I know that there's going to be a lot of young entrepreneurs watching this. I know that they typically ask me the same questions, so I won't ask you just a couple of them before we wrap. One of them I get a lot is, you know, there'll be someone listening to this, they don't buy any money, they want to start a business, they don't have an idea, but they want to start a business. What would you say to them?
If you don't have an idea or money. Yeah. But they want to be young entrepreneurs, I get this a lot. So the first thing for me would be to find out what you're truly, truly passionate about.
Because for me, when I started Gymshark, I made two fitness apps beforehand. I made two fitness apps that failed miserably. yeah, the discipline that I learned, the structure, the fact that if I was tired on a Monday, the gym doesn't care. Go in and lift, it doesn't matter.
And most importantly, that if January 1, I join the gym, and I lift five days a week, every single week, by December 25, whatever, I am better than I was a year ago. Those lessons to me were massive. Because previously, I didn't really realize that. And I do this thing in school where I'll be like, I'd try really hard and get a bad grade.
And then there'd be another thing I wouldn't try out and I'd get a really good grade. It didn't add up to me. So for me, I was in love with the industry. And fitness was and is my passion.
And that's carried me through some of the difficult times because I remember the difference it's made in my life. And it's this inherent passion that drives me every day. So if you've got no ideal money, just lean into that community, whatever it is, it might be boxing, it might be golf, it might be videography, it might be motorcycles or bicycles or whatever, lean into it. Because inevitably, there will be an opportunity, especially now because of this new social media world that we live in.
There's a massive, there's so much room for people to create brands. So yeah, I would just lean into whatever your passion is. It's so true because you can waste a ton of time procrastinating and falling into indecision by trying to guess. As you said there, I read that Gymshark was actually like the seventh Apple website you created.
So you like leaned into the industry, did this process of like failure and exploration and stumbled across the winner, right? You have to fail. This is one of the, if you're a young entrepreneur, just do not be afraid to fail. Just all names out of boxes, ideas out of boxes aside, the likelihood of an individual starting a business and that one being the one that strikes gold is ridiculously low.
What we've got to remember is you can start 30 businesses and you're still more likely to fail than you are succeed. So just honestly, just keep trying and keep trying. Don't be afraid to fail. I think that's so, so, so important.
And everyone I've met, by the way, from the people that run businesses that are 10 times bigger than Gymshark to every entrepreneur that I've met, every business person, every successful person in sport, in business, whatever, whether they've started a business or not, every single one of them has failed time and time and time again. And I think then people look at the final product and just assume that they've just, they were either this incredible human who had, was born this way or, and it's just never, never, ever the case. More often than not, all the most successful people I've ever met are all winging it. They're all literally just working incredibly hard and they're just giving it their best shot.
Can I ask you one more on this point? I think that's a super hard answer as well because it's just incredibly true. The other question I get a lot from entrepreneurs is something like, they're in a job at the moment and they've got an idea. So this is an example where they've got a business idea that they want to pursue, but they're just, you know, they've heard you say that, they want to pursue it, but there's something holding them back.
And they're, you know, I know you get this a lot as well. There's probably more conversation. What do you say to those people? Well, I think if it's your passion and I think you should jump in, but the other thing I would say, and this is, I think this is a dangerous thing.
I do see people online going, quit your job, jump in, go and do something. It's a bit like, personally, I'm thinking, no, don't quit your job, it's fine. Like, I worked at Pizza Hut for whatever, I can't remember what the amount was, it was four or five pounds an hour and Jim Sharp was doing hundreds of thousands in revenue. The utility of having a job whilst running a business is huge.
One, because you can earn money to survive, so you don't need to remove, you know, you don't need to remove money from the business. So two, you can then reinvest all the profits that you can make in that business. If you just quit, and two, by the way, if business number one fails, you've still got your job, you're trying to do the three and the four. And I think, whatever it is, find your passion.
I genuinely don't think it's a good idea to jump out of your job, just on a whim. There are some people, you'll hear about the one in a million that succeeds, and congratulations, I'm super happy for those people. You don't hear about the 99% that ended up quitting their job and it didn't go as well as what they would like and then they ended up having to go back and find a new job. So use that job as a superpower, as stability, and invest the money you own from that job in the business and just keep trying, trying, trying.
And hard work, where does that fit? What's the importance of it? Because there's a narrative I talk about this podcast that hard work is maybe a little bit, the narrative you see online from the hustle points, that's a little bit toxic. But would you beat that here without hard work?
Oh, definitely not. No, it's that combination of hard work alone is definitely not enough. You have to work hard but you also have to work smart. There were periods where we were finding out ways to manipulate Google in a way that got Gymshark to the top, which gave us huge revenue for an expert, no cost, right?
That was smart work. But there were days when we would work 12, 14, 16 hours sewing and printing t-shirts every single day. There were days like that now where we just work and work and work to get the job done. So exclusively hard work won't solve your problems.
You definitely have to work smart. But I've never met anyone who was genuinely successful that wasn't hard working.