YouSaid · the spoken record

John Caudwell

lines on the record: 88
first: 2022-03-10
most recent: 2022-03-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, firstly, I am old, but when I'm older still, it's more of the same. I need to love and respect all those people around me. I need to change a lot more people's lives than I'm already doing. A heck of a lot more over the next 10 years if I'm lucky enough to live that. and drive everything forward for the benefit of people, but also make a success of my businesses. So all of that, I'm quite greedy, you see, but also probably to get Steven Bartlett to come to my next charity board. Take a table and be supportive of all these children that we help and bring in some of your amazing clientele and connections.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And give everything you've got and make it a success. But just don't get yourself into a huge mess that you never really thought that could happen to you.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“who I am and I don't you know I probably wouldn't change it but so this work-life balance I don't believe in look if you want to run a business make sure that your wife's on board make sure that she understands the potential sacrifices and make sure you do and make sure you've got the six critical success factors and if all of those are ticks in the box go for it if there's a lack of ticks in the box be cautious because there's more people damaged by going into business than there is those people that are pleased that they're dead it's not this romantic notion oh I'll run my own this and we'll be wealthy and we'll have a lovely house and a beautiful car it's not like that at all it's hardship and graft for most people make sure you want it make sure your wife and family want it and then if all those boxes are ticks yeah fantastic go full steam ahead”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am male. I think the first thing is that I wouldn't change anything on that. And I was utterly focused on business to the detriment of my wife and family. But I say detriment self-critically because I'm not sure that's true because I was always as kind as possible, always as loving as possible and always would put important events forward. So my children would probably say if they said, did you get enough of dad? And they'd say, well, we didn't get that much of him. But when he mattered, when it mattered to us, he was there, when we'd got a problem, he was there. And I would always, if there was a significant problem, like that employee I told you about who was broken down. When somebody really needs me, I'm absolutely there for anybody important to my life. But I wasn't able to be a devoted, doting person.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I always really knew I just wasn't very good at implementing it and that's just I think loving people caring for society and making the world a better place and I think if you can do that No matter who you are, no matter how little money you've got, if you can just contribute to society in a positive way, the feelings are immensely positive. But there's the obvious lesson that health is critical. I mean, I did nearly die on that mountain road in Italy. I could have had a death from four or five different reasons because the injuries were so severe. And health is utterly, utterly vital. But that's an obvious statement. But I think when you've experienced as much ill health as I have, mainly with my family, but also these accidents I've had, which have been an endless stream of accidents over the last 40 years, which are self-imposed, you know, entirely my own fault. It's the way I live my life. I live my life for thrills, you know, as well as making the world a better place. I have my own world which is...”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“to give him proper satisfaction. That might just be spreading the word of Pans Pandus and I pay him a wage to do that, you know, but whatever it is, I think he's definitely on the pathway to a fulfilling life. And that's thanks to my daughter, my ex-wife, and all the effort my family have put in alongside Jenny Frankovich in Stanford and the psychiatrists in LA. So it's quite a happy result. And I think there's an old expression where there's life, there's hope. And there is really hope for those pans pandas kids, but we need to get the message out.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we hope, we are hoping for full cure. We're hoping that he'll be able to travel one day soon. But for the moment, it can just go down. We got in this house specially right on the side of Beverly Hills. I mean, also wealth comes into this. You know, we're so lucky to have the wealth because when you get a child like that, like our children with Cordwell children, you haven't got the resources to help them. It's devastating. You've got the most devastating situation with your child. But you're unable to do anything financially to do what you need to do. Anyway, we bought him this house on the side of Hollywood Hills, and he's only five minutes away from Sunset Boulevard. So he's got a life commuting between the two. Girlfriend and a lovely life, you know. And all we need to do now is get him to the next level where he can travel and maybe find a meaningful form of it.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And can liaise and relate to everything and he's inspiring other people. So it's, I hope that the trauma that we've been through, that he's been through more importantly, we can turn to making him the biggest ambassador for Pans Pandas and for using his dreadful situation to help hundreds of thousands of other children around the world to avoid it or understand it and deal with it better.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's one of the symptoms and the things that happen as one of these anxieties. Agoraphobia, hermetophobia, a whole range of symptoms and lots of others as well. Anyway, eventually we ended up moving Rufus down to from Stanford down to LA where we'd found a whole psychiatric team. We wanted to put him in a clinic first of all. Now bear in mind he couldn't travel. Every time we moved him even five miles from the house was traumatic. Traumatic for him and traumatic for us. Anyway, we did manage to get him to, I actually bought a $200,000 American motorhome, put Wi-Fi in it to try and make the journey tolerable to him in concept and in reality. But it was still traumatic taking him down in this Winnie Bago. And anyway, we got him under this team of people. I'm not going to tell the story from there on because it's a bit long. And also there's a lot more trauma to come, but he's now in really great shape. He's not cured, but he's living a good life and a happy life.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they won't be getting the help that they need or the diagnosis. So I really hope they go on and look at this because it might transform their lives and the lives of their child. But this is a big challenge I've got going forward to get this out there, this message out there. And it's quite easily identifiable at first because it's the same thing. It's a collapse of somebody that's fairly sudden, unexpected for not really any identifiable reason. And there's a whole range of symptoms, but some of those are absolutely anxiety, fear. Then Rufus Casey went on to develop all sorts of symptoms like air hunger, which is horrendous. An air hunger is best described. I mean, I can't describe it really very well because I've never, I don't really understand it, but Rufus has described it as like somebody puts a plastic bag over your head and seals it and you gasp him like this for every last breath until it passes.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody knows about Pans Pandas, so it's one of my great big campaigns over the next few years to make sure all the medical authorities understand Pans, understand that it's a real illness, understand the symptoms and start working out what the very best treatment is. Anyway, we found some experts and they had been treating pans pandas for a few years. So we took Rufus over and Jenny Frankovich, this expert on pans pandas, started treating him. Anyway, he still didn't really get a lot better. He had ups and downs. But he'd got this horrible, horrible symptoms that pans pandas people get. They get a whole range of symptoms. I hope your listeners will go on to the pandas, pandas, the website and look at these symptoms because some of your listeners will have a young child who is suffering from pans pandas.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know whether he ever would have done that, but that's the way it was. And it was a very traumatic period of my life for many, many years. I'm lucky because my ex-wife was utterly devoted to me and looked after him. And when she was then no longer able to, my eldest daughter took on the mantle and became an amazing, amazing carer for him and just looked after him to her own self-sacrifice, massive self-sacrifice, actually, because she lived Rufus's life, even though she got a husband and a life in America. She just lived Rufus's life with him. So we had amazing support. And then we found out about Pans Pandas.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We treated him for that, but he never really, he just deteriorated, carried on deteriorating to the point where he was utterly suicidal. He'd lie on the bed rocking all day pulling his hair out, screaming, screaming. He just wanted to die. And he's since told us that the only reason he didn't kill himself was because we were there fighting every second of the day to keep him alive and fighting with the authorities and the medical people to try and find a solution. And he was like my mother really surrounded by love. And if you surround somebody by love, it makes it more difficult for them to do something, not that that would stop everybody, but Rufus said that's what kept him alive. And we kept him alive. We had to have 24 supervision in the bedroom in case he jumped out the window.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We took him to a therapist. The therapist started doing all the retrograde looking at his life and blah, blah, blah, blah. Was there any traumatic events and there wasn't? And just going through everything. Nobody over the next few years could find anything that was causing this illness. Nothing. And eventually, and this was only about seven or eight years ago, after he'd been suffering already for about probably the best part of about eight, nine years already, we found out that he'd got Lyme disease. We didn't know about Pans Pandasan. No Lyme disease can show as a set of physical and conditions, but also neurological. It can attack the brain and cause neurological situations where your brain is unable to respond appropriately and normally because of this bacterial infection.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost to the point of physically dragging him, not that I did, but I was feeling like come on, Rufus, please get in the car. You know, you know you'll be fine once we get on the road. Because I'd had it with my other children. I knew exactly what was going on, or so I thought. didn't get him to school. And I actually never got him to school again, not properly. And the next day he's still in a dreadful state. It wasn't really anxiety, it's just that he couldn't leave the home. Well, it must have been anxiety, but I couldn't explain it. And”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll add that with all my children,'cause as much as they wanted to go to boarding school, after a weekend at home with the family, you know, they'd feel emotional about it and wouldn't really want to leave the family home. And I knew I had to be quite hard and firm and cold about it, you know, and say, no, of course you do, Rufus. It's always like this. You get this pain in the pit of your stomach that you're leaving the family home and you're going to school. But it's fine. You know, you'll be fine once we get in the car and we just go. He said, no, dad, this is different. I said, what do you mean? I said, don't be silly. And I tried everything in my power to be persuasive, inspirational, hard. I tried every emotion to get him in that car.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He collapsed on me, I was taking him back to school on a Sunday night, he was at boarding school, which was all my children went to boarding school, but as their request was never something I wanted them to do particularly, but they wanted to do it. So Rufus went to boarding school. He was home for an Exiat. And on the Sunday night, he said, Dad, I don't want to go to school.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sick with Lyme disease. Yeah, it was a huge irony, really, because all of my kids were very, very healthy and I felt hugely privileged and even more privileged when I got involved in the NSPCC and saw these tragic cases of abuse. And then when I set up Cordwell Children and saw all these children that so desperately needed help and who had been born with nothing, you know, in a traumatic situation. I felt unbelievably lucky. And that luck lasted for, I suppose, six years. I think Rufus ill. No, seven or eight years, and then Rufus fell ill with Lyme disease and panspandus. We didn't know any of this at the time because none of the doctors knew anything about it. He fell ill with anxiety.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“like a lot of charities are, I decided that the Cordwell group would pay every single running cost of the charity, so all the wages, all the cars, all the telephones, everything. And not only that, but every single employee would be involved in the charity in some way, either by donating themselves or by fundraising to try and raise money for these kids. That's what we did”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The NSPCC is a fantastic charity, but I wasn't getting enough satisfaction out of hands on seeing the difference I'd made, and I knew I could do a lot more. And so I decided to found my own charity, which was called All Children. And with the objective of helping every child in the UK that needed help, and the only qualifier wouldn't be anything to do with what illness or the only qualifiers that the parents couldn't get the help anywhere else. So any child with any illness, serious illness, we would be there to help. And that's what we've done and up to yet help 60,000 and still growing it enormously now. And to avoid the criticisms of the NSPCC had, which was that the overheads were high, and I'm not criticizing that because I'd have to really understand the nuts and bolts of everything. So I'm certainly not implying any criticism of that, but they were criticized for the overheads being too.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“abused. Often my relative, maybe the father, may be the mother or an uncle or a friend, and they were sexually abused Looking at this in horror. But what was even more horrible, if anything could be, was that the child then couldn't do anything about it because Daddy would say you don't want Daddy to get in trouble, do you for showing his love? Daddy will go to jail and you don't want that, do you? So this sexual abuse would just continue and continue and continue. And the older the child would get, the more the child would think this is horrible, horrible and feel guilty and dreadful about it, but the same threat that the father would go to jail was sitting over them. I thought, just how horrendous is that, how horrendous. So I got really bought into the NSPC then. I immediately fired into action. Ended up as president of the North Staff's branch for a short period of time. What happened next was, I mean, that was the pivotal moment, really. But what happened next?”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's not going to raise a lot of money. And somehow I evolved in that meeting to taking over it and being largely responsible for running it and making it successful. And it was celebrities that were playing cricket against other celebrities, you know, and just a fundraiser that was in the local cricket. It didn't make a massive sum of money, but that was the moment that really got me involved. But then the NSPCC, realizing I could be a useful asset, got me to come down to a centre and have an understanding of the work they did, which I didn't really understand. I knew it was to help children, but I didn't really understand. And when they showed me videos and taught me through, it was young children, sometimes as young as three and four and five.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was absolutely. I mean, everything that you've described there was evolutionary, but there was an absolute pivotal point because during the years of growing the business, and I've already tried to describe the difficulties and challenges I faced in that, I was all consumed. And charity was the last thing on my mind. But the destiny was still written in stone somewhere in my DNA. It was just buried by the need to maintain the success and keep the success and not lose it. And there were so many threats that I had to be 100% focused. One day the... The NSPC came to me and said there's a Lord Taverner's cricket. I don't know why I held this meeting, but I did. It was a charity meeting. They said, there's a Lord Taverner's cricket match in Stone. Would you sponsor it? And they gave me the details and I thought”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's amazing and joy like that can never be replaced by anything. I can have all the boats in the world, all the helicopters, all the trappings that I do have, which are lovely and wonderful. But without that, there wouldn't mean much to me. And it's that sense of spiritual satisfaction from changing a person's life, especially a child's, that you'll never get from restaurant meals or boats or holidays. You just never get it. Yeah, you enjoy it. And I take all my friends and I have a lovely time. Really enjoy it. But does it really go down into my heart like the 60,000 children we've helped and the tillies of this world? No, can't even begin to compete.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Understand this wheelchair worked, and I said, Tilly, I thought your arm was too weak to lift a weight like that. She said, It is. I said, well, how are you doing that? She said, oh, I've got two foot pedals there. And one of them, well, the foot pedals motorize. This bracket that lifts her home. So she got power assisted on. She's drinking this coffee, and I'm thinking the absolute trauma that she's gone through in life, and yet she's done everything with grace, with spirit, with enthusiasm, even ending up at Stanford University six thousand, five thousand miles from home.