Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:39: Monsieur Barnett
00:02:20: Louis’s journey
00:05:18: Chocolate air miles
00:07:39: Shiny object syndrome
00:10:02: Foreign languages
00:13:35: What came after chocolate
00:17:07: Louis’s long-term goal
00:18:29: Ethics and values
00:22:36: Louis’s pivotal conversations
00:29:08: You never know where a conversation might lead
00:31:51: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Wendy Harris: Hello again, it’s me, Wendy Harris, your host on Making Conversations Count.  I want to just quickly remind you of the values of the show: looking to bring you business leaders with their industry insights, sharing their honest real-life stories and that conversation that counted.  It couldn’t be closer to those values with today’s guest, because it’s somebody that I met over a decade ago and actually, he is the same age as my eldest daughter, and I got talking to his mum quite a lot because he was a busy young man back then.  He had won the Young Entrepreneurs of the Year Award for chocolate; we all love chocolate, right?  He’s gone on to do some really fantastic things.  Let’s get on, because we’re making conversations about young entrepreneurs count.

What’s new Wendy Woo?  Well, I’m going to be spending the next few weeks, I think, sharing with you your reviews from the Brad Sugars episode.  It’s been fantastic to have your feedback and of course the rituals that Brad shared with us.  The stretch, WIFLE and whoosh are a great way to start a meeting.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, scroll back to Episode 55.

Now, I want to get this young man, Louis, chatting about young entrepreneurship.  Monsieur Barnett!

Louis Barnett: How are you?

Wendy Harris: I am absolutely splendid.  Do you know I was just reminiscing, that must have been 15, 16 years ago when you first came on my radar?

Louis Barnett: It’s got to be a long time, because I remember I was talking to my mum the other day and she remembers you popping up.  We were trying to figure when it was, but it was probably 15 years ago or so, as you say.

Wendy Harris: Life has been kind to you since, yes?  Because I almost feel like your mum.  I’ve been following your career all this time.

Louis Barnett: Yeah, very kind.  I think it’s been a very interesting journey, particularly over the last five or six years as well, where making that transition from building my own business pretty much full time and since 2008, I’ve done consultancy in different projects.  But building your own thing versus building others with them, it’s quite a different transition.  I’d say I’ve probably learned almost as much in the last sort of five, six years that I did in some of the years previous to that.  So, yes, it’s been a very interesting journey for sure.

Wendy Harris: You weren’t really far out of school were you, before you were launched into this madness of being successful?  You were selected for, was it the Duke of Edinburgh or Prince’s Trust or something like that?  Come on, I’m an old lady now, help me out.

Louis Barnett: Yeah, sure, so there were a few different ones but the big one was the Lord Carter Award, which was for the achievement in the food and drink industry which typically had been given to CEOs of quite big companies.  It was presented at the time by CEO Justin King of Sainsbury’s and others, so it’s quite cool to know that I was carrying weight in the industry.  I think at the time, when I was very much the youngest person in a lot of rooms, it was good to know that I was still being able to stand toe-to-toe with some real industry greats, which was brilliant.

Wendy Harris: Young Entrepreneur of the Year, I seem to remember those headlines.  How jealous must some of our listeners be that you made your mark with chocolate?  It must have been the coolest job ever leaving school.

Louis Barnett: It was, yes.  I mean it’s interesting because I think I was very much an entrepreneur by default, in the sense that I think a lot of entrepreneurs, especially now, it’s like this thing which wasn’t around when I was around, it was this whole career path where when I started, I certainly didn’t intend to be an entrepreneur, I didn’t intend to really make any money out of it.  It was just I loved, and I was pretty good at eating chocolate, so that helped, fell into making stuff for family and friends and then it just snowballed, and it ended up being this big part of my life.  But it certainly wasn’t a conscious decision of, “Right, let’s start this business and make some money and create a career”. 

I left school obviously to be home educated.  That was, I think, a consideration somewhere in the back of my mind that it was like, “At some point, I’m going to have to employ myself or find something”, so I think that helped, but most of it was just I loved doing it, I carried on doing it and it just went from strength to strength and organically grew.

Wendy Harris: How many air miles did you do in those first early months of chocolate?  I remember back in the day when I was hammering the phone for clients all the while, I was working for a design agency that just really wanted to take your brand put you on the map, and that was it.  I was always just talking to your mum, because you were on some aeroplane somewhere in South America or something.  I was just, “How cool is that?”

