Leadership and responsibilty
Narrator: Mick Jackson is one of Scotland’s leading entrepreneurs, as well as being a best-selling author and a rock musician. His passion for extreme sports, such as ice climbing and sky diving, led to the creation of his start-up company, Wild Day, which has become one of the largest online outdoor equipment stores in Europe.
In the summer of 2001, Mick Jackson set off on a mountaineering expedition to the Himalayas, to climb the notorious K2 – the world’s second highest mountain, and which claims the life of one in every three people who attempt to reach its summit. One of Mick’s fellow climbers was to die within days of the ascent. A month later, a very different Mick Jackson stumbled back into the foothills of the Himalayas. Lighter by three stone, severely dehydrated and frost bitten, he had turned back on his attempt on the summit to save the life of a guide who was dying from a collapsed lung.
During the four nightmare days that he spent carrying his fellow climber to safety, something changed inside him and he decided that if he was to survive he would dedicate the rest of his life to improving the lives of poor people across the world.
And it was from this experience that Mick launched the Wild Hearts Foundation – a rapidly growing, office supplies company who’s entire profits go towards feeding starving children, building schools and preventing child trafficking. As Mick says, ‘Even a bad day at the office saves lives.’
This is Mick Jackson’s story.
Mick Jackson: Hi, I’m Mick Jackson. I’m the co-founder of WildDay.com which is Europe’s largest retailer (online) of outdoor equipment, I’m the chairman of Wild Hearts, which is a foundation dedicated to launching businesses to help the poor. I’m from the west coast of Scotland; I came from a working-class background, was brought up in East Kilbride, went to a comprehensive school there which was fantastic.
I remember I sold Betterware door to door … and I ended up trekking miles with all these plastic bags full of cleaning products and stuff - and that was at the age of sixteen. I remember I had blond hair halfway down my back and I thought I was too cool for school! I was convinced I was going to be a rock start, so was selling Betterware products to buy studded leather jackets and guitars … which was quite funny! Selling house and home-ware products to try and look like a metal star was quite funny!
But it was a great wee job, actually. Because what it taught me was that the more you sell, the more you make. If you don’t sell anything, you don’t make anything. And that’s, really, the way that business works. A lot of people get cushioned from it … but the bottom line is – if someone somewhere doesn’t sell something – nobody gets paid!
There has always been a predisposition in me to do things which, to me, are very exciting and very dramatic and very fast-moving, and one way that I express that is through the type of sports that I like to do, like intense mountain biking or ice climbing. So, extreme sports would be, potentially, taking things which are a pursuit and then pushing it to its limit.
So, I started by walking along by Loch Lomond – I’ve still got pictures of me walking along Loch Lomond! It was the most beautiful place in the world to me, and I would be going, ‘Mmm … let’s go up a wee bit higher.’ Next thing, it was Glencoe … next thing it was the Himalayas!
It’s like anything; if people start doing things then once they get into it they want to do the next thing for them. And when it comes to mountains it’s going to the Alps and then going to Asia where the really, really big mountains are. However, I don’t tend to do it anymore because it’s just too damned dangerous!
Mick Jackson: I didn’t know how to have a business, and I had about a hundredth of the skills and abilities that I’ve got now. I just knew that at some time, I wanted to have my own business and I believed enough that, one day, I would. And I just gave what I was doing my all and next thing I knew, the opportunity was before me.
I loved sports, I loved outdoor activities and, therefore, I was looking for ways to pursue that further. Opportunities … the world is crammed with opportunities – most people just walk past them with their eyes closed. So, I was at a clearance sale at the North Face factory down in Greenock, before they closed it. And I said to myself, ‘If I put this stuff online, you wouldn’t have to queue overnight in the rain to get money off your jacket.’ And that was the idea.
And you want to know, the next thing that happened was really freaky … I remember phoning up North Face going, ‘Hi, I’d like to buy some jackets.’
‘How many would you like?’ … oh how many do we buy?! Because I didn’t have a clue! Neither did the guys that I was working with, who were all very successful but, in retail, we didn’t have a clue. I went to a meeting that I didn’t want to go to, my friend invited me along. My friend says, ‘Mick, you have to meet this guy.’ This guy gave me his business card and it said Bridgemill.co.uk ‘Outdoor clothing at internet prices.’
I was like, ‘You are joking me!’ The guy said, ‘I’ve got a chain of outdoor shops in the Highlands, we’ve got a whole warehouse infrastructure and we’ve got a website called Bridgemill but it’s not really growing the way I want it to.’ I had what he needed and he had what I needed. I needed warehousing and experience in buying stock and all those kind of things, and what he needed was somebody who was really good a promoting things and creating brands and things like that – and building up traffic to websites. The next day I had convinced him that he couldn’t live without me and WildDay was born.
Why WildDay? Because we could sell anything we wanted. We didn’t call it The Extreme Outdoor Clothing Store dot com. It had its extreme element, but then it grew into camping and barbeques and everything – like a big hyper store for the outdoors. And then skiing and all that kind of stuff and to the extent now that four million people, every year, come and shop with us. I haven’t got them all to buy yet … laughing … that would be an art! But think about it; four million people pile through this door (if you will) to buy, and WildDay has given me the right to launch WildHearts and all the other things that I’ve done.
