Business

Mike Greene – The Secret Millionaire

Mike Greene – The Secret Millionaire 1 2 3 4

How did you make the transition from employee to employer?Mike-Greene-secret-millionare-5

Well, it didn’t work the first time! As an employee, I found that if you respected the people above you – whether or not you liked them – and you got your head down and worked hard, it was easy to be promoted, because big companies are always looking for the next tier of people. And I had a very strong work ethic. But as a relief manager I kept going into stores and turning them round and seeing sales grow dramatically – and even if sales didn’t grow, I saw profitability grow – then I started to become aware of the commercial possibilities and think ‘Why don’t I do this myself?’

So I did that in my early twenties – only to grow too quickly. One of the things I advise now when I mentor, is that businesses go bust more often due to lack of cash than lack of sales – fast growth without an understanding of cash flow. And I went bankrupt. That was a tough time. I also came back to a house that I rented out in Peterborough thinking that at least I had that left, only to find that the tenants had burnt the kitchen and done a runner, and the smoke damage meant the house was virtually valueless. I then discovered I wasn’t insured, because I had domestic insurance, not commercial insurance. So I pretty much lost everything, and found myself in my mid-twenties delivering pizzas, with my wife – whose been with me for 20 years this year. We both went, literally on mopeds, making and delivering pizzas for a friend in Hertfordshire until we built some kind of financial stability back up.

Mike-Greene-secret-millionare-6During that time, when I was literally on the breadline, I became a voracious reader. I wouldn’t accept that I was “a bankrupt”. Yes, I’d had bankruptcy, but that didn’t define me. So I read lots of biographies, stories of business successes – hundreds of them – and that was the start of an understanding that failure is a very necessary part of most success. In fact, I challenge someone to pick up a biography these days that hasn’t had some elements of failure in it. Hence why the book is called Failure Breeds Success. I really challenge schools on this. Schools say “We’re not having winners and losers – we have competitors”. But they create an unreal expectation in children – for life – and often when they do fail, they’re given such a hard time and made to feel so unworthy that they take the failure as a kind of final destination, rather than as a stepping stone or apprenticeship towards a future success. Kids are often afraid to sign up for teams or get involved in things because they don’t want to fail at something they’ve never done before and look stupid.

The theme of the book is to say: “Failure is normal”. Pretty much everything you’ve ever done, or become good at, you were rubbish at when you started – whether that was learning to walk and falling down every time, or learning to ride a bike, or learning a computer game, or even relationships – all the mistakes you make when you first start getting to know people. But there was a desire that took you through that failure to get to a point of success. We inherently know that, and do that, but we’ve kind of forgotten it, commercially – to the extent that people settle for what they can get rather than striving to achieve more. The book goes into that, helping people build a transition map with goal setting for the future.

So, how did you turn your situation around?

I went back into retail roles, as an employee, and worked through again. Then I started doing more of the development side of retail – merchandising, store opening, then ran a team of store openers, then ran Shell’s foodstore network in the UK, then became head of shops marketing for Conoco Jet, and along the way learned how to manage bigger and bigger teams of people, across bigger and bigger budgets and geographies – even doing a sixteen country pan-European role. So, I got a lot of experience, but always with a drive to ultimately do it myself.

It just so happened that when I was at Conoco, one of my clients was a marketing research consultant, and I used to give him a hard time because he would spout numbers at me rather than answers or solutions or insights, and he eventually said “Why don’t you come and work with me?” and I said only if I could buy the business off of him! And that’s basically what happened. After two years of running the business as CEO for him Tom Fender, my business partner and I bought it, and then we expanded it into America, Australia, New Zealand, and lots of different sectors from the initial retail base.

Clearly you need great determination to do what you did, but are there other factors that hold businesspeople back?

One thing I find when I’m doing conferences and mentoring, is that they have a kind of belief that successful people, or successful companies just had an upward, linear success. When I’m doing presentations, I’ll show maybe an Apple share price graph and of course we all know about the fantastic success story of Apple and its growth, and if you look at a trend line across its share price it’s upwards and exponential. But if you look at it in detail, day by day, it’s up and down like a yo-yo. No company or individual has purely upward growth. By showing that there are as many downs as ups, but that the trend is up, it helps to show that the downs are necessary. Because often, when mistakes are made, or markets are misjudged, that’s when we adjust or evolve what we’re doing, to end up building a better business. I’ve climbed a lot of mountains in my time, and there’s a mountain analogy that I use – and I show a contour line of a mountain climb, that goes up and down and up and down. There’s actually a saying in climbing: “Climb high, sleep low”. Biologically, by climbing higher than where you sleep, you kid your body into creating more red blood cells to carry oxygen, and that will enable you to go higher the following day. So you can, over time, achieve better results by coming back down and giving your body time to adjust. I use real metaphors and analogies to explain why it’s not just normal to have troughs as well as peaks in any growth, it’s probably necessary to have them.

The problem is, the minute people see themselves going backwards, they either freeze, or are unwilling to go back as far as they perhaps need to put something right, or to consolidate, or to get their health right. In climbing, if you went straight up without giving your body time to adjust, you’d get altitude sickness, probably get an aneurism, and probably die. It’s the same with companies. If they keep growing without checking that they’ve got people who are still motivated, that they’ve got the funds to expand, that their technology is being updated and improved – if they’re not pausing and looking at that, even if it’s just for a very brief time – they’ll likely create an unstable business. Those lessons in consolidation are actually what give you a far stronger base.

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Channel 4’s description of secret millionaire says: “millionaire benefactors say goodbye to their luxury lifestyles and go undercover in deprived areas to find out who needs their help”. How did your involvement in that come about?

It was all very strange! First, I was kind of easing off a bit anyway – not necessarily getting ready to sell off the business, but to step back a bit within it. One of my mentors, who’s also a great friend, sold his businesses when his daughter was 13 so he could spend more time with her. And I saw how their relationship blossomed. It was fantastic. And at the time I had a three year old – who’s now 14 – and I determined that I would work to some kind of similar strategy, because that was the kind of relationship I wanted to have with my children. So, the timing was kind of right when I filmed Secret Millionaire – she was around 12.

I hadn’t seen the programme and didn’t really know what it was. In fact, I got approached because a friend who ran a very successful business had been asked to do it, and at the last moment thought it wasn’t right for him, but said “I know someone who does a lot for charity…” And they approached me. So it was a combination of the timing with my daughter, and the fact that I was a behavioural profiler, and was also very interested in how I would actually deal with being in those environments – which were very much the kind of challenged environments in Peterborough I’d been brought up in. And it was an opportunity to give back. So I decided to do it, thinking it would be a good thing, and interesting.

The reality was it had a much bigger impact on me, and I went on to sell my business, and took a sabbatical – taking a hundred days to raise £100,000 for a hundred charities – and then I became an ambassador with Localgiving nationally, and have been doing quite a lot with philanthrocapitalism since then. So it brought about quite a fundamental change in my life.

What was it about the experience that caused this change?

Several things, really. It’s kind of obvious, in a way, but unless you see it I don’t think you get how selfless a lot of these people working in charities are. They will give and give and give when they haven’t even got the health or money to give. And that made me feel a bit awkward, because so much of my life had been about making money. It was easy to sign a cheque and feel good about yourself for a few minutes, but to actually give of yourself in the way that those people did had a real impact on me.

Mike Greene – The Secret Millionaire 1 2 3 4

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