E139: Chris Murdoch

Richard:
Hi, and welcome to another episode of eCom@One. Today's guest, Chris Murdoch, Director at The Outpost and the host of other successful companies. How you doing, Chris?

Chris:
Yeah, not too bad, thank you very much.

Richard:
Great.

Chris:
Enjoying the relatively gray weather.

Richard:
Yes, it's not quite as nice as the sunshine makes us believe what's coming through your window, is it? It's minus two, I think. No, minus four this morning when I got up.

Chris:
Four seasons yesterday out the office windows.

Richard:
I know.

Richard:
We had bright sunshine didn't we, a couple of days ago? And then two inches of snow or maybe more in quite a few-

Chris:
Yeah.

Richard:
... places in the UK.

Well, great to have you on Chris. Chris, you are not too far away actually, are you? Only about 45 minutes away from where I am right now, which is quite rare on the eCom@One podcast. So great to have you on.

Chris:
Yeah, thank you.

Richard:
But I think what would be great to start with would be if you want to introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us how sort of The Outpost came about.

Chris:
Yeah, well, as Richard said, I'm Chris Murdoch. I foolishly run five companies. One of them's a bit older than the rest, but that'd be The Outpost. But it sort of came about accidentally. 2008, the company I was working for went under in the financial crash and I, basically, had a bunch of stuff sat in boxes, so I decided to sell it, and within a couple of weeks, eBay had turned around and said, "You're selling too much. We think your business is a business account." And I immediately panicked and, "What does that mean?" How old would I have been? 19 at the time. Absolutely no experience in business.

And so registered a company and got an accountant and it just sort of started from there. And then within a couple of years I decided that it was probably time to get out of my living room and go and meet other people.

And the industry that we're in, so for the uninitiated, it's, basically, an extremely complicated game of chess where you build and paint your own pieces. So there's a lot of social interaction, it's face to face rather than computer based. So decided to start building a plan for a shop, and that came about, I think, 2011 now. And many years later and lots of blood, sweat and many, many tears and we're still going, but with the four sister companies.

Richard:
Yeah, that's brilliant. I absolutely love these stories because, ultimately, what we're saying is we had some stock from somewhere and then it's-

Chris:
Yeah, that's-

Richard:
... like, "Oh, let's put a couple of bits on eBay and see what happens?" And then we sold something and then we sold five things, then we sold 10 things ... Or you sold 10 things, and it's like, "Flipping heck, the house is rammed. We can't cope anymore. Let's get a little unit, let's get a bigger unit, let's get a shop." And now fast-forward.

Chris:
I loved it. I mean, I can still remember within those first couple of weeks the insane amount of excitement every time I got a pinged on the phone and it was the eBay tone that was unique and I'd be sat in the pub and it would go, Di-ding," and I'd look down and be like, "Oh, I've just made 40 quid. Hooray. Everyone, drinks on me." And it really was a hobby. It was never supposed to be a business. Computer engineering is where my heart initially was, but it just ended up in an accidental business.

Richard:
Yeah, I mean it's great. It's great. I just love those stories, and that's how I think a of ... It seems quite a common thread where, "Oh, we'll just try we'll and sell a X on eBay and then scale."

Chris:
Especially in our industry, I mean, our particular sort of sector is really low margin. It's like cottage industry a lot of the time. And, weirdly, the people that come into it thinking, "Well, I just spent a hundred pounds in that shop. If I had a shop, I'd get to keep the hundred pounds." It's a really common conversation we have with people and we're like, "It doesn't work like that."

Richard:
No.

Chris:
And they tend to go into it expecting to become millionaires overnight. And then when they don't within the first six months they bail. So we tend to find the accidental businesses tend to do better because they've not got those expectations.

Richard:
Yeah, that's very true, isn't it? Very true.

Chris:
A real interesting one.

Richard:
So obviously that's quite some time on the eBay side, on the eCom side, on the retail side, which that's been obviously ... We'll talk about that ... Obviously, with the last two or three years being, shall we say, very up and down on the retail side I would imagine. But obviously you will have seen a lot of success as I know we've talked about before and obviously I'm well aware of. Obviously, I've met quite a few of your team recently.