Louis Barnett: Yes, there were a lot of air miles and I think it was interesting, because a lot of Brits go through the disillusion of the island mentality, as I like to sort of say, this idea that when you’re brought up in Britain, we’re quite isolated in a sense culturally and from a business perspective.  Whereas, I’ve got friends that live in Switzerland, and they speak seven languages, and they are going in and out of borders.

Wendy Harris: A great place for chocolate.

Louis Barnett: Yeah, absolutely.  As an islander, you get very locked in and then suddenly, it’s like somebody lifts the lid off it and goes, “There’s a really big world out there”, and actually the UK is this teeny tiny little grain of sand in the ocean.  It’s a perspective in a way that I wish a lot of British businesses really understood, that we’ve got one of the best brands in the world.  Brand Britain is so strong, and actually there is so much potential for so many more British businesses to get out there into the world, use that as a kind of leverage to actually get their products and services out there.

I was very lucky to be invited to speak and to do various projects, but obviously also exporting the chocolate.  So, 8 years after we started, we’re in 17 countries around the world.  So, yeah, it was a pretty steep growth curve, but at the same time probably a little bit of overtrading and we did have a bit of a shotgun approach where we were being pulled in every different direction and it was great.  At the same time, it meant that some of our markets probably weren’t as established as they could be.

Mexico ended up being our best, because I just fell in love with it.  I’m a massive foodie and obviously that’s where chocolate came from, and I ended up spending loads of time out there and that then became our best market, but I wished I could have cloned myself sometimes with all the travelling and stuff.

Wendy Harris: The challenge there though, Louis, is that this next best thing, being pulled in all these different ways, it’s like shiny object syndrome, isn’t it?  It’s all new, it’s all the challenge that you’ve always gone, “Come on, bring it on.  Let’s just see where this takes me”, so why not just enjoy the ride and there will be places that you’re not going to do as well as, but it doesn’t mean to say that you haven’t just smashed it really?

Louis Barnett: I completely agree, and I think that learning curve is sometimes really important and I think that it’s almost this expansion and reduction that I ended up doing, where it’s like shiny object syndrome, like you said.  You’re everything to everyone and everywhere and there’s this big wide world out there.  I just think — I suppose I sort of learnt then my perspective was that the business still has to fulfil me and still has to actually give me what I need from it, rather than just me allowing it to pull me in every different direction.

For the first five years, I didn’t have a single holiday.  We had a few days off at Christmas, but a proper dedicated holiday, so little things like that I think teach you a lesson that actually, eventually, a business is supposed to support your lifestyle instead of takeover every aspect of your life.

Wendy Harris: But of course, you were doing all this travelling, so weren’t you having a marvellous time?

Louis Barnett: Yes.

Wendy Harris: People don’t understand the difference between travelling for work and travelling for pleasure.

Louis Barnett: Yeah, sure.  It was nice that I think as we really started to establish some of those markets, I would spend longer, because actually I realised that dipping in and out of countries was good fun, but somebody says, “What’s San Fran like?”  You go, “The conference centre’s really nice, the hotel was great and the airport’s quite nice and clean”, and you have a lot of stories like that, that when you drop in and out, as you say, it’s a very different experience.

I know the insides of lots of different exhibition centres around the world, but not so much the countries they belong to.  Whereas, as time I went on I said, “Actually, I need to choose a few key markets, spend more time out there” and obviously, Mexico became one of those, but there are a few others as well that you really got to know, and it became fun again rather than just lots and lots of jetlag back-to-back.

Wendy Harris: It’s realigning that purpose that you started with, isn’t it?  We’re all about conversations on this show.  What was it like travelling to different countries?  What was it like with the language barriers?  Did that hold you back, or are you a bit fluent in some languages?

Louis Barnett: I think we are incredibly lucky that English is the international language, especially when you are doing business at a certain level, everybody seems to speak English and it really puts us to shame.

Wendy Harris: They speak in pound notes, do they?

Louis Barnett: I really wished that somehow Britain was more culturally integrated, even with Europe, that we had more focus on foreign languages, and I think you pick up little bits of different languages and I had all kinds of different phrasebooks in different countries.  I am probably not as practised anymore, but at one point I could get around and do most things in Spanish and hold a very basic conversation.

Wendy Harris: Is that close to Mexican; is it the Hispanic route?

