Andy Coulson: Welcome back to Crisis What Crisis, the podcast that aims to guide you towards a more resilient life and whatever it might throw at you. If this is your first time with us then please do hit subscribe wherever you're watching or listening and please do leave us a review. It really helps make sure that these I hope useful conversations are shared as widely as possible.

My guest today is one of Britain's most successful and energetic businessmen, a lad from Bolton who turned a one pound bet with a friend into a billion pound success story. John Roberts is the founder and CEO of AO.com, the electricals company with 12 million happy customers, 3,000 employees, and has led the way on recycling our old washing machines and fridges; about seven and a half million of them.

John Roberts: I did direct sales as a kitchen salesman, I did it because I was repping during the day, so I was selling to kitchen showrooms. And this wise old man in Blackburn once said to me, “You know nowt, lad. You know nowt about- you're only 18, 19, you know nowt about selling kitchens.” I thought, “He's right,” so I went and got a job at night selling kitchens. And as you say, talk about no. You're knocking on a door, you've never met these people, and you have to sell it on the night. If you don't get the deposit on the night, you earn nothing. If they come and buy it the next day you earn nothing. So, talk about focusing the mind.

But it was a vertical learning curve. And it was about resilience, but I didn't think about it as resilience. I just thought I was learning.

Andy Coulson Established 25 years ago in the early days of the internet, AO.com is now one of Britain's most recognisable brands. Those green vans and lorries with the smiling face are everywhere, but the journey to success has not been a straight road.

In this special Business episode John joins me to talk about the challenges he's faced along the way, and there have been plenty, that have seriously impacted the business and John's plans for global domination. That in November AO issued its ninth profit upgrade to the city is testament to his and the business's resilience.

John Roberts: There were some very, very dark days, I've sat- I used to have a green Mondeo and I remember I've sat with my head in my hands wondering what to do, I've been in tears, I've been through every bit of emotion, failure, you don't want to let people down. I had some amazing investors, I didn't want to let them down.

And the emotion of not wanting to let people down is actually one of the heaviest ones. And then you come to, right, well that's nobody else's problem, that's yours. You asked for it, so get over it and deal with it.

Andy Coulson John has also given away millions, most of it directed at levelling the playing field for young people in some of our poorest communities. John Roberts welcome to Crisis for Crisis.

John Roberts: [Thanks for having me, Andy.

Andy Coulson: How are you?

John Roberts: I'm excellent thank you.

Andy Coulson: Now John, given the title of this pod I suspect this may be a challenging conversation at times. I say that because you are one of the most positive individuals that I've ever met. I'll explain our background a little bit later. The world crisis does not loom large in your vocabulary. Am I right?

John Roberts: It's not a word I'm really fond of, shall we say? I prefer to think of it as we deal with situations that we come across. I think crisis, I would lean much more to personal matters than business matters. Business matters are things that you deal with. Bill Holroyd, one of our investors, once said to me, “John, if we spend our life putting fires out, one day we're going to have to go and find the arsonist.” Clearly he meant me.

So a lot of what people might call crisis is self-created through lots of different things. But I think you've just got to get pragmatic and practical as well very, very quickly.

Andy Coulson: Good. Well, let's give it a go on crisis, because in this episode we're going to look at some of those key moments of challenge that you've had, and talk about how you've managed them. You feel very strongly about delivering lessons from your own experience to help others who might be starting a business, who might be already kind of on the road. And that's what this conversation is all about.

Before we do that, though, let's set some context. Because in some ways AO was born out of crisis, certainly out of personal difficulty. School wasn't for you, John, let's put it that way. But the work ethic, I think in part thanks to your mum and dad, was very strong. So no uni, straight to work, you were a kitchen salesman for a while; a tough gig, and one with plenty of rejection built in.

When you look back at those early years of your working life, sowing the seeds of the resilience that I referenced there in the in the intro, when it comes to the business now?

John Roberts: Yes, I always loved work. I was brought up working, whether it, you know, we were never given any money, and that wasn't because mum and dad were tight, we had to earn it. And whatever it was, whether it was cutting the lawn, whether it was- one of the most famous jobs my dad ever gave me was, I wanted some money to take a girl out at the weekend. I only wanted a fiver, and there was a whole pile of dry stone stones next to the garage and so he created- he didn't have a job for me to do to earn my fiver, so he created one. Which was, move all the stones over there on the Saturday, sweep underneath them, and move them all back neatly on the Sunday. And that got me a fiver. And I remember thinking what a pointless waste of time it was.

But those things shape you. So you know, I've always enjoyed work, and as you say, school wasn't for me. I've never been tested but I'm convinced, and Sally my wife is convinced, that I'm slydexic. I always struggled to read, I still struggle to read now. But the enjoyment of achievement, whether it was- I used to buy deformed gingerbread men from Warburton's factory shop and sell them in school, I used to get a kick out of doing that. You had to sell them in ten minutes before the teachers caught you. It was always a buzz.

We talk about, you know, when I did direct sales as a kitchen salesman, I did it because I was repping during the day, so I was selling to kitchen showrooms. And this wise old man in Blackburn once said to me, “You know nowt, lad. You know nowt about- you're only 18, 19, you know nowt about selling kitchens.” I thought, “He's right,” so I went and got a job at night selling kitchens. And as you say, talk about no. You're knocking on a door, you've never met these people, and you have to sell it on the night. If you don't get the deposit on the night, you earn nothing. If they come and buy it the next day you earn nothing. So talk about focusing the mind.

But it was a vertical learning curve. And it was about resilience, but I didn't think about it as resilience. I just thought I was learning. I’ve always, even today I have a passion for learning. I'm always listening to some audiobook or other, which is why I think these podcasts are so valuable for people, and this wasn't available when I was younger. I talk to my kids, “You don't know you're born. The amount of education in whatever form and whatever topic that you want that is available for free to you today is incredible.”

So I enjoyed learning, I enjoyed selling, I loved the buzz of selling and I loved learning how to get better at it.

Andy Coulson: It's interesting to me, John. I should explain, put the little disclaimer in now. You and I worked together for a while, from about 2017 for three or four years. And we became and have stayed friends.

You've never said that before in any of our conversations, that you’ve got a strong suspicion that you're dyslexic. You've never said that before, and you gloss over it there so quickly, it is also perhaps- can I argue, a great demonstration of what I said right at the start of this conversation, that you just don't dwell on the challenges.

