Exclusive Interview with Simon Leslie, Joint CEO of Ink

Simon Leslie's company Ink, partners with over 30 airlines and travel brands to reach over 1 billion people through travel media each year.

In this revealing interview Simon shares the stories and insights that lead him from a 17 year old kid without a penny to his name to co-founder of a company which in 2019 turned nearly $100 million.

?We cover sales strategies, naysayers and his approach for handling Covid-19 in an industry which is taking a direct hit.

David Citron: What epiphany moments have you had on a personal or career level which have taken you to where you are today?

Simon Leslie: I'm 17 years old, selling insurance door to door and I'm on my first night out - we all get put in a car, a group and a manager and they drive us to one of those God forsaken places in London and dump us there and they said 'see you at the end of the night'.

We were trained quite aggressively for a week on the scripts 'this is what you say, this is how you deal with things'... and on the first night I sold an insurance plan for Irish Life ￡50/month to this young guy. No-one had ever done that, it was always 'this is your first day, this is your practice' and I continued to sell....basically everyday. 

I thought I was the bees knees. At the end of the month though...when I thought I was going to get my huge commission cheque only one of the deals, that first one I had done, had stuck - all the others had cancelled.

And the reason was, for the first one, I followed the process to the letter. From then I became big headed and arrogant I guess. You go from competent to confident to arrogant and I had jumped straight from a little bit of competence to arrogance. 

But, I realised I was good at selling.

Simon with Ink Co-Founder Michael Keating, 1994

David Citron: What events have motivated you through the years?

When I think about the events that have happened over the last 30 years that have made a huge difference - you've got Madeleine Johnson - I attribute a lot of my success to her, because she told me that this company would never amount to anything so I took that very personally and rather than being upset I used it as a motivator 

David Citron: Who was Madeleine Johnson?

She was one of my sales people at the time in 1995/6 maybe a bit later....she thought that she could do better for herself, which I respect - so she went to work for IPC which was like the number one publisher in the country...

... and I was looking last year and probably we made more profit than all the big newspapers, all the publishers in the UK... probably with the exception of one or two. 

David Citron: What revenue did you do in 2019?

Simon Leslie: Close to $100 million 

It takes a long time to mature a story. Some people think that you do something today and you see the outcome of it tomorrow - you don't know how long it's going to take.

Most people get disappointed by what people say to them or annoyed and I say to them you've got to channel that energy in a positive way, use it to drive you, to fuel your fire, fuel your engine, not to bring you down and make you feel insignificant.

Simon and Michael at their New York Office

David Citron: What was another major turning point for your business?

Simon Leslie: In 2000, I think it was around 2000...Just to paint a picture of where I am at this point,...I'd already had 3 or 4 failed businesses

I'd had a failed business in real estate, textiles and publishing, so I'm on my fourth venture - the clouds are dark and grey, the walls are closing in - we are not very big at this stage, maybe 8 people....we've got a tax bill coming up and I'm thinking, here I go again, this is another failed business.

..and something really miraculous happened - that's the only way I can describe it it was a miracle.

One morning I opened up our banking system to see how much money we had and didn't have ... and there was ￡57k from Kleinwort Benson (German bank - now Kleinwort Hambros)

... and Kleinwort Benson had been an advertiser  in one of my magazines so I guess they paid us by accident.... and this was a big German bank so you're thinking efficiency in a private bank and you think well they're going to work it out and ask for their money back.

And after a couple of weeks when they didn't I thought, let's see if I can put this money to work and see what I can do with it. 

Now, if someone had given me ￡57k and said run your business, I'm not sure that would have made the same difference. Sometimes I listen to people telling me how much funding they got blah blah - it doesn't mean anything

...it's what you do with that money and how you behave with that money.

Because I felt it wasn't my money, I was looking after it for someone else I was very frugal about how I used it.

...and within a couple of years we were profitable and successful and kept accumulating. 

In April 2003 we sold the business for the first time...and the day after...not before... the day after we completed we received a letter from Benson saying we seem to have mis-paid you.

Simon with Easyjet Publisher, Phil Castle running the NY Marathon in 2009 to prove to the team what the mind can do.

David Citron: What else would you say people need to create a successful business?

Simon Leslie:

You need to consider 3 simple questions

Do I love what I'm doing, am I incredibly passionate and will I work every hour God gives for it?

Does somebody actually need it?

Will somebody pay me for it?

Unless you can answer those 3 questions you shouldn't be doing it!

Also...

There's lots of successful businesses that failed because everyone told them that the market didn't want it - they just didn't find the market that was right for it.

I've bought businesses that were hugely failing and I've turned them around because I found the market for them. 

How many phone calls did you make? How long did you sit up thinking about it? How many people did you talk to about it? Did you do really look at every avenue you possibly could have done before you either threw the towel in or decided it was a huge success?

