Barry Jessup - Part 1

Barry is the founder of the property companies Socius and Populate. In this first part of our chat, he talks about being uninspired by the town where he grew up until he discovered punk and alcohol; getting pinned against a factory wall by an unambitious foreman; inventing his own fantasy football game before the rest of the country caught on; having his eyes opened by an incredible Australian boss; working on the Bluewater shopping centre development; being thrust into a demanding operations role; risk-taking and backing one's judgement; and getting a taste for that start-up mentality.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Obler Moment, a podcast that tells stories of remarkable careers. My name's Paul Howard. Joining me today is Barry Jessup. Barry is the founder and managing director of Sociist, a property developer that transforms underutilised sites into thriving mixed-use destinations in towns and cities across the UK. Sotiest have won awards for their developments in London, Brighton, Bristol, Milton Keynes, and Cambridge. Barry is also the founder and chairman of Populate, a place management specialist, and I'll ask him about that in just a moment, that focuses on the social and economic value of developments for occupiers, communities, and investors. Barry, thank you for being there. How are you today?

SPEAKER_00 0:48

I'm exceptionally well, and thank you for having me on. And it's yes, pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Well, I've tried tried to get you on for a little while, so it's great that we've uh managed to do it eventually. Can we just start with that? Because I guess some people who aren't that familiar with the property world may not know what place management is. So could you just explain for the uninitiated, please?

SPEAKER_00 1:05

I think a lot of people don't really understand what place management is. Uh in some senses, it should be unnecessary because it's really the way we describe it is putting the people with the property. So, no, uh for us, no, development and property development is a lot more than simply building buildings. Uh, it's about creating places that are really interesting, dynamic, fun, that people want to visit to spend time in. And sometimes that needs a helping hand. We tend to work with quite large projects that take a little bit longer to for people to colonize naturally. So you just need to give it a bit of a helping hand uh just to accelerate that process. So populate was really there to support the development functions. So let me give you some live examples.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Yeah, that'd be great.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Trying to get some occupiers into building, so it might be a cafe, it might be um a bar, might be a restaurant, might be a pop-up pizza band, it might be a music venue, it could be trying to stimulate these new strangers that have perhaps met in these developments to fast track the creation of a community. So the word ecosystem gets banded around quite a lot in science and IT circles, but actually it relates also just to everyday life. So, how do you make places more interesting? And so that that these bit of stimulus, that bit of organization, run some events, and just allow people then to the phrase I used earlier, colonize these spaces and make them their own. That's the sign of success. And for populate, interestingly, how I determine our success as place managers is to make ourselves redundant. So the sooner we are no longer needed, the the the better we've achieved.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

Okay, thank you for that explanation. That sounds great. Um, no doubt we'll return to that in a bit more detail later on. But let me start by saying that what I try to do here on the amber moment is to tell some great stories, and I think yours is a really interesting one as well. So, for the purposes of today, just to be clear, you are the hero of your story, and every story starts somewhere, every hero has his or her origin story. So I'd love it if we could start, or you could start, by telling us a bit about your childhood, your upbringing, your education, and any early influences you might have had.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Yeah, so it's interesting, isn't it? It's certainly not a heroic story, and it certainly hasn't been linear in any shape or form. And in fact, I think one of the reasons why you struggled to get me on the show initially was I was a little bit doubtful about whether, given where I feel I am on the journey, we I think we're doing very well, we've been relatively successful, very happy to talk about that. But as far as I'm concerned, there is so much more to do, and there's so much further to go. So part of me was thinking this was premature, but I'm 54, so probably not. So the origin is quite simple, I suppose. So family of four brought up initially in France, moved to back to the UK, but I'm I'm British or French.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Sorry, but you you say you say family of four, that's four siblings, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Correct, yeah. So yeah, yeah, two parents uh alive until quite recently, and four. I was the oldest of four children.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Uh so no, classic sort of middle class, I suppose, background. Grew up in France, had a great time, happy time in France, came back to the UK, didn't like it as much. We can delve into that a little bit more if you want. Um, ended up in a place called Kenworth in Warwickshire, which I found increased incredibly drab, uh uninspiring, and unambitious, and that probably uh drove me to leave there as quickly as I could. And um, it was reasonably academic, but then became disillusioned, really. Um, so it became probably in my teenage years discovered punk and alcohol and decided that was a much more interesting pastime to spend my money on, uh, which what what little money I had. Uh so you know, flunked my A-levels and uh got kicked out of the house. So again, we could delve into this if you wish to, but um only if you want to. Well, no, I mean so uh a happy family upbringing, but not necessarily a happy experience at school, and with no real clear ambition or path I had laid out for me. It was just no survival at that point in time and just knowing that there must be something better out there.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Okay. Do you want to talk a bit? Well, I don't you know have to talk about getting kicked out of your house as you put it or anything like that, but do you want to talk a bit about some of those sort of experiences at school and maybe what you what you found to be uh negative or uh what spurred you on and where you ended up?