John Roberts: You’ll get me off on other societal topics, but it can be a crutch. So yes, it made school really hard for me, and I wasn’t academic in that way either. But I was good at football so I got forgiven a lot. And I think you know, everybody has got a syndrome of some form or other at the minute, and that’s not to decry serious things, but we seem to-

I’m going out in a few weeks to The Somme, I’m taking my wife’s uncle out there, which is a journey I’ve done and explained it to him and he’s always wanted to go. When I came back from that last time, it’s an incredible perspective on how soft we are as a society today. How we get knocked off balance.

I was listening to somebody at the weekend that was talking about America innovates, China replicates and Europe regulates. You can’t say anything any more, you can’t do anything any more, you can’t take risks, you can’t get anything wrong. We’re sat here, at Millbank over the road they can’t make mistakes over there. In business there’s mistakes made all the time. If you’re not making mistakes, the old joke, you’re not trying hard enough. We’re not pushing the envelope.

You don’t want something like- Richard Branson I think is dyslexic, so it just proves that it doesn’t matter.

Andy Coulson: John, you touched on it there, but we talked quickly about your relationship with the word crisis. You've got a much closer relationship with the word failure. You've always said you're brilliant at it, you're comfortable with it, you embrace it and have done a number of times during the course of your life. Just sort of paint a bit of a picture for us around failure.

John Roberts: I hate the term ‘celebrate failure,’ because who wants to celebrate failure? But the fear of failure stops a lot of people doing a lot of things.

I talk internally, I welcome everybody or I try to get to everybody across AO when they join, and call them to welcome to AO sessions to explain what we're about. And one of the things that I tell people is that confidence is a currency. If you believe you can, you can, and so don't worry about getting it wrong. We only have one rule as a business: If you make a mistake, tell someone, and tell someone quickly. The cost of a problem never goes down with time, and the size of a problem only goes up the longer you don't tell someone. Whereas if you tell someone very quickly, it just gets dealt with. Then if you don't tell someone for two days, why didn't you tell me two days ago? Then you don't tell them for a week. Then you've got to start covering things up, and then something that was really small grows into something that's really big.

And so what we try and empower in our business, and I've always tried to empower, is a culture of empowerment, but you've got to have people that care in the first place to be able to do that. You can't pay people to care, so you have to recruit the right people and create the right environment. These things take time, but then empower them. And if they make a mistake, so what? But as long as they own that decision- if they make the same mistake six times, get rid of them. Be brutal.

But most people don't come to work thinking, “I'm gonna really cock it up today.” You know, it just doesn't happen. So as long as people are making honest mistakes, then keep trying, keep pushing the envelope. Have fun with customers.

And we distil all that down into two simple phrases, which is, “Treat every single customer like they're your own gran.” Everybody's got a slightly different interpretation of that, but broadly you know what that means. Look after them. Be nice, be kind, smile, apologise.

And then we empower you to make decisions right across the business, and so within that context, “Make decisions that would make your mum proud.” And so if you had to go and have dinner with your mum at the end of the day and explain the decision that you've made, would she be proud of that decision? And even if it all went wrong, was it made from the right place? Was it made with the right intent? Would she be proud of the spirit of how you went into that? And if the answer is yes, don't worry about the output. The output's the output, people cock things up.

Our buyers have to make decisions in April, May about what we're going to put on promotion in Black Friday in November. They're always going to be wrong, it's just a matter of degree. They could be millions and millions of pounds out, but we deal with it. They didn't sit down in April, May and think, “Right, I'm going to really, really order a bad deal here.” Doesn't happen.

Andy Coulson: John, I want to talk about that one pound bet before we before we move on. You know, I touched on it in the intro, and the business in a way being born out of difficulty, but you married and divorced quite young. And it's at that point in your life that this thing called the internet emerges into all our lives, and it leads you to place that one pound bet. Just tell us the story.

John Roberts: Very quickly, the story is there is a guy called Alan Latchford who, our paths in life should have really never crossed. But I was working in a hotel called the Last Drop Hotel, which is also where I met my wife Sally, and where we married as well, and where I met Alan, so quite informative. Also where the business strangely, digressing a little, got its customer service ethic from, because it's where I learned how to get tips under a maître d’ Richard Thompson who was hugely informative in my life.

So I learned a lot at the Last Drop, and I also bumped into Alan. Alan sadly is no longer with us, he died a few years ago but he- and he won't mind me saying this, Alan was very odd. He was a van driver during the day and a quantum mathematics guy at night who was into rope theory, he had degrees in anything to do with maths. Maths, further maths, all sorts of different maths. And he was into this thing called the internet.

Of an afternoon on a Friday he used to finish early and always come to the pub for a pint. I used to serve him, it was dead, we'd end up chatting and we became friends. He was talking about this thing called the internet, and this would be in ’97. Anyway, our friendship grew from there, we ended up playing snooker against each other, we played pool against each other, and we always had a one pound bet. It was just an honourable thing, you always had to pay the bet. It’s more fun if there's money on it, type principle, but not enough that it mattered. It was the principle.

Anyway, so the next couple of years progressed, Alan kept banging on about this thing called the internet, and I kept saying to Alan, so this is going through about ‘99 I kept saying to Alan, “Thinking about that, I reckon you could flog gear on it.” Alan said, “Don't be ridiculous, it's not about that it's about information.”

Bear in mind Google didn't even exist certainly in the UK then, it was Altavista and Ask Jeeves, if you remember them, and squawky dial up.

Anyway, this conversation sort of bounced back and forth over many months, and in the end on Christmas Eve 1999 Alan turned- at the time I had a kitchen showroom in Manchester, and Alan turned around to me and said, “Look I've had enough of you banging on about this flogging gear. If you really think you can, I'll build you a website for free. But I bet you a pound that you don't give up your job and do it and make it happen, make it a reality.”

So the rest is history. I then- as you say, I’d just got divorced so Christmas Day I was on my own. So I spent Christmas Day, Boxing Day and the next day building what I now know to be a small database, spreadsheet, I'm as non-techy as it gets. On a laptop, manufacturer’s price list, product code, description, colour, cost price, typing them all in, thousands of the bloody things. And then I took them around to Alan's house on whatever it was, the 28th or the 29th, in a stack of about a dozen three and a half inch black floppy disks, you remember them? You will remember them. And basically gave them to Alan and said, “Right.” And I'd worked night and day on it, and said, “Right, go on make a website, I'm off to the pub.” He went, “I'll come with you,” I said, “No you won't, you're making a website.”