So many businesses especially in this market today who won't be here when this wave passes. They didn't have enough cash, they didn't have enough loyalty in their business and they didn't have staff who believed what they believed.

The most important thing to me in this whole exercise is how I can retain the majority of my staff during this difficult period, because they're the ones who are going to get me out of this when it all comes back again.

They are more important than everything else. Whatever sacrifices a company has to make - staffing shouldn't be one of them.

Ink Takes a Team Up Kilimanjaro

David Citron: You have an amazing way with employees and leadership. What stories can you tell us which help us understand your staffing philosophy?

Simon Leslie: Yes, but I wasn't always like that. It took a moment in 2008 where I dug deep inside me. In the early days I was always coaching and trained on 'you've either got it or you don't and there's nowhere in-between'.

One of our most successful sales people - back in 2001 had come from Xerox - had incredible training was good on the telephone but just couldn't do it.

... and for some reason we just carried on pursuing with her whereas everybody else would have thrown her out the door and said 'thanks very much but you can't do it here' and I genuinely believed at that stage that people could either do it or couldn't do it, you couldn't really get them to that point. 

But we persisted with her and she went on to become one of our greatest salespeople - she married someone she met in the office, they had a baby together - they live in Ibiza now and even yesterday she messaged me saying 'how are you, how are you dealing with all this?' and I said 'it's just nice to hear your voice'. 

Simon with First Employees in Atlanta Office 2006

David Citron: I want to dig deeper about this woman who lives in Ibiza? Some would say, yeh but cashflow is cashflow - if someone isn't performing at what point to you say goodbye? At that stage you didn't believe - so why did you stay with this employee?

The truth is if someone turns up everyday and works bloody hard, I'll back them and I think that still applies today.

If people really come in and do their best, it's our fault that they don't succeed because we just haven't coached and trained them and educated them to the point where they can be successful.

If people come in and their lazy and they don't want to do the basics that we ask them to do and their not prepared to put the process in on the calls, I've got no patience for them at all.

I think she worked really hard, she made lots of phone calls, she had lots of conversations - some people get it quicker and some people take longer and probably in the period that she was there I probably lost 2 or 3 other people who I didn't have the patience for and I guess thinking about it in hindsight she gave everything and she did her best.

She was resilient and with all the rejections she turned up the next day with a smile on her face - she was a positive human being.

Staff Loyalty: Steve Andrews has worked with Simon for over 15 years

David Citron: Considering current circumstances - are there any pivots that you are considering because of the Covid19 situation - are you seeing this as scary, challenging, exciting? Do you feel your creativity bubbling up or are you finding yourself sinking into any sort of paralysis with it all.

I feel like I'm working longer days, having more conversations, with more interesting people by the way, as the days pass by. 

I feel enthusiastic and positive that when it passes that the team are in a good place - depending how long it goes on for - we've kept them stimulated and we're bringing in groups speakers to talk to them, all of them from their home offices in the next couple of weeks just to make sure that their working on their mindset.

And this is an opportunity for us to think about where we want to take the business in the next phase, how we grow the business from here on in, what the business version 2.0 looks like. 

Always Growing: Ink's New ReachTV Network at US Airports

We have regular team meetings and I jump into some of them just so they can see my face so that they can see that I'm positive and not pulling my hair out.

It's actually quite cathartic for me because this is the first time in in 33 years that I don't have to worry about targets or budgets or numbers or how pages we've got left to sell or how many ad slots we have to sell. 

All I have to worry about is keeping myself fit and healthy and inspiring these guys to come back stronger.

I'm people first, numbers second. 

David Citron: Have you made a pledge to your employees that you're holding onto them for a certain period of time? (question asked before government revealed support packages)

Simon Leslie: We have commited to keeping them whole, we haven't asked anyone to take a pay-cut. The leadership team have taken a pay-cut.

,,, and we've told them that we will keep them whole as long as we can. Now if it goes on 3 months that's fine, if it goes on a year then we'll have a different conversation.

The challenge today is if people are really highly leveraged... they've gone and got too big expenses, too big a mortgage and too many cars - they're the ones that are struggling. 

People who have lived within their means, they've got their savings, they've got some element of a safety net they really are going to get through this quite easily.

Whereas it's the ones who are living hand to mouth every month that's where the pain is for this.

We've brought in wealth managers to help a lot of our successful team so hopefully they've done some sensible investing.

David Citron: Oh, that's fantastic. So you've brought in people to train people in financial maturity over the years. That's probably unusual for a big company to do that?

Simon Leslie:

Yeah.

I've got a young workforce and I've watched them fritter quite a lot of money away and I say, 'Just because you're making it now, at some point the harvest goes'.

Staff Appreciation: Simon at the Company's Award Ceremony

David Citron: You mentioned to me before the interview that you're in the best place you've been for a while with your personal relationships? What's helped with that and any sort of stories that might help other people who are trying to... I don't want to use the words work life balance because I don't believe in that, but work life harmony I prefer to talk about. Any words on achieving that?

