Chris Kirby: Helping automotive companies launch new, flexible business models.

In this episode we are celebrating the career to date of Chris Kirby.

Chris has been speaking about how technology will change the automotive landscape since he published a white paper on the subject in 2017. Since then, he co-founded Tomorrow's Journey, an Enterprise SaaS platform that enables automotive brands to launch and scale fully digital solutions, working globally with the likes of Hyundai, Jaguar and Leaseplan.

Chris Kirby has a diverse career spanning multiple roles in the automotive industry including as a Strategic Advisor at Autofutura Limited, as the Automotive Director at WeCreateClarity and as the Head of Business Development at FGA Capital UK Ltd.

As well as speaking at events across the globe, Chris also hosts the Autocar Change Makers Podcast, where he regularly meets and engages with automotive industry leaders on the future of the industry.

In our conversation we talk about how he left school at 16 and how he had an early opportunity to demonstrate his leadership skills on the rugby field.

Chris shares how he somewhat fell into a career in the automotive industry. He found himself with a good manager in his first role in a Ford dealership, he worked hard and made good progress.

His father had been an entrepreneur and so he'd seen the reality of how hard that can be. Nevertheless he felt the need to step out of his corporate environment to be able to work on the significant change initiatives that he believed the industry needed.

Even though he went in with his eyes wide open to the likely challenges, external factors like Covid and difficult conditions for fund raising proved strong headwinds.

Chris explains his approach to navigating the ups and downs of start up life and is clear about what constitutes the right reason to become an entrepreneur.

I enjoyed and appreciated getting to know Chris better through this conversation and look forward to hearing what resonates with you.

Connect with Chris

LinkedIn: Chris Kirby
Website: Tomorrow's Journey

About Andy

I'm an experienced business leader and a passionate developer of people in the automotive finance industry, internationally.

During over twenty five years, I have played a key role in developing businesses including Alphabet UK, BMW Corporate Finance UK, BMW Financial Services Singapore, BMW Financial Services New Zealand and Tesla Financial Services UK.

At the same time, I have coached individuals and delivered leadership development programmes in 17 countries across Asia, Europe and North America.

I started Aquilae in 2016 to enable “Fulfilling Performance” in the mobility industry, internationally.

Learn more about Fulfilling Performance

Check out Release the handbrake! The Fulfilling Performance Hub.

Connect with Andy

LinkedIn: Andy Follows
Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk

Join a guided peer mentoring team: Aquilae Academy

Thank you to our sponsors:

ASKE Consulting
Email: hello@askeconsulting.co.uk

Aquilae
Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk

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Episode recorded on 13 August, 2024.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome, childhood and education
• 12:05 Love of rugby and learnings
• 22:11 First dabble into automotive with MG Rover before moving to a Ford dealership
• 29:26 Account Manager for General Motors
• 33:21 Approached about a role with Jaguar Land Rover
• 44:48 Finding a job you love doing
• 51:45 Leaving JLR to head up the automotive division within a marketing agency
• 55:32 Setting the wheels in motion for his own company
• 1:05:14 Raising funds and starting Tomorrow's Journey
• 1:10:07 The progression of Tomorrow's Journey
• 1:18:31 Tomorrow's Journey today
• 1:22:57 Wrapping up and takeaways

Transcript

Chris Kirby: 0:00

Like a sporting team, sometimes you just get in a bit of a bad funk. You get in a bit of a bad run, and you can't control it. You can't fix it. You just have to keep playing, and you have to keep turning up. And then eventually your tide turns, and you keep doing enough of the right stuff. You keep training hard, and you keep turning up and playing the matches. You eventually get your reward.

Aquilae: 0:19

Welcome to Career View Mirror, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry looking back over their careers to share insights to help you with your own journey. Here's your host, Andy Follows.

Andy Follows: 0:51

Hello, listeners Andy here, thank you for tuning in. We appreciate that you do. We're also very grateful for our guests who generously join me to create these episodes so that we can celebrate their careers, listen to their stories and learn from their experiences. In this episode, we're celebrating the career to date of Chris Kirby. Chris has been speaking about how technology will change the automotive landscape since he published a white paper on the subject in 2017. Since then, he co founded Tomorrow's Journey, an enterprise SaaS platform that enables automotive brands to launch and scale fully digital solutions, working globally with the likes of Hyundai Jaguar and Leaseplan. Chris Kirby has a diverse career spanning multiple roles in the automotive industry, including as a strategic advisor at auto Futura limited, as the automotive director at we create clarity, and as the Head of Business Development at FGA capital, UK Limited, as well as speaking at events across the globe, Chris also hosts the Autocar change makers podcast, where he regularly meets and engages with automotive industry leaders on the future of the industry. In our conversation, we talk about how he left school at 16 and how he had an early opportunity to demonstrate his leadership skills on the rugby field. Chris shares how he somewhat fell into a career in the automotive industry. He found himself with a good manager in his first role in a Ford dealership. He worked hard and made good progress. His father had been an entrepreneur, and so he'd seen the reality of how hard that can be. Nevertheless, he felt the need to step out of his corporate environment to be able to work on the significant change initiatives that he believed the industry needed. Even though he went in with his eyes wide open to the likely challenges, external factors like covid and difficult conditions for fundraising proved strong headwinds. Chris explains his approach to navigating the ups and downs of startup life, and it's clear about what constitutes the right reason to become an entrepreneur. I enjoyed and appreciated getting to know Chris better through this conversation, and look forward to hearing what resonates with you. If you're listening for the first time, hello, I'm Andy Follows. I help business owners and executives to enable Fulfilling Performance for themselves and those they lead and care about. If you'd like to know more about Fulfilling Performance, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter. In it, you'll find easily digestible ideas on how to increase levels of performance and fulfillment for yourself and those you lead and care about. Go to andyfollows.substack.com, or use the link in the show notes to this episode. If you listen to podcasts like Career View Mirror, I'm guessing that you recognize you can learn from other people. When I'm not recording these conversations with inspiring individuals, you'll find me facilitating guided peer mentoring teams in our aquilae Academy. We bring together small groups of business owners and senior leaders from non competing organizations, and create a virtual environment in which they can get to know and trust each other and share and support each other with their current challenges. If that sounds interesting, email academy@aquilae.co.uk and we'll send you more details. You'll find that address in the show notes to this episode. Hello Chris and welcome and where are you coming to us from today?

Chris Kirby: 4:13

I'm in sunny Hertfordshire, just outside Aylesbury.

Andy Follows: 4:16

Thank you very much for joining me. Really looking forward to our conversation. You're certainly quite prominent in the industry. So can we start with where you were born?

Chris Kirby: 4:27

Yeah, absolutely. So again, relatively local to where I am now. So I was actually born in Northampton. I actually grew up in Milton Keynes. I was born just before Milton Keynes Hospital was built. So my younger brother was born in Milton Keynes hospital, but I was in Northampton. But interestingly, I'm a kind of, I'm a second generation Milton Keynes person, which, as a new city is, is a bit surprising. So actually, my family are from one of the villages that has now been engulfed by Milton Keynes. So my dad was actually born locally to there as well. So yeah, kind of from the town of roundabouts, or city of roundabouts as it is now.

Andy Follows: 4:59

I don't. Have ever the expression second generation Milton Keynes? I love it.

Chris Kirby: 5:03

No, I'm not sure if it is a claim to fame, I say to people, and they kind of make a funny face at me, but I have, but then explain why that's relevant. But where Milton Keynes was, when, when my dad was born there weren't very many people there. So, yeah, it's kind of moved there in one way, shape or form.

Andy Follows: 5:19

So let's talk a little bit about your childhood growing up there then, tell me, first of all, what did you see your mum and dad doing?

Chris Kirby: 5:27

Yeah, so my dad was an engineer, so primarily in my younger years, I think up until I was kind of 10 or 11, my dad worked in the printing industry. So he was an engineer on printing presses, and my mum was a teacher, a maths teacher, actually at my secondary school. So again, people make a bit of Oh, that would have been terrible that me and my brother went to the school that my mum was was a teacher at, but yeah, she was a secondary school maths teacher for 30 plus years. So yeah, it's kind of relatively stable, sensible, but nothing too exotic as an upbringing.

Andy Follows: 5:59

Your dad was he working for a printer or a press manufacturer,

Chris Kirby: 6:04

press manufacturer. So he actually worked for a couple, I think, but he got made redundant when I was about 10 or 11, and then he started his own business. So I kind of saw a little bit of that entrepreneurialness from an early age. And I would say, like, probably from a relatively negative viewpoint, my dad found it quite hard. He was building a company, basically making furniture, fitting kitchens, that kind of thing. Because my my granddad was a carpenter, so my dad as a engineer, and who had grown up with those skills, you know, had gone into that. And my dad's a very smart, capable guy, but not a brilliant businessman, he would probably admit. So he found that business bit that difficult. And I think, you know, that was a thing in my childhood brought a lot of stress into our ensemble. So it wasn't the exciting startup type journey that you see today, but a lot of got to get this job done, to get paid, to do this thing, kind of approach. So it was an interesting experience for me of entrepreneurial activity, something that probably until my late 20s, I was going, Oh, I never want to do that. That seems so stressful. That sounds like a thing that is best avoided for anybody, but funny how situations change.

Andy Follows: 7:10

Yeah, that is interesting, and this is why I asked my guests about their childhood, because we get exposed to certain jobs that are out there in the public domain, but otherwise we only see what our parents do, and to see the less glamorous side of being an entrepreneur would surely be affecting and then to know when we get to the end of the story, what you're doing right now, it's interesting to see how you've you've changed your attitude, clearly towards that, and then also the point you make about, you know, not the image we expect. I just wonder how much of the startup, how many people are having loads of fun and how many people aren't having a hard time being entrepreneurs? But, yeah,

Chris Kirby: 7:48

it's probably a thing that, yeah, definitely, we'll touch on later on, because it's definitely a thing I like to share about the entrepreneurial journey that I've been on is it's, it's largely been pretty hard, pretty, and I don't mean hard. Like, Oh, it's been, it's been hard work, but hard, like, you know, tough, tough times. It's a lot of you see the shiny bit on the outside, but actually often it's pretty tough and lonely in in places so, but yeah, I'm sure we'll get to that when we get to that point in the in the career. But yeah, definitely some stuff that I had experienced early who I guess it helped to shape maybe some of the good things that I can do today, but also definitely put me off the idea for a long time.

Andy Follows: 8:26

Yeah. so staying with childhood. Do you have brothers and sisters?