Things went from there. He rang me later on in the day and said, “The web address appliancesonline.co.uk is available.” “What does that mean?” It was £350, I was broke, I didn't have any money. So go on then, stick it on the credit card. He rang me about half an hour later and said, “appliancesonline.com is available.” “What does that mean?” He said, “That's if you want to go global. “Jesus Alan, we’re selling out of Bolton, calm down.”

Things developed from there, one thing led to another. I then convinced Alan to come and join me when we started the business, so we had a tech department of one which was Alan. He built the website, he did all that. There were three of us in the office when we got going.

Andy Coulson: It’s a fantastic story, but you've said John that AO was built on energy, on imagination, and a fair bit of cheek. Just tell me about the cheek in those early days.

John Roberts: Well, I mean it was fun. I think imagination, the great thing about the internet certainly back then was you could be anything that you wanted to be. And so we decided to present ourselves from day one as a big professional organisation. Because the big thing that was lacking then, and still to an extent today, is confidence for people to buy.

You know, you put in your credit card details, there was none of the security there is today. You used to put your credit card details in, we would print your whole credit card details off and then punch it manually into a PDQ machine. In those days, we had lever arch files with all customer credit card details in, there was no other way of doing it.

So one of the great stories that always makes me chuckle is, I had a friend of mine that had an insurance call centre in Manchester. And so I went down to Will's call centre and got a ghetto blaster with a tape in it. Again, you'll remember this. And put it in the middle of his call centre and pressed play and record, and just recorded something like two hours of background call centre noise.

Because there's only three of us, literally in an office half the size of this studio. And so the phone would ring, it would only ring about a dozen, 15 times a day. But you wouldn't reach for the phone first, you would reach for the ghetto blaster and you'd press play and turn it up with call centre noise. And it was Appliances Online then, so you'd answer the phone and say, “Good morning, Appliances Online, how can I help?” And if somebody was chasing- if it was sales, I'd deal with it. If somebody was chasing a delivery, you'd say, “Oh I don't understand. Just bear with me, I'll put you through to logistics.” Hold. “Alan.” Alan would be tapping away. “Logistics call.” “Oh right, okay.” Again, it was all manual on the orders. And so Alan would come on the phone in his dulcet logistics tone, “Hello, logistics, how can I help?”

But it was- and looking to where our business is today, a lot of that has just manifested itself into being real now. We held no stock. You'd place an order and we'd say seven to fourteen days delivery, and then we'd scrabble around to go and buy one from somewhere. And again, you look at our business today and we've probably got the thick end of £100 million worth of stock in the warehouse now. But the systems that sit behind that actually are still built on what we did 25 years ago of optimising sell one, order one, sell one, order one, and how you keep everything as fresh as possible. And that's how we are still today able to have the levels of availability that we do.

Andy Coulson: But also, for all that cheek and that imagination, what also sat behind it in those early days and has continued, I think you're going to tell me, is that in the end, you've got to do what you're promising to do.

John Roberts: Always, yes.

Andy Coulson: That's the core of it.

John Roberts: [Well, it matters.

So we just passionately cared about pushing the envelope, always how do we make it better? How do we make it quicker? And even still today, it's my obsession. I joke about it with the team, almost the better the business performs, the more I drive the team nuts because how do we reinvent? What does perfect look like? I go and do customer focus groups and try and imagine what should it be like in five years' time.

But we've always done that. We've always disrupted, whether it was- we were the first people to make the whole range of products available. It used to be curated by big box retailers, and you could only buy what they decided was on the floor. We made the whole tail available. Then we invented things like next day delivery. Then we invented weekend delivery. Then we invented things like deliver it and install it at the point of delivery rather than having to get it delivered and then organise someone to come and install it. So always pushing the boundaries.

One of the biggest challenges was not what we do, but how we do what we do. How do you get thousands of drivers to truly care about customer service? That was probably one of the hardest challenges that we ever had. We've got 700,000 reviews on Trustpilot, rating us something like 4.8 out of 5 now.

Andy Coulson: In a sentence, how did you get those drivers to care then?

John Roberts: Engage them. Get them to care. There are loads of tricks that we've done over the years. One of the- we don't do it anymore actually, we've moved on from it, but one of the cutest things I think we ever did was, it wouldn't be me, but let's say it's me and you're the driver. At the end of the day I give you a bollocking for something, you've upset a customer. If you'd done it in the first place, probably water off a duck's back.

So scenario, let's say you're married. Who's the best person to bollock you? It isn’t me, is it? So what we did was we took all our Facebook reviews, good and bad, and we put them into a thing called Facebook feedback. And we put an envelope on it saying it was AO Facebook feedback, it was Appliance Online Facebook feedback then. And we mailed it every couple of weeks to all the driver's homes. And so you imagine when you get home at the end of the day, if you've upset- there was a famous example of a pregnant lady that a driver had been horrible to, and she'd been in tears and we put this whole review publicly, mailed it out to all the families. Can you imagine that guy getting home?

So that was- again, you talk about imagination, creativity. In reality, it didn't cost anything.

Andy Coulson: Was there any pushback from the drivers?

John Roberts: A little bit. But how can you argue against that? Go on, pushback. I mean, for me, don't give them any more work. But how do you credibly push back on that? Really? And if you are pushing back, you are definitely not- if you come in and go, “Hey, I got that one wrong,” that's different. Everyone deserves a second chance in everything.

But another great example today is, we hand out millions of pounds worth of teddy bears every year, the little green AO teddy bear. And only the other week- so get this, this is the pinnacle of getting drivers to care. And he wouldn't have known this, the driver wouldn't have known where my kids go to school. But one of my kids' games teachers was walking his kid on a Sunday morning, his kid's on his little scooter, and a green AO van goes past. So the little kid waves at the AO van, which- for some reason, kids love AO vans. They're on the way to do a delivery. They stop. They've got a kid waving at them, so they stop. They get out of the van, and they give this little kiddie a teddy bear. You can't pay people to do that. You just have to fundamentally get them to care, buy into the mission, understand their role. They're the only people that ever meet our customers, they're our brand ambassadors. So we work really hard.

Funnily enough we do a little booklet, which is an idea I nicked off James Timpson, completely plagiarised from what James does, of how to be a good driver. Give them the manual. We reward them. When they get compliments on Trustpilot or wherever it is, we give them a bonus for those compliments. Everybody thinks this is sort of nuts, but we give them the ammo to get the compliments. So we'll pay for the teddy bear that will help you, all you've got to do is hand it to somebody, and we call it ‘magic in the moments that matter,’ give that teddy bear to that kid and make his day. Your chance of getting a compliment and earning more money is even higher.

