Leading with Purpose: Creating a profitable business from a strong focus on social value | #40

Welcome to Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others, a podcast about inspiring leadership. We hope to bring you grounded wisdom, stories from real leaders and leave you feeling inspired. Let's dive in.

Welcome to Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others.

This is a voices of leadership episode where today I'm joined by Daniel Walton, founder and MD of alpro, a certified B corps known not just for their innovative approach to making outdoor gear that is both functional and eye catching, but for its inclusive hiring practices, their commitment to sustainability, and their strong community ethos. I want to explore today with Daniel his personal leadership journey and how it informs the success of Old Pro.

Now offering grounded insights for leaders who want to actually embrace social. So this interview follows the one I did with Karen.

We want to talk to Daniel today about how social value can be brought to life in a very, very practical way. So, Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Morning.

How are you today?

I'm really good, thank you. Yeah, really good. Yeah.

I mean, we're recording this, if nobody knows, beginning of October, which is not our prime time of the year, but we've just had a glorious summer, so. Very happy.

I was going to say this summer must have been great for your business.

It was, yeah. Yeah. I've got to say, actually, I think that the British campervan fraternity and campers kind of go away, you know, come what may.

You know, it can rain for the entire summer and people will still go away, but obviously you enjoy it a lot more when the sun is shining. And we've had glorious weather this year, so it's been great.

We certainly have. Yeah. Well, we say we used to have a caravan, so. Yeah, I know. I know how that feels.

We don't have one now, but we used to love going away and as you say, come rain, shine, whatever, just get onto a beach, do whatever we want to do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's something about, isn't it, about the sound of rain on canvas or on the top of a caravan or a campervan.

You know, it's still one of the best sounds that there is. I think so.

I think so. I'm sure people listening to this might be thinking, what are they talking about? Sounds like horrendous, but I think so.

Yeah.

You know, I like being part of the outdoors. I like, you know, sitting outdoors and connecting with nature. I'm sure you do as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've got to say, as well, I've just come away from four days in a camper van, so. And that's the end of September, so. It's. Yeah, it can still be done in winter.

It can still be done. So I said at the beginning of the intro here, I'd like to explore your leadership journey.

And I think when we first spoke, you've had a very interesting journey up to where you are now in your life. So I just want to explore maybe what does young Daniel's life look like?

What were your influences and then how you started on this journey of leadership to where you are now?

It's one of those strange things, isn't it, that when you look back you can kind of see a relatively clear path in terms of how I ended up where I was.

But at the time it just sounded like a, you know, sort of seemed like it was just a load of nonsense and, you know, things just happening, but this seems to be a relatively clear path. So I was very lucky, I guess, being born in Sheffield, which is right on the edge of the Peak District, and I spent a lot of time in the outdoors.

In fact, there were two real kind of loves growing up. One was the outdoors and being involved in that in a lot of different ways, particularly climbing.

I spent a lot of time climbing in the Peak District. Yeah. And the other one was. Was gaming and writing computer games and he spent a lot of time when I wasn't outside, inside, on a computer.

And it's sort of strange how those two things have sort of collided in later life to now running an E commerce business selling camping gear.

It's almost like two extremes. I'm locked away for half the day and the other half the day I'm out in open air.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was really like that.

And so, yeah, so my uncle used to run a skiing and climbing shop in Sheffield, and so we used to spend a lot of time, myself and my brother out with him climbing. We were either at kind of Stanage Edge out in Peak District, or we'd be in climbing. Walls were becoming a thing.

And we used to spend a lot of time in Barnsley in particular, at one particular climbing wall, sort of training and practicing out there and. Yeah, just loved that kind of life. And it was.

It was sort of strange, looking back on it, that we would just sort of go out and we'd end up spending kind of evenings, nights out, camping out in the Peak District, kind of wild camping, and it was great. The other kind of side of that was my parents always had a caravan, so we would.

My mum, who I don't think will listen to this, I think I can say this, my mum wasn't A great fan of holidays, so we'd probably get away once a year.

And if we went to Cleethorpe's, which was probably no longer than an hour and a half away from Sheffield, she wouldn't even drink the water because it was sort of considered, it was that far away from home. So she wasn't a great kind of holidaymaker.

But so we went away on these caravanning holidays and they weren't as adventurous as sort of the time in the Peak District, but, yeah, no. So I definitely grew up loving, loving the outdoors, loving adventure and sort of being into that.

And then when it comes to going to university later on in life, I took a year out and I spent just a time working in Sheffield. I didn't go to university when my friends went, and so I got to visit them in places where they were.

And they were in great places like Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester. But whenever I was visiting them, I was thinking, this is very same. This is very same. It's like being in Sheffield, really.

And I thought, I want to go somewhere different. And I was also fancying. I don't particularly know why I was fancy, a criminology course. So I thought, I'll go and do that again.

That's something different. And one of the places, the big place for it was Sheffield, and the other big place was University of Wales in Bangor.

Oh, okay.

So I thought, well, that's great. That's exactly what I'm looking for. That's again, you know, really out in the sticks, out in the mountains, between the mountains and the sea.

And so I can go and sort of get involved in some other stuff. There's the first thing I did in Freshers Week was I joined the climbing club and I also joined the.

What they call the surfing club, which I never went to, and I don't think it ever existed, but I joined it anyway. And I never saw anybody surfing on the Menai Strait, but I joined it.

They must have gone somewhere to do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was before the time of mobile phones, but I never kind of got the message to say anybody without surfing anywhere. So.

But, yeah, but no, it was great. It was a great place to go and again, sort of fed that love for the outdoors.

So obviously there's a sense of adventure from a very early age, which I guess I see you as quite entrepreneurial. I guess that's probably fed into how you've grown as a leader.

That sense of adventure, sense of doing something different and putting yourself out there. Is there any other Influences that you think made you that entrepreneurial person that you are today?

I think probably things that I read or films that I enjoyed and, you know, kind of growing up, there was a kind of sense of adventure and like you said, say, not just really and kind of being in the outdoors, but trying new things and maybe things that other people would maybe look at and say, you know, what the hell are you doing? Why are you doing that? And that's definitely followed me into my working life.

I remember one of my previous bosses saying to somebody, half the time, I don't know what Daniel's doing, but it always seems to work. And I think that's kind of how I've run a lot of things or done a lot of things.

And obviously that can be quite dangerous at times, but you've sort of got to try the new and try the different, I think sometimes. And it's definitely worked. And yeah, in life I think I've been pretty much the same. Even going to university.

I was the first in my family to go off to university from Sheffield. That in itself was a bit of an adventure at the time.

And I guess from what you just said there, you've never been afraid to fail either. Let's try something that doesn't work or learn something or move on.

Yeah, definitely. And that, I mean, bringing us up to now, that's a lot easier to do now.

It's easier to try things, to kind of look at how things could possibly turn out before you sort of go into them full tilt. It's probably more difficult.

In the past, I had, when I left university, I'd been working, you know, just in kind of local jobs, working in KFC in Bhangar while. So I was at university, but I was also fixing computers, kind of continuing this line of me working on sort of doing computer programming.

In fact, before I went to university, I'd written a few computer games. They'd been released and things enough to buy me a little Renault 5, which I had at the time.

And then at university, I didn't want to leave straight away, North Wales, I really enjoyed living in Bangor. So there was an old bank that had closed down and they didn't want much rent for this building, so I rented it out and I started fixing computers.

It was right near the university campus, so people would bring PCs and things into me and I'd sort of repair them. And I did that for about a year, just working out of that. And again, I guess that was a sort of a strange thing to do, really, in some Degrees.

But it was my first business. It was the first thing I ran, set it up as a company, did it for a year and then ended up moving back to Sheffield. But really enjoyed it.

You know, it was a risky thing to do. It was very much a lifestyle business. It was never going to go anywhere beyond, you know, doing what I did.

And I employed, I think at most two people and part time that would come in and help out when we were busy. That was it.

But you had no real, at that point in your life, no real sort of sense of what your future plan was?

No, no, no, no. I don't think I ever have. Maybe even still haven't now. I don't think even now.

Well, you've done quite well if you had no plan. So how did it develop from there then? So what was the next step in your journey?

So I got back to Sheffield and then I think it probably was a point in my life in what was kind of my early 20s of sort of having to look at what my career was going to be and what direction I was going to go in. And really fortuitous, there was a job advertised for a company called Apollo Travel, which were travel agents.

And I knew of them, they had, you know, shops on the high street. So I phoned it. I phoned up the number in the newspaper, as was the way back then.

And the lady on the other side of the phone said to me, a lady called Ashley, who I got to know, she said to me, well, actually the job's not for a company called Apollo Travel. It's for a company called lastminute.com.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

So I went in and she explained Last minute where it was a company based in London, selling online only. They didn't have any sort of retail premises and they were using Apollo Travel.

And the reason for Apollo being involved was because Apollo were ABTA regulated. Okay, Last minute were not. And they needed to be ABTA regulated in order to issue flight tickets and things. So.

So they were sort of doing the sort of the back systems for them. But the job was to look. Well, the job was to work in customer services. So I went, I said, this is great. Yeah.

So went and joined Apollo Travel, but paid for and working for lastminute.com worked in customer services, there were about 16 of us all joined at once.

And after about two weeks they pulled me to one side and said, look, last Minute want a manager for customer services rather than us doing it, they want somebody who's employed by them. That works half the time in London, half the time in Rotherham, which is where Apollo were based. They want to kind of manage everything.

And they said, because you've got this background in IT and sort of understand computers better than a lot of other people that had started. So again, it was lucky, really. Would you take that on? I was really young. It was a manager's job.

It wasn't particularly well paid, I've got to say, but it was, it was a massive step up for me. So I said, yes, and of course.

Of course you did.

Yeah, that was great.

And I ended up, and this is the start of everything really, was I was spending a lot of time down at Marble Arch where the Last Minute officers were with Brent Uberman and Martha Lane Fox, who set up Last Minute, who've become kind of real icons in business since. And I was involved in board meetings, you know, again, very early age.

Right straight into deep end then, really.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I contributed nothing to them, but I was there, you know, so I was, I was listening.

Learning again, probably not knowing how much I was learning at the time, but understanding how people conversing with each other and ideas were putting. Being put forward and the sort of politics, I think, within sort of larger businesses as well. And it was fascinating.

And I was there when Last Minute, you know, floated. It was a floating stock market with the boom and the bust of that sort of early period of E commerce.

And Last Minute was one of the big survivors, not surprisingly, because, you know, there was a lot of thought going into that business and I think if I take anything away from Last Minute is how far in advance they were thinking.

Yeah, you said that when we first spoke, actually, and in terms of what you got from that period of your life, and you said to me, yeah, they were really good at thinking ahead because I worry sometimes in modern business that not many businesses think far enough ahead or not often enough thinking far enough ahead. So I'm guessing that was a real learning curve for you then.

It was a shock really, the way that they sort of spoke about things, because you could at one moment be going into a meeting where everything around this particular world, this kind of E commerce world, you know, the dot com boom and bust, you know, everything you read in the paper was like, this is a flash in the pan. You know, we're all going to be shopping on the high street. The Internet's not going to survive.

It's not this massive thing everybody thinks it's going to be. And that's what you were. See, it seems very funny now, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does.

But back at the time, and this was a conversation that was going on, you know, up and down the sort of land. That's the way people viewed the Internet, really. And we were talking about most people still being on dial up.

You know, broadband wasn't a thing, really. People had isdn, you'd go to Internet cafes to try and get a good connection. Phones. This was pre Bluetooth, even.

So we weren't talking about smartphones. You were lucky if you had Snake on your phone.

And, you know, we used to type messages and you have to press seven buttons to get the letter you wanted. So that was the time we were living in, but yet the meetings we were having.

So I remember one particular time where one of the technician people who was sort of looking at the technology going forward said, okay, so we're now selling holidays to people. We're selling full package holidays. We've got people going off to Spain, you know, to Tenerife, to. To Egypt.

We want them to be booking their next holiday on the way home.

Okay.

We want that to be done either on a phone or on the sort of, you know, the screen on the back of the headrest on the plane. Yeah, you know, this. These ideas were insane. Nobody was talking about phones being able to do book holidays.

No, no, no, no.

Or anything like that. So. But that was a mindset and they weren't focused on, you know, the chaos around them in the sense of what this industry was or wasn't at the time.

They were thinking about what it was going to be in the future. And it was really a massively brave thing to do.

But actually, in my own business now, with an alpro, the way we talk is, if I'm being honest, maybe not that far ahead, but we're talking about three, four years ahead of where we are now and what the business is going to look like. And we arm ourselves now for that business in the future.

How do you plan that far ahead?

Given how uncertain, ambiguous things are these days, it's very hard to see where the world's going to be in five years time, because look what five years ago was. We suddenly had Covid and all the things that have come from that. So it must be quite hard to want to plan ahead and generate loads of ideas.

We could do this, we could do that, but actually try and fit that into the chaos of the world at the moment. How does that work for you?

2015, we were a four year old company, we had very few employees. It was very much, we're going to have a marketing team, we're going to have people doing X, Y and Z. What's the range going to look like?

As we were going to have a set team of people and we were primarily going to be through our own website, a much higher proportion of sales would come through there. So we worked for five years to get to that point.

Now that looked really bad at first it looked like, wow, we've got too much stuff coming. We've got this really good team now. Actually, the really good team swung into action and we were brilliant.

During COVID we move, moved from being maybe a more transactional business in a sense that we're selling you something, to talking more about mindfulness, talking more about, obviously you've got a limited amount of time in the outdoors, make the most of it. This is how to potentially do it.

If you haven't got a garden, you know, this is how to spend that time that you've got to go out and sort of make the most again of being in the outdoors. And we sort of moved away from being, you know, selling people adventure to a sense of this is how you can get adventure.

Because we haven't got anything to sell you really at the moment. There's no point you buying the tent because you've got an hour outside for a lot of people. It might take them that long to put it up.

Let's not panic about that. So we moved into that. So the team were brilliant. We grew our social media massively during that period.

And then the inevitable happened, which was always gonna happen. We weren't gonna be locked away forever.

No.

Obviously we had lockdowns beyond that point, but obviously from that point onwards, from July, August, we just had a phen final year and it was because we'd got the stock.

Yeah.

We'd be bought and we were going to do that.

And we just ended up doing the sales we were going to do during the year, but within that sort of two month period and we got a really good team to push it. So again, things will happen. And beyond that time, we've had numerous things happen.

Look how unstable the government was for a long period of time and you know, with the sort of mini budget and the effect that had on people's income. So there are lots of things that will always happen and will continue to happen. It will happen again.

We've just had two bad summers prior to this really good summer.

But if we stay focused on what we're doing as a business and looking forward and I think kind of three to five year plans being really fixed on what your aim is, then I think you can get through these things.

Well, yeah, well, yeah. I mean big businesses do, don't they? But I think some people struggle to do that. That's the point, I think. Yeah.

You've obviously been very good at imagining where you want to be and then working out how you're going to make that happen. A lot of businesses I think want to do that, but actually the reality of making it happen is something, something different. Just before we get into.

I want to dive into Alpro because I think it's a really interesting business. But. So how did you get from lastminute.com to setting up your. The business that you now run?

Okay, so yes, I was working at last minute and I met numerous people there that I'm still very much good friends with. And Lisa and Mike, who are both directors in all pro, both worked at Apollo Travel. So back in the day.

So Lisa had a family connection to a company called Toshore who are an outdoor leisure company based in Sheffield, who I'd known for years and years and years. And we got speaking to one of the directors there and said, look, how come you've only got the one shop in Sheffield?

How come tosha, since the 60s, since it existed, has never sort of branched out and opened up other shops? I was at a point then of last minute, we're moving solely to London, that they'd become abda regulated. They didn't need policy anymore, right.

They were moving solely to Marble Arch. I'd been offered the job permanently down there to move. I was on the brink of doing it and then sort of thought, okay, do I want to.

Is this what where I want my career to go to? Kind of be working solely in customer services and working solely in London as well. And I didn't really want that to be the case.

Tosha had really by chance had sort of come by and they said, well, actually, if you can go and find us a. This again sounds like madness. If you go and find us a location, we can look to open up a second shop. So. So, so they gave me, me and Lisa.

They gave me and Lisa a Smart car, which again had just been released in the uk. So it was a wrong hand drive. We, we drove around the country, but the first place we came to was Southampton.

Okay, randomly.

Randomly, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we just headed south. So we hit the coast and there's.

A theme building up here, isn't there? Yes, we'll just see what happens.

Go out and see what happens. It was the worst weekend to do it as well, because we didn't know.

But it was Southampton Boat show when we arrived there and you couldn't get a hotel anywhere and it was a nightmare. But we thought, okay, this is a good place.

I think there were other potential ones, like Exeter was definitely on the list at some point, but Southampton was a real, real good location because not only did you have a great sort of camping fraternity there, it's obviously a big population as well, but you've got the new forest and the doorstep and then you've also got the marine side of. And where Tosha were really strong. Tosha had manufactured tow bars for decades.

So from a towing point of view, people with boats in the backs of the cars was really appealing. So I went back to Andrew and I said, look, got a potential location, I think as a city.

And he said, well, I've got an idea of where, I think you might say. So he wrote it down first. We both revealed Southampton at the same time. So we were both on the same page with it. And he said, okay, so.

So we've got a budget, go and find a location for it. And basically we ended up buying an old car dealership location just outside the centre of Southampton. It took a year to open it up.

There was all sorts of issues with planning and stuff like that, which, again, I'd not been involved in this world. This wasn't my world particularly.

And the first day opened, I remember an older member of the TOSHUA team who's a really good friend now, but he challenged me on the day we opened. He said, look, how come you've got this gig and you know nothing about retail? And he wasn't that wrong, really. I'd only really worked in the nearest.

I'll always play kfc, if I'm being honest.

But did you need to know retail? Because it strikes me that, you know, nothing seems to faze you. You just like, okay, this is a challenging thing. I'll work out how we make this work.

But nothing seems to faze you. So did you need to know that much about retail or was it more about the drive and the vision to make it happen?

Yeah, it definitely is, isn't it? I think there is no doubt. And I get this now still.

And I hate this feeling that you learn or you come across something new and you think, I wish I'd known that a year ago.

Yeah, yeah.

And there was very much a lot of that because the second. So Southampton worked really well.

And then a year later, Andrew and the team said, look, okay, will you open up a second one in the Midland, the third one by this point in the Midlands. And we found a site in Ayles Owen, and we opened up a third Tosha store.

And in the first weekend at the new store, I think we did something like 30 times the turnover what we'd done the first weekend of the second store. And that's just from knowing stuff that you didn't know back then, unfortunately. So, yeah, the drive was definitely there.

I was just really fortunate, I think, to be given an opportunity because I didn't probably have the knowledge or, you know, I'd read a lot, always listen to a lot of podcasts, kind of always pick up on stuff, but. But, yeah, I was in a. I think I was in a fortunate position. And then from.

Yeah.

And Tosha were already online, so it was great. And we sort of really drove that, pushed it and we had some phenomenal results off the back of it.

So that was my first real kind of delve into E commerce at Tosha. And then I went to the other side.

So I, I got to a certain point, I think, within retail and within what was essentially a family business where I thought I'd done what I could do and I didn't think the opportunity within the business was there for me. So I moved on to a brand Outdoor Revolution, who are now a friendly competitor of ours. Gambling. Really?

Well, they're a great company but I moved to them and they were just developing things like campervan awnings, tents. They'd always been a much more. They did things like windbreaks and toilet fluid. So there was some quite generic kind of product.

But the owner wanted to go into doing a lot more canvas product. So I started working with them. It's my first experience of visiting China developing product. Okay, yeah, that was really good.

I spent a couple of years there and then another company came along called Discover Leisure. They were, they were new to the industry and they were buying up caravan dealers.

So they bought up 18 caravan dealers around the country and they wanted somebody to manage all of the shops. And obviously my experience at Tosha, they came to me and said, look, will you come and do this? It was a really exciting opportunity.

It was massive in terms of the buying budget that I had, it was phenomenal.

The main point of the Discover business was selling caravans, which relied on people having loans and access to finance, which was limited at the time.

So another opportunity came up to me, which was my last employment before All Pro, which was a company called Maypole and they were based in Birmingham and they wanted a new sales director. Then long standing sales director was retiring, she had another year left and they asked me to join them to do that, which I did.

And that brought me to the Midlands sort of permanently. So I did that. I was with them for a couple of years and they were great businesses, really good family run business.

But it took me the wrong direction to some degree because it was, I don't want to say Boring product. But it was just very sort of standard stuff. It was towing leads and cables and electrical stuff. And it wasn't what I wanted to do.

I wanted to be in canvas, really.

I was gonna say, by this time, I know a lot of what you've done is I'll just see an opportunity and I'll take it and I'll see what. But had this. By this point, had you come to the realization that, actually, I want to run my own business.

I've got a vision of what I want to do, and now I'm kind of ready to be the one that's out front and everyone's behind me?

I think I was. I'd spent a lot of time on the road, particularly with kind of working within sales. I was listening to a lot of podcasts.

I was reading a lot of books. A lot of time in hotels reading books. And it was generally from either leaders of businesses or people that opened up businesses.

So I was really into things like, you know, what Julian Richard had done at Richer Sounds. Great business, great business and great leader.

And I sort of looked at other businesses like him and other philosophies around business generally as well, how businesses could be successful by doing things differently and obviously working with employees.

And I'd never, as much as I loved the businesses I'd worked within, I'd never worked within a business that sounded like a Richer Sounds or other things like that. And very often I'd been born meetings kind of recommending or suggesting some of these philosophies and ideas, and they weren't breaking through.

Probably much my fault as anybody else. I wasn't selling it well enough. But they weren't breaking through. And I also, I did maypole. And I've told this story many times.

I think I'm safe to say now I did get told off in one meeting for doodling.

Okay.

And. And I just thought, you know, I was thinking of ideas. I was thinking of product ideas.

But I was sales director and product ideas, it wasn't my category. I wasn't meant to be doing that. Yeah. And so other directors got really upset with me for sort of trying to push product ideas through.

But what I realized by that point, obviously there was two things. I was a rubbish employee was definitely one of the things.

Yeah.

Because even as a director, I was getting told off. And then I probably did need to go do something myself by that point.

So you decided by this point. Right. I now need to go and run my own business. I've got all these ideas. They're not landing on other people. So let's go make them happen myself.

So alpro was born. I can see from what you've said in your experience was why that would be a natural progression. So when you started alpro, you're now a B core.

You're now trying to do things differently to a lot of other business. Where did that. Was that philosophy there from the beginning? Or is that something that you sort of bought into as you started to grow the business?

So definitely going into the business there was an all idea, a complete idea about doing things differently.

And I'd been in the industry for a number of years through Tosha Outdoor rev discovering Maple and seen a lot of ways in which things were done and not done. And I think as much as I'd learned the good stuff with industry, I'd also learned the bad stuff.

And one of the things, whenever I talk to people about what I worked within a lot of people's view of the camping kind of world was that kind of last scene of Glastonbury. That was what people experienced and it was just stuff left. And it really did get me thinking.

It got me thinking before all pro that for an industry that's all about the outdoors, we don't talk about the outdoors a great deal.

In a sense, in a sense of, you know, the longevity of where we are and, you know, beyond like the country, the countryside code, which we push occasionally as a business, out to people.

Wherever I worked, there was no real talk about sustainability or about maintaining our environment in any way, which I thought was really interesting and a little bit odd really, where other industries, you know, even by, I mean, things have moved on so, so much.

Did you see it, did you see it as being a potentially a competitive advantage at that point, or is it just something that you personally cared about and you wanted to explore how to make that part of your business?

So I didn't fully understand how much people were into it or whether it was still a niche thing, whether it was still, you know, people that gave to Greenpeace and joined the Green Party. And I didn't know that's kind of where it ended or whether actually it was filtering out, out into, into the masses.

You'd have more conversations around it, I think, you know, sort of down at the pub and stuff. Yeah. You would maybe sometimes talk about you'd bought something and they also did this, which is a good thing.

Yeah.

But it was maybe not at that point a reason for the majority of people to be buying product, I would say.

So it was something we were going to try to build within the business, but probably because it was the right thing to do as opposed to it was going to gain us a lot more sales at that time.

At that time.

Yeah, at that time. But we were very set upon being.

And it came back to the old thing of me being frustrated because I'd been doodling in a meeting that we were going to do things different, we were going to design everything we created. And that was the first kind of standout thing. And I think the two things are not, are not separate to each other.

I think the fact that we design everything and create everything means that we can create sustainable product.

The big issue, I think is if you're just buying things off the shelf in China, which a lot of the companies I'd experience with before, including some of them bought from, they very much don't have that opportunity to create sustainable products or to kind of look at the life cycle of products. So I think starting from scratch gave us a real opportunity to be able to do the stuff that was right.

But I think later on has definitely become a commercial advantage.

Yeah. And also sustainability isn't just about what people would think about being green.

There is this thing about social value which is I really wanted to sort of explore with you. So you decided at some point that you, that you wanted to be a purpose driven business and generate your profits by being a purpose driven business.

What was the attraction of being a B corps?

So you're absolutely right.

You know, we got to a point where, and I think it's, you know, in any sort of company's life cycle, you get to a point where you've been around a few years, you're employing people, you're becoming more conscious as a business as to what you're contributing both locally and within the business, to people's lives. Because we all spend a lot of time at work and you know, we were looking for a way to be able to measure a lot of this stuff.

Yeah.

So obviously it's very good to know that you're doing it. And I often say to a lot of people when they ask about BCorp, you know, you're probably doing a lot of this stuff already.

Already. Yeah.

A lot of it is to businesses which are conscious of, you know, as I say their employees and their sort of social standing. A lot of this stuff is lying in fruit when you actually start B Corp accreditation.

But it also what's been really good for us, it's allowed us to measure that. Are we doing it? Are we maintaining it? But more importantly, and since we got the accreditation, we thought we were good when we got it.

We are so much better since.

Okay, so what's changed?

So we've obviously looked at a lot of the areas where we were weaker or where we didn't score as highly on the metrics. We've revisited those.

There were also parts of the process of becoming a B Corp where you think, okay, we do some of that, but actually we could do more of it it. And we've gone back into it and do more of it. And simple things around things like packaging.

So you look at packaging and, you know, we move to fully recycled packaging on everything that we export, but also everything that we ship out, but also in terms of income in stock now, nothing is put into outer boxes anymore. Right. So we've done away with all that and that.

And that process, that second part of that process was done as part of B Corp, as we were getting rid of cardboard within the business. Recycled, but getting rid of it in the first place, so we're not having to recycle anything.

We also put in more balers within the business, so we now bail any waste, and that's all recycled. So there were things that we were doing as we went through it that was like, we can probably tick that. We've got to do a bit of work first.

Let's do the bit of work first, then tick it. And then after the process, we did some really big stuff.

So as is kind of well documented now with all of our products, we make all of our tents and campervan awnings from a recycled material.

Yeah.

It's something we wanted to do, but we weren't doing it prior to B Corp. So we got our B Corp certification with all of our products being made from standard polyester, which wasn't recycled.

And then since that, we've gone into a massive amount of work into creating a recycled material that we now use across all products.

Wow. And I guess at the same time, as you were looking at different ways of doing things, you've got to bring your business with you culturally.

Yeah, yeah.

So making sure that the people that work for Alpro understand the philosophy, and I'm guessing you've got the core values that sit behind that as well. So aligning People, planet and profit is, you know, that's a difficult journey sometimes.

So how did you get your team on board with this and maybe coming up with those ideas for you?

So there's a lot to it. There's a lot to do, is there? Yeah, definitely. And it takes up a lot of time, but it's incredibly valuable. It's insanely invaluable.

And I think what we've often found is when new people have started with us within the business, they're sort of very aware that we. We have quite a lot of get togethers, sort of relatively informal meetings where we sit around and we talk about things.

And they are structured, obviously, I know going into it what the aim is to get out the end of it, but people are kind of very welcome just to talk through particular projects and ideas and stuff. And so what people have said at the end of these meetings.

So we have weekly managers meetings where managers get together and talk and they are relatively informal in the sense of. This is what I'm doing.

Yeah.

These are what we're trying to. This is what we're trying to get out of it.

And there is a standing item on those meetings around sustainability, which is to say it's not just about the environment, but it's how we as a business are, you know, doing things like this, you know, coming and doing podcasts and talking about what we're doing or going to schools. I was at how college at the beginning of the week talking to business students about setting up a business, you know, so working with them.

That's interesting actually, because I think as you were talking through your career, what struck me was, and because you were talking about how you were using social media during COVID there's an element about. We're trying to educate people about stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think.

Do people actually realize that actually part of just having great social value principles is educating people about stuff that they don't know or need to know is actually demonstrating social value, isn't it?

Yeah, hugely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it is for us, like I said before, a lot of stuff that we just do now and sort of barely think about it, but it's. Yeah.

When we get asked to get involved in things, you know, we'd like to, you know, we like to go and speak at events. I've got. And it's not always me. There's a couple of my colleagues going down to London, speak at an E commerce event next week.

Right.

About their experience on certain things. So.

And Katie, who's one of our really good ex apprentices is kind of often pulled out by different apprentice groups to go and talk about being an apprentice and what it means to sort of come through the other end. So, yeah, so we do the managers meetings and then we. We've also got board meetings every month, so the next one is next week.

But we have a member of the staff which rotates that attends board meetings as well.

This really intrigued me, actually, Daniel. I think it's a great idea. So how does that actually practically work then? Because I think a lot of people could do this.

It's incredibly useful. It is really, really useful. I think of all the things, it's one of the most useful things that we now do.

So we've now got a member of staff that has access to all the board papers, get to see everything well in advance.

Yeah.

And we'll come to a board meeting and to be fair, you know, first few board meetings will probably sit there quite quiet like, like I used to do at last minute, just, just listening and learning.

Yeah.

But they then get talking to other members of staff. They. They set up their. It's completely up to them what they do.

They can have an agenda item so that they can, you know, obviously every few months, what tends to happen is they will say, I've done a survey with the staff, with the rest of the team. I just wanted to sort of present that to all the directors. And we have.

We had external investment a couple of years ago, so we have a member of the, you know, of that body coming and sitting on the board. Board as well. So it's quite interesting.

We've got an outside person kind of sitting, listening to our staff talking about us and what we are doing and what we're not doing and, and they're really good. So they'll. That person will present and say, this is what the staff are thinking about this. This is what maybe we can do differently.

And some incredible ideas have come from.

Have they?

Yeah, really good. And, and at first it was. I think I said to you before when we talked about. The first idea is, well, we want more money.

Yeah, obviously, obviously.

Yeah. We got beyond that point and it's in its. I think they did get more money, to be fair.

And then we got beyond that point and we've got some really good stuff come out of it.

So giving us an example of a really good idea that you wouldn't have thought of, your board wouldn't have thought of, but that came out of this representation from somebody that joined the board for that reason.

Yeah, so we moved location. So we've still got our old warehouse, but we moved into a new warehouse warehouse about two and a half years ago and it was really interesting.

It was one of the biggest cases of Stockholm syndrome I think I've ever seen. So the old, the old warehouse was a pretty dire warehouse and it had no offices within it. We built some offices in there.

Right.

Kind of stud wall offices in there. It was very cold. It was an awful place to work and everybody was crammed into little rooms. The new place is really plush.

It's a beautiful place to work. It's in a better location. And we were like, this is going to be incredible when we move here because all the staff are going to love it.

Yeah, we're a lot more spaced out. So we actually work within different offices. There's different departments in different offices and people aren't on top of each other.

We saw that as a massive plus. Now within. We've been there about a month, two months, and some people started saying, I'm really missing the old place.

It was that kind of people being together, I think.

Yeah.

And, and stuff. And so one of the ideas that came out and we do.

We've done a lot more around this since, but one of the little ideas that came out of this which has been really useful is that at 3:00 clock on a Friday, everybody downs tools. We all get together in the main office and at first it was just a tea cake.

We supply some cake and tea and coffee and so we just sit around and we all talk and it was just half an hour, 45 minutes, people just to get together and just chat to each other. We've maybe not seen each other during the working week and it was really, really good.

It's moved on a little bit since then and now it's become a bit of a quiz hour.

Oh, okay.

So somebody pulls out a name out of the hat at the end of the previous week and that person for the following week does a quiz or a game and we've done some really interesting stuff. So obviously it's Friday today, so it's Lucy this afternoon.

Okay.

So we got to see what game she'll have created for us, what I like about that.

And, and I guess, you know, post Covid, I keep hearing a lot from business owners that I talk to about because, you know, hybrid working now is a thing. It's not going to go away. I don't know whether any of your people work from home some of the time or. No, you're Pretty much all in the office. Sorry.

We really promote people being together. Yeah, yeah.

Because I think what people are missing is that social connection which you talked about, that connection to nature which is really important for all of us. But social connection is also really important to all of us. And I fear sometimes we're losing that in the modern and workplace.

Yeah, you've managed to keep that together. You've managed to. The staff obviously want that as well, by the sounds of it.

Yeah, yeah, we've got.

We've always been really blessed with a really good team of people that, you know, do really all get on and all work very hard and, you know, there are lots of advantages to working at Alt Pro. The fact that we are an outdoor leisure business means that we attend a lot of festivals and events and staff obviously get to go to those as well.

And you can tell the ones, the ones with the good bands are the ones that people always want to go to. But. Yeah, but there are varying degrees of people's involvement within that.

Some people, you know, dare I say, don't want to camp out and spend weekends away, you know, away from family and stuff. And I fully get that other people do really embrace the sort of, particularly the van life and sort of the camper van kind of world.

So some people are really into that.

But this kind of, you know, half an hour, 45 minutes on a Friday afternoon, it's really useful for everybody to come together, regardless of whether they want to go to festivals and events. We just, again, we obviously do sort of get together out of work as well and things. And the other evening we did a sports day at work.

So we sort of stayed up behind for an hour after work. We had a barbecue.

Yeah.

And did a sports day. So kind of egg and spoon race and wellywanging and things like that. And that was all good fun.

And what about stuff like.

I mean, Tasha, who works for A, has asked me recently if she could because I've really bought into this whole, how does Zentano do more of the social value stuff? So we go out and do talks. Obviously, the podcast is partly about that. It's about getting some really good thought leadership out there.

So that's why we love doing it. But Tasha came to me and said, actually, I want to do some volunteering.

You did say potentially you'd give me some time off in the working week to do it. And I said, yeah, no, I did say that. So she's now got Thursday mornings every week to go and do some volunteering. She's Chosen what she wants to do.

We haven't sort of directed her any particular direction. She loves animals, so working with animals, amazing.

And I said, yeah, absolutely, because I'm not really worried about managing the hours she works, it's about managing the outcomes that she produces.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think that's a mental shift that, because most of us work remotely in our business, you know, that's how we have to run it. Unlike you, we're not all together all of the time. So. Yeah.

Do you do give people time to do volunteering or to go out beyond your business to do things into the wider community?

Yeah, I mean, talking about, you know, people going out and doing talks and doing events and things and stuff. You know, there would be if somebody was really clinical and said, okay, so what's that contributing financially to the business?

You know, it's probably very difficult to sort of narrow some of that down, but actually it makes us a much better business, you know, for all sorts of different reasons.

One, obviously the sense of we don't want to be measured purely on our financial contributions, but also on what we're giving to society as all that's part of what we are as a business. But I also think that it gives us a lot of strength when we're talking to potential partners.

You know, we, we work with some really big retailers, you know, people like Halfords and go outdoors and Tesco and they can see through our social media and also on our website that we're involved in a lot of these things that we're actually giving back and that makes conversations with them a lot easier when it comes to, you know, looking at new ranges or if their weighing goes up against another supplier, you know, we're actually a conscious supplier that they're going to want to work with, whereas maybe somebody else isn't doing these things.

Does that make a big difference nowadays?

Are some of the bigger businesses looking at businesses like Aldbro and saying, actually we want them to be socially responsible, we want them to see that they are doing things, not just saying things, but doing these things.

Yeah, hugely. Going back to B Corp, it was with people again, the good friends, really good partners.

People like Halford we work with for years and when we have conversation with them about the new range of products for the new year, they will have from on heart, you know, whoever we're talking to, we'll have given them an instruction to look at our green credentials and B Corp just ticks that box straight away.

As soon as you B Corp, it's just, well, let's move on to selling your product now because you can see that we've done the work on this side of it and yeah, so I think it's a huge gain to us. But I also think it gives a lot of experience to the team.

When people have left Dull Pro and gone on to other businesses, they've gone with a lot more experience. They joined us with, you know, they're more confident people. They might have given a talk somewhere that they wouldn't have done before.

They'll have met people not just in our industry, but, you know, through events, whether it be, you know, council events or the chamber of Commerce or FSB or whatever. They'll have met people that are in other industries they wouldn't have done before.

And are you very, very deliberate in terms of recruiting people that fit your values, fit your sense of purpose? Do you ask questions at interview stage to make sure you get the right people in the business?

Yeah, yeah, I think we do.

I think very often when we're doing interviews and this is for all levels, it doesn't matter whether it's management, whether it's a potential apprentice joining the business.

We are looking for a certain type of person that's going to want to be involved in all of the business that wants to understand what we're trying to do. We have something called the all pro way, which is what we set up very early on.

And I think it's the biggest clue to the fact that we were always going to be be a business that did things differently, that we're considering social values, that we set up a particular way in which we wanted to work. And it was all about listening. It was all about listening to customers.

Yeah, it was all about listening to customers and reacting to that and being honest about our communication with customers and producing new products. Product that stood out. Stand out is a big part of what we do.

And I think when we do interviews, we try to tick as many of them those boxes as we can with potential employees. About is this somebody that wants to come and try and do things differently with us?

Is this somebody that wants to is willing to listen to customers, whether that be in a field at an event or whether it be online or whether it be, you know, talking to them. Because actually a lot of what we create has come from what we've learned from customers, you know?

Right, okay.

Which is really important.

And do you struggle to attract those people? Because again, a lot of business owners will say to me, we struggle to find enough of them Right.

People you know, it's almost out there at the moment. If you've got skills, you're in demand from a lot of people. But do you struggle to find the people that you that fit your way?

It's hard to say because I think when I think if we've got it wrong in the past and if we've got to a point where we think, okay, we've just employed somebody and they're probably not quite what we thought they were, I think there's a nature within the business that means. And the other stat, it's not down to me, it's down to the rest of the team. They're in such a way that people sort of join in.

I think when people come, they might not be always right at the beginning. Yeah. But it doesn't take very long for them to kind of join in.

And we've had members of staff that of course, like any business, have not got that and haven't lasted particularly long and moved on. And that will always happen.

But I think the nature of the business and the feeling within the business is that people kind of do get what we're trying to do and kind of join in. And the all pro way, as I've talked about, there's kind of these three kind of A4 sheets really, they're kind of everywhere within the business.

So people can read it.

It's front and center. Everyone knows about it. Yeah, yeah. So it's actually not just the words on a wall. It's part of the actual everyday culture.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is what it has to be, isn't it?

Yeah. I think longer term members of staff will. Will probably not recognize that. But then if you say to them, what do we do as a business?

They'll probably quote half of it without knowing.

Well, that's. That proves that you're doing it properly then, doesn't it?

Yeah.

So what's next for Old Pro? So let's think about. You said at the beginning of the podcast, I'm all about planning ahead.

So five years from now, goodness knows what the world's gonna look like. But what's the next five years for Alpro look like?

We've done really, really well over the last five years in terms of the campervan market. So we're now one of the leading, if not the leading, camper van awning brands.

So when people think about campervan awnings, All Pro is definitely front and center in terms of being a brand. But we are involved in the wider camping market and for us it has to be within the next five years.

Yeah.

If you think about outdoor coats, there are brands that immediately sprang to mind, you know, not face Patagonia, Rab, people like that. If you think about tents to the again the man or the woman in the street, they're not going to immediately think of a brand.

There isn't a brand that people. A desirable brand with industry. We know Van Gogh, we know how well we know wherever we know people like that.

But there isn't a go to brand for kind of the, you know, the person in the street. That's where I wanted to get us to. I wanted to get us to a point of we are the desirable brand that people that stand out, that are different.

That when you go to Glastonbury and there's that final shot as it scoops away from pulp on the main stage or whatever, you can see the field. You can see the fields in the background of the tent, you can see the old pro tents because they stand out nice.

But not just me knowing that, other people knowing that. That's the. That's the aim to it.

Yeah.

And so I think that's why we want to get. Get to. That's a longer journey than three to five years.

But over the next three to five years, what we're going to be doing is we're going to be expanding on what we sell abroad. So we're now really sort of putting a foothold into Germany, into France. We can certainly expand on that.

We've been talking to Sweden in particular quite a lot at the moment. We do more in the Netherlands. So there's kind of a pretty clear plan around this side of Europe on what we're trying to do in terms of product.

We're not looking to go too far out of what we're currently doing, but expand those range. We launched the Blanco, our fleece blanket poncho last year, which is a great product and we're expanding that.

And that's also given us a lot of opportunity to go into different markets because it's not a purely camping line. People can wear them sat on the sofa watching TV at Christmas, which is a different world for us.

So lots on that and then particularly within the team, we're expanding the team massively at the minute. We're wanting to make sure that both our sales and our marketing team grow to cover all the different bases in which we now sell.

But then also we're sort of growing our HR structure within what we're doing.

I was going to say, because one of the challenges of growing a business and putting more numbers of people in it is how do you keep that strong sense of purpose and the values that created it and what made it great in the first place? Have you got a sense of how you're going to keep what you've got now? Which sounds really great.

It's the current team. So the current team are kind of the real drivers of what comes next.

Like I say, I think one of the good things about having a five year plan or a three year plan is that you can plan your workforce in terms of, okay, this is what it's going to look like in five years time and you might have say 10 more people, 15 more people, but actually that breaks down into only so many per year. So you can manage that.

I think if there's no plan, the problem is you can suddenly think, blimey, we've done all this other work, you know, we've done, we're doing a lot of work on the website at the minute. For example, we're introducing more B2B custom customers.

We've done all this work, we've now got selling a lot more stuff we haven't got the staff quickly employ 10 people and we haven't really managed those people into the business in a sense of having time for those people to settle in, understand what we're trying to do.

Whereas if you've got a plan and you know in five years time you're going to be X amount busier, you can bring people in, steadier pace, sort of understand that.

But that's where leadership development comes in, isn't it? And succession planning is that you as the founder and owner can't do it all.

But if you've got really great leaders in your business, business at various levels and I think bringing somebody in from lower down to be part of your board and bring it, that's developing them as a leader as well. So you're actually future proofing your business by doing that, aren't you? So what do you think?

Leaders who are listening to this thinking, wow, fascinating guy, fascinating journey he's been on.

What do you think people misunderstand about leadership because you've Obviously learned and are still learning a lot about being a leader and what being a leader means. What do you think people misunderstand about leaders?

I think we live in a weird world at the minute where people that we sort of, sort of iconic leaders are the people that are a name. So you kind of like you, you know, Elon Musk's of this world are kind of like single individuals who kind of stand above their companies and stuff.

And to me that's definitely not a leader because I think a leader to me is somebody that's putting other people forward and somebody that you know, is part of a bigger group of people that's maybe not. Not even really seeing themselves as a leader. Right.

It's a collective and I think that's where good companies just go back to what you've there about, you know, enabled to grow a business at any sort of pace. You're relying on a lot of different people. Yeah.

And so I think my role as a leader within the business is making sure that, you know, I've always got an open door regardless of how big the business is, that I'm there for people to talk to and that actually I'm pushing forward a lot of the ideas to other people to be involved in. So our current workforce plan is a, is a real kind of point to this that, you know, it's a plan that's born out of what all the staff have said.

You know, looking at where we are now, what that's going to look like in five years time, you know, based on the turnover that we're expecting and what we're trying to do socially as well. And yeah, it's born from what they.

So actually there's a buy in to what we're doing now and the other leaders within the business are sort of pushing that forward to everybody else. It's not just me doing it.

Is that how you make sort of more bold and courageous decisions? Is it you do that by involving your team and getting there by and early on?

I think it's the only way to do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's definitely the safest way to do it.

But I also think as well as a leader, you know, my background is really has been primarily within sales. I've been involved a lot in sales or in sourcing a product.

But apart from running my little computer repair business, I've never run a business prior to all pro.

No.

And I don't have the expertise really to do it other than what I've read in books or in Podcasts.

But I would say that you get to a point, and I probably got beyond that point before I started doing it, where I started really listening to experts and involving experts within the business, bringing other people in. And I think a good leader is one. And this goes against the Elon Musk way of the world, isn't it, where you actually listen to other people?

I have to say, I'm with you on this.

I mean, yes, we have, as you said, championed very charismatic leaders over the last 20, 30, 40 years, but actually, charisma comes in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, doesn't it?

But, you know, if you've ever read books like Good to Great by Jim Collins, he will say, actually, humility in leaders is like one of the most fundamentally important things. Well, you don't necessarily see humility in people like Musk or lots of other people in the public eye, do you?

But I do meet a lot of leaders where you think they're great leaders and they are humble and they are. They have a thirst for learning and they will just try things on the basis that if it doesn't work, we'll learn something from it.

And we can go against.

Yeah, yeah. Your likes of your Zuckerbergs and people like that. They're very much.

And it might be the media presentation of them, but it's very much that these are the people that know everything. And, you know, you sort of don't know the wider teams or whatever.

And, you know, maybe in the businesses, things are very different to what we see on the outside. But if people are using that as a model to run a business, I think that's a very dangerous way to run a business.

Well, the way we explain it.

So Rich and I, I don't know, you may not aware of this, but Rich and I have corrected a framework for how leadership should work in the modern world, and we call it connected leadership. And it's about how you find the right balance between when do you need to hold and use power as a leader?

When do you need to empower others and coach people? And like you said, we actually give people quite a lot of autonomy to go and do stuff within certain boundaries.

And you've got to decide, when do I get that balance right? You've also got the balance between spending time developing relationships with people and holding to account to deliver.

That's another balance you've got to get right. But overlaid on top of that is a ripple effect. So what ripple am I creating as a leader?

So that starts with obviously developing yourself and having good self management. But that ripples that into, if I run a team, how do I understand and manage my team effectively?

And that ripples out into the wider part of the organization, but it also ripples out into the communities that you serve. And I think, and I think you're saying great leadership is about those positive ripples that you create.

It's not about you, you, it's about serving other people, people that work for you, but people that work elsewhere.

It is weird because you get to a certain point as well as a business owner where people, and I still find it a bit embarrassing now where people introduce me, oh, Daniel owns a great business called All Pro and you're sort of introduced as that and then you're sort of on some kind of pedestal and it's very easy to kind of run with that and think, okay, I'm a great business owner and I know everything.

And there probably is a temptation about five, six years in where you survive that early period and you think, OK, good, this is what I'm doing, I'm good at this to sort of go with that. But I think what I've definitely learned, maybe I did do that at some point.

But what I've definitely learned over the years is that the more engaged with other people, both within the business and outside of the business, the more I've got from it. But actually I think it's massively benefit the business and people around us as well. So.

And that goes back to again, if somebody looked at my diary and said, well, how come next week, you know, you're in London giving a speech on this and you do a podcast day and things like that, that, well, that's actually massively benefiting the business and other people. It's a colossal part. Think of what we do as a business.

Well, you're thinking, not just operationally day to day, you're thinking about much more strategically, aren't you? And that's also important to run a business. Yeah, no, I totally agree with you and I think that's a really good thought to take away from.

Anybody listening to this today is, yeah, what are you doing to engage other people, serve other people? Look beyond your business as to how you, how can we bring other people in to help? All of that is beneficial.

So as a sort of final reflection, this podcast was about creating social value. If there's a leader thinking, wow, this is fascinating, I probably ought to do more around creating social value. Don't really know where to start.

As you said, you're probably already Doing some stuff anyway. But what would be your top tip for somebody in the next week, month to just start getting on that journey? What would you say they should do?

One very easy thing people can do is just log on to B Corp and go through their accreditation because you can do that for free. You can just pull down the template and see what the questions are going to be.

And obviously that is going to do as it did for us, give us a guide in terms of what we're already doing. But actually what you can be doing more of or what maybe you can push more into from day one. I would involve the team with that as well. Right, okay.

And I think it's a real temptation to kind of give somebody the job of being the sustainable person person, but actually needs to be everybody within the business and involve every manager at least. And then obviously that can filter down to the rest of the team. But I think that's real key way to sort of start in that journey.

And as you say, as we were talking about before, people will be amazed at how much they already do.

Yeah, yeah.

And I also, like, I think the tip for me that I love is think about bringing somebody onto your board or your exact leadership team that is not, you know, traditionally somebody who'd be on that, on that team. I think it's great to have, have that feed into the other people that work in your business.

I think as well on that side of it, it's probably just chance or we do employ a lot of young people within the business. But it's always been a younger person actually than maybe would be on the board otherwise.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that in itself has given us some real kind of revelations in the sense of, I bet, yeah, the world is not always as we see it.

No, absolutely not. No. On that point, where can people find out more about Alpro?

Well, you can definitely Visit our website. Alproshop.com Alpro shop.com yeah, if people are looking for tents, campervan awnings or we also, we do a real kind of great thing around education.

So if people are just looking to go camping or whatever, we do lots of videos and support for people looking to get into the outdoors and for me on LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn. So Daniel Walton on LinkedIn Olpro O L P R O shop.com please do check out out Daniel's website.

If you want to connect with Daniel, please find him on LinkedIn. But for today, Daniel, thank you so much for your time. I love talking to you. I love the journey you've been on.

It sounds fascinating and I'm really keen to sort of keep, you know, keep tabs of where you're going next. I think it's going to be interesting watching what Alpro do in the next few years.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you very much.