Most Replayed Moment: A Guilt-Free Way to Handle Work and Life

Steven Bartlett (0:04)

When I sit down with CEOs, founders and working parents on this podcast, one thing that comes up again and again is the more you have to juggle, the more important it is that home and shopping for it isn't adding to that load. This moment's episode is sponsored by Wayfair, who understand that the spaces around us should support how we live. Here is Nicola Kilner talking about some of the systems that she's built to make working home fit together better. What's your opinion now on university?

When your children get to that age, where they're about to make that decision, you've got two young children. When they get to 18 years old, and if they said, mommy, I want to be an entrepreneur like you, what advice would you give them based on your experience?

Nicola Kilner (0:43)

I actually would always probably recommend doing a few years in a corporate because I have to say at Boots, I learned so much. You learn the things that they do really well. You learn the things that they do, not necessarily wrong, but just the drawbacks of being such a big organization. So I think more than going to university, like those two placement years I did at Boots, I learned incredibly so much. And depending on the kind of person you are, if you go to a big corporate, it's so difficult to impact the culture there because there's just so many people, there's so much history.

And if you are someone who's got this strong drive to make a change, then entrepreneurship, I think, is just an incredible area. And even if it's not your idea but going to join a start-up is just incredible energy. I mean, it just would always be what I would recommend.

Steven Bartlett (1:37)

At that point, if there was a key skill or a key set of skills that you took from your time working in a corporate at Boots that then proved to be incredibly valuable as you went on, what were those skills?

Nicola Kilner (1:53)

So, when I graduated, I then stayed on and I was an assistant buyer to begin with and then I got promoted to be a buying manager for them, which was really around relationships. It was about collaboration. It was about looking around the world, seeing new technologies, finding the innovation, new brands and then really handholding those, which mainly were entrepreneurs, to come into Boots to actually show them, look, this is how we could launch. We had a stand, it was called Latest Finds. We would launch a new innovation for a period of three months as a trial to see if it would work, would boost consumers like this. If it did, they would get a listing with Boots long term. And that just really suited my skill set because it was a very entrepreneurial role, because actually I very much guided them with PR agencies and actually how to build the plan. And we used to have this saying of launch and love because actually it's one thing to get a listing at Boots, it's another thing for your product to actually be picked and taken off the shelf. The listing is just the first thing.

You have to drive consumers, you have to have that entire plan. And I think it was just a really good way of actually learning from working with supply chain, working with finance, doing the checks with legal. Can we do this? What can we say? It was a really good sense of actually working with so many different departments and actually starting to understand I think consumer goods, learning demand, learning how to create it.

So I feel like that role was created, which really just suited my skill set incredibly well and I'm very fortunate for that and then that's also how I met Brandon. So actually it had a huge impact and obviously my next stage too.

Steven Bartlett (3:38)

And Brandon was a business you were maybe, he had a business you may be looking at?

Nicola Kilner (3:43)

Yeah, so he was with his previous business, which was called Indeed Labs. We launched a couple of their products through this program, Latest Finds. So I'd worked with him and I remember, and actually this sounds alien now so many years ago, but you couldn't check your emails when you left the office. So often every morning I'd come in and I was working with a lot of international entrepreneurs. So I'd always come in to an inbox full of emails. I always remember looking for his name because his email was always so full of energy. He always signed off, smiles, Brandon. Just someone whose positivity, his passion just really shone through that I'd always go straight to his emails, kind of open it. And the launches that we did with Brandon, Indeed Labs were some of the most successful we did through the innovation program.