I'll cash the cheque in the second half, is the way that I think about it. I'll take the cost today, but the chance of that being a customer for life has just gone up a factor of four or five x.

People say to me, “How do you measure the value of teddy bears?” And I say, “The day we start to measure it is the day we should stop doing it.”

Andy Coulson: Superb. That's the energy, imagination, and the cheek. Let's talk about the challenge.

And John, you've joined us today, I think very generously, to focus more on the challenge than anything else, because you believe passionately I think that there are lessons to share there.

Let's start with possibly the first big challenge of the business from the moment that you've just described, the ghetto blaster in the middle of the desk, this business clicks, you deliver what you say you're going to deliver. For all that cheek, it is a business that does what it says it's going to do. It grows and it grows fast. And then a huge opportunity comes along with Sainsbury's to essentially be a white label partner of theirs, rocket boost the business.

And what follows I think is sort of four or five years of pretty epic success. With that success you roll the dice, you buy a logistics company, no small matter, big risk for you, and then the situation suddenly changes. And Sainsbury's come to you with an offer that you've described as the reverse Frank Sinatra. They wanted you to take the blows and do it their way. So tell us what happened.

John Roberts: Yes, well. Quickly, the background to the Sainsbury story was interesting as well. I was sat in the same seats that we had the one pound bet with Alan, and I remember watching an advert on the TV. It was the sea rolling in, rolling out, rolling in, rolling out, rolling in, rolling out, rolling in, rolling out for about 30 or 40 seconds. It was captivating. And at the end of it said, “You can do anything when you breathe.” breathe.com. I was like, “That's cost millions. What's breathe?” Alan said, “It's an email provider.” I didn't even know what email was, but the next time I went to the bar I got a piece of paper and the epiphany for me was, we haven't got any money and we haven't got a brand. We invented white label in our world.

So Alan and I sat there over about six or seven pints and wrote down all the major brands and we then eliminated them on who we could work with. And Sainsbury's came up and we convinced Sainsbury's that we could do Sainsbury's kitchen appliances, share some of the economics with them, and put the Sainsbury's brand in front of the customers and bridge that trust gap and put them on our model.

We were outsourcing logistics, so to your logistics point that was the weakest bit of the business because nobody cares about your business like you do. The graveyard is full of two-man home delivery businesses and even today it doesn't- two-man home delivery quality rarely exists. Sainsbury's were forever giving us a hard time about this, quite rightly, and we masked it by throwing cash and compensation at customers. And having tried virtually every third-party logistics company it came to a situation where we had to do something about it.

As you say we bought expert logistics from the Iceland food group which again is another great story with Malcolm Walker, we both still joke about that today. He says we stole it, we said we took it off his hands for a bargain from him, but it doesn't matter. What we bought was a logistics company with the wrong warehouses, the wrong fleet of vehicles, no IT system, subscale, but we bought an amazing management team. And the leadership team of that business is still the leadership team today. What we did was transform all the physical stuff, it's very difficult to transform the cultural elements of it.

But it was a bet the farm, and Malcolm made very clear that, “I will give you this deal of a lifetime on this business but you're all in, properly all in.” And so it was all done on handshakes, old school as the way we like to do deals, and we take them very seriously. So we were properly all in. Done, all signed and sealed.

Sainsbury's were then about probably 65% of our business, we were operating third-partily stuff for Next, M&S, Debenhams, all sorts of different companies at the time but Sainsbury's because it was the first was by far the biggest.

And then there was a new lady came in to run the dot-com operations. At the time we were a proper pain in the arse for Comet and Curry’s, if you remember Comet. Still a pain in the arse for Curry’s but probably less so, I think we co-exist a lot better now. And so Comet decided to go and give Sainsbury's a deal that was non-economic, it just didn't make any sense, because they thought it would kill us. So they thought it was an investment worth making to kill us.

I got called down to London and presented with this deal. It wasn't a deal, it wasn't it wasn't an option, it wasn't a deal you could take. So I said to them, “Look you know you're giving me a hard time about customer service and I really care about it. Imagine what you're going to get off them. And you talk about your brand?” They just didn't care, they cared about the economics.

But what they didn't realise was, it was us that put the Sainsbury's brand in this category in front of customers. They did nothing to generate any kind of traffic to the website.

It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to us. We had a six-month notice period, and so literally within a week we started testing aggressively: could we direct all that traffic from Sainsbury's into Appliances Online? And we were pretty successful.

And then a couple of weeks after that, Lehman Brothers went bust I remember just- and everyone was talking about financial Armageddon and all the rest of it. I was just thinking, “Jesus, what are we going to do?” And it was absolutely and utterly the making of the business.

So the Lehman Brothers crisis, what did it do? Anybody that was sort of in the mid-market was suddenly looking for better value. Well, what did we offer? We offered amazing value. And so our sales actually grew really well. Sainsbury's gave us this six-month window to migrate everything over to Appliances Online, which we did really, we migrated about 90% of it over. And so by the time we sort of handed the keys, if you will, metaphorically to Comet for the Sainsbury's website, they’d bought nothing. And so then Appliances Online became very much our focus.

And the big lesson for me through that was you have to be in control of your own destiny. And we just weren't. But we'd taken control of logistics, Sainsbury's had forced us to take control of our brand, and so we now really were sat behind our own steering wheel and it got quite exciting,

Andy Coulson: It’s also a classic story of opportunity out of crisis, isn't it?

John Roberts: Definitely.

Andy Coulson: Presumably when you were first confronted with the possibility of Sainsbury saying goodbye, that was pretty existential for you from an economic point of view, personally as well I would have thought.

John Roberts: Oh no, completely. You know, I'm an all-in kind of guy. I've always said with AO that what I did for the first fifteen years of the business was get all my chips, bet them all on red, then spend a year trying to paint some black squares red, and then sort of get to the end of the year and take a squint at the ball and go, “Thank God for that, it came up red again.”

And that's very much how- it was by no means foolproof on anything that we ever did, but we owned it.

Andy Coulson: Where does the risk bit in you come from, do you think?

John Roberts: What's the worst that can happen? I was a pretty good kitchen salesman, so you know, I could always go and earn a good living if it all went wrong, I could go and earn a good living.

Andy Coulson: That thought, the sort of purity of that thought has stayed with you through every challenge?