SPEAKER_00 5:38

I mean 100%. I I mean it's it was definitely formative. There's no there's no two ways about it. And the so this paint the picture a little bit. This was mid to late 1980s Britain. I know Thatcher divides opinion, but there was definitely some good things she was doing and shaking up the country, but it was having a knock-on effect as well. One of the knock-on effects was uh I think the creation of a lot of sort of almost jealousy, and I think amongst communities, um, where there was there was definitely a creation of haves and have nots. And I think that was an interesting dynamic. But the piece that impacted me was there was there was a teacher's work to rule, which you might might remember. Which basically means that there were no that they they they they entered school a minute before school started and they left a minute after the earliest possible closing hour. So it's just I just went to a terrible school with totally disinterested teachers, and then generally children with no real ambition, very apathetic about learning or new ideas, and yeah, found it deeply uninspiring, to be honest. So uh, and that that probably took me from a position of quite enjoying school and learning to a point of well, if nobody else cares, why should I? Uh, and which probably then led on to more interesting things.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

Punk and alcohol.

SPEAKER_00 7:03

Well, well, and and look, just discovery of a world, you know, it was a reason, I suppose it was a reasonably trolling environment, probably in terms of family life, and just realizing there was a lot more interesting things out there, uh, you know, than discovery of sort of punk music and you know, gigs, and I used to travel the country watching football, etc., you realise there's a lot more out there than you find in a sleepy town in Warwickshire.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

And where did that take you to next?

SPEAKER_00 7:28

So, what was interesting, the the the long and short of that um piece was I plunked my A-levels, didn't get into university, and thought I would just spend my time you know drinking and hanging out with my mates. And bless her, my mum was uh not going to put up with that, so effectively kicked me out of out of the house unless I started paying rent, which forced me to go and get a job, which the only job I was qualified to do was effectively lumping boxes around a warehouse. And that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me uh on a number of levels. So I did it for 12 months, maybe a bit longer. So one that gave me some money in my pocket, which I quite enjoyed, and was able to do more interesting things with that. Um, but most significantly, it taught me a few life lessons. So ended up in a warehouse packing boxes, and I realized a number of things. One is that most people were just doing the bare minimum they needed to do, not to be fired. I think that's a general observation in life. A lot of people, and you you know, frankly, you don't need to work that hard to beat the majority of people, is the reality. So, but I then because I just I don't know, it was in built in built into me that you did you know actually work reasonably hard, started packing books into boxes faster than other people. So the next thing I knew I was up against the wall with the warehouse foreman saying, You're starting to make us look bad. You need to slow down to our pace. So, uh, which I thought was an absolute eye-opener. I had no idea that that could ever be anybody's motivation, that sort of regression to the mean, that sort of doing the bare minimum, which to be fair is what I'd seen at school as well, was a shock. Uh anyway, luckily, there was as it as you often have with a warehouse, there is an office element next door. Yeah, and uh so somebody had seen that I was reasonably competent, had half a brain on me, and they'd just tap me on the shoulder. Say, look, we're gonna take you out of the hardcore warehouse area, and you can move into stop control. Now that sounds really exciting, doesn't it? No, it doesn't, but it was even worse than it sounded. In those days, they used to have wooden panels the size of a I don't know, half of a sheet of A4, and you'd have to go around counting books and writing on in in pencil onto this a piece of paper that was glued onto this piece of wood, how many books of certain types there were. So that was my job, but it got me out of the warehouse and got me out of the environment where if I didn't slow down rapidly, I was gonna lose my function.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