But obviously amongst all the successes, there must have been some real challenges over the years. What would you say has been some of the biggest maybe mistakes/challenges?

Chris:
Been loads. Take your pick. So I think there's a couple that I really quite enjoy. The first one is that when we actually opened our retail shop, we didn't start with a website, which was always going to be an uphill battle anyway. We were in development of the website. We'd managed to get the keys ahead, we'd gone down a route of having a bespoke website rather than off the shelf package built, but it was costing us 10 grand. The budgeting for everything. I'd done it to the absolute, like, "How much do staples cost to level?"

And at no point in my entire 15-page business plan did I put any money aside for actually buying stock. So two days before the shop opened I stood there looking at the shelves going, "Where's all my money?" And so we-

Richard:
Some nice racking, though, yeah?

Chris:
No, we had beautiful cabinets, amazing shelves and nothing to put on them. And so, basically, we had to reach out to all the suppliers and say, "Do you do credit terms?" And for the first two years everything was just rolling credit because it's the first two years, you're probably not going to make any money. So I think that was a really, really big mistake.

But an ongoing one I think is probably a little too trusting, I think. I take people at their word a little bit too much. And we've been done over a couple of times. We had a situation a few years ago where we needed to change our lease. This was early on in our growth and we were really struggling financially. It was probably 2010, something like that ... Oh, sorry, 2013, something like that. So it was a really tight time and we agreed with the landlord that we were going to renew our lease under this new company and it was going to give us some breathing room. "Yep, absolutely fine." And then the moment we said, "Right. We're good to go," he went, "By the way, here's your new rent. Here's your new deposit." And I had a week to find 11 grand.

Richard:
So he said he'd renew the lease, but what he didn't tell you is it had doubled, tripled or whatever it may have been?

Chris:
He upped the rent by 50%, doubled the deposit period to six months.

Richard:
Oh.

Chris:
So it was a massive hit and we, basically, had to vacate the shop within a week. So that was really rough. But I think that's the biggest mistake I found I make is I tend to assume that other people have the same moral compass that I do and it turns out that there's quite a few people out there who don't.

Richard:
That's an interesting one, though, isn't it?

Chris:
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard:
Because I'm the same. I'm very similar to you, but I think I've probably got a few scars, as well like you have over from running various businesses and working for myself and never having a job sort of thing. And I think I like to be very much of the mindset of everyone is, ultimately ... I like to think that-

Chris:
Good at heart.

Richard:
... everybody is good at heart. But then I think, "Hang on a minute." I know I've had people stare me down and tell me things that you wouldn't believe and that were absolute lies. But I think I feel that you sort of get a sense for it as you go on in your business career and sort of thing. Still you can get caught.

Chris:
I think it's a difficult one, though. So over the years I came to the sort of conclusion that, generally speaking, there are two types of people: There are people who want to elevate themselves by becoming better and they want to improve their skills, they want to learn things and they want to get better at what they do and become more successful. And on the other side, you've got the people who want to drag everyone else down because that, by default, elevates them above average. So they'll tell you to not go to the gym or they'll tell you this shop you're looking at is a bad place or this website's crap, whatever it is because they don't like their own situation.

So if they drag you down, they'll by default have elevated themselves, and I think, unfortunately ... Well, fortunately, I think most people are the former. I do think, unfortunately, you end up being persistently hounded by the latter who will go as far as sending you private messages and things or visiting your shop to tell you that they don't like it. You're like, "Well, go away then." It's really, really weird behavior.

Richard:
A bit more selective on who you give your time to, who you let in your circle sort of thing and obviously who you hire importantly?

Chris:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, we got stung with an internal theft over the course of a couple of months. It accounted to about 25K-

Richard:
Right.

Chris:
... and that was fairly recent and that cost us nearly half a million in sales once it compounds and it's about 400K of sales I think we lost as a result of that.

Richard:
That's a lot.

