S1 Ep12: Ben Branson, Founder of Seedlip Podcast Transcript

Chris: Have you ever wondered how the businesses you know and love have evolved? What inspired the founders to create them? What chances do they take and what mistakes do they make along the way?

Hi, I’m Chris, the CEO of Uncommon, a company that creates exceptional spaces for work. In each episode of Alive with Possibilities, I get to sit down with a different business leader whom I admire and discuss the journey they’ve been on.

Joining us for this episode is Ben Branson. Inspired by his family’s 300-year farming heritage, Ben was on a mission to solve the, what would you drink when you’re not drinking alcohol dilemma? And in the process invented Seedlip, which is the world’s first non-alcoholic spirit. A category today that is worth $13 billion.

Ben has won two golds at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show and in the last year has launched pollen projects to continue to disrupt the drinks industry and has also started The Hidden 20%, a charity and podcast raising awareness about neurodiversity.

Ben, thank you for joining me today. You’ve certainly done a lot in your career and there’s lots of places where we can start this conversation, but I’d really like to go back to the beginning and talk about your family and your links to nature as this has had so much to do with your products today.

Ben: I grew up in the countryside on a farm, farming family. Love the outdoors, love nature, and I am very, very happy outside. And that’s my mom’s side of the family and my dad’s side’s actually in the worlds of design and advertising.

And so, it’s this very curious mix of places like London and brands and advertising and design with rural, North Lincolnshire and the Lincolnshire wolds and everything happening very steady, and I love both and I still love both. I guess, yeah, I’ve definitely carried that through.

Seedlip is therefore just an absolute product of my upbringing in the sense that it’s about getting to work with nature and farmers and the land, taste, flavour.

And it’s about getting to work in the world of brands, drinks and advertising and marketing, but with the belief that there’s a need for something that’s great and grown up and adult and sophisticated if you’re not drinking alcohol for whatever reason.

And so, it didn’t start as a business Chris, it kind of started with some experiments. I like making things and I’ve always liked making things, whether that’s a skateboard ramp or a booby trap or bow and arrow or a tree house, taxidermy or woodworking. I like making stuff and I like knowing how things work.

And I like creating and I was growing loads of different plants at home and getting on the internet, finding more things I could grow and in finding myself in a rabbit warren on Wikipedia I came across these things called copper stills and distillation and learned they were making medicine back in the 17th century.

And I just got to a point where I was like, “I’m just going to buy one of these little copper stills off the internet and I’m going to get some of my herbs in my garden and just have a play.” And I did it.

Sounds ridiculous, but I turned mint leaves from a solid into a liquid that smelled and tasted like the solid and I thought I was a genius, but I found it magical, really magical. I became besotted with it, and I wanted to keep doing it.

Fast forward that through to 2013, so we’re talking over 10 years ago now, but more experiments and I was in London, and I was driving so I wasn’t drinking alcohol but going out for dinner, everyone on the table gets delicious drinks and I’m like, “Hey, have you got anything non-alcoholic?” They’re like, “Sure, we’ll bring you something.”

And they bring over this horrible blend of fruit juices and just feel like a child. That wasn’t the light bulb moment, but that was again, another moment the dots started to join.

I guess after that I started to think maybe there was something in what I was doing, distilling liquids at home, working with my mom on the farm, working with my dad and design, put everything that I love and value into a bottle and see a project through and that’s all it was.

It was, “Can I just get some liquid in a bottle and get it on a shelf?” That’s it. That’s the end of the project because I’d had loads of ideas and I’d never followed through on any of them and I managed to see that through and got it onto the shelf at Selfridges, which is two years later, and it sold out.

This snowball happened and we kept selling out and I was on my own and this wasn’t the plan. The plan was nice and slow. I was going to hire a part-time intern that was going to be my first employee and my first thousand bottles were going to last six months and they lasted three weeks. So, every single plan went out the window and I hated it.

