The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett XX
[0] Did you know that the DariVosio now has its own channel exclusively on Samsung TV Plus?
[1] And I'm excited to say that we've partnered with Samsung TV to bring this to life, and the channel is available in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.
[2] Samsung TV Plus is a free streaming service available to all owners of Samsung Smart TVs and Galaxy mobiles and tablets.
[3] And along with the Dyeravisio channel, you'll find hundreds of more channels with entertainment for everyone all for free on Samsung TV Plus.
[4] So if you own a Samsung TV, tune in now and watch the Dyer of a Cio channel.
[5] right now along that I was reading about your story online before I came here and I've watched a couple of videos and stuff and I remember a day on this point of like resilience which you touched on I remember a day early on where I thought every we had we were done because um some shit had happened some we'd been hacked all of our clients had been emailed this abusive horrible specific email and I thought we were fucking done and it was the day when we're on our way to our team building day so everyone's on their way to like fucking paintballing or something 6 a .m. in the morning, all of our clients start emailing me, like, abuse, like, cancel everything.
[6] And having to turn the team around on a day which was meant to be happy and bring them all back to the office and say, listen, all your clients are gone, maybe we're all gone.
[7] It was a tough day.
[8] There was dark days in your story.
[9] Yeah.
[10] I mean, we had a few.
[11] Yeah, I mean, I don't find it at the end of the world.
[12] Like, like everyone's pretty understanding that we're going to take big, big risks.
[13] I mean, we've had lots of issues.
[14] So when we were a small business, someone tried to steal our trademark, and we had to spend every penny to get that back.
[15] We spent, again, every penny we had to get the domain name.
[16] There was a point where we genuinely couldn't afford stock, so I was like begging supplies to get a stock in and we'll pay once we'd sold it sort of thing.
[17] But to me, that was sort of, I wasn't a huge issue.
[18] I found that pretty fun, actually.
[19] The first issue, the first time you had something big happen like that, did it feel, I guess I know the answer to the question, but did it feel different when those issues happened today?
[20] And I'm trying to understand how resilience is created.
[21] And from my perspective, it's like you get past that first piece of bullshit.
[22] And then bullshit piece number two, you've got the hindsight of...
[23] Yeah, there is that thing when you first start out and you think everyone's a really good person and everything's going to go okay.
[24] And then by the time you sort of, I guess while you're a few years in, you realize that nothing ever goes okay.
[25] And there's always going to be people that want to knock you down a peg or two.
[26] So you just have to sort of be aware of that and, you know, and just make sure that you're sort of bulletproof and everything that you're doing is for the right reasons.
[27] What was the day where you thought you thought, fuck, we're fucked?
[28] Was there a day?
[29] I read about a story on Black Friday where...
[30] Oh God, that was a fucking nightmare, that was.
[31] Yeah, Magento messed up, absolutely.
[32] The whole website crashed.
[33] On Black Friday?
[34] On Black Friday.
[35] We were down for hours, literally completely messed up everything.
[36] Orders were coming in, and the system were just, like, vomiting nothing out.
[37] Orders were delayed, and the whole...
[38] Yeah, that was an absolute nightmare.
[39] But, and to me, genuinely, there was no issues with me. Personally, I had no problems with me dealing with that.
[40] The frustrating thing for me was that customers had come on, obviously Black Friday, there's tons of new people coming on and they wanted the kit and they couldn't get it and they were being messed around.
[41] And for me, every single thing I took really personally and it did really upset me. But we, from that, next Black Friday was the best Black Friday that we could ever imagine.
[42] Like we, because of that, and just so well versed with making sure that nothing goes wrong going forward.
[43] And again, you know, touchwood, hopefully nothing does go wrong and at some point things probably will.
[44] But every time we do something big, every time we do a launch, a sale, a Black Friday, we've got Plan A and Plan B. plan C, plan D, like we're making sure that, you know, all possible issues are covered way before.
[45] And then I think that was just naivety.
[46] I think going into that Black Friday, we were very naive.
[47] We were a very young business and we just sort of assumed everything and be okay.
