Believe in Your Purpose: Interview with Seni Glaister, Co-Founder of Litalist
I recently went one on one with Seni Glaister, co-founder of Litalist and former CEO of The Book People.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Seni: I left school at an early age and have been running my own business ever since and I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way. With each new adventure and iteration, you develop a clearer idea of your strengths and weaknesses which allows you to focus and delegate accordingly. Though I’ve had my fair share of missteps, I’d like to think I learn and move on quite quickly, and I certainly am not going to make the same mistake twice – well, not the significant ones, anyway! A wrong assumption only becomes a failure if you don’t learn from it.
Of course experience brings enormous benefits but it can be a double-edged sword. There is a significant advantage attendant with the wide-eyed naivety of a first-time founder, one who doesn’t have much to lose in terms of reputation. Being unknown, unsuccessful or un-practiced means that nobody is watching you make mistakes and you’re less likely to feel inhibited when you give things a go speculatively. This freedom allows a bit more latitude to make those first, essential stumbles. Conversely, with success behind you people look more closely at what you’re doing. To overcome this I have to constantly remind myself to be brave not perfect (a phrase I borrowed from Reshma Saujani’s book of the same name, and apply liberally whenever I find a fear of failure interfering with my instinct.)
Other than a couple of poor character judgements, I don’t really have any regrets but I hate letting myself down and berate myself most if I don’t think I’ve given something my very best shot. Knowing it was within my power to do something better and admitting I didn’t execute it well enough, or try hard enough, will keep me awake at night, but if something doesn’t go quite as well as I’d have liked but I know I gave it my all, I’m ok with that. I am quietly confident I will always work harder than the next person, I’ve been doing that all my life, but I am also my own harshest critic.
Adam: How did you come up with your business ideas? What advice do you have for others on how to come up with great ideas?
Seni: Deep in the psyche of most successful founders is a strong pulse of creativity that absolutely must be acted upon. The more people I meet, whether from a business, tech or creative industry, the more I appreciate that the creative mind is very rarely at rest. The thrill comes from building something out of nothing, and that entity that you build absolutely would not/could not exist if you hadn’t had the idea and then personally acted upon it to make it happen. There’s an enormous amount of pleasure and satisfaction to be had, watching something come to fruition that once only existed in your head. And then, when real customers interact as hoped for, your blueprint becomes an entity with a pulse of its own and, with that pulse, a momentum to carry it forward.
Whether you’re building a business or writing a book or composing a piece of music or designing a house or knitting a sweater, the need to create something is a compulsion. That’s what we mean by being driven. Well intentioned people love to tell me their great business ideas and sometimes they will go on to tell me why they can’t build it for themselves but wonder if I might perhaps like to build it for them…That’s like asking me to write their novel. It wouldn’t be their story, it would become mine.
Most of my business ideas are solutions to problems I come up against in the real world. I encounter an issue, I wonder how I would solve it, and then I let it percolate. If the idea persists and nags at me to the point that I am unable to ignore it anymore, I’ll start to look at it seriously. Sometimes I have ideas that I know are sound, but they are simply outside of my area of expertise or I don’t feel passionately enough about them to try to solve them. I’ll still say them out loud, let them settle and re-examine them from time to time but they present an intellectual challenge, rather than something I would actively pursue. The harsh truth is that building a business is not easy. It takes time, effort, a lot of personal investment and risk and you will often end up making significant sacrifices in pursuit of your goal, so for me, it really has to be something that matters to me so greatly that not doing it would feel like a dereliction of duty.
Adam: How did you know your business ideas were worth pursuing? What advice do you have on how to best test a business idea?
Seni: Let it develop as an idea in your head, write it down into a one page plan, talk it through with people you trust and be prepared to believe in your idea so fully that if somebody tells you you’re wrong you shrug and tell the next person. That said, when an idea is really good, when everyone just immediately gets it and says yes, then you know you’re on to something big.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your businesses? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?
I don’t know a better way than to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topic of communications?
Seni: I can talk about the things I’m passionate about for as long as I’m given but I know by now that less is more. Learning to pitch your idea in timed slots, from three minutes to thirty is a great discipline for learning to land the points you want to make against the clock. I went through a period of time where I was working in a number of accelerators and I found these exercises very helpful, and the fairly relentless practice definitely improved my performance under stress. If you’re lucky, a pitch will lead to a question and answer session and then you have much more time to be reactive, and to allow your personality to shine through, but your pitch needs to work hard to grab the attention of the audience enough to get them to want to engage.
I like a narrative to run through my business story and that’s definitely my style but whatever you’re setting out to market, whether you’re selling an idea or a product, I’d advise you to find your voice and stay true to it. Authenticity is key and it isn’t something that can be faked or even learned. Everyone is trying to sell something to each one of us all the time and most of us are pretty hardened to resist the same formulaic approaches. And more than ever, people really don’t like to be sold to, they like to be part of that journey of discovery which is where that strong sense of narrative can really help add colour to your product.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Seni: Put your message or product out there, listen to the response, do more of what works, less of what doesn’t. Have fun with the story but be strategic: measure the results, learn from each iteration and always be prepared to lead from the front and quick to change direction if you’re not making the impact you’re looking for.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Seni: When you begin building a business, it’s ok to walk alone for a while. You need to be single minded, to have a route clearly mapped out in your head and to be confident enough of the direction of travel to take other people along with you. But when you begin to build a team, it becomes important to accept that other people might see alternative routes, perhaps they want to explore easier or quicker paths to get to the same place, or they want to follow the routes that they are more familiar with. The most important thing to do is to be able to agree on the final destination but give others enough leeway to explore their own ways of getting there. If your team is confident of its own route but heading for an entirely different destination, something has gone wrong with your leadership. Similarly, if your team is following behind you so closely that they can’t see the path for themselves, perhaps you don’t need to take them along for the trip.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?
Seni:
You have to believe in your purpose: know what you’re selling but know why you’re selling it.
Don’t over-share.
In the early stages of your business say yes far more often than you say no. In the later stages, reverse that.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Seni: Many, many years ago, I found myself in an early morning queue at the abattoir. The man in front of me was pretty down in the dumps and alternated between dramatic sighs and loud yawns. We got chatting and he told me a little bit about his prize-winning herd of highland cattle, the only cattle to win the top prizes in the category outside of Scotland. But the life was tough and the winning was tougher. The year (weather, disease, a tough economic outlook) had conspired against him and there had been very few agricultural events in which he could show his cattle. And, he went on, there wasn’t much money in it even in a good year. I asked him why he did it and he looked at me astonished, as if the answer was obvious. He pulled himself up tall and looked me in the eye. “To be the best I can.”
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
Follow Adam on Instagram and Twitter at @adammendler and listen and subscribe to Thirty Minute Mentors on your favorite podcasting app.