I hated the first six months against the backdrop of selling out Selfridges, The Fat Duck, all these five star hotels, getting invited to Buckingham Palace, and hearing from a hundred countries in the first three months. All this press and attention and I hated it.

Chris: Why? Because for most people, that must be the dream. You’ve stumbled onto something that is clearly in demand and it explodes. I speak to lots of people who slog for years trying to get things into Selfridges et al.

Ben: I’m naturally more driven by fear of failure than a pursuit of success and I am Seedlip’s worst critic. We just launched our new business season, this range of kind of cocktail bitters and I’m its worst critic.

So, no one is going to be able to say anything about any of my businesses or projects that I haven’t probably already thought of or that isn’t as negative as I’ve probably thought of.

I find that really empowering. So, I leaned in, and I kept in mind the guy that told me that Seedlip tastes like witches piss, that’s the thing I hold onto. Not, “Oh this is amazing, or I love Seedlip or this is the best thing ever or whatever.”

I really try to stay and hold onto the naysayers and the negative things and it doesn’t mean I’m going to necessarily do anything different or that I think I can please everybody or that I think everyone needs to love it, but they just keep my feet on the floor.

Chris: You send him a hundred bottles every Christmas.

Ben: And you retweet a tweet as I did back in 2016 or whenever it was.

Chris: Excellent. I love that.

Ben: Those first six months were very important but very, very painful. I guess I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But the number one reason, and this is on reflection Chris, but the number one reason it was so painful, and I hated it so much was because it wasn’t my plan. It’s that simple.

This is not what my model, forecast, budget, spreadsheet, two years of work didn’t go how I wanted it to go. And it doesn’t matter that it went unbelievably better than I thought it was going to go. It wasn’t my plan.

I like plans, I’m very literal, so when I think something through or commit a plan, I do genuinely believe still to this day that that’s what’s going to happen. Even though I know, and everybody seems to know that it never ever, ever goes literally according to plan.

Like it’s ridiculous. I could save myself a lot of stress by not getting wedded to the plan, but I like a plan, I like to know what’s going to happen.

Chris: What happened then? So, you’re still on your own, you’ve gone six months of gangbusters and it’s all selling out very quickly. There must have come a moment where it then was like, “Oh, this is actually a business,” how did that go?

Ben: I had to go from making 1,000 bottle batches that took six weeks to three months later making 7, 8,000 bottle batches and outsourcing production and that was still all my own finding investment.

We hired 120 people over three years. We were growing faster than BrewDog, Innocent, Fever-Tree, Hendricks, you kind of name it. We took Seedlip from my kitchen to say five countries in three and a half years and then a majority acquisition by Diageo, the world’s biggest spirits’ company.

And so, it was totally wild. This is against the backdrop, let’s not forget. And for listeners back in 2015, the only real non-alcoholic option you could get was Becks Blue.

That was it. Nothing on the shelves, nothing in menus, no podcast, no awards, nothing around the kind of non-alcohol free moderation conversation, nothing.

Chris: And it’s got so much better. The only one that I don’t think’s been solved yet is wine.

Ben: I’ve got a lot of thoughts on wine, but wine struggles in a couple of different aspects, primarily because of how the wine industry has been built. It’s not so much about the liquids, it’s more about the forces that work within the wine industry, which is very producer led. It’s not a brand led category apart from champagne.

Most people don’t really know wine brands, they know varietals, they know regions, so, it’s very producer-led apart from champagne. And then a lot of people have just been trying to dealcoholize wine.

There are a few companies like Murray, Proxies, NON, if anyone’s interested, to look at those three for example, that take a very different approach. So, they’re in wine bottles, you pour them in wine glasses, they might be white, red, pink, but they’re made from the ground up. They’re made exactly in the same way with Seedlip.

We didn’t try and make it taste like gin, vodka, whiskey, tequila, et cetera, we celebrated the fact that we didn’t have the same rules and we could work with any ingredients we wanted to and actually build something that was really unique.

And so, that’s what lots of these other guys in the wine world are just starting to do now, which makes it really, really exciting and you’ve got similar happening in beer as well.