You said this is the 1980s, you sure it wasn't the 1880s. That sounds incredibly Dickensian.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Uh, I I don't think, I think to this day, a lot of that world hasn't moved on, if I'm honest. It's a it's a there's an uh certainly in this country, I think there's an element of lack of ambition and lack of work ethic that I think is a problem. But anyway, so I I moved into stock control, and but more interesting than that, and this really dates me and dates the period, this this wasn't a cutting-edge uh uh company, let's be clear about that. But they just bought a computer, yeah. So somebody at the top had thought, everybody else has got a computer, we need one. It was the first computer in the company, yeah. Nobody else in the company knew how to turn it on. Yeah, so I got dragged in from the warehouse where I was counting books to turn on this computer. Once we turned it on, nobody had no idea, any idea what to do with it. I did have a ZenX Spectrum at home, yeah. So I had a very, very basic understanding of how a computer worked, but that put me head and shoulders above everybody else. So at the final um stretch of my time there, I was I worked in the office. I set up the computer and I was then I transferred, I digitized, sounds really posh, doesn't it? But it really wasn't, all of the manual stock control onto the computer in the office. Yeah. So by the time I left, they had a digital record, literally, just it was the to later would be so vastly simple. AI would do it for you in approximately three seconds. Uh, a list of all of the um uh the book types, and then each week we'd we'd bring in the uh the card from outside, and I would overtype the number of books we had against each, but that was so much more progressed than they'd ever done before.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Than a piece of paper glued to a bit of wood.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Exactly right. So, anyway, that was that but that was interesting. It kind of showed you a little bit so the impact that technology can have, and yeah, actually the fact that if you are even reasonably competent in technology, very relevant to today with the uh with with AI, that you couldn't absolutely steer a march on the competition.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

So, what happened from those early formative experiences in the factory between then and your winding up at the start of what became your career?

SPEAKER_00 12:05

Well, I I think it's fair to say that I I had I probably did think I should go to university at some point. So having flunked the previous applications, I it came around to the next next sort of next period, and I obviously waited to the last minute, was definitely my my sort of uh approach in those days, and uh went through clearing by the time I even got through that. And in those days, you used to get a newspaper, didn't you? And and all of the you you wouldn't have known this. Uh uh for but not for people that didn't go to Oxbridge. Uh um, you you had to apply, and the the Times would print all of the available courses, believe it or not. Yeah, and by the time I got around to reading that and phoning, and then you phoned them up to work out which ones you could do. There was nothing left. And uh as a last resort, I ended up applying for an accounting and finance course at Nottingham Trent, or as it was at the time, Nottingham Polly, yeah, uh, which I got into. I had no interest in doing it whatsoever, but that was definitely a transformative moment. So I ended up uh going to university in the following following September, and then had the best time at uh uh university, and that was definitely formative for me. Didn't pay much attention to the course, or at least I didn't think so at the time. I think with with hindsight, I definitely picked things up that have become very useful, but look with a sort of gang of friends there um who have all become very, very successful, probably coincidentally, but have that we've all used as self-motivation, I suppose, to to drive us to where where we've all ended up. So that that was a formative moment, and then getting out of small town Kenworth, getting into a not reasonably large city in Nottingham, and just everything that comes with that, a lot of that's maturity and learning, and you know, no, standing on your own two feet, becoming you know, being financially independent, uh, all those sorts of things was absolutely game-changing for me.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

And how did how did that take you to the start of your career proper, should we call it?

