubs in the last year alone, of which at least 300 of those have been edited and gone out to round about 50,000,000 views.

That has included, celebrities with me, messaging me, and all of that sounds really amazing, but I have an a 4 piece of paper, and it says these are the things to make sure you mention. These are the things to avoid mentioning. There are 6 questions that you sent me in advance, and I have all of my answers for that. And what people don't realize is what they think is just someone seamlessly kind of going along going, I've got this. It's preparation.

It's hard work and preparation that happens before almost everything you do that no one even has a clue that even happens. I mean, I, you know, I don't have my makeup on today. I should have done I'm gonna look really white when I'm on BBC, but I definitely have my fake hair sprayed in. Not because I'm worried about my hair falling out, but, you know, when we are on camera we are our worst critics. You know, I know that, you know, when you're on a camera you look paler than you normally look.

That's why you put makeup on. Like I know that you look bolder than you look. That's why you, you know, zhuzh it up just a little bit. Right? It's not to make you look better.

It's just to make you look at least as good as you would like to be as your normal self. And that's what people are looking at. People are looking at that and going, oh, he's fine. He's all and, like, yeah. Because I've because I I you sent me these notes, what, 10 days ago.

Yep. And that was Wasn't just like a last minute, like, just rock up and just, like, turn up? I mean, sure. You know, I'm 2 pints and a Thai lunch in. But, you know, it's it all comes off the back of an awful lot of hard work and preparation that always happens behind the scenes.

And that's the bit that people don't see. Right? As you just said, it's behind the scenes and people don't always share. And so I'm glad that you shared it because actually the fact that it does require planning, you know, I've got questions here in front of me. If all of a sudden I stall, I know that it's okay to stall because I can fall back on what's in front of me.

But people don't see that. People just see people, oh, you seem so natural. You seem so comfortable. Do you get those moments or those sleepless nights where you're just like, you know, when you go through those challenging times, like, you've gone through in the in the past, do you get those points where you're just like, I don't know how to move forward? Oh, everyone's had those moments, haven't they, where they sit on the sofa and just go like, I can't.

And sure. You know what? We all call labels for that. Right? We there's all sorts of labels, and I'm a big advocate for, you know, hiring diversely.

Helping people get through difficult situations in life. Giving people an opportunity to, you know, be very open about how they're feeling. But at the same time there is a really unspoken thing that no one will admit as a founder. You do not get mental health days as a founder. You do not.

I mean forget mental health days. You don't get sick days. You don't have holidays. None of that exists. And by the way if you do have a holiday, you're working.

You're checking your emails. You're doing something. Or if you're not doing anything, it's still on your mind. And that is a shift that, is really difficult to accept, I think, for a lot of people. And as a founder and as an entrepreneur, one of the things that I find hardest is that is that people don't always have the same values that I have.

You know, if it needs to get done and it's Friday, stay late, or work at the weekend and it's done Monday, I would. Of course, it's probably unreasonable to expect someone who doesn't have skin in the game, who is on a salary to say, actually, no, boss. I'll stay late, and I'll work Monday. Like, that's not that's not their thing. That's not what they're doing.

Really hard to kind of make that connection or make that disconnect and say, okay. You do your thing. That's fine, and not resent that. The same way that, and I say that because I don't mean to be harsh, but you don't get it the other way. There's times that I've watched the bank balance in a, you know, in a pre revenue tech startup just go down all the time, however much I'm trying to raise it up and get a bit more money.

And we did an amazing job. You know, I watched that down. And, yeah, no one ever no one ever asked me no one ever asked because no one even thought about what I was feeling when that money was going out of the bank account. And I was going, okay. We've got, like, 4 months left.

And you know what? Especially because it started off the back of being made redundant on a WhatsApp message, and I and I was halfway through the month. I didn't even get paid that month for the time I worked. All my expenses, it was all gone. I was like I want to give everyone 3 months, and so I'm talking to people and developing people and helping them feel that they've got a path to progression, and what can they do next knowing, in a month's time I'm either gonna have to start breaking my own rules and eat into your notice or eat into your notice because I'm gonna have to take on even more pressure to back myself to make sure that I give you more notice, I get more money, that we're fine.