But you’ve got a category that’s worth probably about $15 billion across its top 10 markets, which is amazing and growing very, very quickly all over the world, which is incredible and fairly unique in terms of a movement. So yeah, very, very exciting.

And we sold the majority of Seedlip in summer of 2019. So, I’m still involved. I’m still a shareholder and I’m still a founder, which is great. And I get to work with the kind of the Diageo team who are driving Seedlip forward.

But then I also get to explore getting back to the beginning and I’m a sucker for punishment because I’m right back to being a startup with our new projects. And we’ve launched the first one, but we’ve got two more coming over the next sort of 12 to 18 months.

Chris: Do you want to tell me a little bit more about those?

Ben: Yeah, so season is like the secret ingredient to make your drinks more delicious. So, I’m sure people have heard of angostura, concentrated liquids, a few dashes, a bit like seasoning and yeah, will liven up whether it’s a soda or a gin and tonic, whether it’s alcoholic or non-alcoholic, I don’t really mind, but I just wanted to put out these two really delicious complex liquids that are just so easy to use and so easy to hack.

Basically, getting amazing flavour in your drinks really easily without having to be a bartender and having lots of equipment. We are just launching this week in the U.S., that goes to Singapore and Hong Kong later in the summer, Amsterdam, Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne, et cetera, all on the cards for the next 12 months.

And then we’ve been building a laboratory near my house, which the walls just went up last week and that’s about building a luxury liquid that no one’s ever done before that I’ve been thinking about and working on since even before Seedlip.

It’s non-alcoholic, but a really interesting business model. Very disruptive challenges, lots of what’s out there and we will be able to release that later this year.

And then the third project, we’re just commercialising at the moment, but again, totally different to the other two. But yeah, much bigger, probably more premium mainstream.

We’re finding the way to make all of these projects happen with the appropriate business model behind them. That means we can put two fingers up basically to everybody who says you’ve got to focus on doing one thing.

Chris: Does that mean you’re working every hour?

Ben: No, I’ve got three kids, 19 out of 20 times I’m able to put them to bed, 19 out of 20 times I’m there with them at breakfast. I’ve worked out that I work really well in sprints and sometimes I’ll have a total write off day or a total write off morning.

But that’s okay because I’m only measuring myself and my output rather than how long it’s taking or how many days I’m working. I don’t work weekends and my kids are the best break I’ve found to be forced in a nice way to stop.

Chris: And amongst all of this, you went and won two golds at Chelsea Flower Show. How on earth did you get involved in that?

Ben: Wind your way back we’re kind of, what were we? Year and a half old as a business with Seedlip, get an opportunity. “Do we want to have a garden and design a garden for the Chelsea Flower Show?”

They really like what we’re doing, a brand that’s all about nature, no idea what that entailed, but we said yes, and it became our most important marketing activation in 2017 and in 2018, we designed gardens, both years and one gold for both.

It happens in May, so perfect time. Start of the summer, we would work with all the neighbouring restaurants and bars. We would do activities with Harvey Nichols, that was just up the road from Chelsea Flower Show, it’s BBC coverage.

We could host customers, fans, guests, suppliers, et cetera on the garden, private evening, private view. We really, really made the most of it. The first garden was all about the art of distillation and our story from the 17th century and my family history.

And then the second garden, we just celebrated one thing, which was the pea, which was one of the ingredients that we would pick from my farm and use and distil into Seedlip garden, one of our products. So, we did a garden all inspired by the pea family.

It was incredible, it was incredibly stressful. It takes a year to plan these things. It’s all about one week. It was hellish and the team worked so amazingly, and we worked with this incredible garden designer, Dr Catherine McDonald.

And the best thing that came out of it was a couple of years later we hired the head of Chelsea Flower Show as Seedlip’s head of nature, best job title going to Tom, who we’d met as part of doing the gardens. And so yeah, it was very, very special.

