An Interview with Julien Callede, By Day Advisor
Julien is an internet entrepreneur, Board Member & Investor and a Co-founder of MADE.COM and several new ventures.
What was the turning point for you in deciding to start your own business rather than joining an existing one?
The journey to deciding to start your own business is a long one. I do not believe that people are born with it, especially as 10-15 years ago starting your own business wasn’t the norm, but I do believe in the idea of it slowly building up into future entrepreneurs minds. A lot of things could contribute to that: your background, your education, people you meet during your studies, boredom (yes that’s often a big reason), the search for meaning in your life, a specific opportunity… In my case it all really started at the end of business school. I got the bug. Maybe because my first work experience sounded as boring as the idea of having a predetermined career path; partly because I wanted something different, partly because I wanted to have an impact on the world and build something meaningful, and a lot because of the challenges represented.
Then it was only a matter of time until I got together the 3 big requirements of setting up a business: a need to solve (and an innovative way of solving it), experience and knowledge of the right field, and a great team to partner with. That was December 2019. I’ll always remember it.
What keeps you driven when facing difficult business decisions?
Millions of things.
The “negative part”: if you don’t keep it up you’ll fail, your company will go bust, your teams will have to find another job, you’ll have failed personally, etc etc. And the “positive part”: you are creating change, you make millions of customers happy, you give work to tens or hundreds of employees, you give business to a lot of people, you are achieving something big, this is your baby, there is no way you can fail, the feeling you have when you get somewhere and your sofa is there standing in front of you, the one you helped design and manufacture etc; this second list always gets bigger and bigger :)
I believe that the 2 moments when I was the proudest of what we were achieving were when I realised that we were giving work to hundreds of happy employees in just a few years, and when I saw a map in London featuring customers in almost every single street. Numbers are just numbers, turnover and growth are hard things to picture. But this made it real.
We imagine that you had many challenges when setting up MADE, what would you say are your key learnings from it?
Due to our business model, we had to be good at some many things and I could list tons of learnings as a result of building a pan-european direct to consumer e-commerce brand. But in short:
Knowing your industry upside down gives you a huge head start. You save years, you save cash, you negotiate better, you hire better, you make less mistakes.
Operations are HARD: You might have the best and most innovative business model in the world, it usually all comes down to small details. Who delivers your product. Who finished it in the workshop and how well this was done. Whether your supplier decides to go on strike or deliver on time. Most of the time, these details are mainly out of your control. But it’s your responsibility to make the whole thing work.
Scaling is HARDER: The more your grow, the more issues you’ll be piling up. Start solving issues before they start scaling. Anticipate your growth. Spend time building the engine of your business.
Recruiting is tough but critical: Spend as much time and focus as you can (time you don’t have as you already don’t sleep enough) in hiring the best top guns out there. People you’ll love seeing when getting to work in the morning.
Never stop innovating and thinking out of the box: Disrupters of yesterday are being disrupted by a lot of new businesses today. Keep a mindset that fosters creativity, innovation and ideation within your team and your own mind.
What is the one piece of advice you would give to other entrepreneurs?
You don’t know everything. We didn’t know A LOT of things when we started MADE. And, even if we did learn a bit by doing, we learnt tons more by acknowledging we didn’t know much and asking people for help. Ask for help and be ready to listen and enroll people to help you.
What attracted you to work with and become an Advisor to By Day?
I just love the idea of it, the ethos of it, and the team. They are solving a real issue in the market and helping tons of businesses grow thanks to the right expertise at the right cost. It’s priceless.
What are the main characteristics you would be looking for when hiring a By Day Consultant?
The main thing would definitely be expertise, as well as experience in working with a broad range of companies. Every business is different, and you want to be working with consultants who know how to adapt to your own needs, size, and way of working. Great referrals & feedback from people you trust and have worked with is also critical.
What would you say are your top five tips for any new or growing business?
There are so many things to learn along the way while growing a business and I could probably go on for hours sharing advice and tips. But to keep it short the biggest ones would probably be:
Focus on your customers: they are the ones who trust you, who fund you through their purchases, who coach you through their feedback, who build you through the need you are trying to solve. They are your reason to exist. When you don’t know what to do: ask them. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Just make your customers happy and build the strongest link you can build with them.
Don’t take shortcuts: do the job 100% of the way. Be an expert in what you do. Deliver on your promise. In our case, don’t work with average manufacturers, but with the best ones. If the best ones are too expensive, train the average ones. Don’t “half design” your items or pretend you did it, but work with the best designers you can afford to work with. Deliver on time. Or ahead of promise. Undersell and overdeliver. And make it possible by being the most detail orientated person out there and working harder than the other ones.
Be different: don’t jump into a huge market and sell the same product as the other 300 companies. Be different, in what you offer, and the way you make it possible. And please don’t focus on only marketing your offer differently but build a really differentiating / better offer. A better branding or marketing efficiency will only get you to mile 5 or 6. A really outstanding and different offer will bring you to mile 26.2.
Build your team as soon as possible: you might have read it tens of times, heard it from everybody, thought about it so many times, but there is still a high risk you’ll forget it very often. Finding the right teammates is hard and it takes ages. You’ll often struggle to find people with the right balance of experience, ability to think out of the box & innovate, personal fit and ability to drop their comfort zone to join you in your ambitious but risky journey. But better go to war with the best crew out there or not go to war at all.
Build your business to your image. Or to your ambition. You’ll read thousands of articles about unicorns, startups, fundraising, growth, multiples, exits, “founders” etc. This is a world that suits some people. But not all. It’s as beautiful, and sometimes even more, to build a small business, run an SME, or build your own brand without having to raise money. Don’t do it for the media or “what people will think of it”, do it for you and your own way.