Or Yes. It's gonna end badly. It's tough. It's tough. Do you have, how do you switch off from that?

Honestly, I don't think you do. I mean, I don't think you do. Do you? Do you have any things that kind of are a distraction, maybe? 2 pints and a tie.

Yeah. 2 pints and a tie. I mean, it's it is different now. It is it is very different now. There are obviously a few different ways you can run a business.

And there's also and going back to what people talk about when they're like, oh, I've got an idea, and then actually what takes an idea into something else is execution. And so part of that execution is how much time and commitment and effort are you gonna put into that execution to, you know, are you building a lifestyle business? Is it gonna trickle along? Is that fun? Are you building a business that is going to employ lots and lots of people or just, you know, whatever.

Doesn't matter how many people. Like, is it gonna be a lifestyle business for the people you're employing? Or are you looking for foot soldiers that are literally gonna run, like, over broken glass with you? And then are you doing that, again, organically? Are you making money?

It's, you know, it's very different. The this, you know, this business compared to the last business, the last business I ran, because of the experience I had in ecom, I knew that it was very front loaded, our costs. It was a high-tech AI business before AI was a thing, which that was timing wasn't it? And But, you know, it was a very high-tech, high resource business that required a lot of, like, not a lot a lot of money's relative, by the way. I raised 1,200,000.

It sounds like a lot. You know, when the business went pop, you know, that was at the same time that Farfetch was getting sold to, you know, a Chinese PE company for less money than it even raised. So, you know, if Farfetch doesn't exist in the same space, 1,200,000 suddenly doesn't sound like a lot of money. So, you know, you've got that style of business where you have all that pressure to, like, pour more, like, pour more fuel on the fire and front load everything versus, you know, the books kind of just took off, and then all of a sudden it became an income. You know, like I've been paid on book sales every single month for the last year, and if I walk out of the studio go and hit get hit by a bus then that money is still going to go into a bank account for the next year.

I mean sure it will probably drop off as I make less content to stop producing so much stuff, and slowly it will come out of date, but it exists. It's a thing. And so off the back of that, it then becomes a business that you reinvest. I've hired an editor. You know, I've got a nice cohort of people.

I always hire young people or unemployed people or students that can help me with filming and editing. I've probably got 10 people now around the business that are always there to kinda call on. That's awesome. Do you feel, less pressure with the being an author now compared to when you were, as you say, working in a business where it's very front loaded and you're spending a lot? I feel a different pressure, but I also think that I learned a lot on, the last business that has helped me with this one.

My co founder was really good at last company. I learned a lot from working with James. And, you know, one of the things that that he taught me, a little bit like similar to our Amazon days, you know, you're kind of going into interactions with an objective or at least a set of objectives and a lot of preparation. And then you're expecting some sort of follow-up on action points that come off the back of that. And I think that most people don't do that.

And so that leads to a lot of meaningless conversations that don't really go anywhere and half hour meetings that could probably be 10 minutes. But, you know, we've got half hour books. We might as well fill the time. And so it's meant that, you know, really I'm a one man band as an author and then as a content creator and who knows as social media should we call it social media personality? That sounds good.

Don't know. It sounds better. My yeah. My kids think it's hilarious. Dad's a TikToker.

They think it's absolutely nuts. You know what? I think it's a different sort of pressure that comes off the back of that, but one that I feel a little bit more in control of because every time I'm interacting and engaging I know that, like, I'm the blocker. Like I'm the one person. I can't I can't delegate stuff to anyone.

So my time, which is important and I should respect it as being important, has become even more critical and important for me. You've been on quite a journey, haven't you, since, if you go back to pre COVID and to where you're at now. And, that's a huge amount of resilience that you've built up to get you through. Maybe. Or, you know, maybe.