But it was also a time when brands weren’t sponsoring gardens at Chelsea Flower Show. So, it was efficient we could be on all the bars in Chelsea Flower Show. It was an audience of people who love nature and that was our audience. So yeah, it was really very special.

Chris: You’ve had a lot of success over all of this. How do you celebrate your successes, whether they’re big or small?

Ben: God, that’s a really good question that no one has ever asked me. This sounds strange, but I’m not that interested in the successes. I’m more interested in the problems and what we can learn from them.

I’m not the kind of like, “Oh, we got to fail and celebrate failure,” but I definitely like, “Good, that’s what we wanted, we move on.”

Chris: Diageo turned up, deals all signed, what happened? There must have been something fun that you did with the team.

Ben: No, we did get the whole global team to come up to my family farm in Lincolnshire, start flying everybody in and they spent a couple of days together. I was on paternity leave, so I went for an evening.

I’m very antisocial so I love my team and I gave my team 20% of the business. Everybody had shares, whether you joined at the beginning or just before the end, everybody was incentivized, everybody was coached on the financials, how to write a business plan, et cetera, et cetera.

Like a massive load of development for people and I cared a lot about that team, and I care a lot about my team now, but I’m not going to socialise with them if that makes sense.

So, Emma, who’s my CEO of Pollen projects, she was my COO at Seedlip, I’ve known her for 10 years. I’ve never met her husband; I’ve never been for dinner or lunch with her. I love her to bits; we hardly ever speak and I love working with her.

Chris: Interesting.

Ben: I’ve not probably said that out loud actually like that.

Chris: Again, it’s doing something differently, but it works for you and you both acknowledge it, cool.

Ben: I don’t have any friends, I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to make things better and I want to work with brilliant people who also want to do that.

Chris: It’s not because you don’t care, that’s not the point at all. It’s like the opposite. It’s just not doing I guess what the mainstream says that you do.

Ben: Yeah, we don’t have a WhatsApp group. We didn’t at Seedlip, we don’t now, and Emma knows that the team coming together and being in person is really important and I also know that and appreciate that and understand that.

But now I’m open about my diagnosis and what I need and what’s best. I would like to think that nobody’s taking offence if I’m not there for example, or people think I don’t care.

Because I absolutely do because ultimately, I cannot do this without having an amazing group of brilliant people to work with. I don’t even want to do it on my own.

So yeah, I don’t know, I think it’s just about being clear with people, setting the expectations, no surprises. And I probably show my love and care in different ways rather than just spending time with you.

Chris: You mentioned your diagnosis there, so if you don’t mind let’s switch gears and talk about neurodiversity. I know it’s something you are quite passionate about. Can you tell me how you actually discovered that you are autistic and as a result, what have you learned about yourself?

Ben: I’m autistic. I was diagnosed in 2022. I’ve really been able to have the amazing opportunity to learn about my brain which I’d never really thought about before.

I’d never really thought about understanding my brain and how I think and how I work in terms of using it as a tool and making it better and harnessing the really good bits and working on the challenging bits. And so, my brain is absolutely built for efficiency and optimization.

That means that I want to make things better constantly and therefore I’m not interested in standing still and I’m not interested in doing things just because.

But I also need to go really deep in terms of thinking things through and processing and structure and process and the analytics and combining that with a kind of, I guess also being ADHD and that being, “Let’s fucking do it. Let’s make it happen, let’s get on with it.”

I feel like I’m in this quite beautiful piece of push and pull and then I can be incredibly patient, and I can wait, and I can wait and I can wait and then I can also be incredibly impatient and kind of go, “Let’s make it happen.” I think that’s just really, I don’t know, it’s just been really useful and useful to understand.

Chris: What took you to that place to get assessed in 2022?

Ben: There wasn’t one moment, I constantly felt like I needed to be a sponge and kind of absorb what’s going on and synthesise that and assimilate that, process that and be able to therefore, I don’t know, have ideas or make decisions or make plans.