Louis Barnett: Yeah, it is pretty much identical without the “th” sounds.  Obviously, Castilian Spanish you get a lot of “Theravetha” sounds whereas with Mexican, they just cut it out, it’s, “Cerveza”.  Or, in Spain, a ladies’ name, “Rotheo“, would be, “Roseo” in Mexico, so actually in a way it is easier to speak.

There’s a lot of colloquial stuff, and you get some words that are almost illegible initially that are Nahuatl, or indigenous words that just look completely — there’s lots of Xs and Os and Ys and Zs, but it is very similar.  But as I said, it never ceases to amaze me how good English is internationally.  Wherever you seem to go in the world, you can at least have some basic conversations with most people.  I especially think that even if you learn base phrases and base language, people will try with you.  Whereas, if you take the approach, “Well, I’m English and everyone should speak it”.

Wendy Harris: The arrogance of the English.

Louis Barnett: Yes, generally people lose all of their English words immediately and look at you quizzically, so I think it is really important to just pick up as much as you can.  It is obviously not always as easy to do with certain countries; but yeah, just show a bit of effort and usually people will try as much as they can to try and converse with you.

Wendy Harris: Most people will learn certain key phrases, won’t they, like, “Good morning”, “Good afternoon”, “Two beers, please”, that sort of thing!  I remember I was in Kenya, and we were taught by our driver to speak some Swahili, which was just awesome.  So, it was, “Jambo”, going round with all these words.  I couldn’t tell you now what they are, but at the time we felt like we were part of it and people embrace you for trying and that’s the key thing, isn’t it?

Louis Barnett: Yeah, sure.

Wendy Harris: That and the swear words, everybody always knows what the swear words are; why is that?

Louis Barnett: I remember almost every country somebody sitting down with me and going, “Shall I teach you all the swear words?”  “Okay, but I’d like to kind of know how to order a coffee first, but yeah, okay, that’s cool”.

Wendy Harris: I can spot if somebody’s saying something horrible about you now.

Louis Barnett: Yes, absolutely.  Or if somebody almost runs me over, I have at least got a local response!

Wendy Harris: I know that chocolate is what started things off for you, but you have diversified since, haven’t you, Louis?  What are you up to these days? 

Louis Barnett: I captured a lot of what I learnt in the chocolate business, and I think I was very lucky very early on to have some really key mentors and advisors, that really drilled into me the importance of branding, marketing and business development as a cyclical approach to really frontline revenue and impact.  So, there was always a relationship between those three things, and I was always looking at the interrelationship in the chocolate business and especially overseas as well.  You have got even more complexity, because suddenly the branding and the consumer psychology becomes even more complicated. 

So, although I learned a lot about a lot of things about business, I think any good entrepreneur ends up juggling about a hundred different balls all at once.  But I think that there are certain things that you probably gravitate towards as an entrepreneur, and mine within my own business was always those three.  It was always our frontline revenue leaders.

So, I sort of encapsulated that, and as I said, 2008 got a first few proper consultancy projects and started to implement some of that as well as I was doing a lot of food and beverage work as well, restaurants, hotels, hospitality.  Then as the years went on, I came up with my own strategies, theories and implementation.  I’ve branded it now as the chocolate box methodology, this idea of a really heavily driven consumer psychology approach.

That’s what I do now, is I effectively have distilled all of that stuff that I learnt, literally from kitchen table to 17 countries and all of the bits in between, and distil it down into this chocolate box methodology which I work with companies to implement.  It started out, I did projects with very, very large corporate organisations, I’ve worked with some of the world’s biggest, world governments, all sorts of things; but I think I really realised that my passion was very much in the SME space, because they were still agile enough to make changes but also from a consumer psychology, the root of why people buy what they buy is human interaction.  A lot of brands start to lose that human buying from human thought processes, but also from a consumer who runs a lot of these companies, we don’t even know, there’s this sort of faceless thing that’s going on.

Actually, I found that it’s much easier to accelerate growth with SMEs as well from a buying psychology point of view, so that’s what I do.  Predominantly, it’s implementing the frontline revenue, but there is also a lot of stuff backend of getting things in order and organisational capabilities.  I am a super software nerd as well, SaaS products and things.  A bit of everything, but really I help companies grow impact and revenue, that’s kind of what I do now.