Marketing
Mick Jackson: WildDay is interesting in its marketing because you never meet your customers. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of customers and I think I’ve met about two! It’s really weird! And yet, I really like speaking to people, so, in that way, WildDay is the wrong business for me because I don’t actually get to speak to the customers. Because they're just characters throughout the world, who are just digits who come and interact with us.
Once you get a customer, a lot of people – you see bank adverts doing this a lot – they all go on about getting new customers and they really should look after the ones they’ve got. So, there’s a thing which … if there is one lesson that I would ask people to become obsessed with, is word of mouth. Become obsessed with word of mouth. If you annoy somebody or upset them, even if you were right – it doesn’t matter, turn it around. Because that will build up and especially if you’ve got … WildDay is maybe not the best example, but if you’ve got a sandwich shop in the centre of Glasgow and people go back to their office and say, ‘This sandwich was awful, I was sick last night and didn’t …’ You’ll find that people will not come back to you and in time your business will start to do this (gestures a downward curve) and you won’t know why.
So, word of mouth … what we do at WildDay is when we get somebody we’ve got this really nice email called ‘Friends At WildDay’ and all it does is that after the person’s had their goods dispatched they get a little email saying, ‘Hi! Did you get your stuff? Was it good? Everything okay?’ But we don’t ask them for anything, we don’t say, ‘Oh here’s another offer!’ or ‘Come back and shop!’ which is, actually, intentional because the amount of people who email us back saying, ‘That was really lovely of you. You just wanted to know if everything was alright and you didn’t do it for any other reason?’
And you find out two things. One: was everything alright? And if there’s not, it gives us a chance to catch it if there was something wrong; or two: it just reminds them, actually, how good you are. Because they got the stuff and would you tell all your friends?
The reason why word of mouth is so massively important is … imagine you’ve had a mate for twenty years – alright, you're in school! Imagine you’ve had a mate for two years, and he’s you're best mate or she’s your best, best friend and you trust them completely. If they come to you and say, ‘There’s this shop I went to and they're amazing and you’d love it.’ There is no advert in the world that will come close to that, because you will see an advert in a magazine and go, ‘Mmm, it’s an advert.’ But your friend is saying, ‘I know what you like, you know you trust me, you know I’m always there for you and I help you with your homework – trust me, go to this shop.’ That is gold dust. And also, it’s free!
So when you get somebody who likes you, look after them and protect them and find out what they like and get them to refer business to you – whether it’s retail or if you're out selling. Insurance guys are obsessed with referrals because they know the power of that. Word of mouth is the most important thing, so if you get a database of customers then protect it and look after it. There are outdoor shops in Glasgow that I used to shop with and now I don’t and they’ve no idea who I am or why I ever shopped with them.
Motivating others
Mick Jackson: If you work for a company that the owners are maybe in another country or in another city, or maybe they're at the top of the tower and you're at the bottom floor, and you never meet them and you don’t even like them and you have no interaction with them, why would you absolutely give it your all for them? Because they’re anonymous to you.
So, you won’t get the absolute best out of somebody if they know they're working for your Porsche. I had a boss once, who used to say, ‘I’m not going to make my million with you doing that!’ and I never said it to him but my answer was, ‘I don’t care about your million. I couldn’t care less.’
Companies where you’ve got a boss, who hates his job, someone can come in and work for that boss and give it 25% and they’ll get away with it because he’s not going to go through the grief of pulling them up and he doesn’t care anyway, because he hates his boss. And what you get is a thoroughly non-productive, depressing place to work. But the culture comes from the top and if the leader is passionate about what he does, he's not your boss – he's the leader, then people will follow that. And there’s been repeated studies [that have found] that people are motivated not by money – yes, wages are important and, yes, you have to have a respectful wage for what you get paid and rewarded – but the things that really motivate people are more human values.
When people know that [to] you’re boss, you're not somebody who makes money for him – he actually cares for you, as a person, then you get a different kind of loyalty. So, you take your eyes off yourself and say, ‘What does the company need? What do these people need? How can these people thrive and what’s important to them?’
And if you get that right, and they find the meaning in what they do, then they will be animated to work harder and work in a more fulfilled way and then you’ll find the whole company will rise up. There are too many people who have got the ‘I’m the boss!’ mentality … ‘and those are the minions.’ And they wonder why, when they’re out of the office they're all on Facebook and YouTube. Because it’s not their thing they're working for – it’s his. And he just has to crack the whip. It’s a very antiquated way of doing things.
I reward my team before I get rewarded, and that’s what captains of ships do. If the ship goes down, he leaves last. So the buck stops with me. So, whatever I ask them to do, they know I’ve done worse and harder. And so they don’t feel they’re being exploited, they feel they’re being led and that’s a completely different thing.
Does anyone know who Subudai is? Nobody ever knows who he is! He was Genghis Khan’s leading general. Everybody knows who Genghis Khan was! What we celebrate are the leaders of the organisation, what we don’t see is all the geniuses that worked for them or worked with them. The Pharaohs didn’t build the pyramids!
WildHearts
Mick Jackson: I began to think of ways where I could use business to help the poor. And so, I created WildHearts, which is a charitable foundation, just referred to as ‘WildHearts’- that’s a brand extension from WildDay – it fits in with WildDay, we promote it through WildDay. But I thought, ‘How can you harness the billions of pounds which are exchanged in the business community everyday?’ … and then I was in my friend’s office one day and I looked around her desk and I said, ‘How much do you spend on all this pen and paper and everything?’ and the answer she said was, ‘I don’t know.’
So she picked up the phone – she’s the head of the company - and she came off and said, ‘We spend a quarter of a million pounds on office supplies!’
‘Who do you buy it from?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You spend a quarter of a million pounds with somebody; you don’t even know who they are!’ She found out who the company was - it was a big, multinational. Then I said, ‘Do you care who you buy it from?’
‘No, all I care about is if the stuff’s good.’
And then the idea hit me. It was like a thunderbolt! ‘If I could get you the same stuff, at the same prices, with the same delivery but every penny of the profit went to tackle global poverty, would you buy from me?’ and the answer was a resounding, ‘Yes.’
You go to the bank and you say, ‘I want to launch this company.’ And you’ve been a customer of them for about ten years and they say, ‘The problem is you’re giving all your profit away.’ And you go, ‘That’s the point!’ And they weren’t going to give us any money!
My partner and I, we put our house up for it – to secure the overdraft (which we’ve never used, but we needed it anyway), put the whole thing together … then set up next day delivery, 24 hour supplies and, basically, created a catalogue of 20,000 products. Now, that took me two years. And this is the difference – everyone talks about, ‘An idea – I need an idea, I need an idea!’ This is office supplies – it’s the most boring thing in the world – I’ve just changed what it means to people. Getting five warehouses throughout the UK and a website and a function and everything going, a brand – creating the whole thing from a standing start was an awful lot of work. But it’s all about the reason why and it was so powerful, and I knew I was onto something and I, literally, couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t stop until I’d done it.
I, actually, don’t own WildHearts in Action – it’s owned by WildHearts the Foundation. So, I can’t sell it and I can’t take dividends or profit out of it. All the profit – its whole reason for existing is to make profit for the poor. In Africa, starting in Ghana, we are helping people in villages in Ghana to start their own businesses, so we give them a hand-up not a handout.
However, how do you get started if everybody in your village is poor and everybody you’ve ever known is poor and anybody with money treats you like dirt and would never come anywhere near your village anyway? You’re literally trapped. But if you say, ‘Here’s a small loan …’ they then create their own business and then pay the loan back. Then what you’ve got is the start of a thriving community.
But we don’t just do that, we teach them business skills. We teach them how to run businesses; how to manage their profits; how to save … we teach them their rights, as people, so that they're not as exploited and abused by other people in their culture, and we invest in their inner skills while giving them the help to build their own businesses. And it’s my goal, then, to create lots of little micro-businesses that then will go on to create other businesses and other businesses – just like it happened here. And that is where the smart money is. That’s where Bill Gates is pouring his money, that’s where the founders of EBay are pouring their money, Bill Clinton is very involved in that, it’s called microfinance and it’s creating a social revolution because it helps the poor to help themselves
Enterprise
Mick Jackson: An entrepreneur, I think, is somebody who makes things happen. It’s really as simple as that. They decide they want something to happen and they pursue it until it happens. There’s been so many times in my career where I was this close to going down in a ball of flames, but I dug in and maybe had the odd, sleepless night and a bit of a ‘Woah! This is getting a bit tight!’ and I had kind of rough, bumpy patches – but I hung in there.
Being an entrepreneur isn’t really about the big idea – its not! It’s about ‘Are you going to step forth? Are [you going to] bring it back? Are you going to go up that mountain? It’s going to be hard. You might get stuck, have to come half way down and have to change route and go back up. You might have to run for your life… but will you pick yourself up and keep going?’ It’s a process. So everybody thinks, ‘Oh I have this idea!’ and I go, ‘Oh right, when fifty people say no, will your idea seem so great then?’ and it’s that difference and that’s why I always refer to character. When things get tough will you dig your heels in and go, ‘I’m not giving up.’
Tom Hunter, who I admire immensely, said, ‘With great wealth comes great responsibility.’ It’s not about being rich – it’s about the responsibility of what that means. And a lot of people who have created a lot of money tend to be quite big characters because they’ve overcome a lot.
So, one of the strongest lessons is that it’s not what you get – it’s who you become. The journey, in itself, can be immensely rewarding and often leads you to what you were really destined to be, rather than what you thought. Everything I learnt in music brought to me, the ability to launch companies to help the poor and that’s infinitely more rewarding.
So, just go for it, because you never know where it will lead. It will probably lead you somewhere you never knew existed and was better than what you thought you were going to get anyway. If you are more enterprising in your life, life’s more fun – because you get more out of it. So, the bottom line – if you can distil it – an enterprising person just, totally, goes for it.
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