Simon Leslie:

There's no such thing as work life balance.

If you've got a supportive partner who believes in you and gives you all the support you need and understands what you're doing and why you're doing it and what the end goal is and you're giving them the things to be able to live their life to the best of their ability, then it'll work out in time.

Because sometimes the wife wants something different to the husband and the kids want the latest trainers when you can't afford to give it to them.

So in 2012 I was the opposite of that. I had a fantastic family, fantastic life, fantastic business at that point and I was miserable, totally miserable and I couldn't understand it.

I went and I studied everything there was to know about happiness and understanding what makes people happy, what motivates them, what doesn't motivate them, what drives it. If there was a book written about happiness, I'd read it. If there was a paper issued or university course, I took it. So I really went through a year of really trying to understand what drives behaviours and emotions.

The other thing I think that helped, at the end of that year I produced a book called HappINKness, which was all the things, the positive things we've done as a business. That book is still going eight years later. Last year it was nearly 140 pages of success stories of the people who work with me.

The latest evolution of the book can be seen here.

Because the underlying root of happiness is, if you want to be happy then make other people happy, make someone else happy and give as much as you can.

And there is a point when you give too much and you go too far out of the way, you're left with no energy left for yourself, so you've got to make sure that you get what you need out of life because it's very easy to be a giver and to give and to help and to support.

But if you don't give yourself the same care and love and attention, then you're no good to anybody.

I remember one of the wellness and performance coaches came in to see me, he said,

"Look, you're giving everybody a lot of things, if you don't look after yourself, you won't be here to do it and there are a lot of people in this world who will be disappointed by that and that wouldn't be the right thing to do. So it's time now to start really investing in your health and well-being."

And that was definitely a pivotal moment for me, in terms of, I want to make sure that everybody else is okay, my family and kids through to my work colleagues.

Simon reaches another pivotal moment - the top of Mt Kilimanjaro

David Citron: Great, so take care of yourself along the way. What other insights have you noticed about making progress?

Simon Leslie:

When you start out and you're not very good.... then you get better and better and better and you can make these massive shifts.

Now, when you get to the point of success, now, you're only making very, very small advances, and sometimes you don't even know you're doing them, you don't even know you're getting better, you're just... It's tiny, incremental changes.

And I think that, the thing that we most think is, why am I not changing? Why am I not getting better? Why am I not seeing this?

When Usain Bolt does 9.96s he started off at 11 seconds .... But now he's shaving off 10 hundreths of a second, he ain't going to shave off another second.

And that's where a lot of people who become successful are. There isn't that, okay, how do I add a little bit more? Just a tiny little fraction more. And I think that, that's a really interesting way to look at life.

There are no more huge wins, there are going to be lots of tiny incremental wins.

David Citron:

Yeah. Lovely, okay. And how do you then stay happy with those, with that different level of win, that is incremental. Because if you're used to the big changes, you're used to the year when you went from 50,000 to 5 million or whatever it was, how do you come down from that opium high to these incremental ones?

Simon Leslie:

It's understanding it. I think most people haven't stopped and looked back and thought how far have I come? How far am I on that journey?

Am I in a good place and what's the next stop on this journey? And it might be just a tiny thing that's going to make a huge difference.

David Citron:

Now finally, a question in many people's minds - How do you get the attention of the big airlines to be the one to deliver what you're delivering?

Simon Leslie:

Yeah. There's no shortcuts, David. Everybody thinks, "Oh you know what? I know somebody who knows Richard Branson" and we have plenty of those who sat on our boards over the years.

The way we got Virgin's accounts, is that we kept going back year, after year, after year and presenting.

It's not because our chairman knew Richard Branson... It's because the product that we offered Virgin at the time, in 2017, was something that they needed. Every time we'd been there before, they didn't need our help and I hope they're going to need our help a lot more once this phase passes because we're going to do more for them.

Vera: Virgin Atlantic's in flight magazine published by Ink

And it's a case of, you've got to keep going, got to keep moving through the door and you've got to have a better story every time you turn up. Because the story that you went with, if you keep going back with the same story, you're going to keep getting the same response.

You have to change your story, you've got to go through your process.

So, everybody's got a problem. Everybody's got a challenge. Anyone who tells you that life is beautiful and everything is fine, is living in fantasy land because it never stays fine for very long.

It'll be fine for a month or two and then all of a sudden ... You've stopped doing the things that made it fine and that's what happens, that's when it falls off a cliff.

If you want that nugget for sales, it's simple. Find out what the pain point is, find out what's the problem they need fixing, not what you have to sell.

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This was a Business Mastery Through Stories post.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can do two things to further your growth straight away.

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2) Read more about Simon Leslie in his book 'There is No F In Sales'. 100% of profits are donated to Beam - a groundbreaking charity which crowdfunds career training for the homeless!

There is no F in Sales:

A book about selling in every market condition