Wendy Harris: That’s got to be so cool to bring all the tools that you’ve learned to be able to grow a company, while still giving it that — because you are a family run business, aren’t you?  Let’s face it.

Louis Barnett: Yes.

Wendy Harris: You’ve always gone, “Well, you’ll need to speak to my mum about that one”.

Louis Barnett: Yes.

Wendy Harris: Which I think is so ace.  In terms of your aspirations and I’ve got to ask this because you’re still only a young man and I am old enough to be your mum, I need to know what is next, what is the goal for Louis?

Louis Barnett: The long-term goal is actually a large piece of land with a cob house on it and a homestead.  That’s really my thing, but ultimately, I think I’ve spent a long time helping others grow their businesses.  I will always continue to do that at some level.  I think I’m being a lot more selective now with who I work with and finding people with the right mindset that are willing to change the ways that they do things, but also willing to grow and change and become innovative.

Also, I don’t work with any companies that money is their sole object and desire.  For me it is all about larger impact, having a real why and a mission in the world.  So, I think I will always carry on doing that but there are a couple of ideas — it is more than ideas, yes.

Wendy Harris: Percolating something.

Louis Barnett: There are some concepts on the near horizon in the next six months that I’m looking to launch, so I do miss being involved in something day in, day out and really driving something forwards.  So, I think that’s really what’s next, is going back into doing something, getting behind the driver’s seat; and then on the side, still keeping this consultancy, although I really hate that word, but working with other companies.

Wendy Harris: I remember your ethics at Chokolit was, fair trade was one of those big things for you.  It was about the people that grow it, so those are all things that other people realised we should be making more effort in.  I do see that farmstead, grow your own but grow the surplus for everybody else and, “Come and get it from Louis”.  I totally buy into that idea.  I’d love to do that myself.  I’m not very good at growing things though.  I can grow stuff, but not the right stuff.

Louis Barnett: Yeah.

Wendy Harris: I think going back to values and things like that, I know where you are coming from.  It will be that organic, chemical-free.  It’s not even about brand that, is it?  That’s just about being a good human.

Louis Barnett: Yes, I guess so.  In a way, there are two categories of people that are involved in sustainability: those that really care or those that want to be seen to care.  Actually, in a sense, I don’t really mind which one it is, because I think as long as people are doing something.

Wendy Harris: Better than nothing.

Louis Barnett: Yeah, exactly.  I just think that for me, I grew up in a little village, not from an incredibly privileged background.  When I was really young, food was difficult to put on the table and there were a lot of things that I think informed my decisions that really for me and in my personal life as well, I don’t go against my values.  I am absolutely black and white when it comes to values, so for me I think that just fulfils such a big thing for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m always probably going to need to be close to a city, but to be able to come home after being in meetings and be in this little haven of British jungle, if you like, and to disappear into the garden at the end of the day, that is kind of exactly what I want.

Wendy Harris: I think everybody does.  I have this longstanding conversation with a good friend of mine, I’m going to shout her out, Jenny Procter.  Jenny, she’s the self-proclaimed introvert and she says, “Wendy you are the extroverted extrovert that I know”, yet we get on like an absolute house on fire, and I say to her, “I have so many introverted traits it’s just that you don’t see them, because when you see me, I’m in performance mode”. 

I don’t answer the phone at home, I make everybody else do it.  I don’t want to answer the door to anybody, I make everybody else do it.  We all need that space to decompress after something that — because it takes energy at the end of the day.

Louis Barnett: Yeah.

Wendy Harris: I think it is just about protecting our energy, just the same as in a conversation has flow.

Louis Barnett: Absolutely.  I think as you say, there is so much research as well with nature bathing, forest bathing, it really does change our biochemical processes.  As you say, you need that space to decompress and to switch off and also, come up with new ideas, because let’s face it, I can only talk for myself, but I’ve never come up with my best idea staring at a laptop for hours and hours and hours on end.  It’s usually when I’m out for a walk or in the garden or I’m switching off and decompressing, suddenly you ponder about something and go, “Oh wow, I’ve just come up with another good idea”.  You definitely need that balance, recharge the batteries time.

Wendy Harris: Allowing that time in nature to allow your mind to wander, because that’s when it will go, “Oh, I’ve just joined the dots up on something”.

Louis Barnett: Yeah.