Chris:
And there's no recourse. This person admitted it to the police and we didn't even get 10% of it back. So it's an interesting one, I think, especially for growing businesses. Startups more so, but even growing, you start dealing with bigger companies, they've got bigger legal budgets. If they renege on a contract and you don't have 40, 50 grand in the bank that you can throw at a lawyer, there is no recourse. And I think that's one of the biggest struggles that you face when you're dealing with companies and you go into the territory of the bigger boys if you don't have a voice. It's a really difficult place to be.

Richard:
Challenging, challenging. So obviously lots of ups and downs, but here we are now-

Chris:
Yeah, exactly.

Richard:
... and obviously when things hit us ... And I think it's inevitable. I think everyone will relate who's listening right now. We have some good times, we have some bad times or have the ups and downs, and when you stretch that out a bit like an investment, usually over time you look back on things and think, "Oh, yeah, that was a nightmare, but here we are now we're doing well." But in the moment when you've just found out somebody's robbed you for 25 grand and you just realize that you can't fill the shelves or your cash flow or your planning's skew because of X, Y, Z, obviously it's a real, real, real challenge.

But how do you pick yourself up when something happens? Have you got a go-to? What do you do?

Chris:
Yeah, I mean, sometimes I'm not actually sure how I picked myself up from those things. We've had some really rough times at times. Obviously, the people around you make a massive amount of difference. So coming back to what I was saying, if you surround yourself with people who want to drag you down, they'll sit there telling you, "Yeah, you should probably give up."

But if you surround yourself with the people who are actually going to try and elevate you and come along for the ride, it's so much easier. They'll say, "Do you know what? I'm free Saturday night, I'll come and help." And they'll come and do a stock check with you or they'll come and look over your plan or just go for a drink, whatever it is, they'll try and help you.

I think the big thing is probably perspective. It's about stopping, actually. It's the opposite of what I think most people do. When you're in a bad place, you want to just keep going. And I think actually pausing ... I think a realization that most of the time your bad situation isn't going to get that much worse in the next three or four days. It really isn't. You could have ... If you owe someone a lot of money, short of a loan shark, you've probably got a few weeks of grace period to get things in order. So I think just pausing and taking a step back. And even going away to the middle of nowhere for a few days with a pen and paper and just writing stuff and just disconnect to that a little bit and get some perspective, I think that's a really good way to actually understand what the root cause of the problem is.

We had it a few years ago where pre-COVID we were in ... Well, it was about four years ago ... And we were really struggling. We were in a death spiral. We didn't have enough stock to sell to make enough money to pay the bills. So everything we sold went on the bills and nothing was coming back in.

Richard:
Nothing left?

Chris:
Yeah, we were probably 10% of what we are now. It's crazy. But it was my partner, my wife, we sat on the bed and she said, "Right. We'll close it. "And that was perspective moment for me and I just said, "I can't. It's not done yet." And she went, "Right. Well, stop pissing about."

Richard:
So it's about, "Come on."

Chris:
Don't get me started. And that was it. And we just decided, no, we'll go on a holiday and when I come back it's going to get sorted.

Richard:
I think having a break is ... I've just got back, well, about 10 days ago now, so nearly two weeks away, and I feel like a different person. I just feel so refreshed, so much clarity on certain projects. We're working on new things that we're launching, team, recruitment, growth. What's priority? As a business owner, we've all got so much going on as an eCom store owner, marketeer. If you're marketing, you've got 20 channels you're looking at. If you're running a business, you've got the 20 channels plus the cash flow, plus the people, the list never ends. And you get so far in, can't you? And your day seem to stretch out even more and you're doing those 60 hour weeks or whatever it may be. But-

Chris:
Well, I've sworn off them these days. It just got ridiculous. It got ridiculous. I could work all the time. And I think I'm quite lucky that, probably like a lot of business owners, I actually enjoy my work because I know that it's sort of paying a mortgage instead of rent. Everything you put in is going to come back at some point. And so I feel very fortunate to be in this position accidentally. But accidentally starting a business was the best, best thing that's ever happened to.

Richard:
Yeah. I like that. I'll write that one down.

