EE503 - Mentor Moment: Bobby Kerr - How to Scale Without Letting Ego Get in the Way

Welcome to this week's Mentor Moment. This one is with Bobby Kerr, someone we all know and love. He's the former CEO and founder of Insomnia Coffee and a former Dragon on Dragon's Den. This is packed with hard-won founder lessons. Bobby breaks down exactly what nearly took him out in the early stages and the simple strategy through all his successes. Here is your mentor, Bobby Kerr.

What was your biggest mistake in the early years? Not having enough capital. Uh, Underfunded. Basically, I never spent too much in shops, but I probably went in too tight on the basis of what something was going to cost. Well, I didn't have it. So I was underfunded, which meant it was very stressful in the early days. We were close to the wall on a few occasions. So that can be... It can spur you on as well, but it can be challenging.

And then how, you briefly alluded to it earlier, you went from one business to two business to three business. How does that merger come about? Was that a buyout? Did you buy them out? Did you join French? I actually

sold my business to Insomnia, believe it or not. And then I did a kind of a really weird thing. The money I got, I put it back into the business and became the CEO. So it was like... I was a seller and a buyer almost on the same day, believe it or not.

How does that come about?

Well, it's just the way it came about. There's more to that. Well, they needed someone to run the business, and I was the person. Okay. So I said, I'll run the business. I suppose I didn't really want to sell the business, but I knew that if I didn't collaborate, I'd never get scale. So to me, I was much better off with say 30% of something that was far bigger than 100% of what I had. And that was probably one of my smartest moves, believe it or not, to actually see that there was more value in owning 30% of something that could grow rather than 100% of something that was, who knows where it was going to go.

That's quite strategic. Like, I mean, you can see strategic decisions in your journey here. It shows, again, the lack of ego, but it's quite strategic to let go of something you've spent a lot of time and you've remortgaged your house on to then even take a bigger punt.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I think a lot for me in business, you know, you start off with something, you grow it, you grow it, you grow it. There's only one payday. That was the way I looked at it. Okay. There's only, you build this, you build it, everything that you generate goes back into it. And then hopefully one day you get an exit.

Okay. So you were happy to play the long game here. Absolutely. You were like, I'll play the long game and have one day there. No,

absolutely. And I was never in it for a short term. And all up, you know, I was there between Perk and Insomnia, I was there over 20 years. Hmm. Yeah.

So when you went and you joined all the businesses together, talk to me about that because I'm sure that is difficult.

Well, it is, and you've got personalities and you've got different people from different businesses. But, you know, you've got to, again, see what the best – You know, the best name was Insomnia, without a doubt. It looked good, it looked good on a sign. It