John Roberts: It's an interesting one. In terms of focusing the mind, I think one of the things people forget is businesses are made up of people. And one of the things that I take very seriously is the responsibility that you hold as a leader in a business. I think about it in dining room tables. I don't know exactly how many people have got across the business now, three and a half thousand, something like that. That's a lot of dining room tables tonight that will have food put them, there's a lot of kids' school uniforms that are gonna get bought. There's a lot that rests on it. If there's three or four of you, you're all in it together, band of brothers sort of thing. If there's 3,000 of you, that's a hell of a responsibility.

So I don't like to bet the farm anymore, I don't like to do things that will take us back to zero. That doesn't mean I don't want to be ambitious, but we always need to ask, “Can this take us back to zero?” Which is one of the reasons that we've closed our business in Germany.

But let's push the boundaries. Nothing great was ever achieved with easy, kind of thing. And so let's go for it.

Andy Coulson: So you've managed the balance of those two ideas, the kind of, I was a pretty good kitchen salesman, and the dining room tables that you've described so eloquently there. As the business has grown, as you've grown, you’re constantly adjusting the balance between that sort of risk and adventure.

John Roberts: Yes, I think one of my biggest worries is coming up against a younger version of me. Because startups have an energy, they have a belief that big corporates- The Sainsbury's lesson is do unto yourself before someone else does unto you. And startups do it to themselves all the time. They're striving, they’re inventive, they're creative, they make things happen where there's no budget. Bigger businesses need budgets for things and it’s all pre-plan. Again, we're talking about being here, budgets across the road. If they don't spend their budget, the budget gets cut. Must spend the money. I mean it, you know, masters in waste.

But as the business gets bigger, businesses get more wasteful. So I try to keep that energy and that entrepreneurial spirit in the business today, and that's part of the empowerment.

We have young versions of me coming up through the business, it might mean that they leave. One of the things that I'm most proud of is how we grow our own. We have our- we call it the AO University, an incredible development pipeline. I was chatting to somebody in the corridor called Lisa McKenna the other day, who's been with us for, I think it's her 20th anniversary in October. And she was telling me she's going to celebrate by qualifying on her apprentice course. I mean, so that is a commitment to learning and development that we have across the business.

I don't know if it's about getting the balance right. Never get fat and old; keep yourself fit, mentally, physically, keep yourself as young as possible, and keep yourself ambitious. The problem is you have more to lose. In the corporate world it would be called golden handcuffs. But as you become theoretically if you like, more successful, you don't want to fail. The risk of failure, the perception of failure.

I joke about it, but, we lost £160 million on our expedition into Germany. I talk about it jokingly as 160 million lessons. We learned a lot. We got our heads kicked in firmly for that, because we're a listed business and part of being a listed business, you get anything wrong, you get your . But you know, we learned a lot. And so if we ever thought to do it again, we would be much better armed from an educational perspective on how to go about doing that.

Andy Coulson: Let's just touch on that quickly because that wasn't just that you got your head kicked in reputationally, it was also financially pretty perilous for you.

You've said to me on a number of occasions, businesses fail when they run out of money, which sounds like a statement of the obvious, but actually there are a tremendous amount of businesses out there who forget that simple lesson. There have been some properly hairy moments just from a cash point of view, John, am I right?

John Roberts: Yes. Certainly if you look at the first ten years, many times. You don't always see them coming. I look at all the systems that we've got. I've got a KPI sheet on my phone that refreshes every two minutes. It gives me every piece of data that I could possibly want. But also, you don't know what you don't know.

You're growing up. I always talk about it as doing the 110-meter hurdles with a blindfold on. That's what you're doing, and you're trying to go as fast as possible. So you fall a lot, you learn a lot. And at probably about 95 meters somebody might let you take the blindfold off. Most people don't get to that point because it is that bruising. You've got to be ever more inventive, creative, pragmatic, you've got to take it seriously.

I'm trying to remember what the friend of mine, Chris O, that uses this all the time. It's something like you've got to have absolute conviction in the fact you're going to succeed, but also be aware of the brutal facts. Don't kid yourself. That, without knowing that phrase, just instinctively that's something that we were very good at. We didn't have any problems with that.

Andy Coulson: From a practical point of view, on the days when you were waking up wondering how that day was going to end, how did you manage yourself through that day? What's the personal approach that you take?

John Roberts: I haven't done this for a long time actually, but whenever the song comes on, because all the family know the story, people will go- we’ll be in a bar somewhere or wherever, I love skiing, it'll come on and people go, “That's your song.” I used to- as a leader, you set the tone. So you know, what I used to do was in the dark days, and you know, there were some very, very dark days, I've sat- I used to have a green Mondeo and I remember I've sat with my head in my hands wondering what to do, I've been in tears, I've been through every bit of emotion, failure, you don't want to let people down. I had some amazing investors, I didn't want to let them down.

And the emotion of not wanting to let people down is actually one of the heaviest ones. And then you come to, right, well that's nobody else's problem, that's yours. You asked for it, so get over it and deal with it.

What I used to do, I used to have a CD player in the car, when CD players in cars were pretty cool, we'd moved from tapes. And I used to have a Queen album, Queen's Greatest Hits, and I used to put on it Don't Stop Me Now on repeat, on full volume. It was about a 20 minute journey to work, and I used to put it on full volume, and I used to just sing it on repeat. What it did was it got adrenaline flowing, and you couldn't help, you can't help- it's like smiling at someone. It just makes you happier, it just does.

You know, I talk to people in the call centre about, “Smile when you're on the phone.” Honestly, it feels a bit weird to start with, but get used to it, you sound happier. And so by the time you've done that for 20 minutes, you get out of the car, and you spring into the office. I’d make a point of while I was at peak energy, walking around the office, “Morning, we're going have a good one today, come on. Every sale matters, don’t forget.”

You’d go round, go and see the buyers, walk around every bit of the business, pump energy into everybody. And then you might go and sit in your office, put your head in your hands and like, “Shit, how are we going to pay the wages on Friday?”

Andy Coulson: The shop front is critical.

John Roberts: It matters

Andy Coulson John, let's move to 2014. The company grows, grows fast. The decision is made to go public, to IPO. On the face of it, an epic success with AEO being valued at 1.2, it rises to 1.7. For a company at that time making around £3 million, I think?

John Roberts: Yes.

Andy Coulson: In many ways it's the very definition of a high class problem. But one that you've had to manage since in terms of how the company is viewed in the city, which is obviously an important thing for you as a business.