Okay. So obviously we've talked about taking a break, having a good handle on the cash flow side of things and the planning. And I think most importantly of all those really is surrounding yourself with great people, which is probably one of the hardest things I think trying to ... You might have to, say, kiss a few frogs before you, I think I've had close to 200 people work for me over the years now. I had about 120 in my last business over the years sort of thing. Probably about 70 odd people in this business over the years maybe. So it resonates very much. But I think, generally, 9.5 out of 10 people are very good people. Whether they are a right fit for the role you bring them in for, I think is one thing. But then if you get the right people, you can then, potentially, massage them, train them in, or let them go in other areas.

Many, many times in my existing business now we've hired people for certain roles and then it's been clear that they're stronger and happier and more in their flow in other areas. And I can think of quite a few people now that are in my business right now that have come in and, clearly, they're great people, they're absolute culture fits, but they might not be into the numbers side of the business, which is maybe what they were hired for ... AdWords maybe, which is more of a mathematical, mechanical ... That's a very sort of different mindset to a creative, somebody that's writing, creating.

Chris:
We just really had a big shift. So in January we hired three or four people. I mean, we're not a particularly massive team. I think about 18 of us now. So we're at that stage where we're about to evolve into a small, maybe a medium, enterprise, but we're starting to budge our culture. We try to keep our culture ahead. So if we're going to be a small business, we're prepared to be a medium. We've got the policies in place, we've got the practices in place and we're behaving-

Richard:
So.

Chris:
... like a medium. But we just had a recruitment and it was very interesting that we brought these three people in in different departments with different roles entirely, and it suddenly created opportunities for other people internally to move around. So we actually did ... Do you know those puzzles where there's 16 squares and one of them is blank-

Richard:
Yeah.

Chris:
... and you get to move one square across each time? We moved doing that.

Richard:
Good people.

Chris:
And we moved so many people around and they're all like, "I love this. I love my new job. I'm happy I still get to work in the company. I still get to see everyone, but I'm not doing the thing that I dislike."

Richard:
But, ultimately, how rewarding is that for you as a business owner?

Chris:
Oh, it's phenomenal.

Richard:
And then you've seen somebody come through the ranks and then you are-

Chris:
Yeah, definitely.

Richard:
... promoting. That's very much ... I'm a massive believer in that. I absolutely love seeing, say, an apprentice start work at 17 and then when they're 23, 24, whatever it may be. Or somebody who's left for uni, they're clearly absolutely smart as heck, but they just need to be exposed to the world. And when they're exposed-

Chris:
Yeah, definitely.

Richard:
... to the world and you think, "Oh, my God. These guys are so smart." Three years down the line, they're running a department, they're looking after their own team.

Chris:
Yeah, I mean, that's, basically, what happened. We brought someone in in a sales position during COVID. This chap really wanted to work for us. He'd seen how we'd handled ourselves during COVID and how we treated our team. He was working for a very large firm. He took a massive pay cut, he side-stepped some redundancy that was on the horizon.

Richard:
Oh.

Chris:
It cost him several thousand pounds to come and work for us. And I said to him, "Look, I'm going to be straight with you. This desk that you're coming in for, it's brand new. You might find in three months, it doesn't work. Are you really sure you want to take this risk?" And he was like, "Yeah, I want to work in that culture." And two years later, I think now, maybe two and a half years, he's now running one of our companies.

Yeah.

Richard:
He's a general manager now, basically, doing everything day to day and most of the strategic decisions, to be fair. So I'm not generally a big fan of internal promotion. It can cause some real friction, especially if it's within the same department and you can have scenarios where people don't quite respect the role. But, as a general rule, we're quite lucky I think that we don't have to pull rank. We don't have to say, "Well, listen, it's my decision. I'm the boss or I'm the man." People just tend to respect it.

Chris:
Yeah, that's great. That's great.

So I think we talked about the people. We talked about a lot of different things there. I'm going to change directions slightly now. And I think running the business and selling what you're selling, there must be some possible restrictions around like the Warhammer brand and the War and Hammer? Trying to bid on the keywords around war and things like that. Well, how do you get over those potential restrictions?

