FounderMetrics: Mark Wright

The second season of FounderMetrics has arrived and to kick things off, founder and CEO Ifty Nasir sat down with TV icon and business owner Mark Wright.

Mark is the founder of Climb Online and won the 2014 season of The BBC's hit show The Apprentice.

In a long conversation with Ifty, Mark opens up about his journey, reveals his very own lightbulb moment, and shares insights on what truly makes or breaks a business.

If you’re short on time, here are the highlights from their fascinating and broad-ranging chat. Got a few more minutes to spare? Click here to listen to the podcast in full.

The Apprentice

Joining The Apprentice, I couldn't have imagined in my wildest dreams how hard and how life-changing it was going to be.

When I first went to the tryouts, there were 75,000 people, and to say I didn't appreciate the scale is an understatement. We didn't have The Apprentice in Australia. I didn't know who Lord Sugar was. So, it was all new to me.

And then I went on and became Lord Sugar's business partner. He invested £250,000 into my company, which I founded with him. 

Working with Lord Alan Sugar

Working with Lord Sugar for eight years is no walk in the park! We would sometimes have objects flying across the room, we would sometimes have swear words flying across the room. It was all in good sport.

But the mentorship, guidance, and knowledge I gained from Lord Sugar's experience were just gold.

His brand of mentoring is old school. He pushes you right to the absolute precipice of what you're capable of achieving. He'll find out how much is in you.

The biggest lesson I got from him was that to make money and be successful, you need to have a great work ethic, be an expert at what you do, and be tough and resilient because a startup business is incredibly hard. You will quit before the business does.

If you want to be successful at starting a company, you need to have rhinoceros skin above all else.

Before accounting knowledge, legal knowledge, or industry expertise, you need to be resilient and have thick skin to survive the two or three years it takes to make a business successful.

Finding the path

Try lots of different things, and you'll find something you love and are really good at.

Any advice I can give to young entrepreneurs is to try lots and fail fast.

The world deserves that because you're probably better than everyone at something, and it's just about trying enough things to find that one thing. This is all to say I fell in love with digital marketing, and I was good at it.

That was the lightbulb moment. This was the first time in my life, around age 20, that I was really good at something that I enjoyed. When I was working, I wasn't looking at the clock. So that was the moment I realised I had found the right career path.

Metrics for success

What I learned as I went along is that one of the most important aspects of a business is the culture you create with the people you hire.

If you walk up to any of my employees, do they know where this company will be in five years? Do they know the values of this company? Are we all on the same page?

When I've done some consulting, I've found that the issues are nearly always the same. Generally, when I work with a struggling business, there's an entrepreneur or business owner who's scared to seek help.

Nine times out of ten, the same issues occur in other companies, but those companies have just found the right people to come in and fix them.

At the end of the day, they know their industry and business better than I do. I'm not there to teach them whatever it is they're doing, but I know what it takes to run a successful company.

What I'm looking for is a motivating individual with a strong work ethic and a vision for what they are trying to achieve with their company. Someone who is passionate and can articulate their five-year plan, the company's identity, and the reasons behind its founding.

Out of all the things I've learned in business, that's probably the best metric I've come to understand. If you're going to sit there and look at graphs, let me tell you, they all go up. I've never seen a cash flow forecast going down yet in all my years of owning businesses.

AI: Here to stay

I know that AI is the biggest revolution we've had since the internet. I think it's actually bigger: it's the most significant upgrade in our intelligence and technology that I've seen in my career, and I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole with it.

50% of it intrigues and excites me, and I can't wait to see where it goes. But 50% of it scares the hell out of me because of the power and the uses this technology has.

The good news and the bad news is that it's not going anywhere, so it's about learning and embracing it. However, I think it needs regulation - serious, serious regulation.

I think it's here to stay, and good entrepreneurs and business owners will learn it and use it. It'd be like saying the internet wasn't going to be part of your business moving forward. No one would say that now. I think AI is definitely going to be the same.

Helping each other

When I started my first business, I didn't know what a startup was. I didn't appreciate how hard and how lonely that journey would be for so long.

We all know the statistics about how many businesses go on and fail. We need to help each other, especially other entrepreneurs and business owners in the startup community.

So, I'm trying to fight the good fight by doing podcasts like this, working with people like yourself, to go and educate people in the right way to say - listen, it's not easy. It is actually really difficult. But it's possible, and it's a great life.

Listen now

You'll find Mark's episode and more from FounderMetrics wherever you get your podcasts, including Spotify. You can also watch the interview in full on YouTube. Don't forget to like and subscribe!