And I didn’t know the word neurodiversity, I didn’t know what autism was, I didn’t know anything about ADHD apart from it’s kind of hyperactive little boys. I knew nothing. I didn’t know 20% of the world is neurodivergent.

I knew nothing but a guy I know in the drinks industry was assessed and diagnosed and he was quite public about his diagnosis and I’d always kind of related to him. So, that’s certainly deceiving.

And I listened to James Watt, founder of BrewDog being interviewed on Steven Bartlett’s podcast and it was sort of interesting listening to the episode, but it was right at the end they started talking about autism.

There were moments in that interview, I was like, his approach to business, regardless of the fanfare and the media and the bad bits that have come out about BrewDog in terms of him being a business owner, I was kind of like, “Well, I sort of relate to some of this.” And so, it was very gradual.

And then I remember googling what autism is and then I did a couple of NHS tests and then I went massively into denial and we were expecting our third baby at the time. So, it really was not the right time to be kind of doing this.

So, it was a process I would say of six months of even getting to the point where I then went for an assessment, then the assessment was 12 weeks. So, you’re talking like a nine-month period and then I didn’t even tell anybody.

And so, you’re like a whole year of this sort of rolling around and then I decide I need to do something about what I’ve learned, suddenly then I’m setting up a charity and then we’re launching a podcast and a campaign and yeah, off we go.

Chris: Look, it’s that fact of, as you said, like 20% it’s that superpower moment. I’m dyslexic, lots of my family are, and I’ve always found that has been a benefit to me. And that’s a weird thing to say because it’s definitely not, in some ways. What it’s meant is like for my side of things, it’s like that gets moments where I just can’t spell something.

So, I’ve then, for my whole entire life, my brain has worked on different ways to then come up with different words to replace it. Therefore, I can find a word that I can spell.

It means my vocabulary is quite large or much larger, therefore no one ever notices and I just kind of carry on. But it just means that there will come moments where I just have to work that much harder. That’s just kind of my mindset.

Ben: Yeah, you’re just a really good thesaurus. Like how I’ve got five different ways of saying that.

Chris: Exactly. But that’s only come from years of being in a situation where I’m like, “Help,” and there’s no way around it. And I think that’s kind of the point you are making is like there’s superpowers to all this stuff. It might not be helpful at the time, but there definitely are benefits to it.

Ben: I’m not in superpower territory, but I’m definitely in, hold on a minute. Look back over the kind of narrative that has been pedalled around people who think differently for let’s say the last hundred years.

And 9 times out of 10 it’s been negative and 9 times out of 10 it’s been a problem and a deficit and a disorder and a dysfunction and all that kind of just negative. And actually, that’s a lie, that it’s not all negative.

And if you ask me would I have a different brain or if there was a cure for autism, would I take it? I’d be like, “No way. I love my brain, but I haven’t realised that I needed to love it or that I could love it.”

And it sounds a very strange thing to kind of look after your brain or love your brain or try and understand your brain. The heart’s pretty important but my God, the brain is responsible for everything.

And so, why wouldn’t we want to know more about how our brains work or look after them or kind of why wouldn’t it be the case that every single person on the planet has a different brain and therefore processes information differently regardless of autism or dyslexia, everybody’s got a different brain full stop.

So, I’ve kind of now begun to recognize or be able to probably define, “Okay, these are the really good bits, and these are the really challenging bits.” And I didn’t have that distinction before because they were all just questions that I didn’t have an explanation for.

Chris: It must be very beneficial to be able to stop, step outside of your proverbial brain and go, “This is X part of me talking or acting or I don’t know the exact right term, doing something,” but then you being able to step away and label it, then it takes any emotion out of it or it takes any thought out of it and you can really then process away.

Ben: Yeah, it sounds all incredibly self-indulgent to be fascinated by your own brain or thinking about your own brain or thinking about the way that you think or process information, but it doesn’t really matter what it’s called, autism, whatever, it’s not. It doesn’t really matter.