Yeah, I mean, certain brands, I won't name them particularly, but they are protective of their IP and rightly so. I'm a bit ... I'm going to upset you now. We're not big on our marketing, we don't have a high focus on SEO, we don't have a high focus on paid advertising. We're renowned for being honest, we're renowned for being upfront and clear with our customers. We make a mistake, we own it. If Royal Mail loses a parcel, we're like, "Here you go. We'll send you out again and we'll chase it." As opposed to ... Again, I won't name them, but there's several other companies in our industry who are very, "No, look. We're amazing and we can't do wrong."

And I think there's has been a big culture shift over the last 10, maybe 15 years. Customers don't want that anymore. They want to see fallibility, they want to see humility, I think. Especially for certain industries, it's a lot more community-centric. We meet each other, we go and stand across the table and play games against each other. So it's really important that you can look that person in the eye and say, "Yeah, you can buy from me. You can trust me. We're good."

So I think it's some really low hanging fruit that we're now focusing on. We've just put together a creatives and marketing team in-house. We've now got to that size between the companies. We can afford to budget for that. But, as I said before, we seem to do everything on hard mode. We opened on a high street in a niche of a niche during a recession without a website. Marketing was the next low-hanging fruit.

So we had some really good returns from BBC and things like that. They worked really well for us. Again, it's a social hobby, so it makes sense if social marketing will work well. But, as a general rule, we can usually find creative ways of advertising products without dragging other people down.

Richard:
I mean, I think they're a pretty passionate bunch, aren't they, the people that play your type of products. Our head of digital PR is a massive fan. He actually comes back into the office I think it's every other Friday, Thursday, with a group of his friends. They use one of our boardrooms and they're in there till whatever it is, 11 o'clock, and then I'll see him the next week. "Oh yeah, I did two days at my friends and we did like a 24 hour."

Chris:
Yeah, we're, basically, like rap. You're never more than 10 feet away from them. War gamers are everywhere. And over the years I've always been amazed that the tax office has never just put out a call to all the war gamers of the UK because if you want rules lawyers, we're very good at spotting loopholes.

Richard:
With Al, yeah.

Chris:
I reckon if we put together a political party, we could probably solve a lot of the problems quite easily. Couple of dice rolls and-

Richard:
But I think we've got four in the business now. Four guys. It's actually all chaps actually, four guys that play or they're into it, and a couple of our recent hires, they're into it, as well.

So I think with that sort of passionate customer base, and you're talking there about obviously your reputation and brand and that sort of loyalty aspect, loyalty is something we've touched on in a few episodes, but how important has that been to your business? And if you have an example, specific ways you use e-Commerce-wise to really instill and push like loyalty schemes, et cetera?

Chris:
I think a lot of it comes down to how you communicate with your customers. As I was saying before, if you sit there saying, "It's not our fault, it's not our fault, it's not our fault," they turn off very quickly. We fostered over many years just being ourselves. I consider myself sometimes a too honest person. "Does this top look good?" "No." "All right, thanks." That sort of level, I try to put it politely but, ultimately, I'll try to tell the truth and I think that comes across in the business.

So if we have a new product that's due to launch and a delivery that goes wrong, or we've had parcels end up in Germany instead of Sheffield, which is the obvious correlation, and we just openly put statements out. If you look through our socials, you'll see that we put, "There is a problem. This is why it happened. This is what we're doing to solve it." But at the same time, we don't sling mud and say, "This is horrible. I can't believe they're doing it."

Richard:
Yeah, yeah. Totally.

Chris:
We just try to be really honest. And I think the real key way that we fostered would be exemplified during lockdown. We did a free five pound voucher for every key worker, every essential worker. So regardless of whether they ... I think we said, "You've got to have ordered with us in the last two years or something." I mean, it's such a broad brush. And we said, "Look, just send us a picture of your ID. Obviously, retract or adapt certain bits of information, but send us a picture of your ID, we'll send you a five pound voucher."

And we got ... I don't know ... about 600 or something people come through within a few days. But then followed up, we had so many people still to this day who were saying, "I'll never forget that gesture that you made." But it wasn't even like a marketing ploy. My wife at the time, she's an essential worker. She got nothing, except I think the one thing that really sort of stood out to me was when she was in a local supermarket and someone saw her in uniform and said, "Oh, you." And it made such a massive impact. She felt so respected in that moment. And so we sort of transferred that into the voucher and it worked. It really, really worked.