Just talk me through what you learned really from that process.

John Roberts: Well, the single biggest thing I learnt was that the IPO was the start line, not the finish line. And I'd never done one before, so I was Mr Green in a green suit, green tie, green hat, walking in saying, “Hi, I'm Mr Green, very clearly, please screw me over.”

So I decided to learn. I knew I was playing a game with investors and bankers that I didn't understand, that I didn't make the rules for, that they played every day. And so I went and got myself educated.

But I think it's important to make a few points clear. Yes, we were 2.85 of sales selling electrical products, making 3 million, and we floated for 1.2 billion. Which was, you know, I think an amazing success. Why was it a success? Because I saw my responsibility at the time to deliver for the investors that had supported us to that point and to maximize their exit or part exit from the business.

There were two reasons for doing the IPO. That was one, and the other was to raise funds to turbocharge the business. So that meant our international expansion, which I’ve touched on, and to grow the business out into other product categories.

And so doing the IPO at that level, or getting the IPO to that level, enabled us to get the maximum amount of fuel for the business and the maximum exit for investors to date at minimum dilution to the shareholding. So tick, that would be considered a success.

I didn't take one investor, by the way, down a dark alley, put a gun to their head, put their arm up their back. These are bright people who, as I say, they do this every day. First time I've ever done it. We were eleven times oversubscribed. And the only reason we were capped at 1.2 was because I'd shaken hands with an investor called Nick Medici on we would not go over 1.2, which is why it popped to 1.7, because it was eleven times oversubscribed on the first day.

So, you know, back to handshakes matter, I shook hands with him. The banks were saying, “No, don't worry about that, he'll get over it.” “No, I shook hands with him. So that's it.”

So arguably, I could have delivered more value for those shareholders.

And so it was a success, but in the same way that I took our sort of early stage investors very, very seriously, and their return very seriously, I still take people's return today very seriously. We have a clear plan to deliver and to get the business exactly where we said we would get it to. And broadly, you know, we've gone from 300 million to over a billion of sales, we are now in all major product categories. Operationally we've delivered- I think we're planning to- we've taken the 3 million to- the consensus to make about 45 million of PBT

So we have a business that is the most trusted electrical retailer in the UK, making millions of deliveries a year. Operationally, I think we've delivered.

So now it's more about how we realise that value through resilience and continued growth, so markets favour growth, cash conversion, and profit. We've been on a journey to make all that happen, and operationally we are now making that happen. So I'm really proud. It’s been a real rollercoaster, but-

I’m not as anal about last 50 pence, to my cost it has to be said. In 2015, so at our first year's results, I think we were slated to make something like- I'll get the numbers a bit wrong, but I think it was about 17 or 18 million. And we were going to come in at 16, of that magnitude. I remember saying, which I wasn't trying to be clever, genuinely, I was getting a hard time for missing by a million quid. And I was like, “Who cares whether it's 16, 17 or 18? It really makes no difference to the strategy of what we're planning to do.”

Anyway, it turned out a lot of people cared, and in one day, it knocked 400 million off the market cap of a business, because the city always overreacts both ways. You know, we were £4 a share at the height of COVID. We weren't worth that then. How can we be worth seven or eight times what we were eight weeks ago? It's bonkers sometimes.

But I think the trick, and one of the things that I've learned is stick to your plan, be honest. Be really open with investors about what your plan is. We are not an investment for everybody. Don't get too excited when everybody tells you you're amazing, and don't get too down when everybody tells you that you're a complete knob. Because neither are probably true, it's probably somewhere in the middle.

Andy Coulson: Brilliant. How have you how have you managed the- again from a personal point of view, because you touched on it there, you know, being prepared to go into an investor moment and say, “Well, we might not be for you.” There really aren't too many leaders of public companies would be prepared to do that as openly as you have.

Is that a key plank of your sort of philosophy of managing this stuff? Is just go in and say it as it is?

John Roberts: Well, I talk in the business about candour, so consistent candour. You can't just have candour. I do state of the nations every month, everybody knows my email address, they feel free to email me good things, bad things, all sorts of different things, and I commit that they get an answer in the same day.

It's the same with investors, you know? I talk about it internally as candour for kindness, because you need to know where we're at, not for cruelty. Some people think candour is about being blunt and brutal, but it's not, just deliver the message nicely.

I think it's the same for investors. They've got a job to do, so I think it's really important they know what kind of business that they are investing in. They know what style that business is going to operate in, and we are consistent in how we think about that. And so when I meet an investor who I don't think is for us, and you can tell from the questions that they're asking, I think it's better. I don't want to waste my time for certain, I definitely don't want to waste their time.

So you know, if we're fifteen minutes in to an hour meeting and I'm pretty clear that I'm not fussed whether you invest or not, in fact, I probably prefer you didn't. Why waste the next 45 minutes? So I don't mean to be rude when I do it. I'm giving you 45 minutes, but you're on a fair hourly rate pal. Let's move on. I know I am.

And it's funny actually sometimes, we've had a couple, I won't name them, but that have turned into, “Hey, don't tell me.” It's people's reactions when you tell them they shouldn't or can't, you know, the whole FOMO thing, “You don't know what I'd invest in.” “Alright.” So we've had a few funny moments, but I just think it's…

The way I express it, I talk in Boltonese. I don't like people that dress things up in fancy language. Bankers do a lot of it. I love asking bankers to explain the short process and they go, “Yes, well, it's when people borrow shares and bet against the share price and they're betting on the company going down.” Yes, I know that. Come on then, walk me through step by step how that works. You'd be amazed how few can do it, and they don't know. And they go, “Yes, well, they borrow them off another-” “Go on then, what's the margin on it? How does that work? What happens if he wants them back? What happens if-?” they can't answer the questions. And they dress it up in this bullshit language.

Whereas if you're opening your mouth and you're talking to somebody, for me they should be able to understand really clearly what you're saying. Otherwise, what's the point in opening your mouth? So I try and do that as consistently as possible. Sometimes I get it wrong, but the principles and the desire if you like, is authentic, that sits behind it. And why should it be any different for investors than it is for people in the business?

Andy Coulson: John, let's talk about leadership. 2017, you decided to step back as CEO at AO. Big moment for you and the business. You stayed on as founder and handed the reins to your COO, Steve Caunce. It was a decision that you were to regret. Tell us why.