The fact that there’s then getting my diagnosis was definitely this opportunity to go, “Do you want to understand how you think and how you work and maybe have an explanation for why you do or why you are the way you are? Do you want an explanation for that? Because here’s the choice.” I feel more myself than I have ever felt in my whole life.

Chris: Amazing.

Ben: That’s a cool thing that I want for everyone.

Chris: And talk me through. So, what are you doing about it now? What’s that then led to?

Ben: Got the diagnosis and then as I do, I wanted to learn everything there was to learn about the world of neurodivergence and not just autism. I wanted to kind of learn everything about all of it.

And basically, I found two things. Number one, this was 2022/2023, I just kept to some facts and some stats. 85% of children who are diagnosed dyslexic are ashamed of it. That’s not fucking good.

Up to 80% of people in the UK prison system are either misdiagnosed, undiagnosed, or they are diagnosed and unsupported, that’s not cool either. Less than 40% of neurodivergent adults are in full-time employment, that’s not cool. And 9 out of 10 employees don’t want to tell their bosses or their employer that they are neurodivergent. That’s not cool either.

So, it’s kind of like, “Wow, we don’t know anything.” There’s still the myths, there’s still the stigma, there’s still the shame, there’s still the stereotype. I want to do something about that.

And then point two, I hadn’t realised that the people throughout history that I have followed or admired or loved or gravitated towards, are rural neurodivergent. So, whether it’s Mozart, Marie Curie, Agatha Christie, Hans Christian Andersen, Steve Jobs, Alan Turing, Einstein, Warhol, Picasso, da Vinci, Michelangelo, they’re all neurodivergent.

They all thought differently, and they all just created such incredible contributions to society, to the way that we live our lives. Even Darwin, as an absolute nature lover, I couldn’t compute how there was all this amazingness and yet people were on waiting lists for 10 years to get an assessment.

And so, I wanted to change that and kind of update society and share the truth, spread the awareness, inform and update the 80% of people who are not neurodivergent so that we can support the 20%, which guess what will be better for business, better for society, better for the economy, better for people’s lives, et cetera, et cetera.

So yeah, we launched in the middle of January, and we launched a campaign that includes a podcast called The Hidden 20%, where I basically sit down with people who are neurodivergent and that’s celebrities, it’s experts, entrepreneurs, and they wonderfully give their time and share their stories.

And then we’ve done some work with Clear Channel, some huge outdoor advertising that’s been pro bono, which has been brilliant. We’ve got a big research project in the works, a documentary and treatment phase. We’ve been offered a book, like there’s loads of stuff happening, which is really exciting.

Now I had a letter last week, a four-page letter where a lady had shared her story of her and her husband and his autism diagnosis and about their relationship and she’d written him a letter and she’d sent it to us.

It was immensely transparent and powerful, and we’ve basically done a test, we’ve done the first series of the podcast. We reached 17 million people; we spent nothing on marketing and had 16 amazing guests.

And we’re sort of like, “Wow, we’ve got something, let’s go for it.” We’re into recording series two and I’ve got all these other sorts of initiatives that we’re doing.

Chris: Amazing. Well, you’ve just taken something and just run with it. And it’s the kind of people and the traction that you’ve got behind. It’s great.

Ben: Thank you.

Chris: I think that point that really sits with me is just that challenge on how there is still that stigma there on all these things that you don’t want to tell people, you don’t want it to impact on anything. It’s completely wrong, but it’s just people carrying that sort of stuff.

Ben: Massively. And home life or work life for example, if someone can’t be themself or can’t ask for what they need, guess what? They’re not going to be happy and they’re not going to be performing their job to the best of their ability. So yeah, I feel a small but very large sense of duty to stand up and speak about it.

Chris: In terms of the seed work, it could be any of the businesses. What do you think has been the biggest challenge you’ve had? It seems like a meteoric rise, but it can’t have been that easy.

Ben: I was saying to someone the other day, they asked me what was the worst time in business that I’ve had. And it was absolutely this, I travelled a lot with Seedlip, and I’d spend a couple of hundred days out of the UK for example, in a year launching Seedlip and all these markets.

And I wanted to be away for a short amount of time. So, I would make a trip as absolutely laser beam efficient as possible. So, jam packed for a short time.

And so, I was doing a trip that would be like London to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Singapore, Singapore to Taiwan, Taiwan to Melbourne, Melbourne to Sydney, Sydney to Auckland, Auckland to LA, LA to New York, New York to Toronto, Toronto to London and I’d do that in two weeks.

Chris: And what were you doing while you were there?

Ben: Launching Seedlip, working with distributors, doing press stuff, just kind of setting stuff up. And I got to Singapore and was about to get on a plane and I got a call, and it was probably from Emma going, “We need to get on a board call right now. It’s really urgent.”

And I’m like, “It’s at night, I’ve just finished an event, I’m knackered. I just want to get on the plane. I’m being hurtled through security because I’m late. And I’m like, “Okay, what’s going on?” She’s like, “We need to get on a call.”

So, I got on the call, and we found that there’s a million-pound working capital gap in our finances and that basically we’re going to run out of money. And I think we had about three weeks left of cash, therefore like massive mega, very bad.

And I was crying, I was crying on the phone, I was being pushed through security, I was absolutely exhausted, and it was horrible. And I guess the hardest bits with Seedlip and now with the hidden 20% and with Pollen projects are feeling out of control and not knowing how things will go.

And some of that’s exciting, but actually some of that is, I would quite like to know how things are going to go because we’re doing lots of things that people haven’t done before and therefore that’s brilliant in one sense, but it’s quite terrifying in another sense.

And dealing with that, managing that and the anxiety it creates for the team, I think that’s probably been the biggest challenge that I don’t think ever going to go away.

Chris: But if you could go back and do one thing differently, what would it be?

Ben: I’m really kind of fighting to not tell you that that’s a pointless question Chris.

Chris: And that’s fine. Tell me, it’s a pointless question.

Ben: We made loads of mistakes. I signed up for the wrong VAT scheme and so we couldn’t get any blooming VAT back for the first 18 months. We moved offices four times in the first 18 months at Seedlip because we kept getting it wrong.

But they all then, I don’t know, they’re all part of the story. They’re all part of the learning and my head just goes, “But I can’t do anything differently because it’s already happened, Chris.” So, that’s a pointless question.

Chris: And I almost think that there’s a lovely answer to it as well. It’s like you are also happy with where you are and what’s happened, so therefore how can you regret that? It’s a nice thing. There’s no regret in it. It’s learning and it’s part of this nonlinear road that you’ve gone to.

Ben: No, I don’t regret anything.

Chris: It’s good. Have mentors or any figures in your life really played a big part in all of this?

Ben: No, I love talking to my dad about work and he’s had his own business for 40 years, so he’s really cool, calm, collected, and a great thinker. He’s been really amazing. I had a really good board at Seedlip, ex CEO Carlsberg and I had some very amazing senior people from Diageo on the board. So yeah, I’ve had some really good support.

And now we’ve just done our first raise with Pollen projects, and I’ve got some incredible kinds of entrepreneurs, senior business executives for support. So yeah, there’ve been some brilliant help throughout.

Chris: Well, I know how you found your dad, but how did you find your board members and those sorts of people? Did they come with the Diageo business getting involved or when did they come in the process?

Ben: So, a chap called Benet Slay, he’s ex Carlsberg, ex Diageo, he’s a brilliant human being and I was introduced to him by a guy I was at school with who knew him. And we just had coffee and we chatted on the phone, and he really liked what I was doing.

This was just before or around the time of Seedlip launch and it was just really organic. There was never any, “Can you be my mentor, or can I keep calling you or how are we going to work this? Or do you have time or anything like that.” It was very organic.

And then I asked Benet to be on the board and I gave some shares and yeah, he was with us through to exit and would come to the office and we’d see the team and be there to kind of talk to the team. He’s a brilliant man.