Richard:
Yeah, no, I love that. I think especially in those times, building that. I like the way you've done that. It's, basically, just honest values that, ultimately ... Excuse me. I'm losing my voice ... That resonate with your people and people get to know your brand, obviously you did made that gesture.

But do you use any technology at all to, say, any loyalty scheme, any sort of online?

Chris:
Yeah, I mean we've got all the typical. So we've got points and loyalty schemes. We do bonus points. And we've got affiliate programs and I'm always looking for that edge case. I'm trying to find a new way of doing it. And so with the Loot Room, which you don't want the sister companies, that works in a completely different model. It doesn't make money from selling products. It's got a membership scheme and no one else in our industry really does that. A few people have now sort of copied it, but we've got a whole variety of people who, basically, pay a monthly sub and get products at, pretty much, cost price. We have to cover our overheads and whatnot. But it's a completely different model.

Richard:
Oh, I see. So it's like a loyalty scheme.

Chris:
It's one of-

Richard:
So they're paying a monthly fee to get access to a discount, a permanent discount, plus. Are they getting any other things, as well? Access to different information? Or-

Chris:
Yeah, everything goes ... We're so tightly restricted in terms of and disseminating information from a lot of brands. And we ruthlessly adhere to that. But, no, that is the model. It is for a membership, you get it as cheap as we can sell it.

Richard:
Yeah. I guess, listeners, is there room in your business to add? We talk about this a lot, a lot, a lot. I don't run a business unless there's a subscription model to it, pretty much. There's the odd, odd, odd exception around sort of some consultancy things but, ultimately, subscription. Can you add a subscription business to your eCom store, your existing store? I would say, "Yes, you can. It doesn't matter what you're doing. You can add a subscription." Whether it's, as Chris said, adding a discount element or adding a different tier in where you're getting access to certain products that maybe the mainstay of your clients'.

If you're in an industry where there's limited stock, which is quite a lot of industries, certain lines come out, certain manufacturers only release so many different brands, products, if you are then only letting your members or your subscription members have access to that stock, building that subscription business is quite a nice layer, isn't it? It's quite comforting knowing that you've got so much income coming in on a monthly basis?

Chris:
Yeah, it's a lot more predictable. A hell of a lot more predictable. I think there's interesting ways that people can add subscriptions to their services. So shipping costs are skyrocketing, they're going up and up and up, and customers are really, really aware of it. But if you take your pricing and you scale it out going up in five pound increments and watch your profit margin, the second you offer free shipping, you have no profit margin and suddenly you're going, "Please spend a pound less and pay me for shipping because I've made less money than the last. It can be crazy how much it impacts you.

So I think there's a room. It's where Amazon's obviously done really well. They've, basically, said, "Pay for a year and you can have a free shipping option on most things." I don't think you need to go that far, but I do think saying, "If you pay for standard shipping, you'll get express." That might cost you 50/60P more per parcel depending on what you're shipping, but if someone's paying 3.99, 4.99 for a monthly membership, well, 10 orders are covered. And it's amazing how much it will encourage that loyalty. People, basically, ... Someone's once said it to me, they said, "It's genius because people are paying to be loyal to you." It really-

Richard:
I'm paying to buy from you, ultimately.

Chris:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I've heard so many people say, "Oh, no, I don't have this streaming account because I've got this one instead." "Well, yeah, but you're missing this show." "Yeah, but I already paid for this one." "Well, cancel that one and move." "No, I paid for this one." And it's like, "You're paying to be loyal to someone."

So I do think subscriptions are definitely an interesting thing to see if people can add. Even if it only adds a few percent of points of revenue, it's almost entirely profit.

Richard:
Yeah, I mean. We're launching, literally, in the phase of just pre-launch at the moment of a brand new agency service, which is not a traditional agency service, it's a Mastermind group, which is a subscription, but it's a yearly subscription to a group where we'll have a group of eCom store owners and our senior management on a weekly call and various other things. And that's a subscription. It's a yearly subscription. So brilliant.