Chris Kirby: 8:30

Yeah I have a younger brother. Also probably get to him a little bit later, because he's currently one of our senior management team in Tomorrow's Journey. Yeah, but always been really close to my brother three years younger than me, lots of similar traits and very different in other in other ways, but, yeah, always been super, super close, and never really had that. I'm sure there's times I think about it now. I'm sure there's times when, you know, we used to beat each other up or fight over toys or whatever, but actually, largely, we spent a lot of our time relatively close in the standard big brother, little brother. Guys really so nice, kind of growing up in that in that environment.

Andy Follows: 9:05

You mentioned already that you were at the school where your mum was a maths teacher. Yeah, tell me a little bit about you as a student. Then how would the other teachers have described you?

Chris Kirby: 9:16

for me, right? I'm dyslexic, so I find, like the reading and writing part, like, difficult. It was always a bright lad, so, like, that was okay, and I'm a nice guy, so I was never causing trouble or starting fights. But basically, school was boring, so I just used to mess around all the time. I knew there was a line I could never cross because my mum was a teacher, so I would cross the line to lovable rogue, I would probably say, of like, oh, you know, Chris is messing around again. We throw him out of class, but it's all fine. So yeah, I think school was an interesting. Time for me, and also probably an area we'll come on to. But yeah, was a sporty still am sporty guy, but I played rugby pretty seriously. So I was just English staring out the window going, when can I go and kick a football around, chuck a cricket ball at someone, Chase tackle someone, a rugby pitch, whatever it is. So I spent a lot of time being bored at school and not really paying much attention if I'm honest

Andy Follows: 10:23

Right. And when did you start to get some ideas about what you might do, what direction you'd go in?

Chris Kirby: 10:29

I think actually, from a an early age, I guess funny when, when you reflect on it the entrepreneurial bit, I guess I've always been like a self starter. So I remember a summer holiday when I maybe was like 12 or 13, and me and my friend in our street, we lost our football. And my mom went, Well, if you lost your football, that's tough luck. You have to save up your pocket money to get a new one. And I went, I can't wait to save up my pocket money to get new football. So we started selling little door signs to people in our street. We would color them in off bits of wood from my dad's workshop, and color in the number, and then sell it for a pound until we had enough money to buy new football. So I guess I've always had that kind of streak in me. I guess actually, one of the subjects I paid attention to would be business studies. It was like, I'm interested in business. I'm interested in that side. And I think when I got to the end of my GCSEs, and I said to my mom, look, I want to play rugby. I want to focus on playing rugby. I don't want to go to university, and then there's no point in doing my A levels. And I'm really fortunate, I think, because I think a lot of teachers would have wanted me to stay in education and educational system, but she actually said, no, just go. She's like, you'll be fine. Go and get a job. Like you're a bright boy. You just you'll be fine. And that's kind of I went out and got a job. I actually worked for my dad's furniture company for a year while I was concentrating on some rugby stuff. So gave me some flexibility. And then, actually, on my 18th birthday, I got my first job, and that was that really so education was quite short lived for me.

Andy Follows: 11:52

That's really interesting that your mother was supportive of that, especially given that she was a teacher. You Yeah, if you had to put money on it, you'd assume there'd be a no stay in education for as long as you can. Let's talk about the sport then, because you mentioned that earlier, and it's clearly been a big part. So was rugby your main?

Chris Kirby: 12:12

Yeah rugby. Rugby was I loved all sports, to be honest. So I was captain of the rugby team at school, but also played county football, played cricket for local club in the summer and also for the school team and things so pretty much any sport and any description I was I was keen to do. I was relatively athletic. My family recently had been reminiscing over there was a newspaper article about me playing rugby and talks about being me being six foot, three and 17 stone when I was 15, which I don't really remember, but I was always a big athletic guy, so I could do I was pretty good at most sports, and that's just what I love doing in my spare time, in school time, pretty much anything else, but rugby was the main sport. So I played up till kind of the large squad for England under 18. So I played for Northampton. Saints Academy up till I was 18 as well. So I was like, that's just all I did. That was just took up all my time. I was playing two matches a week, training three times a week, and actually, even within my school, again, partly a benefit of having my mum as a teacher that I would negotiated that I was able to use some of my free periods to go to the school gym rather than having to do study, which I'm not sure how my mum managed to negotiate that, but yeah, so I kind of had it factored a bit into into what I was doing, and into that school life.

Andy Follows: 13:29

And do you get paid for Academy? When you're at Academy

Chris Kirby: 13:32

No unfortunately not the egg shaped ball. It doesn't get paid as well as a round ball, unfortunately. So I was kind of on the cusp of that. So the next stage at that Academy level would have been, they had, I think at the time, at the time, they had these, like, Versa things, where you would go, you would study sport at the local college slash University, and you would get paid a small salary for playing. And I was kind of on the, on the edge of that, I guess, but now it was kind of all unpaid, all in the spare time, which is, it got a lot of pressure at that point. So kind of love it. But then you get to a point where you're like, oh gosh, this is, this is a lot

Andy Follows: 14:04

yeah. What brought that to an end?

Chris Kirby: 14:06

I had a an injury. That wasn't the main thing, but I kind of had an injury. I got to a point where the year that I made kind of to that final stage of England selection. I had a really, really good final trial match, but didn't get selected in the final group. And I think I found that super demoralizing. I found it a bit unfair. It was a bit of who goes to the right school, who plays for the right County. A lot of the people that were involved in that selection committee were kind of going, Chris, you should have been in that team, but you kind of, you didn't know the right people. And I think that I continued the rest of that season with Northampton. I captained their under eighteens team, even though I was only 17. But I just got to the end of that season, just went, oh gosh, I'm gonna have to start again. Because it was like a process. You go through the selection process and everything, generally start with preseason, and then you get selected for the county and then regional, and it involves many weekends away and training. But I think by the time I got to September of the next season, I finished preseason, I just went, got. I can't do this again, like if there's no guarantee I kind of have my best ever season and didn't get the thing that I wanted. And I just thought, actually, this is not a thing that I'm enjoying anymore. So I actually spent two months telling my parents I was going to rugby training, but actually going and having dinner with my Nan, because I was too I was too scared to tell them that I was stopping playing rugby. So I used to put my rugby kit on and then drive to my nan's house and sit and chat to my Nan, which was, which was given, till eventually I had to fess up and tell, tell my parents I wasn't playing anymore.

Andy Follows: 15:29

I loved that story

Chris Kirby: 15:30

but that was one of those things is really

Unknown: 15:31

Yeah, no, totally. And are there any aspects from that difficult, because I felt like because my parents had put such a big commitment as a parent to all the stuff that I would do, period, from how far you got in rugby, from your experiences you know, up until that kind of last year where I passed my driving test and I had a car. I was getting ferried around the there, that you think you still carry with you now, or influence country by my parents to training. I lived in Milton Keynes and played rugby for Northampton. I mean, that's like 35 40 minute drive twice a week. They would have to drive there, wait for me to finish training, drive back, all these things. So you now as a leader, an entrepreneur, I felt like at that time, definitely, that I was going, well, they put all this stuff in, and I daren't tell them that I don't want to do it anymore. And of course, they were totally supportive when I explained why and what I was doing. But it's the fear that you have at the time.

Chris Kirby: 16:23

I think so. I mean, I definitely through that time and again. You don't recognize it at the time, you know, I got made captain of the Northampton team, and I didn't really, I was like, I was pleased to be doing it, but I didn't sort of go, oh, that must mean I've got good leadership skills, or any of that stuff. I was just me playing rugby. You know, that's just what I did. But I guess that was always in me in a young age. And I spent, when I continue playing my club rugby, I spent a lot of that time captaining the first team of the club that I played for. So I guess that was always in me. And I think that I often talk about sport as an analogy for work. You know, for me, team is is everything. And when you're working in a team and you're building a team, thinking back to how I was as a rugby player and the different teams that I played. And I played in some good teams in inverted commas, and I played in some more challenging ones, particularly the representative teams where people were coming from different places and sort of rocking up and going, Oh, we've got to be a team together. So I kind of, I think I learned a lot of stuff from that, just generally about how a team should work together and how it shouldn't, you know, definitely a thing that I put into work and also into my personal life. I feel, feel that every kind of relationship that you have, every group that you're in, is an element of team. You know, how do you show up for that person, and how do they show up for you? And what are you committing to do together? And kind of how that operates, I think so, it's a very good foundation, which is why, yeah, my rugby career is something I'm super, super proud of, even though it wasn't one where I went on to represent England or get paid for it. I had a good rugby career, and I enjoyed what we achieved, and I enjoyed what it helped to shape in me, I guess. So. Yeah, definitely something that I talk a lot about and think a lot about.

Andy Follows: 17:59

I've got a couple of further questions on that, if we were able to look back and, you know, watch you on the rugby field playing Captain, or maybe even in the, you know, locker room as well, what behaviors would we have seen from you that you think now, with hindsight looking back, you can see, oh, that's probably why I got given that responsibility.

Chris Kirby: 18:18

Yeah, I think an element of, well, definitely, communication was always a key one. So I would be when on a rugby pitch, I would always be talking the whole time, interesting. I've stopped playing about five years ago, six years ago, and I went last summer to train with the first team of my old club. They asked for, they've got quite a young team now, so they asked for a few of the old guys to go and just join in preseason, and immediately, of two minutes back, just playing touch rugby. Immediately, I'm just like, shout, shout, shout, shout, shout. Is a thing that's just to get get ingrained in you about your communication is really important. I think the other bit is about empathy. So I think, you know, so many times you see in teams, any team, sporting team, personal team, work team, a kind of a blame culture, you know, someone makes a mistake, it's a you know, you're my teammate, so I'll do my best to help you, but also pick you up and go right next job. And if you keep doing the same thing and you keep making the same mistake, and if it's out of laziness or it's out of lack of commitment, then I'm going to call you out on it, but there's a bit of going, it's okay next job, like made mistake, but it's fine. We'll we'll do next time, we'll make that tackle, and we'll just go and score another try to make up for the tackle that you missed because you didn't do it on purpose. And I think, yeah, having that balance of kind of empathy, I think, is really important. You have to have that calmness and empathy in a on a rugby pitch, it's a pretty frenetic place at times. So yeah, I think that definitely things that that you learn, it's not just all about shouting. Leadership isn't about but anymore, it's not about running around and shouting and going follow me. And do I say it's about bringing people together?