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Oh, I'm afraid, I mean, yeah, I I talked about a lack of linearity. This is still where we're here, but we'll just jump through this reasonably quickly. I so I managed to drag out a course for for several years, at the end of it, running out of money. So uh I started to work with Villadbrook. So passions that I had up until that point in time, I'd always I'd always been interested in gambling. Uh you know, the the the I sensible gambling in terms of risk and reward, I've always found that really fascinating, always liked sports, always like live experiences. Um, and so the the obvious opportunity then was to to go and work in the bookies, which is what I did. And again, very quickly started on the tills, and then within six months, I think I was assistant manager, within a year and a half I was running a shop. So it demonstrated to me that with a certain amount of you know, intelligent us intelligence, I guess, but also with no it was a bit of self-motivation and ambition, you could progress really quickly. So I ended up doing that and worked at LabBrooks for several years, really enjoyed it, worked at Trentbridge Cricket Ground and various other bits and pieces, just about got through my university degree. Uh I put the bare the barest possible uh minimum amount of work into that, but got through that. So this is a job, beg your pardon, this is a job that you had while you were at correct, part-time job, yeah, which I had way more interest in than I did my degree itself. Okay. Um uh and and I supp, but I suppose the the other piece at the same time as this was we were meant to go on a placement year part of our course, and you know, I think one of the questions that I thought about in the lead up to this discussion was uh to what extent have I plotted out my sort of road to relative success, and to what extent has it just happened to me? And it definitely hasn't been there hasn't been much plotting going on. There have been a whole series of sliding door moments in in my life that I suspect there are in everybody, so I suspect that's not unique, but that have led me to where I am today. And I think the sliding door moment I had on on this was everybody else applied um to do a year in industry. Yeah, I decided actually that um I'd rather go to Sweden to watch the Euro 92 football championships, which is what I did. I then came back, and of course, when I came back, all of the placements had gone. Um so um I then thought, well, what do I do? As luck would have it, the best placement you could get on that course, which is what all of the top scoring, top-rated students would have applied for, was with BP, yeah, oil company. And they had, through a change of personnel, forgotten to apply to to go to the university to request candidates. So um there were two people left that didn't have a placement at that point in time. Me and a girl whose name I forget, but who could barely speak English.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

So we both went to the interview, and I'll tell you about slightly about how sort of shambolic I was at the time. We both went to this interview for this job at BP. I didn't get the job, right? So they preferred the person with but uh only a sprinkling of English over me, which probably tells you as much as you needed to know about how I sort of turned up and my how how I looked and dressed, etc. Yeah, but as luck would have it, I think having been told that I didn't have this job, which was a little bit galling, um, a week later I got a phone call to say, well, actually, they've decided they needed two, and as you're the only candidate left, okay, well, come and join us. Yeah, and uh cutting a long story short, I then had an amazing year at BP with an extraordinary Australian boss who just was mind-blowing. So he was aggressive, he was demanding, he was good fun, he explained that you were allowed to, that work and pleasure were not mutually exclusive, which I'd never understood before. I'd always thought you did one or the other. And then, no, his his attitude of you work hard, you play hard was something that I loved. He took me to my first Royal Ascot and showed me how the other half lived to a certain extent. Uh, and of course, all of this working on a salary that was twice as much as anybody else else on the course, and with access to a lot of very smart people doing really smart things. So it was eye-opening for me. And then I lived in West London, so I got exposure to London, I got exposure to that exposure to that wonderful city and everything that happens there and on a daily basis, and that was probably my first inspiration to start to think about wanting to work in the as we describe it, the urban realm.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

What what were you doing for BP at that point?

SPEAKER_00 18:37

So it was a effectively a finance analytical role, okay, and but probably quite important to my career because I'd taken my basic sort of computing into a slightly more advanced sort of spreadsheeting, and because it was BP, they had a training program, they sent me on special training courses, and and I saw I developed quite pretty good sort of spreadsheeting and analytical skills, and that had always been a passion that I'd had. In fact, one of the interesting things I did at university that leaped into that was because I really didn't want to do much of the course learning, was I I developed my own fantasy football league. Oh, yeah, and I digitized that, and and I think this is way before it became a thing in this country, and lots of people joining in and competing with that. And uh and again, I think all these elements are slightly formative in terms of the skills that you learn in terms of analysis and reporting and and and bringing people together and giving people a motivation to actually you know to to combine, even in something as simple as a fantasy league, you know, you need people who aren't motivated and don't really want to get involved, it becomes pretty disappointing pretty quickly. So a combination of these different skills that was starting to coalesce.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

And how did all of that stuff take you to property?

SPEAKER_00 19:52

So fast-forwarding two or three sort of reasonably dead-end jobs. I then got but doing reasonably well on the financial and analytical side, I worked for Total, another oil company up in Leeds, and then I got offered two jobs simultaneously. One was working for Rothman's of Pow Mow in the Ivory Coast, and the second was working for Lendlees in Kent. Now, one definitely sounded more exciting than the other. Uh, so I was going to take the Rothman's job, another sliding door moment. Uh, but as I went down the list of perks and benefits, which were amazing and looked really good salary, a beach on the house on the beach, but the bottom of that list there was a a reference to a 24-hour bodyguard, 24-hour day bodyguard. And when I asked what that was for, they said, well, there was a bit of a spree of Westerners, Western businessmen mostly in those days being kidnapped. Uh so I decided to take the job in Kent instead, uh for working for Lendlees. And that was 100% a long-winded way of getting there, but that was that was the start of my property career. So it's working for Lendlees, big Australian business who were making their debut in the UK.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