[48] And in hindsight, I imagine that's been, because for the same as when we got hat, like, we didn't think about fucking cyber security until that day.
[49] And now we're like and it's a shame, but you do have to think about those things.
[50] In a weird way, although it might be the best use of word, has that been a bit of a blessing?
[51] Yeah.
[52] Oh, there's tons of things like that, blessings in disguise, like you say, it's because however else would you learn, you just wouldn't learn those things.
[53] So I think everyone has to sort of encounter some sort of issues like that before they learn.
[54] And I read that you sent out like thousands of handwritten letters.
[55] Oh my God, my hand.
[56] And then I was writing every single person that had an issue.
[57] I made sure I wrote them all birthday cards.
[58] So every, every week, at the start of the week, I'd have to sit there and write for hours.
[59] Like, I'm talking like all day, birthday cards to every single person with a discount to make sure that, you know, we're sorry.
[60] Because, again, I take it really personally, my hand would kill by the end of those days.
[61] Isn't that part of the reason, though, why you're going back to the start point about, like, authenticity and having these values and stuff like that, isn't that, on that day, a lot of people would have been like, oh, fuck, you literally, so you, on Black Friday, just to be clear, problem with your website, the website was down for eight hours, people tried to order, they got messed around a little bit, are following that, you spent days writing thousands of handwritten letters to those people apologising.
[62] All the staff here, because it was a much smaller team, were working, like, there was one guy that did a 38 -hour shift or something like that.
[63] Like, they were, the work ethic that I saw of everyone here was absolutely incredible.
[64] It was genuinely brilliant.
[65] That's part of your values, though.
[66] That desire, like, most people wouldn't write fucking 2 ,000 handwritten letters.
[67] So that's, for me, that's also part of the reason you're here, and while you're staying where you are, is because you care, like, a lot of people see it, we'll see it as a business, or like the numbers, etc. But you're looking at it from a standpoint of what Jim Shark's values are, right?
[68] I really care.
[69] Again, like, if I get a DM on my Instagram, which I will, you know, inevitably, we're shipping thousands of thousands of waters a day now.
[70] Inevitably something will go wrong somewhere and someone will message me saying, I've got an issue.
[71] That really hurts me. I go absolutely mental.
[72] The first thing I'm doing is I'm running up to customer experience and saying, how the hell can we fix this?
[73] You know, how can we make this better?
[74] Because to me, and again, the problem with online is it's all numbers on a screen.
[75] It's very easy to get lost in those numbers.
[76] And it's very easy to become desensitized to the fact that each one of those numbers is a human being somewhere on the world.
[77] So to me it's really important to make sure that everyone has a brilliant experience.
[78] And do you know what, even if the other thing that I'll say to everyone is even if no one ever buys a Jim Shark product, I want to put on Jim Shark event so that these people can go and be inspired and motivated and, you know, in some way hopefully improve their lives.
[79] So if no one ever buys a Jim Shark product, to me that's not the end of the world because I want people to be inspired and sort of be affected positively by what we do in some way.
[80] And what I take from that is that that authenticity and that really fucking caring over time will send your business in a completely different direction because if you imagine that care and that authenticity applied 10 times a day for five years on little touch points that will, like in my mind that completely changes the trajectory of your business.
[81] So in the moment it might, those letters might not have moved the bottom line at all.
[82] But long term, we'd make Jim Shark who you are today.
[83] Which is really inspiring to me, actually, because I think customer experience is something that's often the first thing that's easy to forget.
[84] If anyone gives me about a customer experience, I'll just straight up don't ever order from them again, because I think it's just carelessness.
[85] Did you know that the Dariovacio now has its own channel exclusively on Samsung TV Plus?
[86] And I'm excited to say that we've partnered with Samsung TV to bring this to life, and the channel is available in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.
[87] Samsung TV Plus is a free streaming service available to all owners.
[88] of Samsung Smart TVs and Galaxy mobiles and tablets.
[89] And along with the Dyer of a CO channel, you'll find hundreds of more channels with entertainment for everyone all for free on Samsung TV Plus.
[90] So if you own a Samsung TV, tune in now and watch the Dyer of a CEO channel right now.