Andy Follows: 19:49

And my second question was, then, if your dream came to an end, as it did, and it was significant, and you were, you know, nervous about telling your parents and so on, has that had any repurcussions for you. You know, how quickly did you get over the ending, if you like?

Chris Kirby: 20:04

Yeah, it was interesting. I had a couple of years when I didn't really play. I played, I guess, because of my pedigree. I guess as a junior player, I had lots of teams It sounds like you've taken away a lot of benefits, a lot of saying, Come play for us. Come and play for us. And I did little bits and pieces, some stuff in there about team, my old junior club. So my old club team that I'd played for as a junior, I went and played for them as a senior, and I just didn't like the team. It was very cliquey and like not so I kind of got played a little bit, but didn't, didn't really love it. So there was a little couple of years of going on. I should learnings, a lot of great characteristics and behaviors as play like I'm talented. I don't want to waste it. But I think I quite quickly came to terms with the fact that, yeah, it was my dream. And if things had gone a different way, I could have got a couple of England under 18 caps, and that had been very nice. I wasn't good enough to play professionally. I could have played for money. I could because there's a lot, not as much money, and I'd be like, I could have played national one a result, and you haven't come away with any regrets or championship if I really wanted to, if I carried on, it would have been fine, but it had been a pretty tough old existence getting paid a few 100 quid a game for a thing on short term contracts. I wouldn't have been at this. When I think about what I could have had if I really stuck at it, it's not a thing that I particularly wanted. So I think I kind of came to terms negativity or bitterness about it. So it sounds very good. with that pretty quickly, and then was happy that I was doing rugby in the way that I wanted to do it. Played for a really, really good team, good level, you know, just at the bottom National League, like National four, kind of Midlands one, in between those two leagues, with a great bunch of blokes who have been my mates till the day I die. And I got to, we got to play seriously, but then we also got to get pissed afterwards. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about work. Then you said you That's the balance, you know, we did. We took it. We took it seriously on training on Tuesday and Thursday. We took it seriously on Saturday. And then when the game finished, we had some beers and had a laugh. And had a laugh. And that was a good balance for me. So I was pretty happy with it. I don't think it was a thing I spent a long time regretting. Probably felt like it at the time, but few years, and then I realized actually it started off, you did a year with your father's business, and then wasn't a thing that wasn't necessarily going to be my profession. what happened? Yeah so then I think I just was looking for, so around my 18th birthday, I think it was when my rugby was coming to an end. My birthday is in August, so I guess it would have been in the off season. And I just applied for a job, went to a local recruitment agent, as you used to do in the day, aging me now, but you know when you used to have to go there and they'd make you do some tests and some other things. And I got a job in a call center. I think it was working for a marketing business, but they were doing some were doing some like direct outreach. And it was at the time, this is also going to age me, was for mg rover. So again, if people remember, like rover 75 and the when the the MG, mgf, and ZT and things came out, it was around that time, and this agency was set the task of making appointments for local dealers with small businesses. So that was my job. I didn't know I wasn't like a pet. I wasn't desperate to get into the automotive industry. It was just the job that I did. And they went, I'll pay you some money on a three month contract to come. And it was down the road. So I went and ended it. And that kind of started from there, really. That was where the process began.

Andy Follows: 23:18

So you sort of fell into automotive at that point. And so what did you learn from that? Was there anything stood out? And where did you go?

Chris Kirby: 23:27

It was a bit of just general work discipline. You know, I think that was, I'd always worked that thing. I guess, just going back a little bit when I say I went worked for my dad for that year from the age of 10, I used to go every Saturday and sweep the workshop floor for an extra bit of pocket money, and I used to work with him in the summer holiday. So I was always keen to be busy and do stuff and but this was the first time having an office job, putting a shirt and tie on and turned up to work on time and those things. So there was a little bit of, kind of growing up in that sense. And I was fine. Was a sensible boy, but it was a little bit of just kind of learning the ropes. I don't know that I was there long enough to learn some exceptional skills, but it was kind of that first, like rung on the ladder, and then I ended up going to work in a Ford dealership. So again, kind of semi fortuitously, think I saw the the advert for the job in a local paper, and they were said they had a, you know, the whatever the local B to B sales person was for nottings. They had a vacancy, and I went there and I got the job, I think partly because of rugby, because I think the guy who was my boss there, who was an incredible bloke, actually really, really good guy. Because, again, I turned up knowing absolutely nothing, and he was very patient with me, but he liked rugby, so I think he really liked the fact that I actually, at the time, was still signed Northampton, but also they had just taken over that market area from a different dealer group, and the dealer group hadn't given them any customer records. They just gave them a print off of their database, like this big, like a four very high pile of paper of all of the customer records. And because I'd come from doing telesales, he was like, well, look for the first three months, I just want you to sit there and ring everyone on this list if there is. Interested in the company still there, put it in a spreadsheet, and if you can make an appointment to go and see them, even better. And if not, basically just filter this pile of paper. But I was happy. Got a company car age 18 and a half, whatever it was, and that was fine. I was there for a few years, and I learned loads there, just about, like the industry generally, how things work doing a deal. I think it took me about four months to sell my first car, because, again, I'm calling people on this bit of paper, so about 10 in the first year. But you just that there was a very transformative and so the guy who, although he was he was tough, Roger Atkins, but really, really great, but he was just super patient with me. He kind of was like, okay, Chris, look, I know you've not done this before. This is how you do it. And he used to say to me, I'll show you how to do it once, but and then you can ask me questions the second time, but if you asked me the third time, I was always stuck in my head. I was like, Okay, right, fine. No, you wanted me to pay attention. So that was definitely a really good grounding for me in that leadership environment. It was learning to do a proper job. The call center thing was cool, but you could have done that as a summer job or the thing, yeah, proper job.

Andy Follows: 25:59

How great that you landed on your feet with Roger Atkins to have a leader at the beginning who invests in you. And you obviously were good. You were a good hire because you were prepared to go through the list and make the calls, and you did what you was asked of you, but a great start, and you stayed there a few years. And then what was the story behind your next move.

Chris Kirby: 26:22

I moved over a couple of years, really. I moved around into a few different roles. So I think temporarily, I went to go and work for a leasing broker again, when the company car tax scheme changed, there was some of, I guess, the equivalent of salsa now, but it was a slightly different one at the time. These kind of eco schemes, this brokerage was kind of promoting that, and I met them through some joint customers that we had, and they asked me to go and be one of their area managers. Did that for a little bit at the company went bust, I think after a while, I think I escaped just before it did, but went bust, but then I managed to move into a role working for Ford directly as one of their own managers. So only age 21 at this point, but was one of the regional managers for the Ford fleet team, and went in and did that for a couple of years, working with with dealers, and then ended up at GM. So that was interesting in a role in shaping on that corporate side. But then I guess I always say that was in like three or four different roles that I had. It was almost like one job. I moved to a few places and learned some things, and then I had kind of moved into my kind of proper first career job with GM, where I had a number of different roles working within their finance business.

Andy Follows: 27:29

Yeah you had, I mean, it's good to get into Ford Motor Company because you hadn't got a levels at this point. Have you no further education

Chris Kirby: 27:37

I think I was fortunate, because this team was against one of those. It was an outsourced team. So again, it was through an agency. Were were in charge of running the whole business center that so they had a call center and comms and everything else. I think everything that was like, under 100 vehicle fleets, was all outsourced to this company. So again, I wasn't directly employed by Ford Motor Company. I was employed by on demand, or whoever this company was, but my business card had Ford on it. I had a Ford company car represented. Ford was we were doing that job. I think that made it easier to get get in, because I wasn't meeting their like graduate criteria. So that was pretty, pretty helpful. But it was actually a super interesting one, because I I had gone in there, and I was the youngest member that team. Was very well established, and I was the youngest member of that team by like, 20 plus years. Everyone else was like, at least 40. And that was actually quite difficult for me, because I think they all went, hang on a minute. We've worked our whole careers to get to this job, and this blokes just turned up. He's 21 What does he know? So I kind of didn't I actually did a really good job in that role, but I didn't have the best time because I didn't really feel part of that team. And the team were often going, Well, Chris isn't doing it. How we do it? He's done this wrong. He did this thing on this report, and so I was picked on. It sounds a bit tough, but it was, it was a tough landing into that role. I was was tricky. So yeah, I kind of, again, learned a little bit about that as well, how to position yourself and how to fit into a team when you when you join something that's long standing, I kind of just went in and went, Hey, I'm Chris. Like, I can do cool things. I'll show you these things that I can do. And I know not so, not trying to prove myself to them. But I think again, that that probably came across as this guy thinks he's better than us, which absolutely was not the case. But you know, people can feel threatened by different changes and things like that. It's

Andy Follows: 29:25

But you said you then you got into a role with tricky. General Motors. That was, tell us a little bit about that.

Chris Kirby: 29:31

Yeah so I think it's the thing I often talk to people when they ask me kind of career advice, particularly if you've been with a company for a long time. And I do think that there's lots of benefits when you move roles, because you kind of arrive with all of your experience. You arrive in a role, and you learn a lot of things, but to lots of people, you're still the same person that arrived. To a certain extent, there's only so much you can evolve. But then when you move jobs, you package up all those things you've learned, and then you become like a fresh version of yourself. And I think by the time I landed at GM, when I was kind of 24 25 I had loads of experience. Like most of the people my age, of just coming out of university one year's work experience. I worked in a dealership. I'd worked in a field role done all this stuff, pretty successful in it. So I kind of came with a bag load of experience. I was a account manager for them for a while, so also aging me working for Saab and Chevrolet when they were GM brands on the financial services side at the GMAC. So I had a territory looking after some of those dealers, including Saab city, which was the biggest Saab dealer in the country. So that was, again, interesting grounding, interesting starting point. But then I had a number of roles with them. I actually moved into more of a marketing position, that kind of pricing stuff and to a few different things. It was, it was interesting. That was the first time I'd kind of gone in established myself, and then got moved into some different roles, which was which was nice, I think so, for five years,

Andy Follows: 30:47

a really interesting point about, if you stay in the same organization, people see you as the same. It's like they want to put you in a box straight away when they meet you, and then they don't revisit that box for as long as you're there, almost. And so whatever experience you're getting, they still know you as you know young Chris who joined in whatever year, and only by moving to a different organization do you get the chance to have a fresh first impression on some people

Chris Kirby: 31:18

Yeah definitely. I mean, you can evolve, obviously, in a role, people understand that your experience grows and your trust, people become more trusting of you, and they learn your skills and that because, actually, the same thing happened to me in GMAc, actually, that I came in, did a really good job in this account manager role. I took on a few extra projects that people didn't want to do. I think that helped set up a call center thing for selling GAP insurance, and I helped roll out, actually their first PCP product. So I kind of jumped into some other things that weren't just the day to day account management, and that got me into this marketing role. But then kind of once I'd got a couple of steps down the line, I hit a bit of a barrier. I got to a point where I wanted to be one of the regional managers. So managing a team of zone managers, somebody had left, there was a vacancy, and they basically just went, Oh, Chris, you don't have enough experience. Have enough experience. And the guy who they gave the job to, I was like, I've just got as much experience. In fact, I've got more experience than him, but he was 10 years old. So there's this thing of, like, I was still young Chris, who'd done a good job, and, like, everyone got on well with and delivered lots of good things, but I was still young, young Chris. And then when I left there again, the same thing. Package up all that experience and all that expertise, and then you land in a new place, and they go, Oh, mind me, Wow. You know this guy really knows his stuff. So you can, you can kind of make that transition, hit the reset button on that, that starting point, so you can grow a little little bit. But I feel like the further you get away from that starting point, the more it gets diluted by changing roles. You move the starting point again. You move the starting gap, yeah.