Uh, and Australia has definitely been sort of a constant theme for me throughout my career. Uh, had taken a very, very different, had a very different approach to property and property development than most UK companies, uh companies at the time, mostly populated with Australians, with Australian experiences, and it was to develop a shopping center called Blue Water, which is in Kent, which is one of the largest in Europe, certainly at the time, easily the most premium. And that was really, really interesting to me. I was there initially in a financial role, yeah. Um, but the way that they dealt with market analytics, the way they understood um consumer trends, consumer profiling, the way they used that then to determine how they designed the buildings, the orientation of the Stores, the location and spacing of the stores, how they created events around that, how they put together a branding and marketing campaign, how they managed 30 million people visiting that shopping centre each year. All of those elements were initially mind-blowing and then eventually inspirational. And the flip moment, probably for me, was we opened Blue Water in 1999, and I my role there was I became the finance director. And then after about three or four months of operations, I walked into a very glum MD's office. And the MD said, well, the operations director, the chap who actually ran the business the shopping centre 365 days a year, had left a resignation note on his desk.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

And he looked around the room to the other directors, and I was easily the youngest director there, see who could fill in whilst they found another operations director that he suggested would take two to three weeks. Everybody else, way more savvy than me, staring at their feet. I'm the idiot with my eyes up. So he goes, Yeah, Barry, you can do this, no problem. I went, What? So next thing I knew, I was not only running the finance side, but also the operations side of this business. It took them six months to replace the ops director.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

Uh I did think two to three weeks sounded quite optimistic.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

Yeah, and it was. And so it proved. And I look back on it now, I got absolutely fleeced by all of the contractors because I had no idea what I was doing. I was working 18, 20 hour days, I'd often sleep on under the desk. But in terms of the exposure that it gave me to business, to all everything. So how do you deal with no large crowds and health and safety? How do you deal with no unhappy tenants and occupiers? How do you budget for marketing events, all those sorts of things? It gives me it gave me exposure to absolutely all of that, uh, which which is training and exposure, you simply can't buy.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

So you'd had this relatively meandering route to to property, which has become your sort of life's work, if you like. We were you aware of when you fetched up in that industry going, oh yeah, this is it, this is for me now.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

No, I no. I I it I mean, initially, my I'd been out of school. If you'd asked me which job I was likely to do, it would have been probably stopped broking or something like that. I like the idea, no, the thread of the chase a little bit. I like now the uh elements of risk and gambling. And it was only once I got into property that I realized that it's fundamental to property development, are all of those things, you know. So having a little bit more information than the market, being prepared to take risks, being prepared to back your judgment, having to have a clear thesis and understanding behind what you're doing, what you're doing, because you're gonna have to attract other capital to support you doing that. There are very strong similarities. And I think when what I've realized now looking back is my other passion is just trying to understand how what makes people tick. So if you then sort of combine human behavior with, in a sense, final financial analytics, you end up with a sort of economic sort of behavioral theory type approach to business, and that is ultimately where I've coalesced my passion professionally, and that's what I now apply uh in into the development world.

SPEAKER_01 25:20

And you've spoken of this from a young age, having this sort of ambition that perhaps some of your peers didn't have. And how did how did that sort of manifest itself at this point in your career? Like were you were you aware of having some sort of plan or mission or or where you wanted to get to?

