Daniel is founder and CEO of Fortis, an all-in-one business solution for Personal Trainers looking to scale their businesses. He is a former premier league football player at Bolton Wanderers and sales leader at Just Eat.
You've spent your entire life with one goal, maybe people have this about being a lawyer or a doctor, but with football you're just so fixated on making it. Football is more like a religion than a sport and you've always thought you would grow up to do this one thing but then it's gradually taken away from you in stages…
The first stage for me was to be told that I wasn't having my contract renewed at Bolton in the Premier League. Football's ruthless as is any professional sport. They don't care about people. It is very much about the money. The manager had a particular style of play that I didn't fit into. The manager saw me play two games. Bear in mind I've been playing for the club for 10 years and he brought me into the team for two games and in those two games he didn't what he wanted and he made a decision off the back of that. I didn't fit into his system, so they just got rid of me. That's just how brutal football is.
All of a sudden you're falling backwards down a flight of stairs.
It was the first time in my entire life that I'd suffered failure, like really, categorically failed, and you live with regret, because I didn't try hard enough. I didn't put the work in. I wasn't the hardest worker in the team. You play that over and over in your mind. This could have been different if I'd not been out on a Friday and Saturday night. If I'd have only been at training an hour early or stayed an hour late but then you need to let those demons lie at some stage or it sends you around the bend.
You then have to navigate trying to find another club and you're dropping down the leagues and you're getting rejected, you know, your ego's been hurt, you don't really have any support, so you're sort of trying to figure this bit out, you're almost clambering onto things, trying to hold onto them to stop from falling.
It's such a difficult time for lads and girls not making it as a professional athlete, because you're faced with realities that you weren't prepared for. All of a sudden you've gone from being seventh in the Premier League with Sam Allardyce as your manager and playing with some of the best players in the world. And the next thing, you know, I'm on a pitch with dog shit on it and three people eating fish and chips. It's a world that I didn't know. It was hard, it's like super, super tough. Most young footballers at that stage haven't got an education, I didn't have any qualifications, I had no A-levels, I certainly didn't have a degree, I had nothing.
It's a real heartbreak. I actually have pretty much blocked that period out, genuinely, it was so bad. It was such a traumatic time that I find it really difficult to remember exactly what happened because it was so fast and sometimes I remember things and I'll think oh yeah I forgot about that.
I still hadn’t accepted that my football career was over. I'd been rejected multiple times at this point. So rejected by the team that I'd spent 10 years at, which felt soul-destroying. Then rejected from three other lower league teams. I went to the US and was rejected by two professional teams. But someone told me about maybe going to university and trying the scholarship route. I was offered a trial to go to a US college. And that was my lucky break, I got to do something different and went to university. I was one semester in, I loved the team, I loved the environment, it was like American pie, I'm playing beer pong, it's amazing! But the financial recession struck in 2007. The banks started collapsing and all of a sudden my international funding was removed. So my funding to be at university which was $40,000 a semester was just gone. I couldn't financially afford to stay so after a year and a half of college in the US I had to come back to the UK. At that point, then I had to think, now I have to start all over again. I moved back in with my parents.
I'd love to say I had a plan, but I just applied for every single job in the newspaper. I went for two interviews. First interview was a street salesperson selling hair dryers and electronics in Manchester and Arndale. My second interview the next day was at a tiny little company that sold, you know, halal, vegan, vegetarian, and kosher gummy bears or Haribo. And the guy who was interviewing me was really into his sport and we basically just talked about football. He gave me the job and that was my first step into sales…
Yeap, 18 months later I went for an interview with Just Eat. And I naively had no idea who Just Eat were. This was back in 2010. I had absolutely no idea who they were, which is crazy and totally not advised going into an interview.
When I started the target for new customers signups was 20 restaurants a month. There were seven of us across the country. I did my training in January and February and then March was my first full month. And I brought on 67 restaurants in March. I had this chip on my shoulder from football and I was like I’m never gonna let an opportunity slip through my fingers because of not working hard enough.
I remember the CEO, David, emailed me after that. I reported this number and he commended me. But I was in this team where if you put your head above the parapet, people didn't like it. And all the team were basically happy with the 20 restaurants a month target. They were working part-time but being paid a full-time wage and being paid really well. So three of them messaged me after that first month and said, don't do that. One, it makes us look bad. Two, you'll run out of restaurants in your area. This is a gravy train, just hold your horses. And I remember thinking about it at the time and I was like, no, I'm not going to do that. I just put the pedal to the metal. Within, it must have been six or seven months, I was widely regarded as one of the best sales people in the company.
The sales director at the time left and went to another company that had been started by the original founders of Just Eat, a company called Minto. When he left he said I want to take one member of the team with me. And that was me. And he took me out for dinner, we chatted, he offered me more money, and I was probably maybe like eight or nine months into my career at Just Eat, and I was like ok, more money, I’ll switch jobs. So I went in and I actually handed my notice in.
But the CEO, David, sat me down, and he basically had printed out my resignation and he ripped it up in front of me. And he said, you're not going anywhere. We've got big plans for you. Just give us a couple of months and we'll move you into your first management role. And I wasn't trying to move into management. It wasn't a political move. I wasn't doing it out of anything other than wanting to progress. And within two months, they moved me into management. So then I was managing all the people that I'd worked alongside for the first year. And I was really young at the time. It was a big, big jump. But, you know, I think I took to managing a sales team like a duck to water. I loved it immediately.
I think being in a sports team, especially a team-based sports team, you kind of have this feeling of how important the team is. You can't win on your own, you need the team. Because I'd done the role and I'd done it really well and I built a good relationship with them so that played into my strengths. But I think to be honest with managing a sales team, if you're a good coach, you can really work with someone and get them better and if you’re driven, I think that's like 80% of the role is just coaching your team to get better and being driven.
At that point, I wasn't very strategic. So my role wasn't strategic in any sense. It was just, here are 10 people, here are their territories. It was all set from above. Dan, you need to hit, you know, 10 times what the target is through your team. So I was responsible for hiring people, I was responsible for performance managing people, running all of the KPIs, but in terms of strategy, that wasn't what I was responsible for. So I had the natural ability in that sense to do those things.
This was 2010 to 2014. When you zoom out and you look at what actually was going on in the company, I mean, it was just going gangbusters. Within four years of me starting at this company that very few people had ever heard of, it was the UK's largest tech IPO, with a valuation of over a billion pounds. It's crazy.
When I moved into management a lot of those people I mentioned earlier were all gone. They were all performance managed out. There was an excited feeling in the sales team, there was a hype. Everything was very, very focused on performance. So we had, as a field-based manager, my responsibility was to look after 8 to 10 individuals. And my job was to get the best out of them. In a lot of other industries, line managers don't solely have responsibility for performance. It's usually alongside a bunch of other responsibilities. Sometimes they have to go out and win business themselves, sometimes they have to do strategic thinking. Basically, there's usually a lot more on people's plates and performance management is a small part of their role. At Just Eat it wasn't that way. You basically had one person whose sole responsibility was to get the best out of the team.
They were also very aggressive with competition. Hungry House was the competitor at the time. I don't know if you remember Hungry House. In the end Just Eat acquired them. They crushed them and then just hoovered them up. But it was visceral, you know, we would be really passionate about beating out the competition and that came from the top and that was something that sort of drove the team quite a lot as well. So, you know, really highlighting the need and the desire to be number one was really important. The other thing that Just Eat did really well was they had the best parties, the best socials, the best culture in that sense. All the senior leadership team, none more so than the CFO, Mike, who's actually an investor in Fortis, he was hilarious. He was funny. And they had these world parties where we'd fly every single person in from all the different countries, and we would basically have a two-day festival. And there was almost a cult-like feeling. There's still a Just Eat Mafia. You really felt connected with the company you worked for and proud of it. And that I realised after leaving is so rare. I actually haven't ever come across it since, to be honest. It was like a real cult-like community that was created internally.
It's really hard to put your finger on. Like you said, the takeaway restaurant industry is just not glamorous at all. But Just Eat had garnered this cool reputation. It was a cool brand to be associated with. I think it still is. Whenever I speak to people about it, it's obviously not in the leagues of Apple or Amazon, but in the UK as a brand it's pretty well known and it's celebrated. It has an advert with Snoop Dogg and it makes fun of itself. But I think it comes from the CEO at the time, David Buttress, who I’ve always looked up to and trusted. He set really strong values. We work hard, we have fun, we take our jobs seriously, we look after each other. He's also a huge sports fan. He actually owns Cardiff Dragons, I think it's Cardiff Dragons the rugby club now. But it was his mantra and the way that he was that permeated through the rest of the company and it just attracted really good people. It really did. It was very cult-like. I still stay in touch with dozens and dozens of them and lots are investors in Fortis, which I’m incredibly grateful for.
He was really good at articulating the vision. He knew everybody. There were 1,500 people at the company but he remembers people, like a really good politician would be, he would comment on something, you know, so I'd see him and he'd be like Dan, how's it going mate? How's the football going? You know he must speak to hundreds if not thousands of people and he would remember these little nuggets and he would ask you about them. So he made you feel really special. He was the type of person that everybody wanted to work for. Because he was sort of down-to-earth, huge vision, very passionate, and he was very charismatic. And people just wanted to work for him and wanted to make him proud. You wanted him to think that you're doing a good job. You could have asked anybody from the tech team to the marketing team, to the sales team, they all had the same impression. It's really hard to cultivate a leadership style like that. I try as best I can to emulate the way he went about things. But he's like a guru of how to, if you look at the Just Eat trajectory and journey from when he started as CEO in 2006 to when he left, I think he left in 2017, two years post IPO. If you speak to anyone who worked at Just Eat between 2006 and 2017, they will almost exclusively look back and say that that was the best period of their careers, no matter their team.
At Fortis we acquired a business last year and a former colleague, who was in the legal team at Just Eat, did the paperwork for the acquisition free of charge because he's an ex Just East teammate. I only actually spoke to him a handful of times at Just Eat and shared a beer at one of the social events. But because we knew a lot of the same people and because he was ex Just East, he did the work for free which I’m beyond grateful for. We both reminisced for 15 minutes on our first call on the good old days and how great it was.
I had an epiphany recently around this term work-life balance. It’s talked about a lot. And it's something that for years I've raised an eyebrow at. It's actually something that I'm really starting to understand and acknowledge. Just Eat was a freak. A true one in a million business with crazy growth and the classic up and to the right graphs. The majority of the people went and realised that it was just a freak of nature. I've realised in my time at Fortis that it’s dangerous and ill advised to try and replicate something that was one in a million. If you try to be the one in the million, you have to make a ton of sacrifices, i.e. working 14 hours a day, driving your team around the bend, basically you turn into an Elon Musk type character and it's full on and you're going to fail 99.9 times out of 100. Trying to be a unicorn business almost always ends in failure and I owe it to the team and our investors not to fail.
There's a really good book called Lost and Founder that I read that articulates this really well. And I'm coming to this idea of, hang on a minute, I actually want to build a profitable, growth-based business where my whole team can finish work at 6 p.m. without crying into their pillow, without ridiculous amounts of anxiety. If that means that we're worth half the valuation in five years time, then so be it. But actually we'll be alive. No one talks about a £50 million pound exit. If you're acquired for £50 million you just don't get talked about. I've really come around to thinking that a billion pound exit is not everything and that everything we do inside Fortis is to be able to run efficiently and smoothly and predictably. Predictable growth, predictable service delivery, high quality, low stress, low complexity. That's becoming an internal obsession now. After the first two years, we just didn't do that. It was, let's do more, more complicated things, like let's try and we need to get these numbers. It's an interesting cycle I've been on personally and I'm very much at the other side of it now.
Daniel is part of the Greenhouse team that delivers our leadership and management training. We tailor each programme to the needs of each organisation we work with, working with you to select the right mix of start-up leaders, practitioners and leadership thinkers. Find out more here.