So I think we've mentioned a lot of different things there and I think you even mentioned the word "Affiliates," loyalty, et cetera, but what's probably the biggest impact recently you've had with a technology that you've implemented in the business that's been, potentially, transformational?

Chris:
So we've had a team that's grown. I think three years ago we were like four people. And, as I say, we're at like 18 across five different businesses. There's a lot of shared resource and central services. Obviously, we don't need five HR managers, we don't need five building managers and things. But we actually found probably two pieces of technology that have made a massive difference. The first one I imagine most people have heard of, which is Zendesk. There's lots of different options similar to it, but it's that central ability to communicate with your customers from all different areas. So we have probably 20 plus social media accounts between the companies. We've got five sets of email addresses, five contact forms. You're suddenly like, "Wow. It's a lot of inboxes to check."

And we are able to ... And there's loads of similar technologies, but using Zendesk we were able to centralize all of that. We're able to lock in branding to each of the companies and it suits our business really, really well. It comes at a little bit of a price, but it's definitely worth it if you can afford it.

The second one was completely free and we still use it now a year and a half later, I think. It's still incredible technology, especially for free. But that'll be ClickUp.

Richard:
ClickUp.

Chris:
ClickUp. It's a task organization, it's a glorified Outlook calendar but, wow, it's got some functionality, and for all of our functions, it's completely free, and it's great. And obviously they've taken the approach of "You can have it for free." And I think you can have up to 500 lists and then within each list you've got 2000 tasks or something. So it's perfectly scalable. But I know at some point will be like, "Right. Come on, let's pay for some custom functionality." And they've taken that interesting approach of, "Well, we've got the code. We've written it all, but let's just get as many people dependent on it as possible." And no doubt, in 12 months' time, they'll stick a subscription model on there and we'll eat it up.

Richard:
Yeah. It's not what I've used, to be fair.` I'll have to have a look at that.

Chris:
We went through about seven or eight different options and that was, by far and away, the most usable at the free level, which when we started, is what we needed? But it's on my phone if I need it. I can customize it. You can customize everything I've found so far. I think it's a really, really good system and it's very intuitive. It feels very modern built ... Like a very modern build. Sorry. And everyone within our teams that uses it loves it.

Richard:
I think that's the trick with anything, isn't it?

Chris:
Mm-hmm.

Richard:
There's so many options out there for every single element of marketing.

Chris:
Oh, definitely.

Richard:
CRM, whatever it may be, but if the people aren't using it, then it doesn't matter how good it is. So I think that intuitive interface, the look, the feel, obviously the functionality is the key. But, ultimately, if no one's going to use it because it's a little bit ugly, it doesn't-

Chris:
I like it when I look at something and think, "I should be able to double click on this and it should do something." And I do it and it does it, and I go, "Huh. I like this technology. It makes sense." And you can tell they've put a lot of effort into that user journey.

Richard:
Yeah, no, that's great. So I think crystal ball time, really. We're sat here in 12 months time. What do you see happening and what are your plans for the next 12 months plus

Chris:
Well, we've got some super secret e-Commerce plans, which I can't say anything about, but they're pretty massive and I'd love to come back and have a chat with you once we've implemented them. They're so top secret. I think there's three people in the world that know about them and one of them's a web developer.

But in terms of our sort of business moving forward, we're at an interesting point where 3D printing is starting to impact our industry, maybe single digit percentages, but it is going to have a bigger impact, much like when a photocopier in a news agent goes dodo. So I think we're going to see a shift towards more the gaming cafe, coffee shop type approach. Less about selling models over time, more about selling hobby supplies, maybe providing printing services in-house and things like that. But predominantly gaming space.

So we've just expanded. We did have four tables. I think we're now on 16. So we can host up to 64 players in a day, all buying drinks or having a good chat. They'll probably pick up a few bits. But we're building our business structure, as I suspect a lot of the companies in our industry are building it around this idea of, "Come down and have an experience a day," rather than come down and shop. And if you look at the high street, that's become apparent. Every bookshop has a coffee shop in it. Every hairdresser has a gay coffee shop in it. It's really changing.