SPEAKER_00 25:36

No, not specifically. And and and when I talk about ambition, I think it initially it wasn't that I felt I was more ambitious than everybody else. I just realized how unambitious a lot of people are. And I think it was when you there's almost a dawning realization that one, you if you work harder than other people, you can you can you know you can frankly pull pull away from them. Uh um, and and but equally that I wasn't satisfied with what a lot of other people seem to be satisfied with. So it wasn't that I was massively ambitious, it was just that I was I I perceived I was more ambitious than the next person. But but I think equally, you know, I was still very wet behind the ears and and just naive in terms of the way the world works. And there were a few observations and a few a few occurrences that I really remember. There's a mutual friend of ours, Max, and um uh who was very successful at the time in his business. And he picked me up once in his sports car with these swanky shades and you know a nice watch on his on his wrist. I didn't have any of those things. I still don't, it's not really it's not really my scene. But the fact that he was able, he had chosen that and he and uh he he had chosen that lifestyle was something that sort of woke me up a little bit. And also the point that he always made to me, which was if you're gonna be successful in business, um, it's quite important to present yourself as somebody who's successful. Uh, and that's actually an interesting life lesson. People don't tend to gravitate towards desperation or or just evil. This is maybe slightly different in the tech sector, but the people there is an element there of and you need to present yourself in a in a professional and successful way in order to or almost that to be self-fulfilling. So that was an interesting life lesson for me. But when I sort of set foot in the property sector, I you do realize that the scale of what you can achieve is a significant, has a significant multiplier effect over inter compared to what you put in, if you see what I mean. And and at SoCis, there is no doubt that that is the situation today. So the for the input we put in, the impact that we have is so much greater for good or for bad. So if we do a bad job, you know, the the no the blight you can create is really bad. We're all familiar with those developments, but if you do it well, the positive impact you can have is really strong as well. So that whole leveraging of and that ability to make a big impact with a much smaller input is was was interesting to me.

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Can you give us can you give us an example, maybe a live example of how that's happened in the real world?

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Well, I mean, I I even if I just uh we haven't talked much about associates yet, but in terms of the business that that that that I run that we set up about four years ago, and I will come back to that perhaps in a moment in terms of how that happened. But the no, we run projects which are much, much, much bigger than we are as a business. You know, so um and a counter counter example to that would be somebody who runs a factory who builds lots of things. Well, the size of the business reflects what you build.

SPEAKER_02 28:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

Um, whereas we are, in a sense, the working with our investor partners at the tip of the of the pyramid, and and and beneath the pyramid are thousands of different building blocks that make create what we want to create. So working on projects like the London Cancer Hub in Sutton at the moment, which is a £1 billion extension to what is an already very, very successful um cancer research and treatment location, well, that is that the impact that we have there is enormous compared to the size of business that we are. And if we can if we can create the right environment and and you know build the right buildings and uh and the right space between the buildings and attract the right occupiers and create the right ecosystem and and and amplify all of that through the right elements of branding and marketing comms, the impact that we can have on on the local community, on people who work there, on local school kids who might aspire uh to become scientists, on patients, on nurses, on researchers, the impact that we can have is enormous compared to you know what we're putting in. Now hopefully we're putting in something meaningful and and and well thought through. But again, the it's there's an enormous multiplier effect. If you're asking for negative examples, well, I could take you to almost any housing, new build housing estate country, and look at how uninspiring, unambitious, and ill-thought through a lot of those are, uh, and you see the contrast.

SPEAKER_01 30:02

So let's get back to you and maybe fill in some of those gaps then. So you've spoken about uh winding up at Lendlease and how you you got um that well, you you called it a sliding doors moment where you got thrust into this ops director role and worked 20-hour days, and that sounds horrendous, by the way. What happened from there to where you are today? Gives a little potted uh synopsis.

