Charlotte Mair: I Spent 10 Years Becoming an “Overnight Success”

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[0:00] Charlotte Mair:

There are so many people that I’ve met that have got big followings, and I’m like, you are dry ass. Like, this has been so cleverly constructed. I’m Charlotte, founder and managing director of brand marketing agency The Fitting Room. About a decade ago, I started my company with £17.22 pence, and now I am working with some of the biggest celebrities and brands in the world. We did our Christmas party in December, we hired out Stormzy’s House Party venue. We hired DJ Luck and MC Neat and So Solid Crew, and they came and did set, right? 150 clients dancing on tables to 21 Seconds, right? Soft skills are being completely drained because everyone’s so used to doing everything on screens and on their phones. Confidence and an actual personality that can function of making small talk with strangers in a room, for me as a business owner, is an underrated skill that is going to become more and more needed as we have these generations that have never been into an office. I think personal branding is the most wanky term to ever exist in marketing. And so my team, I have mapped out like a team, and I know who needs to play where to get the results. Okay, you train like an NBA. Yeah. If you want them to run like a fast motherfucker, you need to fuel them with this. People often see the shiny output. Girl, do you know how fucking hard we work in here for the little bit of jazz hands that you see outside? And that’s another issue that I have with the Money Gains Podcast. So, Charlotte, welcome to the Money Gains Podcast. How are you? I am so good and I am so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

[1:33] Sammie Ellard-King:

I am we’ve known each other for a long time.

[1:35] Charlotte Mair:

We have, we have.

[1:36] Sammie Ellard-King:

So we should set that precedent now, I guess. Like nearly it’s like nearly 10 years when I looked it up. It’s crazy. We first bumped into each other at Street Feast back in like the old Dynorama days. Yeah. Wow.

[1:48] Charlotte Mair:

What a time. That was when this country was peak. Like we were living. Like we really were living. We didn’t care about five days a week in the office. We were outside.

[1:56] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, there was none of that, wasn’t there? None of that at all. So we were in the office, but we were just living like four days a week.

[2:03] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah. Millennial.

[2:04] Sammie Ellard-King:

Young and in London. Yeah. Like just living our dreams.

[2:07] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah. Iconic times.

[2:08] Sammie Ellard-King:

You’ve since like gone on to do some incredible stuff. I mean, like, it’s the like the repertoire is endless.

[2:16] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah. It’s um starting a company with less than 20 quid, having never worked in the type of company that you’re starting, is a head fuck that I like I don’t think at the time I understood. And I always talk to people about the power of naivety. And in a time when we have so much information, I think, would I do it now with all of this, only this amount of businesses last and all of that noise that sits around it. Whereas at the time, like 10 years ago, I was like, fuck it, what’s the worst that can happen? Right. Because I didn’t know, I didn’t have access to everything. So it was just like, let me just run into this fire. And as my dad said to me at the time, what is the worst that happens? You lose a bit of money and you might have to move home for a few months. That’s it. And that fearless naivety, I was like, let’s fucking do it. And so here we are, thank God, a decade later, and still doing it.

[3:05] Sammie Ellard-King:

Like you hit the nail on the head. So when you start a business, you just like you feel like, oh, there’s a plan A, but then it ends up being plan like Z by the time you actually get to it. Yeah. And you just got to be flexible and never play with it. No.

[3:17] Charlotte Mair:

That’s the thing. Yeah. I think it’s Nike that says there’s no finish line.

[3:20] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah.

[3:20] Charlotte Mair:

Because if you’re striving for greatness, there’s always that next thing that you have to evolve, learn, do to get to the next level.

[3:26] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah. And set some precedence.

[3:28] Charlotte Mair:

Like I definitely don’t do my job for clout. It is very much I fucking love this shit. Yeah. And that’s why I want to stay doing that. So to stay doing that, like integrity has to be at the absolute forefront of everything that we do every day. Yeah. With whoever it is, big, small, you know, whatever.

[3:43] Sammie Ellard-King:

100%. I mean, like you helped us when we were doing hospitality. And some of the ideas and the people you brought through and like the nights we did off the back of it was just like epic levels. And so, like, your agency doesn’t do things half-assed. Yeah.

[3:58] Charlotte Mair:

We are very in the boat. And I think that’s like I, my personality and my beliefs are very much driven around America, right? And how they really nurture from a brand perspective the depth of DNA as to why you love something that then makes you go on and consume and spend money with it, but also the value in relationships. The UK is so much more transactional. You’re going to prove to me that you’re good enough to do that before I give you the chance. America, hey, I’m going to co-sign you because I think you’re really fucking cool. And it’s such a different energy. And everyone’s like, Where’s Charlotte this week? And she’s like, she’s fucked off back to New York because I need that for my soul, right? To see those big ideas and to operate around people with high levels of delusion. Right. I always say founders are no different to anybody else. We just have higher levels of Dululu. And delusion is what gets you through on the days when you’re having your ass absolutely kicked and you need to keep going. Yeah. And that is everything that TFR embodies every day in everything that we do. That’s like one of the most important things ever. It’s a high level of delusion that someone told me I couldn’t do that. Well, fucking watch me go and do that actually. And it’s, you know, it brings up a challenge of spending a lot of time exhausted. But the sentiment, I think, in business, if you want to get anywhere, has to remain. I think it’s Timothy Armoo that talks about being unreasonable. Yes. Being an unreasonable founder. Big fan of me. Brilliant, right? Absolutely brilliant. Also came through when the world was focused on more, say your Stephen Bartlett’s that had the bigger profile. And he was just almost in the background, just doing really great work that allowed him to sell the phenomenal business that he did. And, you know, there’s always two ways to approach business, isn’t there? Like you’re out there so much, so everyone believes that you’re incredible, versus you’re just in the background doing the work and everyone knows you’re incredible because word of mouth and referral does everything for you. And he’s such a great example of that. And I love that he’s having his social moment at the moment, and people are really giving that man his flowers for what he achieved.

[5:55] Sammie Ellard-King:

Absolutely. He’s got a book coming out soon, which I’m really excited about, actually. Read a couple other pages of it and was like, wow, like where he’s come from as well. It’s really close to here. He’s from Borough, isn’t he? So it’s like it’s it’s amazing to see. Um, but I love what you said there because I think it’s really important about America and Britain and the way that we see kind of the culture is like push people up. And it’s like, oh, you you’ll get there soon, buddy. Yeah. We’re jeering for you. Yeah. In the UK, I feel like, especially for small business owners and people that are perhaps have those dreams, we’re like, no, no, no, no, no. You need to stay where we are on our level. And like that mentality in the UK, I feel like is really holding us back at the moment.

[6:41] Charlotte Mair:

A hundred percent, because we have this mentality around staying humble. Like that is your lane, that is the box that you’ve been put within, and that is where I expect you to operate. And often what I found in my career is those conversations have been built on the projections of others. And I think that’s something that founders don’t talk about enough is your inner circle. I always say, from the people we hire at TFR to the people that are in my personal life, they have to have like a star winner’s mindset because that that I don’t want the people around me that are like, no, you can’t, right? I need my finance to be team to be like, absolutely fucking not. But the people that I want to deliver cool shit with, I need them to be like, yeah, you can. And this is how we’re gonna do it. And that is one of the biggest things with founders. I know they talk about the five people that you spend the bulk of your time with. I think that’s true to a degree, but in the business day to day, you need the people that are gonna elevate you. And in the UK, that is a really hard thing to find. Energy matching skill set and then a level of delusion. Like that, you know, where where Timothy says unreasonable, I say obsessive. Like I am pop culture obsessive. Yeah. Our vision is to be in the UK the agency that is famous for being the home of pop culture because popular culture influences absolutely everything. As we even just saw with the last election, right? Kamala going on and doing Call Her Daddy, and then Trump going on and doing Joe Rogan. Those podcasts and that pop and those little bite-sized sounding trends that went everywhere played a significant part in how all of that rolled out.

[8:15] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, 100%. Like, don’t get me started on the whole like stifling the Joe Rogan episode as well. Like that was mad. Like, I’m sure we’re gonna tuck into that. But um, like the biggest word buzzword on the internet right now is personal brand. It’s like everywhere. Like every guy and their dog is going, you need a personal brand. And I just feel like it gets totally misinterpreted because it means one thing to one person completely different to another. For someone for you that’s like essential on brand and like bringing this together, what do you actually feel about it?

[8:48] Charlotte Mair:

I think personal branding is the most wanky term to ever exist in marketing. Um it’s probably up there with authenticity, actually, as well. Another word that I absolutely hate. Um, to me, personal branding is your skill set and your personality, right? It sits at the intersection of that. And actually, if you think about it, personal branding that is now been predominantly driven by LinkedIn, right? This was the rebirth of LinkedIn as a channel, is the same as what we were doing 15 years ago with publicists, right? The role that publicists used to play in celebrities’ lives. It’s exactly that now, just reinvented. There’s just a new wrapper around it. And I think that I think that the the challenge with it is so much of it is pre-made. Um, that what people get isn’t always what it actually is. And as I said to you before we started recording, like one of my biggest fears in life is someone reading a LinkedIn post or watching one of my TikTok videos and then meeting me and being like, oh, she’s not fucking vibe. Like that’s a completely different energy to you know what she brings across. And there are so many people that I’ve met that have got big followings. I’m like, you are dry as. Yeah, man. Like this has been so cleverly constructed that I don’t even know if you know the difference between your personality and what you what you are, like what you’re presented to be. And I think as well, it’s a bit of a it’s a bit of a dangerous game because I also don’t think that it talks to the other side of what getting a platform looks like as a business owner and as a founder. I am very in tune with my business and I’m very uncomfortable. And you can see it with patterns on my LinkedIn of how I post. If we’ve got a shitstorm going on, I’m not very comfortable getting on the internet and being like, everything’s amazing, because I know chances are that client’s going to see that and be like, well, actually, it’s not, is it? We’ve just been doing this. And I take it to that level of personal, which I know a lot of people are able to push past and just, you know, carry on because everything gets sorted out. But there’s another layer of pressure that comes with it that isn’t spoken about, and another layer of criticism and people’s perception of knowing you because they watched a 60-second video where you spoke about something. And I don’t think founders are set up for that necessarily in the same way that someone that’s been striving to be famous or a celebrity since high school or has been in acting school or whatever. It’s a completely, it’s completely different thing.

[11:12] Sammie Ellard-King:

So to turn that on as head of touch, like the guy that’s working his job in account management, et cetera, et cetera. And they say to him, you know, put three, four LinkedIn and I’ll post that a week and talk about what you’re doing. That’s building his personal brand in a way and that might elevate him up to AD or even a, you know, even higher than that head of marketing or whatever that might well be, that might give him the platform. Do you see that?

[11:36] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah. Well, I think that’s slightly different in the sense that I think that’s a show of building reputation actually as a trusted voice within whatever your um sector is, and also confidence and a big part of business and career growth comes down to confidence, actually, because you know, there’s it’s actually a small pocket of people that actually post on LinkedIn out of all the people that have got a LinkedIn profile, right? So I think if you’re already attempting to put something out there, you’re already ahead of 95% of people that have the platform and that are scared to post. I think the balance that then comes in with that is understanding the part that your employer plays in what you’re putting out as well, because these things are all interconnected from a um UGC perspective, but also being really clear in what you want, you know, because that should influence the strategy of what you’re talking about. But that’s where I think that it starts to become really contrived. I just talk about the shit that I love.

[12:36] Sammie Ellard-King:

And that is my business. This is a thing as well. Like if you’re working in account management for a marketing agency, but you love rockets, yeah, talk about rockets, dude. That’s it. Like, have fun. That’s it. Like it doesn’t have to be that deep. Yeah, because actually that’s going to help your marketing job eventually, because they’re like, oh, cool. Like you’ve got something about you.

[12:54] Charlotte Mair:

You that’s it, right? In a time when soft skills are being completely drained because everyone’s so used to doing everything on screens and on their phones, confidence and an actual personality that can function of making small talk with strangers in a room. For me, as a business owner, is an underrated skill that is going to become more and more needed as we have these generations that have never been into an office, have never had to do stakeholder management within a business. It’s all been done over screen. So they don’t have the understanding of those little mannerisms and how you work that room, which have been fundamental to my career and all the the women predominantly that I know in my career that have gotten to high places.

[13:33] Sammie Ellard-King:

That’s the room.

[13:35] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah, that’s a really important part. Like I always say, women are tricked into believing that we need to be nice. I’m not a big believer in needing to be nice. I’m a believer in needing to be liked. People have to want to work with you. And to a degree, that is a set of soft skills that you cannot get from being able to write a really fucking bang-in hook for social media versus coming into real life. That’s a completely different skill set.

[13:57] Sammie Ellard-King:

I’ve seen it too a million times over because the language is so powerful. And like you can just put across this whole persona, yeah. You can be a fantastic writer, but a complete and utter bore.

[14:07] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah, that’s it. And so many are.

[14:09] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, so many of the biggest authors on the planet. They have these insane stories. And then they you give an interview and you’re like, boring, like turn off. I can’t listen to you. So it like there’s a there’s a position there. Like, you know, yes, probably if you are perhaps a touch dry and boring and you spot that about yourself, then elevating yourself to perhaps be positioned as not is a good thing. But yeah, I think it’s a difficult one for me. But I came across a video that you did last week, yeah, and I loved it because it just sort of struck me. And I feel like, especially in this day and age where we’re like, you need it now, you are going to do this now, or like start this business, and you’re gonna make 10 grand a week in using AI chatbots or whatever that bollocks that we see every day is right. But they don’t see what happens before that. And you said overnight success takes 10 years, but people only read the last page, and I’m just like, why is that?

[15:02] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah, well, I think um there used to be so much more value put on craftsmanship, right? There used to be so much value put and emphasis on training, right? And the journey that you go on. If you think about it from an athlete’s perspective of how many hours they have to put in to win a race, right? If you think about all those movies of that era, your Rocky Balboas, even your cool runnings, right? There was the sentiment of mindset of how you had to actually win. The thing about social media is it made everybody believe that there was a shortcut. And it also gave us this dopamine hit and also this desire for instant gratification in everything to do. Oh, that only got 30 likes.

[15:47] Sammie Ellard-King:

Okay.

[15:48] Charlotte Mair:

Like it’s 30, right? Because to the point of which one of my friends and media always says, if there was 30 people stood in front of you clapping you, you’d be like, oh, I’m the shit, right? But social media, well, that person’s got a million likes.

[15:58] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah.

[15:59] Charlotte Mair:

I’m useless. And I think that that part and losing your head because you quickly get this instant gratification that is very different to something that you’ve had to really grasp for. Like when I think back to the beginning, and I’m definitely not free from the woes of day-to-day business at all, still, right? Some people have amazing success stories of that. I definitely don’t have that. But I also love what I do and achieving the unachievable. But people’s perception of me now, because I’ve got this social following, I’m like, guys, it’s just the internet, like back in the room. It’s not that deep. It’s really not that deep. Like, let’s, you know. But some people’s whole personalities are driven by needing that. Whereas I’m like, post it and go, like, you know, kind of keep it moving. And, you know, but I also on the other side of that really value the community. So on most of my posts, as long as there’s not hundreds of comments, which is what I’ve got on one at the moment, I will go back to everybody. Whether they’re telling me that I’m a dick and they disagree, I’ll be like, well, talk to me about that. And that also always calms the situation. But again, that comes back to the soft skills. People aren’t used to being criticized anymore. No. Because everything’s perfectly presented. And that’s again where you’re seeing people have mental health issues and everything else because they haven’t been raised for that. They haven’t been groomed for that, for real life, um, which isn’t a quick hook on the internet.

[17:26] Sammie Ellard-King:

No, and it’s not shiny.

[17:27] Charlotte Mair:

No, it’s not shiny. Real life is hard. Running a business is hard. It’s good days, bad days. And the people that win are the ones that have the resilience in the middle that are able to balance out the good and the bad and still turn up.

[17:37] Sammie Ellard-King:

Steve Jobs said it’s like 90% of entrepreneurs are still in the game, are in the game because they never gave up. And it’s like, and I what one thing you said there, I think it’s like really important as well, is like I have been able to do Up The Gains because of like the call center jobs at 20, the sales roles on the sales floors, the hospitality businesses, like interacting and seeing culture and seeing how people actually handle their money in like bars, like and dealing with those kind of conversations and branding and startups and ideas constantly in hospitality. Like your next night ends and everyone’s on a high. And in my eyes, I’m like, shit, we have to fill up tomorrow. Yeah. Like, so I’m just go again, go again.

[18:19] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah.

[18:20] Sammie Ellard-King:

And it I brought that mentality into Up The Gains, and that’s allowed me to do that. But that’s 10 years of forming that person, which has then allowed me to be doing this.

[18:30] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah.

[18:30] Sammie Ellard-King:

Which is, I just think is so something that I think people just don’t see.

[18:34] Charlotte Mair:

They don’t.

[18:34] Sammie Ellard-King:

They’ve got to form little bits of themselves.

[18:37] Charlotte Mair:

That is the journey. That is the chapters of the book. That’s how it is built often from the hardship. And I think people talk about setting up a business and the focus is always on just getting started. I don’t believe it is in that. I think the getting started is easy because you are normally running on high levels of adrenaline and Lulu, right? It is the keeping going and the betting on yourself that is the point where you push through and you actually get the success, not the high of everyone going, oh my god, you quit your job because you wrote that big statement on social media, right? The actual getting through it, having a bad quarter, and still coming back and going, okay, we’ve still got Q4, let’s let’s go again. That’s a completely different kind of resilience and mindset to getting loads of likes on social media.

[19:19] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah. They just didn’t see the 5 a.m. Nope. And the, you know, 1am finishes, 16, 18 hour days that we was I was doing before, and you’ve done a million times over, and other founders do. Yeah. And then they have that one moment, and it’s like, oh, cool, this guy’s cool. It’s like, yeah, we’ve been crafting about it.

[19:39] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, we’re still just about still here.

[19:40] Sammie Ellard-King:

I was just on the edge of like thinking this is gonna work. But now we’ve had that moment, and that’s that that moment is rewarding, but that you do have to put that work in. Now, I love this what you said about this, and I want to sort of unpack this from a male’s perspective because I I I want to learn about this from you. And you said, Why do successful women scare people?

[19:59] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah.

[19:59] Sammie Ellard-King:

And you said that in a recent video, and I wanted to understand your thoughts on this because yeah, I want to learn.

[20:50] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah, so I think, and actually, it’s a really interesting time to have this conversation because the world is changing. Some people believe for the better, which is why they voted the way that they voted, and some believe for the worse. And there are so many layers to this. And I sit here as a black woman that has managed to build a business in the mainstream. Um, and I knew from an early age because of how I was raised, some choices were gonna have to be made as to how I positioned myself from early doors to get longer term where I wanted to be. And I think we had the girl boss era, right? Um, Sophia Amoruso, Nasty Gal. I loved it. And I people judge me when I say that, but I did. I really fucking loved it. There was this real, like, we can fucking pack a punch, we can go and do anything. And a lot of businesses were founded by women within that period because again, it was a high level of delusion. There was that North Star with this woman leading on it that hadn’t had this perfect life and was very much telling the truth about it. And we all, I think, pushed ourselves as a group of women to our max. I think we then got a bit older and we went, oh shit, like this is this is a lot to sustain because you’re not just turning up to do the job, you’re turning up to do the job and change people’s perceptions of you. Make sure you’re winning enough, make sure you’re showing the world that you’re winning enough and keep going. Whereas to a guy, they haven’t got that point to prove. And I always say this like my job, so we specialize in brand marketing and culture. A lot of culture over the last five years post the George Floyd incident has been built around black culture, right? Hip hop, all of those things really had that moment. And I have to, before a lot of things happen, check docs to make sure that doc is balanced, to make sure that it’s not skewing, oh, there’s loads of black people in it. That’s so cool. I have so many other checkpoints that I have to do before I do the job. I have The blended team. People’s unconscious bias that is not racism, is not ignorance, is just the way that we are products of how we’ve been raised, right? Conditions, yeah. Yeah. I have to do a number of checks. If you haven’t spent time with people of colour, people of a different religion, whatever, and you just read the headlines of certain newspapers, you will believe that people are one thing. I don’t believe that that’s your fault. I believe that that’s your environment, which you were born into, right? And in a cost of living crisis, people are thinking of themselves. It’s not about how can I help that person anymore? It’s my family’s got to survive. Which completely changes the dynamic. And I think this narrative has run is that everyone’s bad. And I’m like, no, they are just responding to the economy and the world that we are now operating in and trying to survive themselves, right? We’ve gone out of thriving into survival mode. And I think with women, we I some of my very good friends are okay at their jobs, but they know how to play the system. So they’re perceived as even better at the jobs. Some of the best women at their jobs are perceived as not so good at their jobs because they don’t have the profile and they don’t do the shiny game. And then you’ve got the perception of the world because strong women has always been put as a negative, right? That goes back to people talking about the burning of bras and it goes back to right back to like witch hunts. Yeah, witch hunts, right? Yeah. And it’s now really interesting if you take a movie like Wicked that turned the story of the witch completely on its head, put a black woman to play that role that had become the like the underlying things that pop culture is able to do to make people question the things they’ve been told.

[24:23] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah.

[24:23] Charlotte Mair:

Is really important. But if you’re gonna turn up online, be a strong woman, be a strong woman in the workplace, everything else, people will perceive you a certain way. Totally. I watched a thing, I think it was Wired magazine put out a TikTok yesterday, and it was a look at the change in the tech bros, right? So we’ve gone from these big tech CEOs being super casual, right? They’re just in a hoodie and a t-shirt. Now the macho men, yeah, it’s a completely everything tailored, perfectly presented. And I thought that is wild, isn’t it? It’s so interesting that that’s happening at a time where the trad wife trend is happening and women are going back to being in these perfect dresses and everything else whilst having their rights stripped. If you’re gonna go on the internet now and call out the patriarchy and call out the systems, you’re gonna get a higher level of hate back now because the narrative has changed from what it was two years ago. And I think the thing that people miss, and I talk about this as a black person, is I don’t need you to give me charity. I don’t need you to give me something because oh, poor Hersh is black. I just want a fair shot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s it. I don’t need anything else. And actually, we’ve managed to thrive without being given a fair shot. And honestly, again, this point at the beginning around too much information, I can never work out where is you need like a bigger sledgehammer. Yeah.

[25:42] Sammie Ellard-King:

That’s like you’re gonna go through the wall, but you just need you need a hit harder and another higher level of delusion.

[25:49] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah. But I think women, isn’t it interesting again? Um, Elon Musk in the White House the day before yesterday with his son. If a woman was stood there with their child crawling all over them, sat next to Obama or whatever, they would be controlling. Yeah, they would be absolutely annihilated. And that’s the difference, and that’s where people are talking about equality. That’s actually the fairness that they’re asking for. It’s not for anything more, it’s not to be given greater access, it’s just a level playing field. Um, and that in the narrative that’s been spun by people has completely gone out the door. It’s it’s now people people perceive equality as something completely different to what it started as in its purest intention.

[26:32] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, absolutely. You put that beautifully. I it’s it’s it is so interesting to see. I mean, you see like the likes of Stephanie Swords and her like fuck being humble campaign.

[26:41] Charlotte Mair:

Fucking gee.

[26:42] Sammie Ellard-King:

Absolutely brilliant equality. Yeah, she’s amazing. And you know, Emilia Sodell, who you know, also pushing that narrative. And it’s just kind of brilliant. See the Grace Beverlies, etc., now like, you know, number two podcast in the UK, like incredible. Yeah. And women in business have really risen up, and that’s been amplified, of course, by socials. And I I feel like it’s only going to carry on, but we are sort of, you know, 30, 40 years since bank bank accounts and credit cards were a thing. So it’s still like we’re still in its infancy, really.

[27:13] Charlotte Mair:

Absolute infancy.

[27:14] Sammie Ellard-King:

Um, so I feel like we’ve got a long way to go. Of course we do, but um, it is improving. I’m seeing it improve.

[27:20] Charlotte Mair:

But I think there’s layers to that, right? So, how many political women can you name that are actually shaping the world? We’ve got we’ve got the multiple wars going on, we’ve got all these things that are long-term detriments to the world. When are you ever seeing a woman talking about it? When are you seeing the women do those interviews? So I think there are seasons and reasons. And so we’re definitely in the entrepreneurship season, but I would also argue that some of that has been by design of what the world believes that a woman in business should look like. But if you want to drive real change, we need money. Like there needs to be investment. You can see that in the stats of how few exactly. And we need some political power to actually, no, you can’t just take out Roe versus Wade. No, those things can’t just happen because of votes that go into court, you know, of who like that’s real power. And I think that people forget that again in the oh, she’s got half a million followers, and yeah, because that tech platform can take that away from you tomorrow, right? That isn’t actually the power. Yeah, yeah, you know, and I think that that’s there are there are layers, and then at the moment there’s the perception of what is power versus what is actual power and influence, and who’s in the room speaking for women and a collective thought as well, not a monolith, like we all got different views, but a an understanding of this is actually where we’re trying to get to um as a gender, that this is what forward looks like. And also, you know, again, I upset some people. I don’t always think you can cut men out, right? I did a video that really upset a few people, but then again, a lot of people got it. And I was talking about um, it was mainly from a from a people of color skew of if you want to get ahead, get yourself an old white dude. And I said, they wrote the book, they wrote the blueprint, they wrote these contracts, they wrote how you succeed. So if you understand them and the underpinning of it, that is halfway there because they’re all playing the same game repeatedly, you know, chess and checkers, like they they they know the system. And I think again, sometimes we’re too quickly to retreat, you know, we’re very much in a tribal part at the moment now because of everything that is going on politically and economically. And I think that sometimes it’s like, yo, invite him to the cookout because the the white older dudes that I’ve got that help me, they’re like on a contract, they’re like, fuck that, change that, da-da-da-da. It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s embedded in them. And those contracts aren’t changing, right? So you need someone who understands that system, you know, and I think that sometimes that is the power within that is forgotten, particularly in minorities, because again, too much information and the internet, if you go into certain parts of it, will make you believe as a black person that every single white person hates you.

[30:05] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah.

[30:06] Charlotte Mair:

You have to be intentional with what you read, what you observe, and and where you put yourself.

[30:10] Sammie Ellard-King:

A few of our mutual friends come to mind in this situation. They know the game. Yeah, they do.

[30:15] Charlotte Mair:

They know the game, they know the systems because they they built them.

[30:17] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, and and yeah, and why not use them for your advantage?

[30:21] Charlotte Mair:

You can still go and build your North Star, but understand where you’re playing the game from. Totally. That that’s so important.

[30:29] Sammie Ellard-King:

I think you mentioned Elon and the little child coming into work, etc., and the way that they’ve like done this whole every government employee back to work, and that’s been this whole like work balance conversation is like restarted again. And I’m happy to say where my views are on it because I think it’s a load of bollocks, and but like for you, how do you play that with your own team? Because you’ve got a big team.

[30:57] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah, so for me, as I say often, to be successful at anything, at some point you’ve got to be an extremist for me personally. For the team, I think that um Jimmy Iovine talks about in The Defiant Ones. I love Jimmy, man. Oh my god, about going forward and never looking left or right, right? And I think that’s one of the biggest things around leadership is this is what I want to achieve. Who am I taking on the journey with me? And then Tim Grover, who was obviously a big NBA coach back in the day, he talks about cleaners, closers, and coolers, right? And how he builds out NBA teams and what the role is of that, whether you are a cleaner, a closer, or a cooler. Yeah. And what things will impact you getting the result. And so my team, I have mapped out like a team, and I know who needs to play where to get the results.

[31:49] Sammie Ellard-King:

Okay. You treat them like an NBA team.

[31:51] Charlotte Mair:

So to play in that position, you then need these things around you. So, yes, as a company, we have these are our values, these are our core, this is how we operate. But this is an individual, if you want them to run like a fast motherfucker, you need to fuel them with this. So you’ve got to understand how you play people outside of the generic. And that’s why so many founders and business owners of the old world are struggling because they had one size fits all.

[32:18] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah.

[32:18] Charlotte Mair:

Whereas now you need to understand the individual. Yeah. Right? You can’t just, well, that’s that, and that’s the rule. That’s not the world that we live in, especially with people going online and talking about toxic workplaces and everything else. Quite often it isn’t toxic, it’s that the leader hasn’t adapted to the world that we now operate in. And that’s for me, you know, my team. I think as well, sorry, it’s also about living true to your values. So our ambition is to be the home of pop culture. So everything we fucking do is around that. So we did our Christmas party in December, we hired out Stormzy’s House Party venue. We hired DJ Luck and MC Neat and So Solid Crew. And they came and did set, right? 150 clients dancing on tables to 21 seconds, right? We, when the Barbie movie came out, I bought out a cinema, 150 clients for a screening. And so, to my team, not only is that work, it’s street cred because it’s like, look what my fucking boss just did. Guys, do you want to go to Ibiza for next week? Yeah, I do. Two nights in Ibiza. And you have to have the budget for that. But the way that people have previously thought of employees as so disposable, oh, we’ll just replace them. Oh, we’ll just replace them. If you took that money to replace those people and invested it in creating an environment, which by the way is still never perfect, I still fuck up the same as everybody else, right? But my intention, my team know, is absolutely right aligned to them. It’s not always right, right? And sometimes I have to make different decisions based on the business needs, the environment, whatever it might be. But they go to bed at night knowing I’m turning up to do my absolute best, whatever the variable. And that is not always giving everybody what they want, but it is understanding what they need, what they need to win for the business, and then in their personal lives, what they need to feel like a winner.

[33:58] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah.

[33:59] Charlotte Mair:

And I don’t think that enough people spend enough time on trying to find that balance. A business is only as good as its team. And I, the some of the bullshit that I read on LinkedIn from these, I won’t name the name, but a certain founder that went on and posted up that he just um 70% of the people in this picture no longer work here as he, I think he was, as he is South Africa, he was somewhere fabulous. And he got really called out and the press picked up on it. And I just thought, where is the empathy here?

[35:39] Sammie Ellard-King:

It’s like the guy that cried when he had to sack all of his team.

[35:42] Charlotte Mair:

Like, yeah, that is what you do off camera. Yeah, yeah. That is what you say to your partner, your best friend, or whatever.

[35:48] Sammie Ellard-King:

I’m destroyed.

[35:49] Charlotte Mair:

On camera, it’s how do we pe help these people get jobs, right? How do we help them pay their mortgage? Yeah. And that’s where I think the sexiness of the founder life and entrepreneurship has completely lost its way. Great businesses used to be built with great people. You think about any of those tech brands, irrespective of where they are now, what they started as a founder with a dream, a high level of delusion, they all follow the same story, bro. They all follow the same foundations, but they were always about people.

[36:18] Sammie Ellard-King:

Totally.

[36:18] Charlotte Mair:

And it’s not that anymore. It’s who can get me that quickest, who can get me that cheapest.

[36:23] Sammie Ellard-King:

I don’t, I literally love that you said that because like when I looked at how I’d wanted to set up Up The Gains, I wanted to make sure it was that that Richard Branson approach of like you can work whenever the f you want. Yeah, we just get the job done. Yeah. But you wanna I want you to love the what you’re doing as well. And like everything’s set up for you to be able to do that. Obviously, we’re a young company, so we still have massive improvements to make there too. But that’s the premise. Like, if you want to work Sunday night and you’ve got to have the kids out on Monday morning, like that’s your work-life balance because your company is set up for you to allow you to be able to do that. And I agree, there’s the problem that I’ve got with these like old UK FTSE 100 institutions is like they don’t get the fact that the world has changed and that people need and want this flexibility, yeah. But it’s only the younger companies that are really pushing this environment for people, and funny enough, they’re all leaving and coming to us. That’s it.

[37:20] Charlotte Mair:

The exodus as to why these big brands um and corporations could not recruit and having to spend so much is because they’re not getting with it. And that getting with it doesn’t actually come from a chief happiness officer or uh, you know, those those titles. Um, it comes from or pizza in the office.

[37:39] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah. Yeah.

[37:39] Charlotte Mair:

Like it’s it’s how you treat people is such a my team. When I arrive in our building, they will see me walk through the building and say hello to pretty much everybody, the guy that’s running the café, the lady that’s cleaning the loos, you know. And that is just so important.

[37:56] Sammie Ellard-King:

Like how you treat a waiter.

[37:58] Charlotte Mair:

Yes. And people forgotten that. Like, I find it wild now that people are posting up pictures of them giving a drink or money to homeless people. What the fuck are you doing?

[38:07] Sammie Ellard-King:

Why are you posting it?

[38:09] Charlotte Mair:

I always say, like, you’re one bad quarter away from losing it all. And my finance team is always like, you need to calm down. I’m like, no, but if you stay in that mindset, that that can happen to anybody at any time because it is one bad decision. Everything’s gone. And people don’t think about it like that because that’s someone else’s problem. And that empathy, especially in this current climate, people you lose, you lose, you lose it. And it I want to build a business where the people felt like they built it too, you know, and also understand that they’re never gonna give a shit as much as you do. They never are. That’s okay. Yeah, but also how are you making that like you is better than exactly. Yeah, there is something in that and finding that and understanding that, and also how you turn up. If your boss is uh strolls in once every six months off that boat in the south of France, how motivated do you feel? You know, like there’s a there’s a line.

[39:04] Sammie Ellard-King:

I’ve had so many bosses like that. Yeah. I always say to people as well, like, look at your boss, take one look at your boss, and uh do you want their life? And if the answer is no, well, guess what? That is what you are striving for by trying to move up the ladder. Eventually, even if it’s just your team manager, like, look at them, is that them? And usually you get there like, what am I doing?

[39:26] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah.

[39:26] Sammie Ellard-King:

And I know now I need like a whole rethink about where I’m going. Do you get that vibe from some people as well?

[39:33] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah, I think so. One of the challenges that we’ve got at TFR is people often see the shiny output. So people will come and interview and they’ll be like, oh, Charlotte, la la la. And I’m like, girl, do you know how fucking hard we work in here for the little bit of jazz hands that you see outside? And that’s another issue that I have with personal branding and that perception is that it doesn’t represent what’s actually going on to get that result that you see at the front. Um and again, like the the the shit that goes online. I always say the most uninteresting part of me is the bit that you see on online. Actually, it’s the other stuff is the more meaningful and stuff that represents more in life. But society’s now bought into believe that that that’s what that is. And you know, you can take that back to Paris Hilton, you know, the queen of reality TV that then gave us: she walked so the Kardashians could run, right? That the the value and the power in perception, and that’s why I say, like, it’s just the internet, like, yeah, totally.

[40:34] Sammie Ellard-King:

Um we just had Kendrick kill it. Yes, I mean, iconic performance. I say that every year, though, with the Super Bowl, it seems to just be going up and up and up, and then I feel like Kendrick just went stratosphere levels with that, yeah.

[40:51] Charlotte Mair:

I think there was so much pre-hype um around that because obviously the diss track last year was such a big moment, and we haven’t had in kind of hip-hop like a beef like that in a in a fairly long time, right? Everybody felt like they’re invited to the cookout, right? Everyone can have an opinion on it.

[41:09] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah.

[41:09] Charlotte Mair:

And the the cultural significance of that for the black community at a time when you’ve got a Diddy uh locked up who was previously, you know, a highly respected from a fan perspective of somebody that had come from nothing and built billions. And it it’s it was so significant. And the stories and the nuance that he put into that performance, everybody could understand it because everyone’s watching what is happening globally. It wasn’t just for the black people, but it meant more to the black people. But everybody was invited to enjoy and appreciate that. And obviously, it’s a proper bit of art. It was, it was, it was more than just a performance of when someone comes out and does that big hits and everyone feels really good after it. It was a this is entertainment, but it’s also an education as well. And you didn’t have to look very far to understand why it was so significant, and that is one of the biggest stages in the world to perform on with the with the highest viewers, and he got the highest viewers in history. And obviously, Jay-Z has completely turned around those half-time shows and the value of culture and how people perceive entertainment and what entertainment can be on a big, big, big stage, yeah, rather than just the artists making music for TikTok to go viral because that gets them into the charts, right? That the artistry is completely different to that again, that very quick dopamine fix of that 30-second trending sound.

[42:39] Sammie Ellard-King:

On the subject of that TikTok, was that um we we don’t judge ads?

[42:45] Charlotte Mair:

Oh, yeah, we listen, we don’t judge uh Uber, um Charli XCX and um Martha Stewart. Yeah, I think again, those brands are doing so well um at social listening. How you take a consumer behaviour and package it into something that’s gonna make them consume and buy. That is marketing now, is the ability to do that and to see it before it happens. And that’s why marketing is changing so much because it requires a different ear. It requires a different lens culturally as to how someone can take something and turn it into a multi-million dollar Super Bowl ad that people get and that they and that resonates with them and that they feel like they’re part of the conversation because they’ve made two TikToks on it a month or two before.

[43:33] Sammie Ellard-King:

How much is a Super Bowl ad?

[43:36] Charlotte Mair:

They start from seven million. I’m sure it is seven million. Yeah. But I think again, like a weird, a weird thing about them all is I wonder sometime with ads now, if we’ve lost our way, right? The success of an ad is now measured by how many people are talking about it on LinkedIn. But if you go and ask your everyday consumer, did you see that? They’re like, what? There’s such a disconnect in the ad world of what actually is getting cut through with the person that you want to buy your product versus the echo chamber that is the community and the sector. And I think with Super Bowl ads, you know, Nike just came back and did that first one, I think I want to say in 27 years. Um, and they’ve done, to a degree, just fine without it, you know? So there’s there’s a balance in there, but I think so some brands are so deeply into it that they’ve got to turn up and do it. There’s got to be budgeted for, right? Because they need to be a part of that conversation for their brand recognition and their uh brand equity.

[44:32] Sammie Ellard-King:

You can PR the ad now.

[44:33] Charlotte Mair:

That’s it.

[44:34] Sammie Ellard-King:

Like that’s it.

[44:34] Charlotte Mair:

How many think pieces did you get? Yeah, you can recruit a B2B LinkedIn influencer to write and talk about that to their, you know, their audiences. It’s it’s a game in itself. Advertising to advertisers.

[44:46] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah. And the best ads now aren’t ads, they’re just purely, and then suddenly you’re like, oh my God, wow. And the last line is a tiny CTA or even in the caption, and you’re like, that was sick.

[44:57] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah.

[44:57] Sammie Ellard-King:

Like that got me. Yeah. Culture first, product second. Totally. You’re a big fan of this, right? Yeah.

[45:02] Charlotte Mair:

I I I live, I live for this. Actually, this is everything that people needed to understand of the role that subcommunities and subcultures play as they feed into what goes on to being popular culture. And I always say there are the leaders and there are the sheep. In the UK, most brands are sheep. They have to see two or three other people do it first before they will believe in it and buy into it, which makes my job that a little bit harder because to find the challenger brands that want to lead at the forefront, like a Gymshark, right? That are going to reinvent a whole category and put a new cultural flex on it to what everybody’s been doing. And then suddenly your legacy brand shit themselves a little bit and like, right, we need to get back in this game. Right, what we’re gonna do this year is a Super Bowl ad. So, yeah, the storytelling. Yeah, and what’s the biggest name that we can get? Oh, we’ll put Ben Affleck in a Dunkin’ advert. Like it’s you know, but again, there’s culture and then there’s culture. And they’re two very different things that very few people understand.

[46:00] Sammie Ellard-King:

I completely agree. I I mean you got your finger on the pulse more than anyone with this type of stuff. I mean, you live for it and breathe it. When it comes to money, because we’ve got to bring it back a touch with being a money gains podcast, of course, but what’s the most interesting thing you’re seeing at the moment in terms of like consumer trends in the UK and how people are spending their money?

[46:20] Charlotte Mair:

Cash is back. I had a really interesting conversation with somebody about this the other day. And what they were, we were talking about hospitality. And some parts of society live a life of clariner. Other parts of society live a life of not knowing what’s in their account. So that, you know, Apple Pay just keeps them going when it runs out, it runs out. And then this new crowd that’s back that we haven’t seen since the last crash, the 2008, that go on a night out and are no longer taking their bank cards and everything with them. And they’re going to the cash point and they’re taking out 50 quid. When that 50 quid is gone, it is gone. And it shapes then what that Saturday looks like. Because actually, if the happy hour is four till six, I’m going to get the most bang for my buck then. I’m then going to keep an extra 15 quid so it doesn’t look like I’m being tight at the table and I can get a drink at 8 p.m. But after that, I’ve got the money that I’ll use for my Uber to get home. But that’s me done. And that again shows how disconnected the government is as they try and get rid of cash, right? People are going back to being dependent on cash, actually, because that allows you to set that boundary that can’t get out of hand. When it’s gone, it’s gone. And that’s a big trend that don’t think enough people are talking about yet. And I’m trying to find the stats actually on that to match that human behaviour and put it into some data terms.

[47:36] Sammie Ellard-King:

So I would like cash in an envelope or money in the jar and just being able to like control a little bit more.

[47:42] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah, which I think we need at a time when they gave us credit, like everything to do well in life, you’ve got to have good credit. To have good credit, you’ve got to get yourself into debt to prove that you can pay off your debt. Like it’s a slightly wild um roundabout to get people to live in that cycle and then to expect people to not go too far with it. Yeah. Right. To not and then have social media on top of that, telling you that this is what success looks like, this is what you need to have. Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They’re gonna get you to, yeah. At some point, you are gonna get caught. And I think that that’s really important actually. And you know, you’re seeing it with on the other side of the the money side of the de-influencing, you know, of people saying you don’t need all of this stuff, don’t believe the myths around that. Um, and that’s a whole that’s a whole different world in itself of of consumption.

[48:36] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, you’re totally right. You mentioned Klarna. How do you feel about buy now, pay later?

[48:43] Charlotte Mair:

I’ve never used it. Um, and partly that’s a privilege to have not needed to, which I completely recognise.

[48:50] Sammie Ellard-King:

10 million customers now in the UK.

[48:52] Charlotte Mair:

Scary. And secondly, I think if you can use those things to be building your credit rating or using them to just make your money go that little bit further because you’re having a bad six months. I think the danger is when they become your always go-to. Um, and that’s how you become used to living, not for things that you need. I think that’s the other thing that’s really important because there are the things, there are people that have to use those systems to get their families through that, you know, but it’s the overconsumption where people are using those things that I think they become problematic. If they’re a tool that allows you to enhance your life and you understand the ramifications of that and understand debt and everything else, that’s one thing. But I think if you’re so used to just buying shit that you don’t need and using them to keep up with the Joneses, if you will, that’s a whole different problem. And also people’s understanding of money now, I think is a big, big gap. Because where you used to be, oh, become an accountant, become an electrician, put this aside every month for this. This is your rainy day. This is for if something breaks on the car. People can’t live like that anymore because they’re struggling to do just their weekly shop because of the cost. So I think it’s a really complex conversation situation with quite a lot of nuance that people who have never been in debt don’t really understand. Like in my era, oh my God, let me tell you, I was the girl that had the store cards. Me and my friends are store cards, River Island, all of them. And let me tell you, I got humbled the first time I missed a payment of one of those, of what that cost me. And I was like, never again, never again. The business, my agents. Right? I was that era of just coming through and be like, you’re at the till. Do you want to sign up for this? 10% off. Yeah, I do. Gap year, like, you know, and had no real understanding of the consequences of that and the real cost implications of that. And I always say, like, it’s one of the things that needs to be taught in school. Not everything is about stats and traditional maths and equations. People need to know how to run their lives. They need to understand what a credit score gets you, actually, and why that is significant. Um, we don’t have enough of those conversations because we make them all believe that everyone’s trying to build the next unicorn business, which 99.9% of the world never achieve, right? It’s about how do you pay for your egg sea bread. Yeah.

[51:14] Sammie Ellard-King:

You mentioned obviously like struggling with costs. Are you seeing people behave differently in store and yeah in the markets right now as well?

[51:23] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah. And I think even if you look at the fact that a block of Cathedral City Cheese will now have a security tag on it, it tells you about where people are really at. You know, and I think that that’s something again with the empathy that gets completely missed. For someone to walk into a store to steal a block of cheese, you’ve got to understand that for that, that that is a reflection of society. That is a mirror because people aren’t choosing in that way that you want to wake up and do that in the mornings. Um, and I think that’s down to opportunity. I think that’s down to bad governance for a number of years, and that’s not to do with political parties. That’s just as a general rule, there’s been bad governance. And I think that people feel like opportunities are gone. Like coming through, we had the local youth club. You paid £2.70 on a Friday to go to. It’s where you hung out with your mates. I loved it, man.

[52:12] Sammie Ellard-King:

I was there every week. Yeah, I know. It’s all gone. My my local one’s gone.

[52:15] Charlotte Mair:

It’s all gone. Um, you know, and I you have to ask yourself, where does it end? What more can you take away from people, right? And expect them to still turn up as a society and whilst increasing tax and the cost of everything. I think the human touch has been completely lost in how countries are being led. And that, you know, we saw with COVID, like so much integrity was lost. So much, so many diff truths, you know, told to people in the internet can very quickly squash them because we can find out information ourselves. Integrity in money and an integrity in behaviour is vital for a thriving economy and people feel comfortable spending.

[52:58] Sammie Ellard-King:

People are leaving.

[52:59] Charlotte Mair:

People are leaving.

[53:00] Sammie Ellard-King:

Like en masse, 222,000 Brits now in Dubai.

[53:05] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah.

[53:06] Sammie Ellard-King:

And that’s Dubai. Like you’ve got Portugal, Italy, Canada, Singapore, all these low tax havens, booming economies, in some regards, Italy and Portugal not so much, as but these other more wealthy or affluent country countries. And you just sort of it gets to the point, like, I’m getting getting fed these things now from like Dubai embassies, like, here’s a golden visa, you’re a content creator, come here, da da da. And you start thinking, and you go, What am I actually doing this for? To pay for this country, which is basically falling on its ass right now. And it does make you sort of question things.

[53:43] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I with a lot of those tax havens, everything comes at a price as well. Of course, of course. Because the shiny thing that we see on the front, you go to the old town and you’ve got quite a different thing.

[53:57] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah.

[53:58] Charlotte Mair:

Um, and I think the UK kind of stopped dreaming. I think that’s the the more of the challenge and the return of traditional media being very dominant in that where they stand on all of these things as well. I think people underestimate, you know, you get 10,000 marketing messages a day. If 80% of those tell you that things are bad, that’s what you believe. And then that then because you project that, right? That comes into your behaviour. I always talk about bad vibes, Britain. I always say, like, and it comes back to the point that we were talking about at the beginning around not having high levels of delusion and not wanting to reach for the stars because you don’t want anyone to think you’ve gotten out of your lane. But this country, I, as a black person here, feel so privileged to be here and to be in a safe environment and all the opportunities that it can afford you. However, I also understand the blockers and the barriers of some of the mindsets that don’t allow people to believe they can get their absolute best. And it does come down to I wrote a newsletter about this, and I said the Democrats’ um tagline was we’re not going back, right? So that is something that lives in the past. Donald Trump’s and the Republicans, I don’t even know if you can call it Republicans anymore, because it feels like Donald Trump’s party, right?

[55:19] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah.

[55:19] Charlotte Mair:

He was like, make America great again. There was a there was different sentiments. That leaned into the negativity. His lead leaned into perceptually, I think that’s a really important word in that, the positivity at a time when people needed to believe that things could be better. And that in itself was very good marketing. The the underpinning of what that means is a separate conversation. But the way that you could get consumers to believe that they were part of something and that their vote meant that that country was going to go back to its greatness, however, that meant that individually to those people, is something that I think people have heavily undervalued as to why people would go to the polls and vote for that. And then you kind of, you know, I think it was Zeze Millz who made a show for Channel 4, I want to say. And she spoke about being a black person, everyone expects you to vote Labour because that’s the working class, that’s the unions. That isn’t what they represent now, right?

[56:19] Sammie Ellard-King:

You know, you’ve got You saw Keir do a lot of what Donald did in the initial stage campaigns. A lot of the exact same messaging was like brought into Labour. Exactly. Just felt so off. So off, right?

[56:31] Charlotte Mair:

Because you don’t know what you’re voting for anymore. And we, the in America, it’s such levels of extremes because it is around very real things, Roe versus Wade, um, gun licenses, like those are life and death things here. Whereas because our laws are very different here, we don’t, I don’t think we approach it with the same rigor of what that person in charge means. And again, Boris Johnson, incredibly problematic. But to a lot of people, he sold a dream. It wasn’t all doom and gloom. It was there’s hope at the end of it.

[57:02] Sammie Ellard-King:

Big red bus.

[57:03] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah, big red bus. You will get a little bit more back in your pocket. Like, and I think that people on the left have underestimated the value of perception, whether it be true or not.

[57:16] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, yeah. It’s volatile for now. It’s very split. And I think there does need to be someone come out and stand for something. Stand for something. Yeah.

[57:28] Charlotte Mair:

I don’t know where fairness went, you know. Most people are good people. And I I I fundamentally believe that in my core we as a society need to do better at reminding ourselves that there’s more that connect us than separates us. And at the moment, we are in individualism and tribal mode. And as we’ve seen from history, that never ends well.

[57:53] Sammie Ellard-King:

No, no, it’s quite fractured. But I think the next two, three years, it’s gonna tip one way, and then hopefully it’s gonna just then exactly, it’s a cycle. Yeah. It’s a cycle. You I was saying this to my other half the other night, just like, this is just so crazy. And I was just like, honestly, look at the last 30 years, it’s like this, and then look at the previous 30 years, it’s done this, and it just basically one person messing it up less than the other.

[58:19] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah, that’s it.

[58:19] Sammie Ellard-King:

And then that’s they then it swings the other way.

[58:22] Charlotte Mair:

And it’s not who is best. Like the Tories lost an election. Labour didn’t win an election. I think it’s important to be able to, irrespective of your political views, understand that. And in the job that we do as as marketeers, like I always say, I read so much stuff that I probably shouldn’t read as a black person. But you have to understand why people are responding, why they’re responding to do your job. You have to be able to have sit and have a balanced conversation with somebody who’s got a different viewpoint from you and understand that they are a product of their environment. You’re a product of yours. But somewhere in the middle, you will normally be aligned in that you want the best thing, be that politically, economically, socially, environmentally, but we’ve lost the ability to have a sensible conversation because we’re tribes. I’m right, you’re wrong. Yeah. I’m gonna shout it louder. Yeah, Arsenal versus top. Yeah, everything is this versus this versus this versus actually we’re here. Somewhere, we was that was a happy place.

[59:25] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, totally. What could what can we do? How can we fix this? Because it does feel like there’s so many opinions out there. I’m sure you’ve thought about this.

[59:33] Charlotte Mair:

Yeah. I think we need new leadership. I’m not sure.

[59:38] Sammie Ellard-King:

The start-up party.

[59:39] Charlotte Mair:

Yes. And I’m really surprised that we haven’t seen that. And that isn’t a party that’s driven by politics or deep divide. We’re not talking reform in the world. No, we’re talking about balanced people going. Do you know what? We do now have need to have some limits on immigration. But that doesn’t mean that we need to make the people that are trying to immigrate here the worst people on earth. We just need to have a framework that we’re all understanding and we understand the enrichment that people coming in can bring. They are not all what is represented.

[60:12] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yes, right, exactly.

[60:13] Charlotte Mair:

Why is everyone choosing to go and be doctors in Australia rather than come and be doctors here? There’s a balanced conversation to be had here. Do you know what? We need to make sure that we’ve got policies that do protect people in the workplace. But you know what else? Not everybody is sexist and racist. Like somewhere in there, there is a balanced conversation to be had as people, but I don’t believe it exists in the current political structure that we have. No, and I also think that people are starting to see now with what is going on in the world, just how corrupt that is. And the the part that lobbying and big money plays in the background first, plus lords and ladies, like it’s just mental.

[60:53] Sammie Ellard-King:

Like, how on earth are we supposed to like push through that system? Westminster is toxic, in my opinion, right now. And so, yeah, I agree. It’s like it’s very interesting. Like, I know Dominic Cummings isn’t the most popular person in the world because of everything that happened with all of that. But his recent paper about the startup mentality in politics was bang on the money. Yeah. And I was like, this is very interesting. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be led by Dominic, but I think if you can bring in the smartest people in this country, the the entrepreneurs that are doing the thing, that understand how this country works and bring them together and actually funnel that into a really powerful political movement, I think it really would catch on.

[61:38] Charlotte Mair:

Because I always, you know, with politics, it’s like can you run a country if you can’t run a business, right? Because they are one and the same. You’ve got to listen to people, you’ve got to learn, you’ve got to grow, you’ve got to be nimble, you’ve got to be agile, you’ve got to adapt. And what we’re seeing because of how these political parties have run for such a long time, they can’t do that, right? There’s there’s one structure, yeah, and that’s that. And they’re all trying to stay existing within that framework, but the world changed. Yeah. And so it’s just it’s the next four-year cycle, right? You just you you you keep on moving it forward, and that’s why you end up now at a point where we’re at, and as well, just sensible conversation. I don’t know what happened to that.

[62:16] Sammie Ellard-King:

No, you’re totally right. You’re totally right. Um, I want to ask you because you got you smashed it with this, and it’s just a little bit left-field because we’ve gotten quite political, but I just wanted to bring it back to something. I didn’t mean to as well. No, no, no. It was my fault. Definitely, but you got like, I think across all of the videos I saw on it, it’s like 20 million plus views for saying how to say fuck you in corporate.

[62:40] Charlotte Mair:

Do you know what? The funny thing about that video is when I first saw it and we were going through scripting, I was like, I fucking hate this. Because I’m also incredibly direct, right? So the passive aggressiveness is a really interesting thing to understand, right? Because because I’m direct, it doesn’t mean everyone around me is direct, right? They have their other ways of how they navigate the corporate um systems. Yeah, that got the f because we done we did four parts to it. The first one that was nuts got 12.4 or 12.5 million views. And I checked it this morning, it was 17. I, oh wow. I I don’t even really know what to say about that. And do you know what the interesting thing about that is on TikTok, the comments were 90% positive. People were like, yeah, this is right. On YouTube, they were offended. Oh, yeah. It was like a it was like a parallel universe where they’re like, this is not true, this is toxic. Whereas on TikTok, they were like, Yeah, bad. So I say that to my boss all the time. There was such a difference in the audiences as to how they consumed that content. It was really, really nuts. I was like, guys, just calm down. Like it’s because actually, if you have worked in the deep, yeah, you will have said some of this and you will have known exactly what you were saying and why you were saying it. Oh my god, two weeks ago, a really big one. A really big one, did it? And my phone, I was out. I was actually at LinkedIn HQ at an event. My phone was buzzing. I was like, what the fuck? You know, we were trying to focus. And I was opening my inboxes and they were like, is this a joke? Is this a joke? Is this a joke? Is this a joke? What I will say on that one is he did send me an apology note. I will say that I got an inbox message because I do know him and I’ve done campaigns with him before. Um, but I was like, I was doing to say the name, but I won’t be on my Instagram. Like my girls were like ready to annihilate in the comments. And I was like, again, I was like, guys, it’s just the fucking internet. Like it’s not that deep.

[64:37] Sammie Ellard-King:

We would have done it.

[64:38] Charlotte Mair:

It’s not, you know, and actually in full transparency, the first one that I did was inspired by a version of that someone had done two and a bit of years ago, but we tagged her and said inspired by again a really important part of the community transparency, integrity of that. Um, yeah. So there are again, it’s just the internet. But on the other hand, if if you’ve got that level of a following, you do have a responsibility to do your due diligence and make sure you turn up correctly.

[65:10] Sammie Ellard-King:

I 100% recommend people to go and watch that video just because if you’ve you 100% have said one of them, yeah, but there are some bangers in there that you can like sideline and use in your next email.

[65:22] Charlotte Mair:

Because I was trying to laugh too hard as well, because there are my little giggles in it, which I think probably made it even funnier because it was like we can all relate to this because we all know when we’ve done it, we’ve done it to being a little fuck, right? We are retaliating to something that just made it really human. Um, but yeah, that that blew up way beyond like what my expectations were. Because as I say, I was a bit like, oh, I’m not sure about this one. And then I was like, let me mind my business and just let it do what it does.

[65:48] Sammie Ellard-King:

Always those ones, though. You don’t feel right. And yeah, same with me, a few videos, and I’m like, what?

[65:54] Charlotte Mair:

Why? Of all the what I consider intelligent things that I’ve said, the passive-aggressive email thing is the bit that gets into this.

[66:01] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, yeah. But it does do the job. So, but but honestly, amazing work. I’ve absolutely loved this. It’s I feel like I chat to you about this for days, and you know, I’ve had loads of questions we didn’t manage to get through. But um, yeah, I’ve absolutely loved this. Where can people find you?

[66:16] Charlotte Mair:

So on LinkedIn, I am Charlotte Mair, and all of my social handles outside of that are TFR Charlotte.

[66:23] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, wicked. Well, um, yeah, it’s been a real pleasure. We’ll link all to all of those in the show notes, but yeah, chat to you soon.

[66:28] Charlotte Mair:

Thank you for having me.