John Roberts: It was a big decision, and it comes back to trust your instincts. I was exhausted at the time. I've had 15 years of pushing these chips on red and all the adrenaline and the journey and everything that goes with that. We'd had six to nine months of doing the IPO, which we've already talked about but was in itself an exhausting process, travelling around the world. I won't run you through the itineraries but they were exhausting, like properly exhausting.

And then we'd done the first, I think it was whatever, 12 or 18 months of the listed process. And I was struggling a little bit with the learning how to- we’ve talked about how to deal with investors, how to do all this stuff, and I was getting advice on how to do it. It didn't sit that comfortably with me.

At the same time, the business was growing up and so Steve, he was our CFO and COO. We talked about each other as brothers that weren't related, at the time, we'd grown the business very much shoulder to shoulder. I would go off chaotically creating crises, and a lot of the time Steve would be sweeping up operationally behind me, but we did it all together.

Steve had got to the stage where with Norman, Bill and Chris as investors, we used to joke about me being their flak jacket. So they made a load of dough that they deserve every penny of, but the spotlight and the focus was very, very, very firmly on me. And I'd gone from zero spotlight to a very big spotlight, and that had taken a lot of getting used to as well.

And so the board was saying, “Look, there's a natural transition here. We need to move to more of a professional management,” not that I was unprofessional, but less chaotic probably was what they meant, and Steve wanted it. Steve had the frustration that he didn't feel like he got the recognition for his part in the journey that we took together. I go back to every interview, I always used to talk about Steve and I, it was always- we always did that together. But that used to really frustrate him and I get that, I get it.

So he wanted that recognition and it felt like all the planets were aligning on the board, on the stage, you know, it was a more organisational thing than an entrepreneurial. He wanted it, I was knackered.

Andy Coulson: You’d both also been incredibly successful, right? I mean, the business was- in terms of your own lives and your own economics, you'd kind of smashed it, the pair of you.

John Roberts: Yes, yes, yes. And again, you know, I go back to handshakes. When Steve joined the business, I don't know exactly when it was now, it was 2006 maybe 2007, and he wanted shares in the business and he wanted to- at some point his target number was £7 million quid of exit at some point. So we shook hands on that, and I said, “Well look if you want to join the business fundamentally you're going to have to trust me, so let's start with a massive thing to trust me on. So to start with you're going to have to take my word for it.”

As we approached the IPO I transferred- I gave it in effect Steve a chunk of my shares that would more than cover his ambitions, and because we achieved what we did, yes we knocked it out of the park from that point of view, it was many, many, many times the ambition, and he earned every penny of it. So there was not an ounce of resentment, none. It was more a case of- I remember after the IPO coming down from JP Morgan's trading floor, Steve and I being in a coffee shop and looking at each other and going, I'll put the polite version, “What on earth have we done?”

We did the journey together, and so it was intensely logical. And I said, “Look I'm not going anywhere, this is my sixth child.” I've got five kids and I view the business as my sixth child There was a bit of he had to suffer the ghost of Christmas past hanging around, you know, I'd been the leader for fifteen years and everyone looked to me, so it was more difficult. If I’d disappeared I'm not sure it would have made that much difference.

If somebody else had come in that was a great leader, I think it would have been different But the first thing they should have done would have been- I offered the job once to Matt Davies a friend of mine that now chairs Auto Trader and Greggs, and was CEO of Tesco. Matt was really clear, “I don't want that business.” I offered him an amazing package to take the role, and he wouldn't do it. He said, “The first thing I'd do is fire you, and we're mates.” So I get that there was some challenges within that, but you know, the culture just changed.

What I learned about leadership was you lead from the front. You have to be very visible, you have to own things, and Steve did the opposite. The team were reaching out to me over a period, saying, “Look, this is bad. I'm thinking of leaving.” People that were amazing people in the business telling me they're thinking of leaving.

And so then obviously I started to- and I tried to give him some space, I went away for a couple of months. Anyway, it didn't work, and Steve wasn't listening and I could see it imploding.

I still had the vast majority of my family's wealth tied up in the business. I'd only sold 20% of my holding in IPO, and promised not to sell anymore. I didn't sell anything for ten years, and I've only sold a few million quid sort since So I was economically very motivated, but actually I would genuinely wasn't thinking that at the time. It was a human thing and all these people that I really care about are thinking of leaving. Something’s got to be wrong.

So anyway, I resolved to come back, and so I said to people, “Look, I'm really sorry. I'll fix this, don't leave, whatever you do.” And It was a painful journey coming back. Steve didn't want to go.

Andy Coulson: Because your coming back meant that Steve would exit the business.

John Roberts: Yes Steve had to go.

Somebody once said to me that what you don't understand, as in me, is the difference between being a number two and a number one. When you're a number two, everybody looks to number one and you are there to support and do all those other things. When somebody looks at you, and this is a friend of mine that went from being a number two to being a number one, you just don't understand how hard it is, because you've never done anything else.

And so I have sympathy, I really do. And I don't mean that in a patronising way, I have a lot of sympathy for the challenge that Steve had in that. What was really disappointing was it should have never ended badly. We haven't spoken since.

Andy Coulson: Do you regret that?

John Roberts: I don't regret anything I've done. I've reached out to Steve many times through the process, I tried and tried and tried to do everything in the right way. I remember sending him a text message saying, “ Would your mum be really proud of how you're behaving at the minute? You know, when you look in the mirror, what's looking back at you at the minute? You know, these are your people as much as they're my people. What are you doing? You know, economically you've got riches beyond anything you ever imagined. Why are you behaving like this?” I didn't get it.

Andy Coulson: For you though, are you able to look at the successful years together and still see them for what they were?

John Roberts: Yes, that's why I've already talked about them fondly, right? We talked about it as brothers. The IPO process, Jonathan Finn from Rothschild said he's never seen two people deliver a roadshow over six to nine months as consistently, word for word, perfect, every time. There was a brilliant chemistry and trust.

That was the thing that broke my heart in it, is I trusted him. I am a very trusting person. I start from a position of trust, but he properly earned trust over a long period of time. It wasn't six months, it was seven or eight years, and we achieved something incredible together. And that's a shame. It's just a shame.

But look, it is what it is. I don't believe in regrets; move on. I genuinely wish him no ill, I hope he's happy in whatever he's doing next. But it's an incredible shame. And so, you know, for anybody else, it is a lesson in pick your partners carefully and be really open about things as you go along.