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not responsible for that. I helped because we supplied her with a wheelchair that she could not have probably succeeded without it. But her and her parents and other support groups around her, we all as a team, but her mainly more than anybody, made this happen. And I visited her at Stanford University, we went for a coffee together. And she's in a wheelchair, the one that we supplied, you know, with a little joystick buzzing along the pavement. I'm there on my bike. I'd cycled down from my son's house. And they're cycling along. She's in a wheelchair. We get to Starbucks. I go and buy her coffee. And she's got this Starbucks coffee on a tray in front of her wheelchair. And she's got a support mechanism on her arm that gives a little bit extra stiffness. And this coffee's quite a big coffee. And she lifts it up. But I'm thinking, I didn't really know, understand how she was doing that, which clearly didn't.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the children helped when she was three years old was Tilly, and Tilly had type too muscular atrophy which stops all the muscles working. She actually won of her own absolute brilliance and effort, a scholarship at Stanford University. Now it's unbelievable”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but I wasn't lonely. I mean I had a wonderful wife, eventually went on to have two children during that time, well, three eventually. And I wasn't lonely at all. I lived for the business and I'd got some great relationships within the business with people who, you know, I was really close to Craig Benny, who was my financial director, who was the one that monitored. I felt like he was my brother. But my brother was in the business as well. So there were these close relationships within the business, not very many, but enough to not feel lonely. And then I got my wife and children at home. So the loneliness never came to fruition. I wouldn't ever want to go back to that because I've never got a huge number of friends and some very special friends and a lot of loving relationships. So I would never want to give that up. But actually the charity is part of that because some of the children that we've helped in Cordwell children are immensely successful in their own right. I was telling somebody on a yesterday that”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I didn't have any choice. I know it sounds bizarre, for I had no choice. It's like now a lot of my life is stressful on the charity work, but I don't have any choice. You know, I give up and sacrifice lots of personal things to do the things that I'm doing from a charitable perspective. I mean, don't get me wrong, I have a great lifesto. I don't want any sympathy on that, but I'm just saying I do. And it's my destiny. And I can't give it up. You know, people say, why'd you do all this? Why'd you miss out on things that you could be doing? Why don't you just take it easy? Why don't you earn that? So I've got no choice. It's just written into my DNA. I must do it. And so I do. It's just who I am. I can't explain it, really. It's just who I am.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my DNA, I visualized when I was seven or eight years old, and it was an immensely strong visualization of being in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce and a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce because my father admired them and said they were the best coyer in the world and only rich people had them blah, blah, blah. So I'm in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce driving around the streets of Shelton, which is the back streets of Stokontran, and handing five pound notes out to poor people. That became, I don't know why, but it became my destiny. That destiny sat over me like a Damocles sword, you know, you've got to achieve that destiny else you've just failed completely in life. You have to do it. You have to do the wealth, and then you have to give that wealth away to make people's lives better.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't imagine really our heroine addict feels, but I think I was a heroin addict. You know, I'd get my shot of heroin and everything would be wonderful for an hour or two. And then the rest of it was despair.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just the nature of the business It was a horrible business. It really was a horrible business. I mean, It's created all my wealth. And I'm very grateful to the business, but it was a horrible business. I was sitting on the edge of my seat nearly every day for 20 years facing threat after threat after threat after threat. There was never a day went by that I didn't face a fairly significant threat, not of the significance that I've just talked about, but there were just endless threats. And, you know, it was really, really actually very tiring and not enjoyable at all. A lot of people that I know have said, oh, business is so enjoyable. Well, not for me, it wasn't. I mean, I enjoyed the success and I enjoyed some moments and some victories. But it was almost like...”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10% of the responsibility with any one employee. Now we can't all achieve that. I certainly couldn't achieve it and have never been able to achieve it since, but it's a goal to have in mind because that insulates you from any catastrophe whatsoever. So if people in business have got any business that was similar to mine where you're relying on customers and suppliers and so on, the 10% rule that I sort of innovated as a consequence of my experiences is an absolute golden rule to try and emulate.