Andy Follows: 32:41

And I think if you're going to stay in the same place, then this is why you have to work quite hard at making sure people appreciate how you've grown. And as you were obviously doing, you were innovating. You're getting involved, creating new products and doing things that would get you noticed. Because you just have to put a bit of effort in to get people to reevaluate you in their minds. Sure, I know people who's you know, they end up CEO of the company, the same company that they started out in. They've obviously managed to convince people along the way of the way they're growing. So, yeah, interesting. So where does that take us? Chris, where to from here?

Chris Kirby: 33:20

Yeah so I left, actually, relatively it was a bit of an agonizing decision. So I kind of got passed over for that regional manager role. And at the same time, I was approached by FGA capital about a role with Jaguar Land Rover. So they had, at the time, had the contract for JLR financial services looking for someone to do a similar role to the one that I was doing at GM, which was kind of in that sort of pricing and campaign management bit of GM, and they kind of approached me quite, quite hard. I think they were keen to to get me to move over. And I was nervous about change, actually. So again, the thing that we've just discussed, I really only learned in retrospect of this situation, because I remember sitting there going, everyone likes me at GM, I've been there for ages, and I get on really well with everyone. And like, you know, the MD calls me up when he wants me to do something for him. Yeah, I've got this. I have to start all over again. Well, that's a big risk, but actually, within about two weeks of making a jump, I thought, this is, this is obviously the right thing.

Andy Follows: 34:16

Why? What made you say that?

Chris Kirby: 34:17

Because of exactly that, because people were pulling me in and going, Chris, tell us all these things you know about all the things that you've done before. You've done before, and, like, it was that bit of just, I was just starting on a on a higher pedestal, so all of a sudden I was more more respected, and I seen in a different light. And of course, being the type of person I was, I continued to do all the good stuff that I was doing at GM. So then I'd still made the good first impression that I was doing it from like, a higher starting point, you know, because I, I was able to bundle five years of experience from GM and bring it on day one in my in my rucksack, and put it on the table, you know. And that helped me in that role.

Andy Follows: 34:53

Yeah, I love this. So would you say that you were able to bring more of what you already had to the role in FGA that you hadn't been able to bring in GM

Chris Kirby: 35:05

yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think there is a point as well when you come in at a certain level. I think within the FGA experience I had, sometimes if you come in kind of senior enough, when you talk about kind of going up into the director and CEO level and all that kind of stuff, I think if you start high enough, it's much easier to do. I think if you start as the graduate, graduate CEO, is a big jump coming in as senior manager, something or other to see to CEO is less a significantly number of X easier in that perspective, for that first bit is harder. So yeah, definitely had an easier time progressing in that FGA role.

Andy Follows: 35:40

Yeah. And I like your analogy of bringing the bag in with all your experience, all your skills, all your capability that you're bringing, and you're able to use more of it. And therefore, I'm guessing it was more fulfilling experience.

Chris Kirby: 35:55

Yeah, definitely was, yeah. And they were a really good team and a really great business as well. You know, the Italians were a bit wacky, you know, in head office. But the team that we had the earlier, the MD and my boss, my director, boss and the sales, marketing director were like quite a good unit. Very quickly, they put trust in me and let me do things that I wanted to do. If I said, I want, I want to take this thing on, I want to solve this problem, they would let me do it. And I was quite thankful that didn't have the biggest budget, didn't have the biggest headcount. You know, it wasn't a huge organization, like a vwfs or something like that, but it was, in a way, was better. I had a lot of freedom to do some good stuff, and I was very thankful for that.

Andy Follows: 36:34

Yeah, it's really interesting to hear you talk about how the environment, how the quality of the leadership, not just your immediate manager, but sales marketing director as well the quality of that and the environment that you're in, the autonomy, you know, the space you had to try new things, we've already learned that you liked innovating before. So having some space to bring even more creates a good environment for you to thrive?

Chris Kirby: 37:01

Yeah, definitely, yeah. And I would say was very fortunate in that kind of leadership structure that I had, you know, it's very close, you know, I would sometimes get the MD would just get me to go into his office and say, Chris, can you look at this for me? And people weren't put out by that, yeah, the sales and marketing director or my direct boss at that time weren't put out by the fact that I was being asked to do stuff directly. And actually, the lady who hired me, Jane, an incredible woman. She now works for Tomorrow's Journey. So she hired me. She actually let me do my thing. She brought me in, and even though I was doing some stuff maybe that she wanted to do, she let me be myself and do my thing. And eventually I got promoted to the same level as her, and we did lots of stuff, and we did lots of stuff, and she wasn't ever threatened by that. She kind of just let me do my my thing. And again, I was, was really thankful of that. And as a result, you know someone who I respect hugely, and was very pleased to hire about six months ago into our business 10 years later.

Andy Follows: 37:55

Yeah, she sounds like a wonderful woman, wonderful leader. Give us her full name. I like to celebrate good leadership when we come across it

Chris Kirby: 38:03

at the time, Jane panone, but Jane Garrow, she is now. So, yeah, she was really good. Good team we had there, and it was really good. I also met David betterly, or I'm sure Bob, you know, obviously, but lots of the listeners will know, and that's when I first had interactions with David within JLR. He was effectively the his team were our opposite numbers. So if they were actually the brand, then we were the finance company. But again, David was someone who I always had a good relationship with in that role, and obviously now is chairman of my company and one of our investors. So that was, again, in that just in that environment, there was lots of like meeting interesting people and kind of developing relationships that lasted for quite a long time. Which was which was good. It didn't know it at the time, but, you know, just doing your thing,

Andy Follows: 38:49

I'm loving the conversation. I'm so pleased that you're sharing this, because it shows that there's more to work than just whatever you're doing at the moment. You know, when we look at take a step back and look at the interconnectedness of you know, the story you're telling us, the roles you had, and then Jane brought you in, but now Jane's working with you, and you met David through this role, and David's chairman and investor in your business. We have to see the bigger picture. We have to recognize that the job we're doing today. It's not just about the tasks that we're up to. It's it's more complex than that. And learn to appreciate that. I think this is really good example of that.

Chris Kirby: 39:30

Yeah, you don't really need to doesn't need to be a plan for it. There doesn't need to be a thing of going well, one day I'm going to start my business, and I want David to be the chairman, so I better, you know, make a good impression. It's just a bit about my my philosophy was always, I think, because I was passionate about work, I like to do a good job, I like to innovate, I like to challenge. So I was always keen to do it. But that bit of turning up and just trying to do the best job you can do every day, you don't really do anything more than that. And the opportunities will come off the back of that. You turn up with the right attitude, and you do some of the. Right things. You know the opportunities. You won't know what they are, but in 10 years time, you know the guy who you did a favor for when he was being a pain. And you kind of play along and do these things, and then later on, he he then says, Chris, I've always thought you're a bright lad. I'm going to invest in your business. And that's, you know, these things kind of happen, and you don't know the plan. It's not written ahead of time, but you do the right things, and things come as a result of that.

Andy Follows: 40:25

I think that is such helpful wisdom. I think human being, I think it's fair to say human beings like to feel more in control than we are. We like to have a sense of being in control, but really, the way the world works is far too complex for us to really be able to plan that much ahead, and therefore it's important, as you say, focus on the behaviors today, put a good shift in, come to work with the right attitude, do good quality of work, respect the people you work with, make sure they're going to appreciate you and play the game and see what happens.

Chris Kirby: 40:59

Is interesting, you know, definitely that kind of framing it and getting to grips with it at that sort of time in my career definitely helped me in some of the things I'm doing now, about, like, understanding the importance, but also the fact that you can't control certain things. I would always talk about kind of the career. People say, where do you want to be in your career? And I can go like, I know, I know I want to be over there somewhere, and like, a kind of rough North Star, but I don't know how I'm going to get there. I just kind of have to follow the road, and as long as I know roughly that I want to work in a role and have be a successful business person, and I want to achieve things in my career, then, like, I know I can go in that direction, but I can't sit there today and plot my next 15 moves to get to checkmate for where I want to get to, because it's kind of, I don't know exactly where it is. It's kind of over there somewhere, and you have to go in the right direction and and just keep checking in that you're not going completely off somewhere else. And I think that happens a lot. I think people get frustrated about lack of progress in looking in a very short period of time, and then going to change. I need to change. I need to something different. And actually, often it's it feels slow at the time matches when you look back on quite quickly,