Wendy Harris: I was having a conversation earlier this morning, with the podcast producer in actual fact and he said, “You know your idea?”  I went, “Oh yeah”, and he went, “I’ve had this idea”, and I went, “Okay”, and I went like this, “Ah”, and I had a better idea, and he went, “You’ve got that look again”.  Ideas can come from anywhere so long as you’re open to them.

Louis Barnett: Yes, absolutely.

Wendy Harris: Sometimes it’s that conversation that really helps.  We’ve got to the bit of the show I really, really, really get excited about, because I never know what’s coming next.  So, I ask everybody to think about a conversation that created a turning point and what happened next, so the mic is yours.

Louis Barnett: Yeah, sure.  So, this was a really difficult one for me, because I think there have been lots of conversations that have really made an impact.  I think I want to share two if that’s okay, I’ll sort of quick-fire them.  The first one was a conversation that I had with a guy who had worked in some of the top agencies in London and all the big names, worked in New York in various agencies as well, come back to the UK and decided to start up a marketing and branding agency, only working with sustainable impactful companies. 

It used to be called HOST Universal, unfortunately it’s no more, Robin sort of semi-retired and doing lots of other very cool and interesting things, but he really talked to me about what brand was.  In a way it is such a simplistic way of explaining it, but it has taken me probably the last 13, 14 years to keep unpacking it and figuring out the depth of the meaning.  He drew on a whiteboard two circles and in one of the circles it said, “Us” and in the other circle it said, “Them”.

The idea is that obviously most companies end up spending their entire time marketing from us, the business to them, the customer base, and they use all kinds of different tactics and sales manipulations and discounts and features and USPs and all of that sort of thing.  They are constantly pushing out to the audience, but when they stop, generally sales dry up or they slow down.  Then he drew another circle and put “We” in it and connected up all the dots and said that this is what brands do.  They invite “them” into a space where they feel a “we”.  They feel that they’re actually part of something and he used the analogy that it’s like inviting somebody to go on a trek with you. 

You say to them, “I want you to come on this lifechanging adventure with me”.  “Where are we going?”  “I don’t really know, somewhere, we’ll figure it out”.  Why are we going?”  “I don’t know, just sort of fancy it”, versus “I want you to come and climb Snowden with me backwards on our hands because we’re raising money for this organisation”.  It’s a very different conversation and so I think that that was the first thing.  As I said I am still unpacking it now and really trying to leverage consumer psychology to understand how to do it in deeper and deeper ways, but it was such a simplistic idea that changed my perspective on really what brand and what it was all about. 

What is brand?  Brand really to me is personality.  It’s a very human thing and so we’re inviting people to come into our space.  Not everyone’s going to like it, just like not everyone’s going to like us.  Good brands are divisive, they push people away and attract others, but actually it’s always coming back to this “we” idea.  How are we creating this “we”?  How are we involving them in everything that we actually do?

As I said, that completely changed the whole direction of the company, it changed the way that we saw our customers, it changed the way that we marketed, it changed everything for us.  One of the key things that we ended up doing was building really long-lasting sales relationships.  When we closed down a lot of the business, a lot of our customers had been with us ten-plus years, and they were incredibly sad to see us move out the industry.  But that was this perspective that I got from this guy.

Wendy Harris: So they were part of your journey, so it was over for them as well.

Louis Barnett: Correct,  yeah, absolutely.  The second conversation, a very different one but again, I think it just talks about not judging books by their covers but also giving people the time.  You never know what and who are you are talking to and what you’re going to learn from them.  It was at a networking event in London.  The girl that was organising it, I think this was 2007, 2008, the girl that was organising it was veggie/vegan, had organised for all this kind of sloppy, sort of Mediterranean veggie vegan food, but we’d got these really flimsy paper plates.  I stacked my plate up, turned around and flung stuff all down this guy’s suit.  I was absolutely mortified!  I obviously offered to have it cleaned and we started to have this conversation. 

At the time, I’d never been a massive fan of people in the banking industry from my own experience and others.  The guy gave me his business card and it said, “Mansour from ING Bank”.  I was thinking, “God?  I’ve got to talk to this guy”, and then something in me and it’s something that various mentors have said to me is that, “Wise men know they’re idiots”.  Wise men know they know nothing, and actually you need to see every opportunity that you talk to somebody as a learning opportunity.  It popped into my head, and I thought, “Hey I don’t know what this guy’s got that he can share that might be great for my journey”.