And I would go and put myself out there and ask people to have a coffee or have a chat and share what I was doing and admire what they were doing, and it does work. I’m now in a bit of a position where people would kind of do that to me.

And whilst I’d probably go for coffee with people, I used to — not at the moment because I’ve had to pair it back, but I’d probably speak to at least two entrepreneurs a week who were at the start.

And I would give them my time, my thoughts, and I’d like to do that going forwards, but I’ve got a startup so I kind of need to reign it back in a bit, otherwise I’ll be giving too much time away.

Chris: Alright. The piece of advice is that it’s dead on correct, it’s just like, “Go and ask.” Just keep asking and you’ll get to a good place. You’ll know someone who knows someone who knows someone and well that’s a nice thing, isn’t it?

There’s been lots of things that you kind of said from a takeaway point of view. Is there anything else that you can think of that you would like to leave our listeners with?

Ben: I’m going to be tired after this. It sounds ridiculous because all I’ve done is sat here and kind of talked to you for an hour, but I always want to kind of give a lot of myself and give the best to myself.

I don’t think I have a kind of last takeaway, I guess to summarise some of the things that I’ve said, it’s just so basic, but they’re so not done, we are conditioned as human beings to not trust people, which is really, really backward.

We’re told right when we’re at school and right when we grow up, “Do not talk to strangers.” That’s one of the first messages we get about the outside world is that there are people out there that might hurt you or take you away. And that’s so influential to young minds and so dangerous.

So yeah, I would just advocate for trusting people, treating them like they’re grownups and not wasting any time micromanaging or worrying about what people are doing.

Chris: It’s become a bit of a ritual now, but I really like ending the interviews by asking each guest for a book recommendation that perhaps has had an impact upon their life. So, what book would you leave and why?

Ben: So, we used to give this to every single Seedlip employee. We’d give you three books actually when you joined Seedlip. But the first one, and the one that is most important to me is a book called Brutal Simplicity of Thought, and it’s by M&C Saatchi, and it’ll take you 10 minutes to read.

It basically says, “It’s really, really fucking hard to make things simple. So, most people don’t, but when you do, that is how you can change the world and make stuff happen by just doing the extra work to make things simple.”

And if you’ve got a brand or a business and you have to communicate it to a customer or sell something to a customer, guess what? It’s highly, highly likely that they will not really give a shit about what you’re doing.

And so, you have this small opportunity to get a very small piece of their attention, my God, make it simple for them. I’m guilty of making complicated things right? I’m not an expert in this, but it is a muscle that needs to be flexed and needs to be trained and developed to go the extra mile to make it really, really simple.

Whether that’s internally, externally pitching something, explaining something, trying to get someone to do something, make it simple.

Chris: And the other two?

Ben: Predatory Thinking by Dave Trott which is another very short book. David Trott was an ad man from the 80s, a copywriter who tells the most beautiful, wonderful, poignant stories about business and advertising brands using history and very short stories, 300 word kind of short stories, absolutely brilliant.

And then the third one was Third Plate by Dan Barber, one of my heroes, most favourite chefs on the planet, all about our relationship with farmers, food, the environment, agriculture. A bit of a longer read, but brilliant.

Chris: All that’s left for me to do is really say thank you Ben. It’s been a really, really interesting chat. And yeah, look, I’ll take a lot away from this and I think hopefully my listeners will as well. Thank you.

Ben: Thanks Chris.

[Music Playing]

Chris: Speaking with Ben, three things really stood out to me. Firstly, mindset. I loved how open he was about neurodivergency and how he’s embraced it. It’s not a negative, but as a person that has had so much success and at times didn’t view it that way because it wasn’t on plan, it’s very interesting to understand his mindset.

As he says himself, “He’s his own worst critic because he finds it empowering.” Point two, certainly not conventional. The view that he has and the way he builds relationships with his team is probably very different to business 101.

And lastly, I think Ben’s a very inspiring character who’s gone through some difficult things and still been very successful. He’s got a number of projects going on and it’s going to be very interesting to see what he does next.