Andy Follows: 42:06

and using your analogy, it might feel slow, but have you checked your bag recently? Have you looked in your bag? Have you felt how much heavier your bag is now than it was? You know, you've got a lot more stuff you're packing in your bag now nothing need be wasted just because you don't think things are going quite as fast as you decided you wanted them. You know, it might have been nice had they gone faster. Let me take a moment to tell you about our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by ASKE Consulting who are experts in executive search, resourcing solutions and talent management across all sectors of the automotive industry in the UK and Europe. I've known them for almost 20 years, and I can think of no more fitting sponsor for Career View Mirror. They're the business we go to at Aquilae when we're looking for talent for our clients and for projects that we working on. ASKE was founded by Andrew McMillan, whose own automotive career includes board level positions with car brands and leasing companies. All ASKE Consultants have extensive client side experience, which means they bring valuable insight and perspective for both their employer and candidate customers. My earliest experience of working with Andrew was back in 2004 when he helped me hire regional managers for my leasing Sales Team at Alphabet. More recently, when Aquilae was helping a US client to establish a car subscription business, ASKE Consulting was alongside us, helping us to develop our people strategy and to identify and bring on board suitable talent. Clients we've referred to ASKE have had an equally positive experience. Andrew and the team at ASKE are genuinely interested in the long term outcomes for you and the people they place with you, they even offer the reassurance of a two year performance guarantee, which means they have skin in the game when working with you. If you're keen to secure the most talented and high potential people to accelerate your business and gain competitive advantage, do get in touch with them and let them know I sent you. You can email Andrew and the team at hello@askeconsulting.co.uk or check out their website for more details and more client feedback www.askeconsulting.co.uk ASKE is spelt A, S, K, E, you'll find these contact details in the show notes for this episode. Okay, let's get back to our episode. The other thing you said, Chris, is you really liked work, yeah, and I don't hear this enough. I hear it from my guests, because my guests are people who are making stuff happen. They're kind of intentional, deliberate. They're rising stars or they're senior leaders in the industry. But outside of this, I hear way too much about how to do less work. You know how to get balance, but it always seems to be phrased as a way from where like work is a bad thing, we have to minimize work so that we can enjoy not work. And it's really I like to put wave a flag for what about finding work we love doing that

Chris Kirby: 45:09

Definitely. I just so much. I've just had so much reward. And it's one of those things you get, like, like anything. You can't be good all the time. You can't enjoy all of these things. But I think that you can find a lot of joy in I find joy in solving problems and I find joy in doing difficult things. I've just spent the last three weeks, evening and weekend, finishing my girlfriend's parents patio that I seem to have taken on as like, main contractor. But it's like, it's fine. I'm determined to finish it as a party this weekend. It's actually done now. I finished it yesterday, but it's like, and that's the kind of thing, and friends and family and people are saying, oh, Chris, if you're like a dog with a bone, but it's like, for me, I want the that I get a lot of satisfaction from it being finished and from the hard work that it took to do it. Don't get any complaining from me along the line. I'm choosing to do it. It's not a thing that I've had to sign up for or I'm getting paid for. It's a thing that I choose to do, but I like the effort of doing it, and I like the end result. And I think work can be very much the same thing. You know, set out with something in mind, and you have to put in some effort, and you achieve it, and you go, Oh, that was actually really good. I enjoyed that,

Andy Follows: 46:13

yes. And I read something the last couple of days, a statement about successful entrepreneurs like solving problems. They identify problems that need solving, and they find a way to solve it, and that's how they find customers and build successful businesses. You mentioned having a North Star and having a general idea. Would you mind just saying a little bit more about that?

Chris Kirby: 46:36

Yeah I think and I don't know if it's an easy thing just or have really been able to summarize it, but I think I've always wanted to be a successful business person in my career, like someone who makes some meaningful change, someone who's recognized, not for the adoration or the limelight, because not really a thing that I particularly enjoy, but to be recognized by my peers as someone who does something different, you know, who wants to change things. And I guess that was part of my frustration in the corporate world, although what I felt like I was almost like forced into an entrepreneurial environment because I couldn't change enough in corporate so this thing where you go, the system, this industry that we work in, is broken. How can we change it? And it's actually hard to change it from within often. So I think that was more more. It wasn't about money so much, or it wasn't about, you know, a job title. It wasn't like, oh yeah, I want to be CEO and, you know, X years, it was just more about going. I want to, want to do something meaningful. So I think that's always been the direction that I've I've been on,

Andy Follows: 47:33

yeah, so before we cross that threshold into entrepreneurialism, I feel like we haven't finished at FGA yet. So what else happened there that you'd like to share?

Chris Kirby: 47:44

Yeah so I moved it. I had a couple of different roles there, actually. So I kind of went in to look after the Jaguar side of the business. I kind of quickly took on the Land Rover side as well. So I had both sides, but this was more from a campaign management and kind of day to day operational management. And then I was asked to take on the Jaguar sales team. So essentially, National Sales Manager for the Jaguar finance team. They'd had a couple of people in that role that not really lasted very well, and I think it was something that was a bit precarious, and they wanted someone to go in. And that was an interesting one that I was asked to do, and I didn't really want to do it. I felt like I was having back to this influence thing. I felt like I had more influence being based in Gaydon, every day. Pulling the string sounds a little bit grandiose, but yeah, I was the eyes and ears for FGA group for their whole relationship across Europe, even though that wasn't my job. And I was doing these things and having interactions with people like David and like the MD of Jaguar and all these things, who were like, looking to me, Chris, we need this help with this. We need to put this finance offer together. We need to do things. And I felt like if I was taken out of that and put into this field position, even though I was going to have a team of six people, and it would have been my first kind of big managerial position, I felt like I was moving further away from the action, I guess. So I was a little bit reluctant to do it. I was asked to do it politely by and boss at the time. So we just really need you to do this. We need stability in this team, which I did for a little while, but then there was quite a big change in the FGA lost the contract for the Jaguar Land Rover business, and everybody was getting two peed over to Black Horse, who I think still hold that contract. And I had a phone call. Actually had surgery on a rugby injury, and the day before surgery, my boss at the time, Alex, called me and said, Chris, look, we don't want you to go to black horse. We wanted to stay with us. We're going to create us. We're going to create this new role, basic to fill the gap that was left by this JLR business. Can't tell you what it is, can't offer it to you, but just please come and talk to us about it. So I ended up kind of going into that role, and that was, I guess, the first bit of, maybe a bit of entrepreneurialism. They kind of went, look, here's this whole can't touch Fiat and alpha, because that's the thing that's being managed on its own right. Anything else, just go and do it. You're now in charge of Contract Hire leasing Fiat professional. We want to set up Maserati financial services. We want to go after some second string business in JLR. But basically, here's your budget, here's the team you can have going. Do it kind of thing. Actually also launching leasing broker stuff as well. So there was loads of stuff in that. That was really interesting role I really enjoyed, because it was really a case of, like, you know, going out of one meeting, talking about vans, and then going into the next meeting, talking about Maseratis, and then to the next meeting, talking about, you know, hiring three telesales people. It was, like, this really varied role, which I really relish. So it was, was super exciting. I was very lucky and fortunate to have that opportunity and to be entrusted with it, you know, to have, out of the whole team that was too being across JLR, to be the one person that got the phone call of going, please don't go across. We want you to stay kind of a good felt nice.

Andy Follows: 50:37

That sounds great. It sounds like you would have got to use everything you had in your bag, plus you'd have got some fresh stuff that you'd have to get your head round quickly. But in an environment where you clearly you'd had the big piece of feedback that we want you to stay so any doubts about yourself don't last very long. When you've just been rehired basically by people who already know you so you're trusted. You like them, you get on well, and you've got this whole new opportunity to go at. Sounds great?

Chris Kirby: 51:08

Yeah it was really good. Yeah. I really enjoyed it. There was a really difficult time through that summer where I couldn't really do the new job because no one knew that I was doing it, and had about three months of just sitting on my hands, pretending to do my old job whilst doing a bit of work on some positioning stuff in the background, you know? And it was interesting for not frustrating. But that was a funny summer. I was also recovering from surgery, so as it was a bit of a weird, weird one. But yeah, that was definitely good. I did that for a couple of years and really enjoyed. It was a good experience,

Andy Follows: 51:38

yeah, and would have required you to be entrepreneurial within a corporate setting?

Chris Kirby: 51:43

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Andy Follows: 51:45

And so what brought that to an end? Tell us the story?

Chris Kirby: 51:49

Also a slightly interesting thing, I think. And this definitely wasn't a something that was clear of my mind at the time, but I went through some kind of personal changes. I came out of a long term relationship that I'd been in that had kind of come to an end, and in a similar time frame, I was approached by a marketing agency that I had worked with quite a lot, actually, through GM and also FGA. And the managing director said, Look, we work with a few automotive companies, but we're thinking of setting up a specific automotive division business, even we want you to come and run it, and you can have some equity in that, and do this thing, and it could be really exciting. And actually, funnily enough, I haven't seen Chris Morris as the MD. I haven't seen him for years, and I saw him on Friday in a coffee shop, obviously. And so it's nice to reminisce. But Chris was the guy that I'd known for five, six years before that, and he said when he first asked me about it, and I went, Okay, cool. I'll think about it, come back. And he was, he was adamant I wasn't going to do it. Going to do it, but I think I went away. And I think just with all of the changes going on in my life, there must have been something going, alright, yeah, why not? I'll give this a go. And at the time, they were a team, a business of 30 people doing some stuff. So again, there was a safety net, but it was, you know, going to work for a small business and having some more say. So yeah, it was a kind of a bit of a big jump, but didn't feel like it at the time. So it was a very, it was a time of significant turmoil, so just generally felt a bit stormy. So it was okay getting in and cracking on and doing some stuff.

Andy Follows: 53:15

Yeah, to have multiple things changing at the same time is usually to be avoided, if you can definitely

Chris Kirby: 53:21

yeah. But so it wasn't something I was doing consciously, either trying to make the change, or even at the time, I wasn't thinking, Oh, should I really be doing this because of all this other change? It was just a thing. But there must have been a mindset of me at the time without wanting to take some risks or make a wider change in my in my life. So it was a Yeah, kind of interesting. Be interesting if I maybe wouldn't have made that decision in a different scenario, possibly So, yeah, it's hard to, hard to say, but yeah, it was a big change area of big change in my life.

Andy Follows: 53:48

And what was the reality then, how did you find your time in this new organization?

Chris Kirby: 53:53

Yeah it was good. It took a little while to find my feet in that role, because, again, there was some complexity about whether we started a separate business or if I became part of the main business and all these things, there was an element of time where I was kind of just, I was working on some projects, trying to find my feet for a few months. But the reality was, it was really good, I think they, the guys, were doing, I don't know, a couple of 100 grand a year of business through their automotive clients. We built that to about 1.1 point 8 million or something, over three years, we built a team of 25 plus people and but also importantly for what I'm doing now is we built a digital capability in that team. So we started doing digital projects for VW and Mercedes, hired some developers, started to work with some people on some technical stuff, and that sort of got us moving in that space. I've got got my understanding why I'd done it, transformation projects in the corporate world, working with vendors. But this was different of effectively being the vendors, I suppose, in that scenario. So yeah, just a huge amount of learnings in that. And then in all of that time, I suddenly was, then, you know, basically part of the board of a small business. So I was understanding that the running of it, you know, on the daily meetings, of going, you know, how much money is in the bank, what's our cash? Flow. What are the projects coming? Who do we hire? Who do we not? Do we need to expand into this new bit of Office title check? So I was involved in all of that all of a sudden, you know, at that very kind of micro level, which actually I found a lot less terrifying than I thought I would, given what we talked about. Right at the beginning, I was like, Okay, this is actually all right. I mean, it was terrifying, but, like, not, it's terrifying, but I can, but I can do this. I think was my take out of it, of going, this is really hard, but I'm pretty good at this stuff. So it's, it's all right.