SPEAKER_00 30:24

So my focus initially was Blue Water Shopping Centre down in Kent, and then after a while, um that that stabilized, and I got the new ops director came in and sort of uh I actually realized that pure finance wasn't where I wanted to be anyway, and I'd seen the other side of what you could do. So, and Lendlees were fabulous as a uh as a business that's sort of allowing you to almost choose your own path. I don't know how many large corporates do that. Um, I've not worked for many large corporates because this that was effectively the last one I did work for, right? Um, and but it's definitely something I've taken into my other businesses since then, which is no, we have a lot of people that work for us who are not currently doing what they started off being employed for. So anyway, they were very good saying, right, well, Barry, what are you interested in? I said, Well, I'm interested in people, in marketing, I'm interested in deals, uh, the all the things that you know I probably thought I wanted to do five, ten years previously to that. So I ended up effectively working in their new business um team, which was focused on well, what are the new opportunities? Why is it a good opportunity? So to for people that aren't familiar, we might look at a site uh in one of the cities I've only ever done um in my private business life, um, urban development. So we don't do any sort of greenfield or anything like that. So you look at an urban environment, what what makes that tick? What does that need? Uh is there a clear path to allow you to deliver that? You know, is that job spaces, offices or labs? Is it no homes? Is it no teaching space? Is it leisure? You need to decide what that is. You then need to match that with the location, and then you need to understand whether that's deliverable. So is that deliverable in planning terms? Can you find the funding that to attract the funding to do all of those things? It's quite a complex recipe you have to put together, and that needs to be back uped up with clear analytics, needs to be backed up with clear thought process, and and a very clear narrative. And I think that's what's really important in in development is creating as it is in lots of different roles, I'm sure, is creating a clear narrative in terms of what you want to do. And that was right up my street. So moved into that role with Lendleys, which ended up with uh you know doing some other developments, that particularly Chapelfield up in Norwich. And but on the back of that, one of the outcomes of that was that we identified a desire to move into residential, which Lendleys wasn't currently doing in development. Lendleys wasn't doing in the UK at the time. And we we identified a startup business called First Base that had been set up by Chap called Elliot Lipton and a chap called Ben Denton, and uh my colleague um effectively broken a deal to acquire a stake in First Base in exchange for investing money into this new startup residential developer. And because I had some financial background, the the recommendation was that I came across to look after the money, effectively, in your role and to help the team to grow the business. So that's what I did. Start a business, very different mentality to a large corporate. I was only there on Second, but I did that for about a year, and after a year, I thought this is just so much better than working for a big corporate. No, I'm master of my own destiny, we're choosing our own offices, we're choosing our own um IT systems, we've we've created our own brand, we've got our own marketing collateral, we're we're directly talking to the market rather than having to go through sort of corporate routes. I thought this is much better. That's quite interesting.

SPEAKER_01 33:47

I'm just I'm just gonna interrupt there shame shamelessly, because I think that's quite interesting. So lots of people I speak to are interested in the business and the work that they do, but couldn't really give a monkeys about things like offices and and kind of the cogs of how the business actually works. But you really are interested in all of that stuff. Why why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_00 34:08

Well, because that that that imp has an enormous impact on the culture of your business. So, you know, where you work, how you work, the no, whether you adopt technology aggressively or you let it happen to you, how you structure your team environments in terms of communication, reporting, all of these are fundamental to how a business is run. Uh, and if if if you could take exactly the same people and exactly the same identical people, put them in two different offices, we're doing exactly the same jobs, two different offices with two different IT systems, with different cultures around meetings and communication, and you have two entirely different companies. Yeah, totally different, and and I believe in that absolutely passionately to this day, and we are constantly tweaking everything that we do to try to make it better. Not claiming I get it get it all right and I don't, but because it's never it's never right, and and there are always things you can get better at, but all of those aspects enormously impact your business. So if people are ignoring those, no, you can delegate them to somebody else, but you still need to have a very clear vision in terms of what you're trying to achieve. If you're ignoring those items, then you are highly unlikely to be getting the best out of your team or your company.

SPEAKER_01 35:25

Okay. All right, so you so you've got this start-up mentality at first place now. Yep. And you're on second there, but you you say you you liked that more than working for a kind of big corporate. You like that startup mentality.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

And I always have done that ever since. You know, that that's still what we're we're larger than that now, and I'll move on to that in a minute. But we are still acts like a startup in terms of the way that we think and the way we you know we we address some of those elements you were just talking about. So so whistling through this relatively quickly, we picked up quite a lot of work. We we partnered with the government to deliver urban regeneration schemes, and it was great working with Elliot. Elliot's the senator, Stuart Lipton, a sort of real no sort of heavyweight in the development world and exposure directly with vested class architects, you know, allowed us to create really interesting products that the market really liked. Uh, and you know, this was the boom years for for um development, probably just prior to GFC. So a lot of cheap credit available, able to do some really, really interesting things, mostly in London at that point in time. And I was I was doing doing that and in a capacity effectively as a commercial and sales director, so very much identifying the sites and and bringing them to market and creating unique identities and identifying the customers that would want those. Um, we set up one of the first co-work spaces in London, that was in 2006, I think. Um, we were one of the first developments on the King's Cross estate that really set the bar high for future developments there. So lots of really, really interesting things, but loads of lessons along the way as well.

SPEAKER_01 37:01

To find out what some of those lessons were and to hear about Barry's shift from holding senior positions to becoming CEO and business owner, join me next time on the Amber moment. Until then, stay amber.