Or it's just being, isn't it? I mean, that that's just that's not a thing. Like it's really it's not a thing. And that's the part that, you know, I'd like people listening, you know, if you're thinking about running a business or thinking about starting a business or you're struggling, like just resilience isn't a thing. Like it's it's just a given.

That's just what happens. It's not something to be celebrated. It's not something to feel bad about. Like it's just what you have to do. And once you kind of put that into a little box, put a little bow around it, and then go that's just how things are gonna be, then at least you get a little bit more clarity on, like, well these are the things I'm gonna need to work on.

This is the stuff that I'm not gonna like. That I'm gonna have to do. This is stuff I'm gonna feel awful about. This is stuff that's gonna get me really excited. That's fine.

But, like, resilience, like hard work, sleepless nights, what that little pain that you get like in your stomach, like that little kind of gut check that you get from worrying about stuff. Okay. Now you know that's a given. Like there's no point worrying about it. Just put it away.

Don't worry about it. Save it for when you have a breakdown in many years. It doesn't matter. And then worry about the other stuff that's good. And you know what?

Actually you probably find that when you think about some of the good stuff, like the better stuff, the good stuff, it that's probably your coping mechanism. Right? You're still gonna feel bad, by the way, and you're still gonna be tired. You're still gonna be stressed. But at least you've got those moments of joy.

And I think they're the bits that I think they're the bits that when you run a business really cuts through the difference however much you care about the job that you do when you work for someone else. It's those little moments of, Yeah. That was cool. Those little bits of joy that you did. You did.

And if you didn't do it on your own, the people that helped you were there with you and they did that. There's a special connection there as well. I that's the part I love. I love that. I love the fact that you've just said, right, the hard work, the resilience, all of that is a given, and put it to one side because you've got to learn to put it to one side otherwise it will eat away at you.

And the fact that you've learned to do that and you've learned that over whether it you felt it came easy or not and you focus on the positivity and the great things, I think is huge advice for our listeners today is being able to it almost cut that out. How do you which means there's other things, right? The cutting out. There's noise as well. Right?

There's not only the voices in your head of things. There's also the noise that goes on in social. You mentioned a few people commenting. I guess you're now in a place where people will comment. How do you just block all of that out and just focus on, right, I'm just moving forward on this myself?

Yeah. So noise is probably the one of the toughest challenges that we all have, even in jobs or just in our lives in general. Right? I mean, we are on our phones looking at the TV, like, at the same time. Like, it's you almost can't watch a film nowadays without what, like, suddenly bringing up who's in it.

Like, it doesn't matter just watch the film. Like, you can't sit through a film. You can't do stuff. And as a business owner and as an as an employee as well at times, like, that context switching is incredibly tough. You know, there's a lot of research around, you know, what happens if you, you know, you're checking your emails and then like your phone goes.

You're halfway through an email and then you see your WhatsApp, and then you can't just go straight back to that email. Like you lose some of that production. And, you know, I've written I've put, like, a 100,000 words down across 3 books. There's more to come, by the way. There's 4 books now I've written.

The 4th one's not out yet. That's a spoiler. And, yeah, there's, like, a 120,000 words, and that there's so much noise around that you're worried about what people are saying about you, what people are thinking or saying about you that you don't even know what they're thinking or saying about you. And then you're supposed to also try and, like, almost put your headphones on and focus on doing this thing that's actually the day job that's gonna pay the bills, and then worry about some other stuff. But there is another view to that which I think is, is what I take a lot of heart in.

There's a lot of really good stuff that happens that you don't know as well, and so, you know, there's stuff you do see that's good and bad. I've got lots and lots of posts on my social media that I've shared where people have written lovely comments and said that, you know, I love this account. Best account on Instagram. Oh my god. This is so good.

You know, those ones I save. I save. I keep them in a little highlight on top of my insta, like, crawler love, and I can look at them. I love that. It's amazing.