Andy Follows: 55:28

So what was the rationale for moving on?

Chris Kirby: 55:31

Yeah. So also an interesting thing, I think, in a business like that, it's, it's difficult, I mean a marketing business. And fun enough. When I saw Chris on Friday, he actually used this phrase with me, but I've always said marketing agency, typically is a pretty bad business model. You're only as good as your last project. There's no long term in lots of cases, not not always, but the best businesses do have kind of long term contracts and retainers and all these things. But typically, in a marketing business of that size, you're working basically project to project, and it becomes a really hard slog. You've always got to come up with something new. You've always got to be pushing for that, that next deal, otherwise you can't pay the bills. So it's a pretty terrible business model. So I didn't enjoy that side. And I think, yeah, with these things, I kind of outgrew it. I guess over that course of three years, I learned probably the most in that job that I've ever learned for my bag, this thing that we've just invented on this call, but like this bag of my bag of experience. But then it got to a point where I was like, Well, I'm not going to learn anymore. I've kind of outgrown this role, because I'm not going to run this business myself, because it's two owners of the company. So I've come, kind of come as far as I can. And at the same time, on the parallel side, I was getting a lot of kind of involvement into the mobility sector, I guess I wrote a white paper, which the Dyslexic 16 year old would never believed. But I wrote a white paper about kind of future of the automotive industry, like 2017 which I really, really enjoyed, because it's just a chance, just to go, this is rubbish, and this should change, and this will happen. And when this happens, this will happen. Really enjoyed that process, actually, and that was a bit the trigger for it. So just out the back of that, it was a combination of a few things. I've kind of outgrown this role here at clarity, I see this massive change happening in our industry, but it's not happened yet. It's kind of happening is on the precipice of starting to happen, and I think I've got some skills, and I think that I was actually working with my now business partner. He was one of our tech team that's gonna be got got some skills here. We've got some knowledge and some skills that might be different to where other people are coming from. You know, there's some opportunity in this market. Let's, let's see what, what we can do. Let's see how we can can attack it. And obviously, put together a plan and did some stuff. But that was the the mindset, really, I was kind of wrestling in this couple of different areas coming together, and then the part of kind of taking the jump came about, really, so

Andy Follows: 57:45

you'd found a problem that needed to be solved and that you felt you were as well placed as the next person, if you like, probably better placed to actually solve it and or have a go at solving it. And you were motivated, more motivated than the next person to do it

Chris Kirby: 58:02

Yeah, definitely. It's back to that thing of, kind of the wanting to to innovate or change. I think we had that real passion for and still remains in me, that that passion for wanting to change some of the really crap things that happen in our industry, and that that passion was there to make a difference. I think we felt like we were well positioned. I think we at the time, I think we felt out of our depth. When I look back, I realized how out of our depth we were. We didn't know, didn't know anything about anything. I mean, we knew the technical stuff, we knew the market stuff. But you know how to launch a starter, other build a tech company, how to fundraise, like, all these things that had absolutely no idea. And I'm pretty sure at the time, I convinced myself that I can't be that hard. Yeah, there was a lot of stuff that we had to learn on the go. But yeah, I think it was a bit and we just ourselves to a position, like, with a lot of things that, particularly in running this business today, we often, like, look at the worst case scenario and then go, okay, as long as the worst case scenario isn't death, and I don't mean physical death, death of the company. If it's not, like, terminal okay, then how do we build up for it? What's our abilities of success? What's the thing? But we're all but we're always protecting against not wanting to take a risk that was going to take us over the edge, and I think the risk was relatively low with this business, because I had my trunk full of experience. I knew I could get a job in the industry if I wanted to. I had enough money for three months, and I reckon I could have already strung it out for six months if we couldn't raise funding and move things forward and do all of that stuff. So it was like, Well, why don't we just have a go? Now's the time to do it. I'm going to leave this business anyway, because I've outgrown it, so I may as well have a go at this. And if I do it for three months and it's really hard and we don't get anywhere, then I'll just go and work for VW or do something else. Because I didn't, I didn't, I didn't hate that. Yeah, that was fine. So, yeah, I think it was a bit bit low risk as well. Obviously, is high risk, but mitigated risk. I didn't sell my house and do any of that stuff. It was a pretty sensible jump.

Andy Follows: 59:54

I'm very grateful for you sharing that. Looking back, you know you didn't have it all. Figured out. And certainly it was harder than you thought it was going to be. I think it's really helpful for people thinking of doing, you know, what you've done is to know that you had some of it figured out, and you had a whole a really healthy mindset towards, okay, I know what the fallback is. Worst case scenario is, I go back doing a job that I quite like, and this stuff really does need to get fixed, and I want to be part of the solution.

Chris Kirby: 1:00:28

And the rest of it was about staying alive again, from a business point of view, it was basically staying alive as long as possible. How do we manage to keep keep things moving, and how do we manage to do get get to that next stage? And, yeah, a lot of it was, was very, very difficult. I think the first six months would probably was, I think we were in a bit of a dreamland. I think we knew what. I think we thought we knew more than we did, and I think we had a bit of success. We did win an award at AFC for startup pitch award, something or other. So we were getting, we were winning awards and going to tech conferences and getting told our ideas were brilliant, and we thought that that was it, that someone would write us a check for a few million quid, and then we'd just go and just solve the problems. And the reality was, you know, hit home a little bit later. But then, of course, we also went into a pandemic, which didn't help. So we kind of went into this sticky patch, and we were going, Oh, okay, we're just about going. We're kind of keeping going here. This is all right. And then all of a sudden, you know, global pandemic, which was tricky. So that first 18 months of life at TJ was tough,

Andy Follows: 1:01:27

yeah, and how much of an overlap did you have? Did you sort of tidy it, everything up at the marketing agency and then start this? Or did you have a side hustle, if you like, where you're putting things together. How did that work?

Chris Kirby: 1:01:43

Somewhere between, I don't think I would describe it as a side hustle. It was more we were making some plans in the background so I can the timeline is relatively clear in my head, actually. So we founded the company in August 2017 because there was a bit of me, where we sat in a room, me and a couple of guys who were doing it, and we sat there and went, Okay, we should proceed with this like we think there's an opportunity. Let's do it. And I went, I'm going to start a company, because otherwise we just talk about it forever, and it costs 20 quid at work. So we set up the company into october 2017 I didn't start full time until May 2018 so basically it's slightly more than six month gap. We did three or four months of figuring it out. So when we got to Christmas that year, I remember working on it quite a lot over the Christmas period. Clarity actually closed for two weeks over Christmas, I worked really hard on it. And I think I sat down, actually, probably on New Year's Eve. I think I'd had too many drinks on New Year's Eve, and I went, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do this. And I made a little list of things that I needed to do before I would quit my job. I can't remember all the things on there. One of them was to get Matt to agree to be CTO. So Matt, I'm a business partner now, actually, yeah, he wasn't involved in those first discussions. But I was like, Look, I need someone who knows the tech Matt's the only guy that I trust in this area. I need to persuade him to come and come and join us. So I had this kind of tick box. So I was like, right, if I can get through to these by the end of January, I'll quit my job. And I had a three month notice period, which, again, I was working a bit both during that time. And then, yeah, first of May, off, off we went,

Andy Follows: 1:03:09

can you remember any other things from a checklist

Chris Kirby: 1:03:12

I think, validating that we could raise money? So I think I know a few people who have been entrepreneurs, friends of family, people that I'd met a little bit in the auto because we'd got a bit into this mode. This mobility space. We'd met a few mobility startup people and the previous six months. So I kind of went, look, this is a business. Is our business plan. We need to raise, I think we were trying to raise 150 grand to get going before we'd written any code or done anything. Yeah, and I kind of wanted to validate that that was possible. And people went, Yeah, okay, in the market as it was in 2018 Yeah, with a credible idea and a few people behind you, and if you get a bit of your own money, you know, into that 150k you know, it'll be possible to raise. So I'm pretty sure that was a that was a checklist getting that on board. Was another one. And there was one other thing which I remember, but I think there was three that I had to do, and I had to do them before the end of January, and then I could quit my job

Andy Follows: 1:04:02

So it wasn't knee jerk, it was thought through. There were some important milestones

Chris Kirby: 1:04:08

Checking my savings account, also checking in with Bank of mum and dad, and going, if this really goes really badly, how long can you pay my mortgage for afterwards, few months, I was like, okay, cool. So yeah, lots of that, like mitigation and extra mitigation. On top of that, it was like, yeah, it's quite a long way away until I have to sell my house, right? Good news, that was all I needed to know,

Andy Follows: 1:04:31

excellent. And your parents were supportive

Chris Kirby: 1:04:35

yeah, absolutely, yeah. But both, both parents actually, again, bit we missed, but my parents separated in the end of that school period of my mum remarried, so kind of mum and stepdad and my dad, but collectively, very supportive of it. I've always, probably would claim they don't really know what we do, just kind of proud of me at a distance, but they've always been there to kind of have my back to an extent. But as we started off with about my upbringing, I was. Relatively humble, not from a terrible position, but I didn't have super wealthy parents or super wealthy family or any of those things, so there wasn't millions of pounds available to me if it all went wrong. So the safety net was low, but it was enough to give us that confidence to push.

Andy Follows: 1:05:14

So you ticked the items on the checklist, it was time to go for this. Tell us a little bit about that phase.

Chris Kirby: 1:05:21

Yeah it was great. And as I kind of alluded to earlier, you know, the first six months was incredibly exciting. So we managed to raise some money. We didn't raise 150k we managed to raise 80,000 I think, from angel investors, so all private individuals, mostly friends and family. It's a big thing again, if anyone's listening to this, thinking about starting a business and looking to raise pre seed funding. Basically, if you don't turn up with half of it from your friends and family, no one's giving you anything else so, and actually all of ours, pretty much just from friends and family. We had a couple of industry people like David who who put some money in but very small tickets. It's a very favorable tax scheme for investing in early stage business.