We talked for about 40 minutes, he then said, “Can I have my business card back?”  I said, “Well, if I’ve really offended you that badly”, he said, “No, I want to give you my real one”.  It said, “President of ING Bank”.  Interestingly, he invited me to an event a couple of weeks later to cater, we did all the chocolates for this private banking event, and on the same night I met three people which would really change the course of the entire business, including a guy called Jamil, who the next day, had a phone call from somebody he went to uni with, who had gone back to Mexico and was asking him to recommend a British chocolatier for a huge chocolate show which then spanned the whole Mexico journey for me.

They ended up being our biggest export customer and over the years, I’ve probably spent four years in Mexico in various different times.  Yeah, I think again, just one of those conversations that had I not just checked myself again, and gone, “Don’t ever have a judgement about somebody or a situation, because you never know where it is going to lead”.  Had I just made my exit at that point, the business certainly would not have gone in many of the directions that it did.

Wendy Harris: Absolutely, oh my goodness, you have just almost used one of my key phrases that I use in my branding which is, “You never know where a conversation is going to lead”.

Louis Barnett: Yeah.

Wendy Harris: One of the other things that I always say to people, “It’s not what you know, it’s not who you know, it’s what you know about them”.  If you actually take the time to get to know these people, you will be able to help them in ways that you’ll never even be able to imagine by just making assumptions.

Louis Barnett: Yeah.

Wendy Harris: Goodness me.  Then, aside from learning a little bit of Spanish, which makes me think of a previous guest who actually teaches globally how to speak languages, so good old Ray popped into my head, but serendipity and another conversation I’ve had with a guest, Sarah Townsend, where she just met somebody at the bus stop.  You are absolutely right, you just never ever know where that next opportunity is coming from, so I always say, “Will you recognise it if it knocks on your door?”

Louis Barnett: Yes, absolutely and as you say, just give it the time because you don’t know.  I could probably say I’ve learned actually more from ordinary conversations than I have from some top 100 CEOs that I’ve met.  I think you never really know, as you say, where that conversation is going to lead and who knows who.  There are some incredible statistics that you’re only 15 people away from anyone in the world.  Things like that, you never really know as you say. 

I’ve been very lucky that I’ve never, ever sought out a single one of my clients.  I’ve never actually done any direct, let’s call it marketing in a sense, because my clients have always found me, and it’s been through my network.  I think there’s an incredible importance in human-to-human connections and I think especially in the digital age, we do need to remember that as well, because it can be very easy to get just so wrapped up in the digital space without actually considering that we do need to remember to build relationships with people, because as you say, that is really when the best things in life happen and the best genuine connections happen.

Wendy Harris: I couldn’t agree more, Louis, and it’s just testament really that you show up as you, and that’s who people want to work with.  I have to say it’s the same for me.  I don’t go round cold calling people saying, “Do you need some help?”  I don’t do that, I wouldn’t have the time, but you just show up as the best person and the best version that you can be, and so long as you’re helpful and offer value, I think that is the key ingredient.

Louis Barnett: Yeah, 100% absolutely.

Wendy Harris: Louis, two great conversations there, lots and lots of value in that, thank you so much for sharing with us.

Louis Barnett: No worries.

Wendy Harris: If people want to carry on the conversation, they can’t wait to get to the website, and we might not have updated it quickly enough for them, where is the best place for them to come and find you?

Louis Barnett: The best place is my website, www.louisbarnett.org.  I do update it usually every couple of weeks, I’m pretty good at putting things on, but pretty much any other social media you can think of, I am there.  I’m not a massive social media user myself, I use it for a lot of clients, so I think I get a bit of fatigue sometimes but @louisbarnett on almost everything.  Drop me a message and I will respond.

Wendy Harris: That’s brilliant, thank you so much for joining us today, Louis.  I’ll speak to you, soon.

Louis Barnett: Yes, brilliant thank you.

Wendy Harris: There you have it, 15 years on, and Louis has been working with some of the finest British retailers across 17 countries.  If you’d have asked that young man 15 years ago if that was what he saw for his future, he’d have probably chuckled.  It just goes to show, there is no such thing as overnight success and it doesn’t matter how long it takes for you to get to where you want to be, it’s a really great adventure, finding your way there.

And talking of adventures, next week’s guest has been across the globe with what he does.  We’re going to be talking to Tom Libelt.