I get lots of people where they say really bad stuff to me. That's fine. I don't save those. I don't care. They can go and do one.

I'm obviously not gonna swear on this, but they I would tell them to their face. I don't have a problem with that either. They wouldn't tell me to my face. But there are lots of things that happen where people probably think bad things about me that I don't know about. Well, okay.

I don't care. Like, life's too short. I don't care. Like, whatever. I'd rather people, you know, hate me for who I am than love me for who I'm not.

Doesn't make a difference. But there are things, and I do feel because of the pub and the social media, like, my audience is a little bit older. They enjoy my content. They do sometimes comment, but there's a lot of stuff that happens where they don't, you know, they're not active. They're observers.

And I bump into people like I did yesterday. Someone on the train came up and, oh, you're the pub guy, aren't you, man? I follow you. It's wicked. I love watching all your videos.

It's great. So I would, like, dude, make sure you, like, like them and comment them. Like, give me some noise. Right? So we get, like, you know, some engagement and we get to share the pubs and it's really great for the pubs.

Oh, yeah. I'll definitely do that next time. And, you know, that's a guy that's recognized me on the train, that has watched all my videos, loves all of my videos. As far as I know, he doesn't even exist. I don't know him.

I didn't know that that's happening. I don't know that someone, is in that. One of my old Amazon friends sent me a WhatsApp, you know, a few weeks ago and said, I'm in Germany in a pub and I've just met these guys and they're just telling me about your book. I'm like, what? And he's like and he's like and I was telling him, like, that's my mate.

I'm gonna what's happened now? That's cool. That's awesome. Or I got a message from someone saying, hey, we took your book on a pub crawl the other day. We really loved it.

It was really strange though because there was like another group of people that we kept seeing in the pub and it took us to about pub 7 when we had plucked up the courage to talk to each other that we realized that we both had the book and there were 2 groups of mates doing the same route at the same time. Oh, wow. Like, that's product market fit, by the way. Like but all of that stuff has happened. And if that happens and I know about it, then that must be happening somewhere else and I don't know about it.

So I don't worry about what people says to say to me that I don't know about. I don't care what people say to me that I don't like because all of that stuff is happening, and I know about it, and it's amazing, or I can just pretend that it's also happening somewhere else because it probably is. That's awesome. I love that, and, I'm sure it will continue to, to grow. Before we wrap up, I do wanna ask you one question.

Last question is if you were to give some advice to your younger self, what would it be? So, I think we live in a very anxious time at the moment. And I think if, I think and I don't mean this to sound as negative as it might well come across, but I think if you realize how little people thought about you or cared about you, then, you would not care so much what they think about you. There we go. That's a piece of advice.

So definitely. And, yeah. As you say, we do, spend a lot of time worrying about what other people think as you've mentioned, but, actually, does it really matter? Yeah. Can I just do a shameless plug?

You can do a shameless plug. Go for it. Yeah. Because yeah. Like, you heard it here first.

My books are self published, which is, interesting, and it's wonderful that you can just do that. But I have just signed a 6 book deal with the world's 2nd largest publisher, and, I will be bringing more books, across the country, and hopefully across the world, starting with, my England book, which will come out next summer, and then Scotland and Ireland. Wow. Congratulations. That's awesome.

Will you be, going international at some point? Absolutely. I've already so I've already written a book on Manhattan. So if anyone's going to New York, make sure that you search that up. There's a 120 pubs in there across 10 routes that we filmed in 9 days in the freezing cold.

It was amazing. Fantastic. Well, we'll make sure that we, add all the links in the, description on our YouTube channel so everybody can follow. So thank you. You've been, I've loved talking to you today.

I've learned more about you. I've heard more about your story because we actually haven't really spoken since the Amazon day. So That's what happens when you run a business. We're too busy running our own businesses and trying to navigate life. Exactly.

So it's been, it's been good hearing about your story. True inspiration. So appreciate you, getting real, being real with our audience today. So thank you. I thank you for having me.

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