Richard:
Isn't that great? I think that's brilliant. I think being out with your mates, basically. It's almost like going down the pub with your mates-

Chris:
Yes, exactly.

Richard:
... but you don't have to bloody drink, you can go-

Chris:
Just chat.

Richard:
... and play. It's like having ... There's nothing ... In our household we're big on Monopoly and Scrabble and they're great afternoons. We have my lad's girlfriend and whatnot come round and whoever it may be. And it's like just a nice three, four hour thing when you're doing that with your friends, having a giggle, taking the mickey out of each other maybe. Just the usual bit of banter. It's just great for your mental health.

Chris:
We have lots of parents who come down, especially with kids who are sort of 11, 12, 13, younger teens, and they say, "This is the time when I get to spend dedicated time with them. We're away from screens. We're interacting." But there's also a lot of learning within the hobby, as well. So there's stacks of books. So it's always interesting to see how people use the space, but it's just definitely social and having that fun day out.

Richard:
Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant.

Well, thanks Chris. It's been an absolute blast. I really enjoyed that. I like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. What book would you recommend to our listeners?

Chris:
And it's a bit of an odd one this. I suspect most people won't have heard of it, let alone read it. But it's called Super System 2, obviously the second iteration of Super System. It's by poker player called Doyle Brunson, and he's one of the grandfathers of Texas Hold'em and of poker in general. A guy with over $6 million worth of winnings. And you look at poker, he's everywhere, basically.

It's an interesting one because I think there's a lot of similarities between poker and business. And for people who haven't played much poker, it's gambling in the sense that business is gambling. It's calculated risks, it's expected returns, it's contingencies in place if you don't get the return and so on and so forth. But it's very, very mathematical. And I think even if you got a very rudimentary understanding of poker, you'll find the book fascinating because it talks about strategies and how other people are thinking what they should do? What's their right move? What's their wrong move? How to deal with the wrong move? These are all poker terms that apply to business, as well.

And there's two sort of key things in it that he said that really stood out to me, and the first one is that when he was offered ... He said he was asked, "If you're offered 10 to one odds on a coin flip for all your money, would you take it?" And he sort of pauses for a second and says, "Well, I think I'd have to because I've made this money once before, I can make it again." You don't get 10 to one odds on a coin flip very often and I think sometimes you have to take that risk, sometimes you have to take that plunge.

But the second thing he says, to paraphrase is, "As long as you've got a chip and a chair, you're still in the game." And I think when you're down and out, just remembering that you've still got a chip and a chair is really, really important because you can get straight back up there.

Richard:
I love it. I love it. I think that'll resonate with every single business owner that is listening right now.

Chris:
Yeah, we've all been there.

Richard:
We've all been there, haven't we? The fun and games, the ups and downs, the highs, the lows. We've all been there.

Well, thanks, Chris, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

Chris:
Thank you.

Richard:
For the guys that want to find out more about you, more The Outpost and the other brands, what's the best way to do that?

Chris:
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, if you google The Outpost, that's something that comes up is very bad movie second on there. Just head over to our website, check out our socials. It's the-outpost.code.uk. And then we've got the-colorforge.com, loopgroup.com, warhammer.com, which is our business to business, and then darkstarhobbies.co.uk.

Richard:
But The Outpost is the-hyphen-outpost.co.uk?

Chris:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know why, but I really struggle to say it. So I end up just saying google it. I can't say "The." I'll say, "The dash Outpost." We've had people type the word "Hyphen."

Richard:
D-A-S-H, dash.

Chris:
They, literally ... I say, "Spell

Richard:
H-Y-P-H.

Chris:
Yeah. "Spell it out to me." "T-H-E H-Y-P-H." "What? "No, it's a symbol."

Richard:
Yeah. Fun and games with the names, hey? Well, thanks for being on the show, Chris.

Chris:
Cheers, Richard.

Richard:
We'll get you back on in 12 plus months I think, and see how the e-Comm plans have developed and you'll be able to share what you've up to. But thanks for coming on the show.

Chris:
Thank you very much.