YouSaid · the spoken record

Alan Barratt

lines on the record: 110
first: 2019-04-10
most recent: 2019-04-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Influence and the people there that were bad influence, but they were all ten years older than me. And I was all of a sudden surrounded by people I looked up to who were a combination of sort of business people, just regular people and just generally criminals. And I was going to the gym and there was this big concerted effort really, I think, from the schools and my parents to really stop me going into this environment because they just didn't think it was going to be good for me. And they just thought I was going to be wasting my lives. And I'd been to some sort of bodybuilding event, I think it was on this one evening. And I went and worked at this event and it made me late on Monday morning for, I think it was biology. I missed the class. And I turned up and the teacher collared me and she'd been dying to have a go anywhere because I'd been going out with this girl who she didn't like. And she just said, oh, you know, where were you this morning?”
2019-04-10 · The Diary of a CEO · E30: Alan Barratt - From £27 to £72 million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, and she I got into an argument with her. Anyway, she went and got, and she looks from a dictionary. I was right. And that happened probably quite a lot where the teacher would mark something according to the answer. Very often the answer book was wrong. So I bunked off school a lot. And I pretended I was ill a lot. And because my mom was a bit of a soft touch and she knew I wasn't really ill. And I did kind of muddle through school and I did do quite well. But I started at A levels and I thought, you know what, I just can't stand this anymore. And I dropped out after a year. I got into big, big row with one of the teachers. I won't tell you what I said, but it got me into a lot of trouble. What did you say? I started dating a girl when I was doing A-levels who was, again, quite disruptive in the school. And I think I was probably seen as someone who had got quite potential academically. And I started hanging out with her. And I already discovered I liked going to the gym at this point. So there were people that were...”
2019-04-10 · The Diary of a CEO · E30: Alan Barratt - From £27 to £72 million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“School, I just found it really boring. I couldn't get on with the teachers. And I was just, I was probably disruptive, not in the sense of, you know, swearing and throwing things around. But I've just always wanted to challenge convention. I remember once the teacher, she wrote a word on the board and I remember the word was Mississippi and she felt it wrong. So I remember saying, oh, you've felt that wrong. And she said, no, I haven't. I said, all you have. It's M-I-S-I-S-S, I P-I. And I was six.”
2019-04-10 · The Diary of a CEO · E30: Alan Barratt - From £27 to £72 million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“from the age of fourteen onwards I was really interested in weight training because I wasn't interested in any other sports. I wasn't interested in rugby, cricket, football or any of the traditional stuff. So I was kind of interested in being healthy and doing something, but I didn't know what it would be because again, my family weren't interested in those type of sports either. So from the age of 14, I went to a gym on work experience. And in the late 80s, all the big movie stars were Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know, it was a big deal to kind of watch Commando and Predator in the late 80s because it was an 18 and we were like 13. And I remember thinking, I want to look like that because I was really skinny. I was like, I was just under 11 stone at six feet tall. So everything's just come with big Al for a joke because I was so bloody skinny. When I work experience and actually my dad and my family were really against they were like, you're wasting your life. You know, it's a waste because academically I'm fairly clever. But I just hate.”
2019-04-10 · The Diary of a CEO · E30: Alan Barratt - From £27 to £72 million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so my family had had their own business, said they'd only ever worked for themselves since post Second World War they had a heavy goods vehicle mechanics business. Only just my dad and my uncle and my granddad and they'd worked exceptionally hard, too hard really, I think, and never made any money. I mean, my uncle, for example, he never moved out of home. He never had a girlfriend. Nowadays, I think he'd have been someone who was probably prescribed as having definitely some sort of social disorder. He probably never spoke to 20 people in his whole life. And he worked with my dad in this business. And the expectation was I'd go into that business. And anyone that knows me, I'm not practical. I couldn't put together something from IKEA with the instructions and all the parts. I'm not mechanically minded. I physically just can't.”
2019-04-10 · The Diary of a CEO · E30: Alan Barratt - From £27 to £72 million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this guy contacts us and he said, I've worked at GNC for 20 years. He said, I see 120 weight loss products a week. And you'll stood out. So at that point, then I think we just thought, you know what, we're on to something here. Yeah, it's certainly, I'm sure, would have been a lot easier if we did have rich parents. I've got far from rich parents. But, you know, if you've got the time and the willingness to do something, then yeah, you don't need absolute pots of cash. I think you just need the willingness and the ability to go and do something and make a difference. That's what we've done. And disrupting doesn't necessarily have to be expensive. It just needs to be disruptive.”
2019-04-10 · The Diary of a CEO · E30: Alan Barratt - From £27 to £72 million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just the two of us. I'm not really sure at what point what we thought we were doing when I look back, but it seemed like a good idea at the time and then probably was. And at that show, we had, there were a few Americans there. This was a British show. And one of these American guys took a picture of our tank and this product and he sent it to the buyer of the weight loss buyer for GNC in the US.”
2019-04-10 · The Diary of a CEO · E30: Alan Barratt - From £27 to £72 million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't take a day off for four years, so we couldn't afford to employ anyone. We really, I think, learnt quite quickly in the power of doing something with very little money and being very cost conscious. So when it came to, say, doing a trade show, for instance, and a lot of our competitors, the big sports nutrition brands, would have Formula One cars in there and they'd have entire booths that took a week to build. And you could pretty much live in and they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And we couldn't do any of that. So we got a friend of mine. We convinced him to lend us his tank. So he's more eccentric than I am. We borrowed this tank and we drove this tank into this show. And we just stole the show. And that was our booth. So we just drove it in. We put like some camo netting over it and we had some products. And then my wife and I just stood there and we got like a t-shirt each that we paid sort of six pounds each for something.”
2019-04-10 · The Diary of a CEO · E30: Alan Barratt - From £27 to £72 million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we spent four years trademarking, so between 2006 and 2010, we spent four years, which took a lot of discipline and time and effort to be able to do. Did everything ourselves. So to date now, we've accumulated over 200 design marks, trademarks, pending patents. So we locked grenade down globally as a brand, which I think is probably the best thing that we ever did. But yeah, we just had no money to operate with in terms of doing anything. So we didn't pay ourselves a salary for four years.”
2019-04-10 · The Diary of a CEO · E30: Alan Barratt - From £27 to £72 million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet absolutely so we'd had, without going back to my childhood and boring everyone senseless, the business that we had in a say week, because my wife is the co-founder, so my wife and I started grenade. We had a distribution business, which I started in 1999, just out of my garage at home. And the idea of that was to import American-made sports nutrition products and distribute them throughout the UK. I won't believe the whole journey of that, but met my wife in 2003. She then came into the business in 2005. By 2008, we got bored of that business and sold it and basically decided to follow the dream, which was to have our own brand, which was grenade.”
2019-04-10 · The Diary of a CEO · E30: Alan Barratt - From £27 to £72 million · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT