Have you ever thought about changing your work setup due to a change in your life circumstances, time constraints, or just stress? At some point in your career, you may face a moment of reckoning, when you realize you can’t continue to sustain your current career, and something has to give. But how do you choose whether to hang on to honor the investments you’ve made or let go to make room for something else?

On Career Relaunch® podcast episode 107, Matt Oliver, founder of Oliver Co, describes his career journey to go from designer to company founder and eventual design consultant for Native Design. We talk about how to pace yourself when making a transition, balancing your side projects with your day job, and the importance of outsourcing and delegating tasks if you want to open up new opportunities in you career.

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of releasing your grip on one aspect of your work to make room for another priority. My challenge to you is to decide on one thing you want more of in your career right now. Then, identify something you could spend less time on so you can make room for that.

00:00:00 Overview

Matt Oliver is a design strategist with a background in product design who’s had to wrestle with this question himself. Matt’s career spans both consultancy and entrepreneurship. He started out designing in-house before moving to a design consultancy, working with global brands like Zenith and TAG Heuer. He later founded Oliver Co, a sustainable accessories brand that became B Corp certified, won international awards, and partnered with Virgin Atlantic. His experience has given him a strong blend of creative thinking and commercial awareness. And today, Matt helps businesses use design as a tool for innovation and growth.

Learn more about Matt Oliver and Native Design.

If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!

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[00:03:22] Okay, Matt. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to join me here on the Career Relaunch Podcast. It is great to have you on the show.

[00:03:30] Matt: Great to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

[00:03:32] Joseph: All right. So we’re going to talk about a lot of different things today. The steps you took to launch all of your Co, some of the challenges you’ve faced along the way, and also why you’ve recently decided to return to full time employment. But before we get to all that, could you just kick us off by telling me a little bit about what you’ve been focused on in your professional and personal life lately?

[00:03:54] Matt: My current role is at a company called Native Design, so we’re a design and innovation consultancy doing physical industrial design and engineering. So the physical design of products and also digital design as well. So that’s things like user experience and user interface software development. My title is Design Strategy Manager. So really what I’m doing is I’m connecting potential clients with the different disciplines here at Native. So kind of understanding their challenges and then connecting them with the different capabilities that we have here to try and solve those challenges. So that’s what I’m doing on my on my day to day here. So a lot of outreach I guess quite similar to a business development role, a lot of outreach networking, a lot of going to events. Very interesting because I’m working across various different sectors. So one minute I could be in the life science sector. So we do a lot in genome sequencing and that kind of thing. And then the next minute I’ll be an automotive conference. So very different worlds in my personal life. Much more stable in that I’ve moved out of London, moved to a place called Guildford, which is about an hour west of London. Bought a house, got a dog, married a kid on the way, like, okay. Yeah. So that’s in November. Lots going on. Very interesting time.

[00:05:19] Joseph: Sounds like you’ve got a lot going on personally. And things are going to change radically for you later this year. And so I do want to talk about your career in design, and I’d say that you’re probably a less typical guest than the ones we typically have on the show, because a lot of times we’ve got people here, Matt, who have kind of shifted out of one industry into another industry. I mean, in your case, you’ve spent, I guess, a good chunk of your career in some regard, always involved with design. Now, I know you haven’t always been at Native Design. I was hoping we could start by going all the way back in time. And first of all, just revisiting how you got interested in design in the first place at the very start of your career. And then we can move forward from there.

[00:06:08] Matt: In primary school. Genuinely. Wow. There was a project, probably. I think I must have been about nine. And it was to design the front of the cereal packet. I was the kid that would always read the cereal packets in the morning. I just was fascinated by the design and what was going on with those. I guess I wouldn’t have known. I was fascinated with the design. I was just intrigued with all the characters. And so when this project came along and I loved it, and I got really involved with it, and I remember showing my parents and my dad said, oh, you should be a graphic designer. And he said, oh, our family, friends, he’s in graphic design. You should speak to him. But, you know, I was only nine and I saw the work that that he was doing. And I found I found that really interesting even at that age. And so from that point on, I kind of had it in my head. I was like, well, I’m going to be a designer. And really, I didn’t deviate at all. All the way through secondary school. I did design technology. Absolutely loved it. Yeah, all the way through to the sixth form where they’re not deciding what career wants to go into. I guess I slightly deviated in that my school was pushing me more towards the, I guess, a more academic job. So they wanted it ended up being naval architecture actually was what they suggested I did. I was doing physics and maths and they said, oh, you should be doing that. I think they were not pushing us towards design and creative industries as a school, which is a shame really, but they were quite academic focused, kind of just before we were starting to look at universities, I was like, no, I don’t want to do that. I want to go into design. I then studied product design at Loughborough, which is kind of a blend of industrial design with the more kind of engineering side, and that’s how I got into it.

[00:07:53] Joseph: This might sound like a strange question, Matt, but it sounds like you were always really interested in design. Did you feel like you were good at design? Like, did you feel like you had some potential to be a good designer, or was that not really part of the thought process, or did that not feed into your decision to continue to pursue it.

[00:08:13] Matt: Within my school? It’s quite a small school. I felt like I was top of the class for design. Then obviously then when you go to university, it’s a bit of a wake up call as to whether or not I am a good designer or not. There were some incredibly talented designers there, and I think I probably went into the university more confident. I think probably from the fact that I knew from a very young age I wanted to do it, and I thought I’d be more ahead than I was. And you learned what real design was, and I was good at sketching and the sort of artistic side of it. But actually what design is, you know, the more kind of problem-solving side of it. I perhaps wasn’t as strong. I guess I was always confident until I got to university, then realized, okay, I’m not quite as good as I thought I was.

[00:08:59] Joseph: I think that happens to all of us. It’s sort of like you go from a big fish in a small pond, and then you realize the world is a very, very large ocean. It’s quite a humbling experience to go to college or university, and you start to see all the talent out there. So what was your first role in design and how did you get involved professionally in the world of design? I recall that your dad was a business owner. Did that have any influence on the direction you took?

[00:09:26] Matt: Yes. So I didn’t go down the naval architecture route, but the reason naval architecture was on the agenda at the time when I was looking at universities was that my family are from that world. So my dad did interior fit outs of cruise ships. That was his business. Born in Southampton, very naval, part of the world, growing Grown up around ships and boats, and I thought I was going to be heading into. And even as a designer, I thought maybe I could go into exterior boat design. Not quite the extent of a naval architect, but exterior boat design. And so even at university, I was thinking that somewhere I could go. I worked at a company called Sunseeker during my placement year, and in a way, I realised then that maybe it wasn’t the world I wanted to get into and actually more kind of product design as we know it. More sort of consumer products was perhaps more suitable to where my skill sets were. And actually it was a recruiter that told me that. And that kind of led me to my first job, which was in watch design.

[00:10:32] Joseph: I know you would go to Larsen Jennings, which is a well known watch brand, and I would be interested to hear how you made that pivot from focusing on, I guess, boat design at Sunseeker to then working for a watch brand, because this is something that comes up with a lot of people, is I like what I’m doing. I might be in the wrong industry. I want to switch industries. So I’d be curious how you made that pivot.

[00:10:54] Matt: I guess it didn’t feel like much of a pivot in that everything we learned at university was much better suited to Lance and Jennings than the work that they were doing. The course and what I studied for four years wasn’t actually really that suited to boat design at all. It made a lot more sense. At least in Jennings, it was a lot easier. I probably had I gone into boat design, I probably would have struggled, to be honest.

[00:11:17] Joseph: So you just applied directly to the company and landed the role?

[00:11:21] Matt: It wasn’t directed through the recruiter. I loved watches, I loved Larson Jennings watches, but I didn’t think I could design them. I thought that was a different world altogether, and I hadn’t realized that actually, a lot of what I’d learned at university was very applicable. So all happened quite fast, actually, and got the job and they were taking a bit of a risk. They kind of saw me as an opportunity to nurture into a watch designer and actually sent me out to Hong Kong within my first two weeks of being in the company to basically learn what they were doing and then be able to apply that.

[00:11:54] Joseph: That sounds really cool to me to be able to be working for a watch. I love watches myself, and I think that sounds like a dream job in many ways to me. How did that go for you? Were you thinking, okay, I’m set. I’m going to focus on watch design. This is aligned with what I studied in university. I’m heading down the correct road. Were you seeing that this was going to be the path you were going to be on for a while? At that moment in time, if you can kind of remember back to that moment.

[00:12:20] Matt: When I joined them, they were still very much a startup, but an exciting startup. It was growing fast. Lots of young people in their vibrant office in London. Young founder yeah, just had this feeling that we were going to take over the world. That’s actually what we said. We’re going to take over the world one watch at a time. And I actually loved the whole machine of what we’re doing, the content social, the marketing, the operations, like, the whole thing fascinated me, and and I was exposed to all of it as well. I was connected to all those teams. And so I was doing just the design. But actually I found I was getting very interested in all the other cogs, seeing the founder, who was this young guy, I was quite inspired, probably inspired by my dad as well, thinking, well, I could be a business owner, I could do this. You know how exciting to have a group of people like this that you know, to build something and put it out there in the world. And the founder, Andy, was getting featured in GQ, and it just the whole thing was just a great buzz. I became more interested in the business, I guess I was doing design day to day, but also doing a lot of more kind of product, managing the managing factories. So actually not doing that much design towards as I got more established, the watch market was growing. It was really this was before the Apple Watch or the Apple Watch maybe had just come out. But we kind of were thinking, this isn’t going to disrupt things. This is fine. This is for a specific tech audience. But the way that it then disrupted the industry within the next two years, I realized this probably isn’t an industry with much longevity, and therefore I probably don’t want to be staying in it for too long.

[00:14:08] Joseph: So what triggered you to start to think about beginning and starting your own brand and business? I know that you started to kind of notice that this could maybe be part of your own lexicon and part of your own ethos to be a business owner, especially because your father was one. But was there a particular event or moment where you started to think, okay, no, this is something I really want to pursue.

[00:14:33] Matt: So firstly, my interest in sustainability started all the way back when I was on my placement year at Sunseeker. But I saw how boats were built and the huge amount of waste. I mean, it is staggering the amount of waste that goes into it. And I think that sparks an interest in sustainability. And then I started to try and push a more sustainable agenda at last. And jenning’s in the materials that we were using, we had a lot of stock at the time, and they weren’t willing to transition to new materials just because the business wasn’t in the position to do it. So there was this kind of moment of, of a few things coming at once, this kind of passion for sustainability, these new materials that were coming on the market. The excitement that I was getting for them. So these were low impact leather alternatives made from from fruit waste. They take the fruit waste from industries like the apple industry, where they create the fruit juice and the compote, and they take the waste and they turn it into essentially a leather alternative. And I was so excited about this, and I wanted to bring it into Glass and Jennings. And initially they were like, yeah, as I said, they got lots of stock. Can’t do it. And I think seeing the young founder being inspired by that. It was kind of those combination things where I found this material. I think I can do it myself because I can see it here. I’m excited by that.

[00:15:52] Matt: I’m going to do it myself. I’m going to do it. I think I can do it. I know about all the different areas. I know how to set up a website. Now I know what platform they’re using. I know how to do the marketing because I see them doing it every day. Maybe I can do this. And I also knew, because we started to get into small leather goods as a company. And so I started to understand things like the minimum order quantities that they had, and they were quite low. So I also was thinking, this won’t be too expensive to get into this. It won’t be like an upfront cost. So I also thought if I’m going to start a business, this is quite a good one because yeah, it’s not a massive investment that I have to put forward. So it could be just a side hobby actually initially, but realized I had to speak to the owner of the company to greenlight it, which I did, and actually he was very excited by it and said, no, this is going to be really beneficial for you. Probably beneficial for this company as well for you to kind of see the, you know, all the different things that go into starting a business. You should do it. I just started it very, very small to begin with. It was card holders I’d made first made 30 of them. Yeah. Sold those to family and friends and started Instagram and really just built it from there.

[00:17:02] Joseph: You’re making this shift now into entrepreneurship at this point, and you start with a few cardholders. What sort of product line were you thinking you were going to be focused on? At this point, it sounds like you didn’t pursue like watch straps. At that moment, you decided to go down card holders. How did you land on card holders, and how did that end up expanding into what we now know? As Oliver Co.

[00:17:25] Matt: Couldn’t go into watch straps because that was a conflict of interest a bit too far. We had just done a project with small leather goods looking at wallets, card holders. Actually, it was more female orientated for Larsson & Jennings. I felt safe designing those because I knew what I was doing. I knew I could create the technical drawings for that myself, and I didn’t have any exposure to any other products. So the other reason was I felt like carry goods more broadly. People were always going to need to carry stuff. No matter what happens with technology, people still need to carry stuff. So I also thought there was longevity in the business. The ethos of the company, the ethos of the company was to be the forefront of material innovation, and I could see that that was a long roadmap that was always going to be. You could always make a material more sustainable, lower impact circular products, and being able to completely recycle them was still a long way into the future. And I thought, well, then, if I baked that into the ethos of the company, there’s actually lots we could do.

[00:18:27] Joseph: Another question about you just starting up Oliver Co. How were you actually getting this business going? I know a lot of people who maybe listen to this show, they’ve got ideas, they’re thinking about launching a company. Maybe they want to start a product line or service. I mean, it sounds like, okay, I want to start this business, but what did you actually do to actually turn this thing into a concrete business? I’d imagine you need to find a supplier. You need to, I guess, find employees. Could you take me through some of those initial steps to make this thing real?

[00:18:58] Matt: So initially, the focus was on the product to make those 30 cardholders. And actually the challenge then was getting hold of the material because it was a brand new material. The company who produced it, who were initially the very focused on obviously large orders they’ve just got going. They want to be getting in with the automotive companies and the furniture companies. So they weren’t interested in working with startups at all. And so that was that was the first challenge, is just getting hold of the material, because the minimum order quantity of it was 150m, which can make thousands of car orders. So that wouldn’t do. So I had to try and get hold of like a sample piece almost. And I just kept calling this guy. I met him at the show. I had his number. There were two materials I was using, and out of a strange coincidence, they were collaborating over a project. These two different materials. One was made from wood and the other was made of that apple material. And I just texted them on that day. He said, I’m actually heading there. I’ve got some samples in the back of the car. I’ll give them ten meters of the brown. Will that be okay? And I was like, perfect. That’s amazing. Quite lucky in that sense, but that sort of got me going. Made the products. Launched a website with the cheapest platform I could find at the time, which was a company called Big Cartel. And really, it was initially just family and friends just telling people about what I was doing, setting up the Instagram. I guess Instagram pulled in probably the majority of the initial sales. It wasn’t like they flew off the shelves. It wasn’t at all. It was probably over a few months and that’s how I initially got started.

[00:20:39] Joseph: We should also probably mention that financially, this is still in a kind of startup early stage phase. You were also working full time, as I understand it at the time. How did you balance those two worlds like working full time? I understand a design firm at the time and also launching your own business.

[00:21:00] Matt: Yeah. Stuart Larson Jennings when I first started it and it was just morning and evenings, really. It was never crazy. I was never like, you know, working till the early hours of the morning. I would be quite structured in the way I did it. I generally get up quite early anyway, so I would normally do maybe a couple of hours in the morning before work and then in the evening just really sat in front of the TV doing the work as well. That’s really how I got started with it. I think having that prior knowledge of the different areas of the business and having them to lean on as well. Like I’d actually speak to the marketing team or the e-commerce team and say, how do I do this? Like, how do I change the coding of the website to look the way I want it to look? And they would literally on a lunchtime even just say, oh, you just need to do this thing.

[00:21:44] Joseph: What were some of the bigger challenges along the way that you can recall in those earlier days?

[00:21:52] Matt: The supply chain was the hardest bit. After those 30 wallets, the cardholders were made. I needed to work with a factory that had a bit more capacity. The first challenge was finding that factory and firstly, people taking you seriously because they know the size you are. There’s a lot of emailing with no response. And then I missed so many factories. Really. It was just like, oh my goodness, like someone wants to work with me. Not that. Oh, let’s test them for quality and see if there’s actually a good product. I was thinking about that, but more I was just relieved that someone wanted to work with me. And then when we started producing the product, The biggest challenge was that they’re handmade goods. The quality just wasn’t there. I wasn’t earning loads then. I was putting quite a lot of money of my own money into it, and so I found it really stressful. When production would arrive and there would be faults with 25% of the products that I had, and, you know, thinking that if I bring this up with the factory, I’m such a small they don’t need the hassle. I think. I think they’re just going to say, oh, just go away. And I was so fearful with that. I was kind of very reliant on them. But at the same time, I couldn’t accept I did have a high standard of what I thought was good. It was just a real challenge to get them to empathise with my position, try and get them to care more and fix the problems that I had. And it was a lot of back and forth.

[00:23:20] Joseph: How were you finding the entrepreneurial journey as a whole when you compare it to working full time for an employer that’s paying you a steady salary. Like, what was that experience like for you? Did you like that contrast? Were you enjoying it or were you finding it more stressful than it was worth?

[00:23:41] Matt: The lows felt low and stressful, but the highs were just awesome. You build this thing and then you get a small win. You know, you get featured in a magazine and you get a customer review. I couldn’t compare anything that was happening at work to that feeling of of building something and someone saying, I love this. I love what you’ve done here, and I love that. That part of having a business and having my own thing. The biggest thing I would compare with it, it was just it was my own creative outlet where I had full control.

[00:24:14] Joseph: So as those two jobs are running in parallel, so you’ve got the consultancy that you’re working for. You’ve got Oliver Co that you are running. How are you thinking about where your career was heading at that moment and where did you want it to head?

[00:24:30] Matt: At this point, now I’m pretty set on Oliver Co. My career. I saw the consultancy role as a really good learning curve for learning very detailed, high quality design, but I definitely saw all the lessons that I was learning there. I was thinking, how am I gonna apply this to my own business? The focus then was, how can I start to transition to this being a full time role? So within about a year of being at the consultancy, I asked my boss whether I could go down to four days a week because at this point my own business was growing. I brought in a friend of mine who was marketing digital marketing, and he introduced me to running ads through Instagram and Facebook. And that was like an overnight. Completely changed the business. It was like, like doubled revenue practically overnight.

[00:25:22] Joseph: Wow.

[00:25:22] Matt: Okay. And then I really kind of thought we can scale this now, like create more products, Run more ads. If the unit economics work and you’re not spending too much on the marketing. Your return on investment makes sense. Then you can turn up the dial on the ads and you’ll sell more product. That’s when I then went down to four days a week, then quite quickly went down to three days a week. Worth saying. I built a base of money, so I was lucky in that I had got money from my grandparents that I kept. I started saving money from my job. It was quite clear I wasn’t going to pay myself for a little while, so that was another part of the mindset and strategy was, I need to start saving because I’m going to probably make this jump.

[00:26:02] Joseph: So before we talk about your eventual shift into what you’re now doing for Native Design, can we talk a little bit about those couple of years? I’m just looking at the timeline here. Do I have it correct that between around like 2021 to the present day is when you were kind of more fully dedicated to Oliver Co?

[00:26:23] Matt: There was a period of time where I was very focused.

[00:26:27] Joseph: How long was that for when you were, like, 100%. This is all I’m doing, Oliver. It was post consultancy.

[00:26:33] Matt: Yeah. So that was a year and a half.

[00:26:36] Joseph: So a year and a half. What was that year and a half like for you when you were just like 100% all in on Oliver Co?

[00:26:43] Matt: Incredibly exciting. I had my own space in London, and, you know, it was just like my, again, my sort of complete outlet of everything. I wanted the brand to be in a room. It was, yeah, incredibly exciting and at the same time, a whole new level of stress, knowing that I didn’t have any income coming in. And it was almost like a clock of like, you’ve got a clock, but it’s only going to last a year. Max, you need to grow this business and get this working. And I think there was probably a bit of naivety to the scale that I needed to get to, what levers I needed to pull in order to grow the business. So there was a lot of trial and error, and probably quite frantic. I was very motivated in the office early, and the day would just melt away, and I feel like I’m doing quite enough because I guess it wasn’t growing fast enough. So as time went on, the stress levels went up more and more, and there’s literally even an app on your phone that you can see the sales each day. And if I’d had a bad day of sales, it completely affected me outside of work as well, like I was. I would be miserable to be around, so it would be what I was thinking about. I was going, I’d be checking the website, is it down, what’s going on? And yeah, I’m like, listen, my now wife. She was just beside herself with it. It was carnage. Thinking back to it, before I had the office and I didn’t have the office straight away in Bermondsey initially, I had all the stock in the flat that we were living in, and I’d be getting up early and doing all the orders so I could get down to the post office and the whole room would just go explode with tissue paper everywhere and cardboard, and it was just absolutely carnage. Like get there when the post office opens and and then rush back. And then I was just at my laptop.

[00:28:30] Joseph: And was it you packing up these . . .

[00:28:33] Matt: Yes! And if it was personalization, I’d be embossing it as well with their initials. And I love that about it. I love that– I probably am a generalist at heart. I love getting stuck into kind of a bit of everything. That’s what I’ve realized is that I love learning how to do the website. I love learning how to do the marketing on Instagram, and it was a really frantic time. I just learned so much. But then I guess the reality hit after about a year that I wasn’t growing it fast enough.

[00:29:09] Joseph: Is this like a one-man operation at this point? Do you have employees? Do you have freelancers contractors who are helping you? Or is it literally Matt in your bedroom packing parcels on your own and literally running to the post office?

[00:29:25] Matt: So I mentioned the marketing manager in the early days, getting me set up on the digital advertising, and then I brought in some freelancers to help me out here and there. But at that point, still, like 90% of it was just me doing it all. Then as the business grew, I could start hiring more freelancers.

[00:29:43] Joseph: This is what I hear from entrepreneurs is, at least in the early days, when you’re doing the vast majority of the work, this thing is yours. Like, it feels almost like is your baby. And this is you are pouring your blood, sweat and tears into this thing. And I think you were about to say that things. I guess the business wasn’t growing as fast as you would have liked it to grow. I’ve always curious at what point do you decide that something needs to change? You’ve invested so much into this at this point, and you’re not seeing the traction and the growth that you want to see. How did you think through that? Like, how did you think through whether you needed to make a change not only to the business, but also your involvement with the business.

[00:30:26] Matt: It was more a financial decision. I was at a stage in my life where I was about to get married. We wanted to buy a house, so it was kind of at this point where, okay, I’m now starting to pay myself, but this is actually really putting the brakes on the company, and I can’t see how on earth we’re going to grow it if I’m not reinvesting this. But I couldn’t just keep going on and on without an income. So if the business wasn’t at the size where I could keep it going. But I did take comfort in the fact that it was now at a size where I could go get a full time role. The business could self-sustain, and I could hire freelancers to keep the lights on and keep it going and keep growing it. I think I would have been really heartbroken if it was like, I need to go get a full time job and I have to, like, stop the business entirely. I think. I think I really would have struggled with that. I kind of felt like I got the best of both worlds in the way.

[00:31:25] Joseph: Before we get to some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way. I do have a couple more questions about this transition that you made where you shifted back into full time work, but at the same time, you were also outsourcing the work at Oliver Co. And I know those two are related, and at the same time, they’re two quite big decisions individually also. So just outsourcing versus doing the work yourself. And this is something that I actually really struggle with as somebody who runs my own business, is when to let go and when to hand the keys over to somebody else. I would be really interested to hear how were you able to just let go of stuff and to hand it over to these other people? I know that’s what companies do all the time, and that’s what managers do. And people hire people all the time. But when it’s your own business and your name is literally I’ve got one of your cardholders, right? I mean, your name is on this thing. And so I’m just curious how you let go of control.

[00:32:20] Matt: It was a difficult and also very fast lesson that I had to learn in that getting my role at Native happened so fast. I expressed an interest with a recruiter. He literally got me the interview within about a week, and then within two days they gave me an offer and in my mind, I was this was going to be a lot longer process of getting finding a job, and it was going to give me time to learn how to relinquish control, understand how to set people up in the way that I want them to. I thought all these things were yeah, it was just going to happen at a slower pace, but it didn’t. The offer was there on the table, and they very kindly said, we want you to start now, but if you need to sort out your business, because they firstly amazing that they let me continue with the business. I think a lot of companies would say no, that’s going to be distracting for you. You need to stop it. They again saw it as a positive. Having my own business and they gave me the time. So initially I was on I was doing three days a week, and I said, you know, can I do that for a month? So then I had two days on Oliver Code just to start to make that transition. Then went to four and then went to full time.

[00:33:37] Matt: That was over a period of two months. In that two months, I had to learn and hire the right freelancers to relinquish that control. It was stressful initially, or that’s scary. It was the one thing I felt very confident. Running all the different parts of the business, I always felt like I could quickly learn something and do it myself, but the one thing I had never learned was how to manage other people to do this work. And so there was someone that I met who was also a founder of a company, and he had also transitioned into a full time job, almost exactly the same situation as me. And he said something. He was like. When you relinquish control and get out of the way of the business, you’d probably be surprised how much it will grow. He was like, just get out of the way. Sometimes you’re your own worst enemy in a business, and if you leave someone who is specialist in marketing to do the marketing, you’ll be amazed at how good they could be and how much they could grow. And that’s kind of pretty much exactly how it went. I brought in someone to do the marketing, someone to do the graphic design and customer service, and they were all brilliant at what they did. And the business grew. They did better with me. Not in the way of it.

[00:35:00] Joseph: How is your return to full time work been? Because you were working full time, then you went and did the entrepreneurship full time, and now you’re back into full time employment? I know Oliver Co is still out there, which I know is quite different than it not being out there. I’ve always been really curious what it’s like for an entrepreneur to go back and then work for somebody else.

[00:35:22] Matt: It was difficult in some ways. In other ways, it wasn’t because the role itself was quite self-starting. There was no one else in my role. It was in design strategy slash business development. There was no one in the team doing it. So it was very much I had complete ownership of that. In some ways it felt like my own, my own little business within the business. I guess it would be. It would have been quite different had I gone into a role where I had a manager that was very much telling me what to do every single day. It wasn’t that. So it was a bit easier. In that year I was running my business. I was in a room majority of time completely by myself. It was lonely. There were people. There were other entrepreneurs in the same block as me. And, you know, I’d see them on lunch and we would catch up them. I had a social person. I loved being around people, so I did find it quite challenging not being around people in that year. So being in a company with 80 people, I was immediately energized by that.

[00:36:19] Joseph: Well, the last thing I was hoping to talk with you about before we wrap up, Matt, are just some of the lessons that you’ve learned along the way of your very interesting career change journey? First of all, what has been the most surprising thing for you about simultaneously running your own business? I know you’ve relinquished some control of it, but it’s still your business while also being employed. Has there been anything in particular that’s been surprising about having those two things running simultaneously?

[00:36:47] Matt: The surprising thing would be around the balance having more time for my personal life, even though it was, it was almost like it was going to become more condensed. My life with having the business and my personal life and Oliver Co and I thought, how am I going to juggle all of this? And how am I going to be optimum with Oliver Co, still drive it forward and still be good at my work. And and I’ve realized the more I have created the balance between them all and really focus on that. The more energized and focused I’ve become on each thing. And I’ve been surprised by that in a way, because I really thought I was never going to get the balance. Yeah, I thought I was going to get pulled in different directions and feel quite stressed in this position, but actually being quite strict and splitting them up and making sure I felt like I was more balanced has really helped.

[00:37:38] Joseph: Do you have any sort of advice that you would give to somebody who’s maybe listening to this, and they’re thinking about launching their own business? This idea of going all in and kind of burning the boats and just focusing 100% on the business versus taking a more, I guess, measured, maybe more diversified approach to your career. Do you have any thoughts on or advice for somebody who’s kind of weighing up whether they should just jump in or whether they should kind of dabble at first and kind of dip their toe in?

[00:38:10] Matt: I personally think dipping your toe in is the best way. Keeping hold of your job as long as you possibly can. Probably learning quite early to outsource what you can. I think it’s so easy to say with hindsight, but building a business where you thought through the unit economics or whatever service you’re going to provide, like is this actually going to be profitable? Because I think I didn’t give enough focus to that. And then if there is a way of going more slowly into it, you’ll start to learn the lessons and it will be nowhere near as stressful as just going all in. I wish I kept my hold on my job a little bit longer, because there was that initial financial stress quite quickly. Going all in has its merits as well, depending on the type of business, but it wouldn’t be for me.

[00:38:57] Joseph: Final question before we wrap up here, what are 1 or 2 things you’ve learned about yourself as you’ve gone through all these pivots in your career and had these different formats of working.

[00:39:11] Matt: Yeah, I guess the thing that I touched on before is that I’m energized by people. That was kind of one of the main things. I think the relinquishing of control, and that’s something that I’m able to do, I can still be incredibly passionate about something without being in full control of it, and I can apply that to my role. Now we’re actually expanding the team, and there’s other aspects of my role that have now involved other people where I can start again, relinquishing control, and it’s felt easier.

[00:39:39] Joseph: Well, I do want to wrap up with something that I know you’re focused on right now, in addition to all of our Co, which is your work there at Native Design, can you tell me what you are currently working on doing right now at Native Design? And if anybody wants to learn more about what you do, where they can go.

[00:39:58] Matt: Yes, I mentioned at the beginning we’re a design and innovation consultancy. We’ve been going 25 years, a team of 80 in central London. Yeah. Working across physical, industrial design and engineering and digital design, and working with clients of everything from start-ups all the way up to your fortune 500, designing products and digital experiences for them. It’s incredibly diversified, the work we do. We design speakers one minute, the laptops and other and the interiors of automotive medical products and always something different going on in the studio, which I find incredibly exciting. Always a different challenge to solve. It’s an exciting time now because we’re looking to grow, growing into different markets, so trying to move into climate tech. So looking at things like heat pumps, batteries, energy storage, that kind of thing. Growing more in medical technology and the life science industry as well. And everyone’s talking about it. Ai being the buzzword, but these are transforming these industries, and we are right at the forefront of how to implement this stuff. So it’s a really cool time to be in this role in it. Native.

[00:41:07] Joseph: Thank you so much for telling us more about your life as a designer, Matt, as a business owner, and the balance that you have managed between full time employment and entrepreneurship. And as a proud owner myself of an Oliver Co card holder, I’ve bought plenty of your wallets and products and gifted them to friends. They’re all thrilled with them, so I definitely recommend people check out Oliver Co if people are interested in learning more about native design or even applying for a role, I hope that they’ll reach out to you and check out the company. And so I just wish you the best of luck with both Oliver Co and your work at Native Design. And thank you so much for coming on to the show.

[00:41:43] Matt: No, not so. Thank you so much for having me.