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I don't have sleepless nights, but I did on that because it was terminal. If I didn't find a solution, it was instantly terminal. You know, my turnover was going to drop immediately, my stores were empty. Nothing. No future. And all those employees would have been out of work. I'd have been bankrupt and I wouldn't be here talking to you today. I had to find a solution. And I did it with ferocity and passion and drive, you know, and I would not sleep a moment until I found enough solutions, not just one solution, enough solutions that gave me insulation. And what I always say to people going into business, follow my 10% rule about everything. Never have more than 10% of your supplies with any one supplier. Never have 10% of your sales with any one customer and never have”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To utter despair. Utter despair. On the one hand, Fires up the lion in me on the other. And I have got a lion in me, you know, and my brother once wrote a poem about that, that I could be the kindest and best friend, but don't make me an enemy. But just for clarity for your listener, I don't hold grudges against anybody ever. But if somebody really, really goes at me, they better beware. So it was a combination of these two aspects.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Commensurately at the same time, Motorola's market share started dropping. They were world leader until iPhone and Apple came out. So we helped Nokia get to world leader. Well, we helped them to get to UK leader and helped Motorola's massive decline. And listeners might think, ooh, that's a bit harsh, but it was not harsh because what do you do if somebody wants to destroy you like that in an unethical way as well? I don't mind fair competition, but it was very unethical. They'd help me build up to what I was. I had helped build their market share. Then it didn't suit them, but it was mostly on an unethical general manager who just wanted to kill my distribution and remove my distributorship so you could set up on his own.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The older ones because it was a really famous phone in its day. And I managed to do a deal with Nokia for huge quantities at a phenomenally advantageous price. And my goal. The nth degree not just as a vendetta, but because that was good for my business. And I was really, really upset with Motorola because they tried to kill me. And if I hadn't been able to find solutions, I would have been bankrupt. I wouldn't have survived. So we got this Nokia 101. And we absolutely blasted it out through our retail premises, through our airtime retailer services, and through just pure wholesale. And we built Nokia up to 20% market share in a year.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chris, look, we can build this business. You'll have my heart and soul and passion because I want to kill Motorola. I want to destroy them in the same way that they've tried to destroy me We did a deal with one of their old stock items that they'd failed with completely and I bought 3,000 units, which doesn't so much now. I mean, I bought that every second almost in the later days of Cordwell. But at that time, it was a monster deal, the biggest that's ever been done in the marketplace by anybody. And I bought these 3,000 units at a phenomenally low price. And I was able to Nokia on the face of the map with these units. And that wouldn't have saved the day for me had it not been for a bit of a stroke of luck as well, which was that Nokia had decided to get aggressive. They decided that they didn't want to be a nobody at the mobile phone business. They'd got a new phone coming out, the 101, and they really wanted to capture market share. Well, that's music to my ears because it was a lovely little phone. It was once again before your time, really, but it was a lot of listeners will remember it, especially.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do it very, very secretively, you supply me and I can go out to the market and continue doing what I'm doing. And I managed to get two suppliers who bought into that and supplied me with a kit cheaper than I'd been buying it before because motorroll had always manipulated me and given me a price that was far worse than I should have had for the volume that I was doing. So I managed to keep going immediately on that, but that wasn't the answer because I didn't want to help motorola. So another situation occurred where I asked Nokia to come in to see me. They were actually quite reticent to do so. The guy Chris Jones, who was there sales director, eventually did come and see me. We got on like a house on fire in spite of his reputation for being a real bit of a hard knot. We did just get on very, very well. Nokia had only got 1% market share. And I said to him.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way I dealt with it was Every challenge in life, whether it's business, personal, or anything, is just that, it's a challenge. And there's always a solution. And you've just got to put your intellect towards what the solution is. So what was the solution here? Well, I just looked at the marketplace and there was lots of service providers who are the people that sold the airtime on behalf of Vodafone, Celnet, and so on. And these service providers were distributing motor roller, of course, because that was 90% of their business. And they were getting discounts according to the volume they took. So I went and I'd confidential conversations with a couple of them and said, look, why don't I buy from you? And what I can do is I can add my massive volume onto your volume, and you'll get a huge retrospective discount, a much better buying price. We'll have to keep it secret from motor roller because otherwise they might cut your supply off.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With motorola as his supplier. So he went from general manager to my competitor, but having stripped me of all of my turnover. How do you deal with that”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we don't really like this distribution model of yours. And we really hate the fact that you're undercutting, hate the fact that you're competitive and it's doing us a lot of damage around the world and in the UK. And if anybody was going to do that, I'd be doing it. I naively at the time that to mean motor roller wanted to take my distribution off me. A month later he terminated my distribution agrimp. Don't forget this is ninety percent of my business. By then I got sixty or seventy employees, huge overheads, and motor always ninety percent of my business. He terminated my agreement and one month later resigned from motorola and set up his own distribution business on the south coast of England.