Andy Follows: 1:05:58

How much of your business did you have to give away for that. So

Chris Kirby: 1:06:02

it was a relatively small I mean, the good thing about the tax schemes around the early stage businesses is that the investors get 50% of their money back as tax free flex, straight away. So almost what that allows you to do as a company is almost to have a slightly higher valuation, because the investor who's putting in, let's say, 10,000 pounds actually only really putting in 5000 and the government actually cover part of the risk if the company gets bust in a period of time. So as a result, I think we valued the company at like a million pounds. So I think we gave away a relatively small percentage in that first phase, and actually have, throughout the process, we've managed to limit our dilution, and probably fundraising is a thing we'll talk about in a bit more detail. But yeah, it's definitely been an interesting learning experience, but also one where we've been reluctant to raise money. Well, we found it hard to raise money at lots of times, but then also been reluctant to take money from people who either want a big stake or we don't think would be part of the right fit for us.

Andy Follows: 1:06:55

So you're not just looking for cash, you're looking for fit and other contribution. Presumably.

Chris Kirby: 1:07:01

I think the only thing I was going to say that we found that, personally, I found difficult with the friends and family stuff is that, you know, kind of rolling on a year or two later in the middle of the pandemic, when, you know, things were pretty close to going tits off across I felt a lot of pressure, because it was my friends and family who invested money, and all of them would say to this day, and at the time, we knew the risk, you know, we invested in you it's all fine. I personally felt a lot of pressure in not failing because of 80,000 pounds of my friend's family's money. And if that had been a million pounds of VCs money, I would have been less bothered. You know, it's like a slightly strange situation. So that that that did create a lot of pressure and actually a lot of anxiety for me. And yeah, over a period of time, was tricky.

Andy Follows: 1:07:47

Is there something between where we've got to and covid that we should talk about, or is that where we're up to?

Chris Kirby: 1:07:53

Yeah I think so. Yeah, there was kind of a period, as I mentioned. We did, you know, some tech events, won some awards. It was all pretty good. We then got into a bit of going. We've got to do some stuff now. We've worked really hard on lots of things and really struggled to get loads of stuff going. We did really well in any kind of pitch event. We did really well. We pitched an smmt event to three OEMs and all we were the only company out of 50 that all three OEMs wanted to work with afterwards. But none of those three we actually work with today, you know? So these are these things. You do the stuff, and they go over you like it, and do all these follow up meetings. And then we did do a small project with Ford, which actually was our first step, pre covid, and those guys were really supportive of us. But we were about to roll to where one of the kickers from, from the pandemic, we were about to roll that out to kind of a region before. So we trialed it in one dealer for like three months. It's pretty successful. And then Ford said, okay, cool. Look, we're going to give you, can't remember if it's 10 or 20,000 we're gonna give you some money now to roll this out to a region of dealers, and then that all the dealers in the country closed, and we're a bit naked. Now, what I would say about Ford and couple of the sponsors from that Ford project, what one's retired John sellers, who also I saw recently at the move move conference, they still paid us for that project, which I don't again, don't think we would have survived if we didn't have that as part of, you know, some different things we were able to get. They said, We understand this isn't your fault. We're just going to pay you the money, and then when the pandemic's over, whatever that looks like, we'll pick this project up again. By the time we got to a position to pick it up again, all those people have left to go to other bits of Ford and other things. So it never got going. But they paid us that money, which, again, I think a lot of corporate businesses would have gone, well, you didn't do the work, so tough luck. But they recognized who we were and the size of business and the endeavor and effort that we'd made at that point, and was actually really, really thankful for that.

Andy Follows: 1:09:54

So should we go first of all through the Tomorrow's Journey, journey, and then I. Wrap up with a nice explanation of what the capability now is versus what it was, you know, in those years. So

Chris Kirby: 1:10:06

Yeah I think it's interesting probably to start with where we started out. So I talk now quite generically about saying, Oh, we wanted to make the automotive industry a better place and make it easier for people to get access to cars. Our first real mission and where we were really pushing, an area that nobody was really looking at was about asset utilization. So we were saying our technology was there about maximizing the use of underutilized assets. So the project that we did for Ford, the successful trial, was we took their courtesy this deal is courtesy cars, and when they weren't being used for courtesy car bookings. We were making them available to third party rental companies to provide rental bookings on these cars. We were generating 20% uplift in revenue. And a lot of that was us smoke and mirrors and doing lots of startup stuff to do it. But that was generally the principle, and what we soon realized is the market just wasn't ready for it. There wasn't a sufficient level of digitisation in the automotive industry to cope with something like that at scale. Because really, you have to say, right? I am X leasing company. I'm just going to make all of my vehicles, all of my flexible fleet, available to you via an API in real time to where we ended up moving. It wasn't really a pivot, but it was kind of a transition as we started just to look at individual projects. So we did something in the pandemic with Ford, actually, and also with a car sharing company, where we were making vehicles available to NHS key workers so people could rent and Ford dealers could rent their cars that were parked up in their closed dealerships, basically give them for free to these NHS key workers. But our system needed to make them available, get the customers to create an account, do an ID check, take some deposit and contract stuff. So we need to do this kind of due diligence around it. And that was what formed our first product. We were like, Oh, hang on a minute. There could just be a product here in making the industry better at onboarding a customer and managing the fleet. You know, some modern technology to make it easier to access a vehicle. Obviously, that's that's transition. And what's interesting, and everyone will come back to it, is that where we started that bit of a making a fleet or underutilized vehicles available is actually now where we are as a company. You know, the market has come to where we are, and now we're six years into our journey with the best technology in the world to do this stuff. And people are now coming to us going, I've got 5000 vehicles. Can you make these available to lots of people? Because I need to get them used. Yeah. So it's a bit we were just kind of trying to do a too big a thing to do early with two blokes in a shed, as me and Matt used to,

Andy Follows: 1:12:36

yeah. It's about utilization.

Chris Kirby: 1:12:38

Yeah, we talk about, kind of, as a company mission. In one line, we talk about liberating vehicles. Like, in my head, I see, like, the world's vehicles are all in this, like fenced compound. But if anyone wants to get one, you want to rent a car for a day. I need to use it for this party we've got this weekend. I need to, I need a van for an hour to go and move some stuff. It's really hard. And I know there are van sharing places and things like, it kind of exists a little bit, but like, it's just really difficult. It's too hard for me for that job to warrant going to get a van. Should be easier, because the technology's not there, because I have to do paperwork when I go to the thing, I'm gonna have to drive 30 minutes down the road to the nearest rental place. So we just want to liberate these vehicles, and increasing the utilization is one part of that, and then also making the access and the management of it better is actually the biggest problem today, because the utilization is almost like a an effect factor of the fact that people find it hard to get into a car because I use a van for two hours this week to move some stuff, but I can't get one, so I just don't bother too hard.

Andy Follows: 1:13:36

What else have you learned then? Is all these things that you didn't know you were letting yourself in for you've mentioned sort of fundraising. So what were some of the milestones over the journey?

Chris Kirby: 1:13:48

Well the fundraising was an interesting one, and again, without going into each individual one, but yeah, we've been very frugal in how much money we've raised through the process, certainly in the early days, because of necessity, because people wouldn't give us money, because we couldn't articulate the proposition properly, because the market didn't work how we expected it to work. You know that the investment market doesn't work like the commercial market. It's not getting someone to invest in you. It's not the same as getting someone to buy your product. So I was always confident. I come from commercial roles. I knew how to do sales. So you like, oh yeah, cool. I just go in and I'll just sell my company to this investor, but it's not the same, and that took quite a long time for me to get my head around that.

Andy Follows: 1:14:25

What did you get your head around then, Chris, what did you learn?

Chris Kirby: 1:14:29

I mean, essentially, I guess you are selling to them, but basically their motivations are very different to what a buyer would be, you know. So these guys are looking at increasing their fund size. So they start off with a million pounds, they invest it in some companies, and they want that fund to then be worth 10 million pounds. Now that's not about getting those companies to sell. What that's about is getting the companies to be increased in their kind of like book value, call it that. So, so actually, what that means is that they want you to bit like a bit of a pyramid. Scheme. They want to give you some money, they want you to grow and hit some metrics, and then they want you to raise some more money at a higher valuation, which means that the million quid they gave you is now worth 5 million quid. On their books, they don't have it, it's just because our numbers increased, right? And then that person who's just invested in you at this stage, then wants you to raise some more money. And then you do that a higher valuation, the first person then their investment, which then was worth five, is now worth 20. And it is through this this process, right? And that's why you get situations like Kazoo and people like that, because the kazoo guys knew what they were doing. They took advantage of the pyramid scheme to boost their valuation. Take lots of money, grow, grow, grow, hit some metrics, create lots of noise, but we were selling the business differently. We were saying, hey, is this a super cool business here that could be really profitable and could make money, you can grow organically. And they were going, oh, cool, Chris, that's great. And then go, that's not what we want. We talked a lot. My brother and I had joked a lot about, you know, fake business. Investors love fake businesses, and some of the fake businesses turn out to be good businesses, right? That a lot of it is about the story that you tell, and how can you tell something that is, you know, hockey stick projections. And, you know, we're going to raise this in this time and this and this time, and then we're going to be worth, you know, $17 trillion in five minutes. Like, it's all nonsense. I've never seen one of those that I've ever gone that's achievable. And we were out there going, Well, what we're going to do is we're going to grow 100% year on year, and in five years time will be worth 20 million pounds, and they're like, boring, get out. The reality is, we've actually done it, and all the other companies they've invested in that time haven't gone bust. So more fool them. But that's because the market changed. But there's so learning how to tell that story and to to go through that process was a was a big learning curve. There was lots of rejection time. And then the offers that we did have were really bad ones. We got lots of offers to us that were, you know, the terms were horrible, wanting low valuations, wanting control, basically taking control of the business from a really early stage. And it was hard when you needed money to then go, I'm sorry, but no thank you. On those terms is really difficult when you're sitting there going, I don't know if I can pay my mortgage in two months time. And this half a million quid would be really helpful.

Andy Follows: 1:17:07

It must have been so disappointing with the effort that you would have put into getting to that point in the conversation where they're giving you some terms and to then look at it and think, Oh, this isn't actually

Chris Kirby: 1:17:19

And often they they'll string that process out. So there's lots of stages to it. It's not like, turn up at the pitch, you do half an hour pitch, and they go, Yeah, we like it. Here's our terms. You don't see the term sheet to right at the end of the process. And by that point, you're desperate for the money, or you've invested in the process, or, like, whatever, and it becomes really difficult. You're like, oh, yeah, okay, we want this. But at least three times we've had situations where we're like, okay, we like this investor. They seem to be really on board. They're really nice. They've Yeah, we're aligned, and our vision, oh yeah, Chris, we can send you the offer this week. It becomes three or four weeks down the line. You get the offer and you read it and that it's pretty demoralizing. You read it and you're like, Oh my God, and you realize quite quickly it's something that you can't even negotiate. It's like, so bad. You can't just go through it and go take these things that's like, the fundamentals of the deal itself. It's like, really horrible. And then you go, gosh, we're back at stage one. We've been through this whole process eight weeks, 12 weeks, whatever, and then we're back at stage one. So that whole process has been really big learning curve, but super difficult to get our head around and understand and to get through. It's a lot of pressure.

Andy Follows: 1:18:23

Yeah, so should we talk about what's happening now and where you're at, or is there anything we've missed?

Chris Kirby: 1:18:29

I think so. I think one of the things that I touched on a few different analogies today, but I think probably my the one I use the most is about because the problem with particularly in startups, I think this applies often to careers in general, is that everything's a bit of a roller coaster. So we were saying that there's those moments in time where you're like, Oh, it's a good thing. It's a bad thing. People can be a bit knee jerk about roles, and startup is like that. Like 10 times it's like, you up one day down the next day. And what I've always said is I treat every week like a football match. So you like football match, and then you're in, like, a season. So if I have a really good week this week, right? I smash it like, win three new customers, get a few new hires, got some money in the bank, win an award. Do all this stuff, I'll win five nil. Big. Win, massive. But it's only three points, and at the start of the next week, it's a style the next match. And that's the same. When you lose, you go through this whole process, you get an investment offer. It's not the thing that you want. It's a massive loss, but you've just not lost that game. And at the end of the season, you want Champions League football, which is what you're aiming for, you just got to get enough points to be in the top four, right? So it's a way of being able to compartmentalize things, and I'll often go through even today, the business is a lot more stable and growing nicely. Oh god. The last last couple of weeks have been a bit, you know, probably a couple of one nil losses and a couple of draws in there. But you can kind of just compact it like that, and then you have a good week, and you got a great right? We're back on a winning run again, because it is like a sporting team. It's back to my sporting stuff from earlier. It's like a sporting team. Sometimes you just get in a bit of a bad funk. You get in a bit of a bad run, and you can't, can't control it. You can't fix it. You just have to keep playing, and you have to keep turning up. And then eventually your tide turns, and you keep doing enough of the right stuff. You keep training hard, and you keep turning up and playing the matches. You eventually get your your reward. So I think that's just an interesting thing of like can be applied across a lot of stuff, but, you know, I genuinely think like that, if every week I don't get on this week, win, win, lose or draw, and kind of handling it that way.

Andy Follows: 1:20:24

And who do you want to talk to? You said, you know, it'd be a great week if you sign three new clients. Who do you want to be talking to?

Chris Kirby: 1:20:32

Yeah it's really interesting, because our customer base is really, really varied. So it's not just about, you know, if you were saying, what's our ideal customer profile portfolio would be kind of least co rental company, OEM, to a certain extent, dealer group, but some of our best customers are kind of non, non automotive people. We do a lot of work with grid serve, for example, with their test drive activity and some subscription stuff. Because actually sometimes it's harder to do transformational stuff is to start Greenfield. So we have a lot of success where we work with bigger companies, but where they're trying to start something new, and they go, we want the best tech platform to be able to do car subscription or to do this courtesy car program we want to run. And we go, Great. Our Tech's here. It's got everything that you need within it. So actually, there's a few kind of ideal customer profiles. But really, for us, we're we're quite opportunistic in how we we operate, and we find most of the people who do business with us come to us, they find out about us, and they come to us and say, I have a problem. Can you help us solve it? And it's kind of how we treat the process. Really, although we have a software product, we have a SAS products that people buy, pay monthly. Really, we're problem solvers as a business, so we use our technology because it's incredibly customizable and it's incredibly varied in the stuff that it does to solve these problems around vehicle access and vehicle liberation, and that's what we really enjoy as a business. Yeah, we're looking, if there's companies who are looking to change and revolutionize how they give access to their vehicles from their customers. Then, like, with people to talk to, and it doesn't matter if that's for a rental, for a test drive, for want to launch subscription, want to do some stuff with leasing brokers, because you're trying to all of those things are possible because the technology is flexible. So we we're that the kind of one stop place for flexible vehicle access as a platform. So from that point of view, we love it, because it's going back to that flexibility bit. Don't like to say no to solving a problem. No, because problem. Can you help us? Yeah, we can actually

Andy Follows: 1:22:31

let me see what's in the bag.

Chris Kirby: 1:22:34

Yeah we have my experience bag, and then we have our software bag. And the software bag, someone did describe that once. They said, Oh, you're they said this in the middle of summer as well as just confusing. But they said, your your system's like a Santa sack, and it's got loads of things in there. And whatever problem we've got, we can just have a rummage in the sack and get out the things that we need and piece it together to solve our problems. I thought it's good.

Andy Follows: 1:22:56

Yeah. So if people want to get hold of you, Chris, we'll put the link to the website in the show notes this episode, and we'll put your LinkedIn. Just tell us what the website is. In case people can't wait to get to the show notes and they just want to type it in straight away.

Chris Kirby: 1:23:11

It's tomorrowsjourney.co.uk. So relatively straightforward.

Andy Follows: 1:23:15

It's quite an inspired name. Tomorrow's journey. Where did that come from?

Chris Kirby: 1:23:19

Yeah. It's actually the super funny story, actually. So in the marketing agency world, we were doing some work for vwfs, one of our big clients, and they were launching, at the time their Volkswagen financial services rent a car. And we said, Guys, you can't call it Volkswagen financial services rent a car because it's too very long. And went through this whole thing, and they weren't allowed to change it from Germany and all this stuff. And actually, what our creative solution was that we, we say that's, that's the company, the organization name, but we create a strap line that becomes like our company name. So, like, we kind of can position, you know, the company name goes to the bottom, and then we always talk about this thing. And the line was for tomorrow's journey, because they were talking about, you know, freedom of vehicles and all this stuff. So you could have almost started to use tomorrow's journey as the name or the thing that you would talk about, rather than having to say to your mate, I rented my car from Volkswagen financial services, rent a car. Big breath. And they went, Oh no, that's not going to work. You know, tomorrow's journey. It's not for tomorrow's journey, it's for today's journey, and all this, like nonsense client feedback that you get. And we just went, Oh, cool. And then the one of the guys who was involved in starting the business, who was in that meeting when we were sitting down, and a few weeks later talking about this company, he goes, I already know the name. Do you remember we did that thing, tomorrow's journey? And I was like, Oh yeah, that was it. So there was never any debate. There was never a big list or a whiteboard. It was just like, he went, do you remember that thing, that this would be perfect? Then we went, Yeah, hey, will we that was it. So we stole it from vwfs.

Andy Follows: 1:24:43

You offered it them first.

Chris Kirby: 1:24:46

We took their cast offs crumbs from their

Andy Follows: 1:24:53

Oh, is there anything I haven't asked you, Chris, where I might have missed out on an opportunity to hear something else?

Chris Kirby: 1:24:59

No I think it's been really good conversation. We've covered lots of ground. I think definitely the part that you touched on around the entrepreneurial side is really interesting. I think just, I actually have really fortunate to give some guest lectures to MBA class on entrepreneurship. I'm one of the not entrepreneur in residence, but get asked to come and do these talks. So I always kind of come back to this bit of it's not a special person who has to do it. I don't think that I'm like, brilliant, and other people aren't, but you do have to have a kind of special mindset, a different mindset, the thing that makes other people good at certain things that I'm not good at, like patience, of sitting down and reading an essay or doing whatever, you do, have to kind of be wired in that that certain way to be able to put this stuff together. But it is super rewarding to be able to do it if you can. So it's always a thing. Like, I would encourage people to do it because it's amazing, but it's always a thing of, like, really think it through what you do it. And the first thing is, like, is it a topic you're passionate about? Don't do it because you want to be an entrepreneur. Do it because you're passionate about a topic, and if you are going to do it, realize that there's times really, very hard and really lonely, because when it's hard, no one wants to be your friend. So you have a lot of times on it's a different office now, I've moved house since, but, you know, I've not that two dissimilar times. You know, in the last 12 months, I've sat on my office floor and had a little sob about going, this is really, really hard because there's no one to help you in that situation. Have a boss, you don't have a support, you have a HR department to go to and say, This is really unfair, so you just have to get on with it. So there is a bit of kind of acceptance now, but if you're happy to do those things, if you're passionate about a topic, I think there's nothing more rewarding than than building a business and looking at a team of 30 people that we've got now who come to work every day to help you fulfill your passion is really rewarding, so it's kind of like an encouragement, but with a disclaimer,

Andy Follows: 1:26:53

excellent, perfectly balanced. Thank you so much, Chris. I've really enjoyed getting to know you more deeply through this conversation and understanding your backstory. There were lots of moments there where I was excited to talk about what I noticed and what I thought was helpful to others to see that you've learned along the way. Yeah, really appreciate it. Thank you.

Chris Kirby: 1:27:12

Yeah, no brilliant. Really enjoyed it.

Andy Follows: 1:27:19

You've been listening to Career View Mirror with me Andy Follows. Depending on your unique life experience, where you find yourself right now, and your personal goals, you'll have your own takeaways from Chris's story. Some elements that stood out for me were that he left school at 16 as he had no intention of going to university, so A Levels weren't relevant. Even though he played rugby to a high standard, he decided that enough was enough when his best season wasn't good enough to overcome some of the other factors that were being taken into account by the selectors. His candid sharing of the tough realities of building a startup and his idea to look at each week's results like a football match, to help compartmentalize the highs and lows and his assertion that you should be an entrepreneur because you're passionate about solving certain problems, not because you want to be an entrepreneur. If you'd like to connect with Chris, you'll find his contact details in the show notes to this episode. If you enjoy listening to my guest stories, please, could you do me a favor and share an episode with someone you lead, parent or mentor, or perhaps a friend of yours who you think would also enjoy listening. Thank you to Chris for joining me for our conversation. Thank you to our sponsors for this episode, ASKE Consulting and Aquilae, and thank you to the Career View Mirror team, without whom we wouldn't be able to share our guests' life and career stories. And above all, thank you to you for listening.