Andy Coulson: You say pick your partners carefully. You actually picked a brilliant partner for a while. It went wrong in the end. But in the same way as you're now able to speak very fondly about the success, is the lesson more don't necessarily think that everything is forever, and keep that in your mind?

John Roberts: Yes.

Andy Coulson: What do you think the mistake was in terms of your attitude? You talk about trust, but?

John Roberts: I don't know. I've thought about this many, many times, as you can imagine. I think if I have any failings in that process, one would be possibly hanging around like the ghost of Christmas past. And although I don't believe that would have actually changed anything, and arguably not then having the people being able to reach out and be around might have made it go worse.

But probably sitting down and having hearts to hearts with Steve through the process, of how you're feeling about stuff, and doing more of the human element rather than giving him the breathing space and going from sort of zero to one of, “Right, it's all yours.” But I just didn't see it in that way at the time, because it wasn't somebody new into the business.

But it's the point of I didn't understand the transition from number two to number one. So maybe if I had my time again, I might do that a bit more. Maybe I might be harder.

Andy Coulson: John, what's interesting to me is that throughout these challenges and the success obviously, and I've worked with you for a while, as I've said, during both challenging and successful times, not once did you step back from the philanthropic side of your life.

And I know you don't like talking about it, but I'm going to force you to, because I think it's important. In fact if anything, during the difficult years you gave more, both in terms of your time and obviously money, to OnSide Youth Zones in particular, which is an organisation that you've played a very important part in over the years. In short order, OnSide Youth Zones bring an epic level of kind of youth services to some of the most difficult areas of the country.

It strikes me that when things are difficult, you double down on your values in particular, because that's what sits behind your giving, right? It's how you see the world. Am I right about that?

John Roberts: Well, I think that- Sally will tell you, I am a contradiction in many ways. I am incredibly commercial. James Timpson and I joke about this, that culturally the businesses are seen as fluffy and there’s a hard commercial that sits behind it. So I am a capitalist to my very core.

but I also think that the- one of the guiding principles for me is the world should be a better place for the fact you were in it. And so how do you make that happen? You can't fix all the world's problems. I believe deeply that talent is evenly distributed and opportunity is not. I have been hopeful for a long time that I can do something to level that playing field, albeit, Jesus Christ, you know, what seems obvious to many is not obvious to politicians.

So I think that the, unfortunately probably and maybe fortunately, if you want doing well, give it to a busy man. But the two things of- the business challenges and the social challenges that we face as a nation, I think collided, and what I saw was an opportunity to try and do something about it.

And so if you genuinely believe you can, and you do not, what kind of person are you? Is the sort of challenge that I gave myself.

Andy Coulson: W hat you were seeking to do was rebalance, reorder really the way that we fund, support, drive youth services in this country.

John Roberts: I wanted to change the lens. I wanted to change the narrative. We spend over 100 billion a year on the biggie of education; schools, universities, that sort of stuff. Kids spend 85% of their time outside school. We spend about half a billion on provision for kids when they're out of school. It's fine for your kids, it's fine for my kids. My kids can go and play cricket at the cricket club, or they can go ten-pin bowling, there's lots of activities for them, because they can pay for it.

If you haven't got any money, what do you do? You hang around. If you're in a two-bedroom flat as a family of four on the fourteenth floor in Tower Hamlets or Barking in Dagenham, wherever, or Middlesbrough, it doesn't matter where, what do you do? You get out. The first thing you do, you either bury yourself in a screen, which is incredibly isolating, or you get out. If you get out- I've never known positivity fill a void. As a kid, I’d get myself in as much trouble as I could.

But then you get demonised. You know as well as I do. If it's dark outside and you're walking up the road and there's ten kids with hoodies on just hanging around in the corner at the end of the street, you'll cross the road. It's intimidating. They're not trying to be intimidating, they've got nothing else to do.

And so why wouldn't we-? This is obvious stuff. Why wouldn't we want to invest to give those kids somewhere safe, somewhere inspiring and positive to go, and something to do with their leisure time?

What I've seen through OnSide is it is not difficult, it is not complicated. If you build an amazing place, they come in their droves. There will be hundreds of kids every night in every youth zone, with a range of activities. So it's not just all about football or basketball and sports. Every sport you can imagine is catered for

It's 50p to get in. The 50p is really important, because it means I choose to come and pay to come, but there's a whole gym. But it's like a gym like David Lloyd. These kids deserve the best.

There's a kitchen there to help them cook. There's boxing rings, there's design and art, there's music. They have their own radio stations. You can record your own album. There's every musical instrument that you could want to learn, in there. They get a hot meal for a pound. Obviously, it's subsidised. For some kids, that is the only healthy meal that they get all day, for a quid.

These things cost, let's say for round numbers about 10 million to build and 1.5 million a year to run. Antisocial behaviour crime drops by 50% within four weeks of opening one. Why? Not rocket science, is it? They're all in there doing positive things.

Because no kid is born naughty, we make them into that societally. And so actually what we should do is just give them a better future. Not all kids are good at school, mea culpa. I was lucky, my mum and dad could afford to pay for me to go to a private school, it was a good school. I didn’t manage to get any qualifications but I learned a lot.

God only knows what would have happened to me. Would I had gone the other side of the tracks? Very probably. I could have easily spent a career at Her Majesty's leisure.

So you know, this is not difficult, it's not big money.

Andy Coulson: In summary John, as you've alluded to with your frustration with Westminster, you've been fighting this very good fight for a long time with our previous government. We now have a relatively new government. In a paragraph, what's the ask now?

John Roberts: Care. In a word, care. The government needs to put a billion a year into this, and I promise you, philanthropy is queuing up to get behind this because it is a magnet for the filings of all sorts of charities and community groups that suddenly get the best facilities

Imagine having the school system 50% funded by philanthropy. It would be incredible, wouldn't it?

And so empower a group of people to go and make it happen. Take a risk. There are I don't even know now. I've lost count 16, 17, something like that, OnSide Youth Clubs across the country. We've never had one close. Looking through a retail lens, there's about 300 B&Qs. So if a community can sustain a B&Q, surely it can sustain a youth club of scale and quality. So our first ambition should be, let's build 300 of them. That'll take at least ten years, but the societal difference it'll make will be incredible.

Andy Coulson: John, thanks so much for joining us. I think this is going to be such a useful episode for people on such a number of levels. First and foremost though, I think for anyone who is trying to build a business, who is on that road, I just think this episode is full of gold thanks to you.

John Roberts: Thanks very much for having me, Andy.