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was very weird because on the one hand they would encourage me to do something, then they might get a plaint because I'd exported to China, perfectly legitimately Brad exported to China and they didn't like that. So then they get a complaint from the Chinese and the people that were in those territories. The English guys were very happy because I'd done the volume. The Chinese guys were complaining to head office. The complaint came back to the UK and the UK then had to come and say, well, you mustn't do that again. But then they'd still encourage me to take big volumes, which they knew I couldn't do without exporting around the world. So it was this very tenuous relationship. Anyway, eventually a new manager took over and he came to see me. He took me out to lunch, which was a very rare occasion, but we went out to lunch and stoke on Trent. And we talked about the business model and so on. And he said.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other 10% was a bit here and a bit there, the odd Panasonic, the odd Nokia, but really almost inconsequential because Motorol had the entire market share. And the relationship with Motorola was always very tenuous because although we came to sell vast volumes, it was a bit of a, well, they always referred it as the tail wagging the dog. You know, when the tail wags the dog, they don't like it. So when they're encouraging you to do huge volumes for them, that's wonderful. As you gain volume, you get in power. As you gain power, they feel vulnerable. And as they feel vulnerable, they want to cut your power. I mean, this was with every manufacturer, with everything in my life. I grew these people and then they wanted to chop me down because I grew too powerful and they didn't like that situation. Anyway, motor roller had been threatening me for a couple of years.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feeling very emotional about that. But that was a very emotional occasion to make certain that I didn't let her down. But in the early years of cellular, we had probably 90% of our business was through motorola. Motorola were world leaders by a long way.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've sort of been quite lucky mostly because that's the only time I can remember my body rebellion. But I think anybody's would, you know, because you can't work 22 hours a day under immense pressure. You just cannot do it. I get an hour and a half sleep and doing that for seven nights, seven days. I don't think anybody could probably do it. And it's probably the only time that my system started to fail. But then with the odd tranquilizer, I was able to keep going. It calmed us whatever with this retching was, it calmed it down. I was okay. And then I had no other symptoms. And this is just pure look of life. You know, it's just the look of life that nothing's been able to cave me in. You know, there was, I was thinking when I answered that question, do I tell you about my mother? Well, I told you that because it's very topical for me at the moment having lost my mother.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think there were, if I remember rightly, I think they were Librium. Just an acety that the doctor had given me. I wasn't feeling anxious. My nervous system was just shot. I just got so much stress and pressure to save my mother's house. Even though it wasn't under immediate threat. But I've always done that. I've always seen the threat a long way in advance, which is what keeps you safe. Because then you react. But it didn't keep me safe physically because, you know, it put me under enormous pressure to try and make certain that day never came.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really drove me at the time I was still working at Mitchell Entire Company. I was doing 50 hours a week there. I was doing probably 70 or 80 hours a week at the car sales site as well and going out and doing all the buying. I remember for a period of six months, I worked 22 hours a day, one week and three, because I was on night shift at Mitchell in that week. And on that night shift, I'd get home at 7am. I'd have two hours with my, well, one and a half, two hours with my wife. And off I'd be going to the auctions, buying cars during the day, running the car sales site at night until I went to work at 11 o'clock on the night shift again. And I did that one week and three for about six months. It did nearly finish me. I was on tranquilizers because I was retching and I was so disturbed. You know, I was in a real mess. But I was able to find.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was before then. It was about 1982, perhaps, but they dropped off a cliff. Now, we weren't in financial difficulty, but the trajectory would have put us on it. And I started really, really, really panicking. And there was not much I could do about it because every time I went to a car, you couldn't even open the door. It was frozen solid. The batteries were always flat. There was no customers anyway. We couldn't clear the frost off with the great difficulty. If you hosed it down with water, the water would freeze. I mean, it was a nightmare, a complete nightmare. And I started having visions of letting my mother down and failing her in a bad way.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the answer of the question of the trauma, all went well during the summer, but as November came, sails dropped off a cliff, and we started losing money hand over fist because there was just no sails. It was a very, very grim November and December and all the cars were frozen up. It was one of those winters that were just horrendous back almost before you were, or probably was before you were born, actually.”
2022-03-10 · The Diary of a CEO · Phones 4u Founder: The Pain Of Becoming A Billionaire: John Caudwell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT