Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Jonny Goldstone, co-founder of Green Tomato Cars, the environmentally friendly taxi service and he’s an implementer of EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which helps entrepreneurs get what they want from their businesses. You’ll be hearing lots about both of those pretty soon. Qualifying as a corporate lawyer, following in his lawyer father’s footsteps, Jonny soon realised it wasn’t for him and he left the law without a plan of what he’d do next. Six months later he and university friend Tom Pakenham, another disenchanted lawyer, perish the thought, saw the need in London for a green, high quality, affordable private hire business. They launched Green Tomato Cars in 2005, growing the company from 5 cars to 150 before selling, with Jonny returning to the business in 2017 and saving the company from being put into administration on Christmas Eve. Jonny Goldstone is my Business Shaper, as you heard, co-founder of Green Tomato Cars and lots of other things too. It’s fantastic to have you here. Hello. That was a long time ago, twenty years.
Jonny Goldstone
Yeah, does feel a very long time ago.
Elliot Moss
You still look very young.
Jonny Goldstone
I feel younger probably than I did then.
Elliot Moss
Do you?
Jonny Goldstone
Genuinely, I’m enjoying life and what I’m doing now is giving me the chance to look after myself maybe, maybe a bit more than in startup phase where everything was crazy.
Elliot Moss
As I was thinking, I obviously do a bunch of research, one would hope, about the people I’m about to meet for the first time, this is the first time we’ve met, and I’m like going he’s a lawyer, he was at Clifford Chance, that’s a very structured world and it’s a very formulaic, frameworky type thing and now twenty years later, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, is again a framework within which you like to work and structure your thoughts. The hurly-burly of the startup world, you just referred to it almost immediately, kind of the chaos of it, where is Jonny happiest? Is it 2005 setting something up or is it now, the karma, framework focussed Jonny Goldstone? Which one is it?
Jonny Goldstone
I think in 2005, it was the 2005 Jonny Goldstone. I was excited about starting a business, I was younger, I had a lot of time to be able to devote myself to a startup and I wanted to build something so, then that was absolutely the thing for me and actually process and sort of frameworks and too much detail probably was what I didn’t want and in fact was part of what put me off staying in the law. Now, I think I’ve moved on, I actually lost my passion for being in an operating business probably over the last four-five years and became much more interested in learning and coaching, in optimising things through, through systems and so, moving into doing EOS implementation actually completely suits the me of today so, I’ve kind of had my cake and eaten it in terms of fulfilling what was right for me at the right time.
Elliot Moss
Some cakeism. Some Boris Johnson stuff going on over here. Who would have thought I would have said that? Now, but going back to that 2005, so the, the not the rebellion but the reaction to the law not being right for you, can you remember the glide path as it were to you coming to the conclusion you didn’t want to be a lawyer? Was there a trigger point or was it the sense that you weren’t doing what made you happy then?
Jonny Goldstone
There were probably two moments. One was the decision to become a solicitor in the first place, which I think with hindsight wasn’t the right decision for me. I think I probably, if I’d have been brave enough, would have tried to become a barrister and that came about because at university, probably for the first time, I was surrounded by a lot of people who were a lot smarter than me and so I took the what felt like the safe path of going to become a solicitor, where there were a lot more people who make it as a solicitor than they do as a barrister. So that was my first sort of self-doubt maybe clouding what probably would have been the better thing for me to do at the time and so I was probably on a path that was never going to work out for me and then there was a very clear moment when I knew I had to get out, which was I was working on a big acquisition, I was in corporate seat in Clifford Chance, working on this massive acquisition, Santander and Abbey National, and I’d been working all weekend, sort of left the office at 3.00 in the morning, that kind of thing, and we came in on the Monday and the partner who was in charge of that transaction sort of sat us down, the trainees, “How was your weekend?” and we were like “well, you know we were here, it went fine, how was your weekend?” He said “Ah, I had the best weekend, I spent the whole weekend, really spent some quality time with my family. We went away. We went to Portugal, we flew out on the Saturday morning, it was a great flight and then they went off and I flew back and it was really good to spend some time with my family” and I just remember walking out of the room thinking if that’s what good quality of life feels like for a partner in a corporate law firm, then get me out of here.
Elliot Moss
You talk about not being that, you know you thought you weren’t that clever after you arrived at Cambridge University I want to add now, studying Law so, you might have been around some of the brightest brains, academic brains in the country so, incredibly humble of you to say “oh I probably wasn’t the cleverest”, I think everyone probably feels like that, but that movement away from the law and then that transition into that first business, just talk me through the emotions of that because lawyers are really good at talking about facts and, and I know you’re not a lawyer obviously, you’re, but you’re a structured man, just talk to me about how it felt to finally be in a place where you went, “This is me.”
Jonny Goldstone
Well I guess it was just a buzz, there was a real buzz of starting up this business not really knowing what we were doing. We had a good, what seemed to be a good idea, but that’s the easy 1% and then you’ve got to actually make it happen, but it was very liberating, we were making it up sort of as we went along with hopefully a reasonable dose of commonsense and the legal training was certainly useful in terms of lots of the setup and how we went about approaching the regulators and that sort of thing and getting the vehicles, all of those details that, you know the training certainly helped.
Elliot Moss
Very early on by the way for environmentally friendly taxi services essentially.
Jonny Goldstone
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
I mean, ridiculous.
Jonny Goldstone
We were early, I mean with looking back, we kind of rode the wave at just the right time. So there were some businesses that had tried and failed because they’d been too early and we got the timing just right and I think there’s luck in that as much as having a good idea and execution. But it’s hard to put into words what it is about being in that startup phase that is really galvanising, it’s energising, it’s a lot of fun because you’re creating something and you’re making mistakes and then and realising and going back over things.
Elliot Moss
Had you been like that as a kid, sort of making it up as you went along and were pretty creative?
Jonny Goldstone
So, I’m quite creative, I’m curious and I’m an optimist and I think those two things, so I want to understand how things work and then if they’re not working as well as they could, I want to turn that round and work out how to make them better. So, you know, things like building Lego as a kid and that sort of stuff. So I think building a business, you know takes on some of those assets and traits definitely and then luck also comes into it a bit and things worked, things fell really well for us at the right time, so, so that helped and also made it all the more enjoyable because you sort of get a, a real rush, you have that emotional rollercoaster that people talk about in a startup and we had a few downs but the ups were really high and actually really meaningful because when you’re in startup mode even the smallest thing going well feels like a major achievement and feels brilliant, but for us really big things went well that we hadn’t necessarily planned for. We got a lot of free PR at the beginning, we got an incredible lucky break with James Murdoch, CEO of Sky, getting in one of our cars in our first month of operations and things like that fell for us and we made the most of them, but it was, it was really exciting.
Elliot Moss
And is the ‘us’ important? You know now you deal with, you’ve got a lot of entrepreneurs that you work with, that sense of partnership with Tom.
Jonny Goldstone
The ‘us’ for me is absolutely critical, I think as well as those other traits of curiosity and optimism. I think for me the other thing is I’m a collaborator with people, I want to work with people, I don’t mind my own company for a bit but actually in a business, when I set up a subsequent business called Piccnicc in 2016, the first thought I have was who am I going to do this with? Not because I necessarily thought there was too much work to do myself, but that dynamic of having somebody else to bounce ideas off, to you know sort of give each other a hug if things go badly or whatever. I don’t know how people who do it on their own actually manage that, they must have a completely different mindset, resilience, make-up, all of that because for me, it’s about working with someone else and like you said then, doing what I’m doing now, what I love now is working with those teams because you see that collaboration and I get to be collaborating with them so, yeah, I think for me working with other people is critical and Tom, my first business partner, we sort of had this pretty natural chemistry where we fell into the right roles, he was more the visionary, I was more the integrator, there was a bit of overlap but generally it worked really well and my most recent business partner as well, we sort of worked very well together as well.
Elliot Moss
Much more from my guest, Jonny Goldstone, coming up in a couple of minutes. Right now though we’re going to hear a taster from the Positive Disruptors podcast which can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Kieran John, a lawyer at Mishcon de Reya talks to leaders who’ve taken innovative approaches to make a positive impact. In this clip we hear from Chris Rigby, co-founder of the venture consultancy, Colab-8.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your favourite podcast platform. My guest today is Jonny Goldstone, co-founder of Green Tomato Cars, the environmentally friendly taxi service and as I said earlier, he’s an implanter of EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System which helps entrepreneurs get what they want from their business, it’s quite a mouthful. Jonny, you, you sold this business a few times. You sold it and obviously you were out of it, you’re out of it now, you tried to make it work in the United States, you even moved there.
Jonny Goldstone
Yep.
Elliot Moss
And it really didn’t work.
Jonny Goldstone
Absolutely. Couldn’t have worked less well. It didn’t even start, to be honest.
Elliot Moss
Is it true, years ago I read an article by Alexei Sayle, the comedian, and he was talking about holidays that the family remembered and the unfortunate thing was that the holidays you remember are the bad ones, but it’s not about the bad ones, it’s kind of the humour in that and what you learn from it. Is it the same for you? Have you got more from this failure than all the other successes?
Jonny Goldstone
No. I’m going to comeback in though.
Elliot Moss
Good, no, no, that’s good. I didn’t know what you were going to say and that’s an honest answer.
Jonny Goldstone
I learned a lot from that failure but actually, it was more lessons about the reason it failed would have been clear to me before I even went to America if I had known information that I found out once I was there. So the reason it failed was a number of factors that I wasn’t told before I, when I was sort of persuaded and sold the dream of coming to America to set up Green Tomato Cars. So it taught me about due diligence and not taking people at their word even if they’re the CEO of a global travel company and understanding that you know people will tell you things that are going to be such and such a way, but you know if you’re going to make big decisions relying on that, you might want to do your own due diligence. So that’s what it really taught me.
Elliot Moss
So that was the big lesson.
Jonny Goldstone
That was the big lesson. The other big lesson was whilst from a business point of view it was an abject failure and like I say it never really started so, I mean some things went well but Green Tomato was never a brand in the United States because the regulators wouldn’t let us do it, but would I not have done it if I’d have known how it was going to work out? Absolutely not, it was an amazing experience, life experience for me and my wife and young kids at the time and we look back on that really fondly and it has led us to make some of the decisions we made subsequently in terms of how we, you know, try to make the most out of our life and we made great friends so, it was a great experience that I would repeat notwithstanding that it was an abject failure from a business point of view.
Elliot Moss
And then I mentioned the selling of the business a few times. 2017, things are not going well for the business, they say to you, “Jonny, please come back, there’s not much cash left”, you’ve got probably a couple of months of burn rate before it all disappears and then you manage to save the business and a couple of years later sell it again. Just, again, the two big things you did that ensured that business didn’t collapse, what were they?
Jonny Goldstone
So, how you just explained it isn’t quite right.
Elliot Moss
Okay.
Jonny Goldstone
So we went back, in 2017 they asked me into the business because it was really struggling and they were trying to sell it, so it wasn’t about to run out of cash at that point.
Elliot Moss
Okay.
Jonny Goldstone
But the business was really struggling, it had been losing money for the last five years which happened to be the five years that I wasn’t there but it wasn’t because I wasn’t there, but that coincided with the emergence of Uber and the business having been acquired, various strategic moves and a lack of clarity around what would be the best thing to take the business forward. So it lost a lot of money but the owners kept pumping money in because they believed the growth would come. So they asked me to come back essentially to be a caretaker and a face that they could present to the marketplace when they were trying to sell the business. They didn’t find a buyer because they were trying to sell it and they sort of dressed it up as if it was a good business to buy and it really wasn’t, so they didn’t find a buyer and we did come to the day before Christmas essentially and they were going to put it into administration and myself and my new business partner stepped in and took the business back from them and the only reason that even happened was because it was, it was going to cost the previous owners less to give it back to us with a bit of cash left in the bank than to put it into administration, so it was as simple as that. So, two things you said that we sort of did that made it a success again, I suppose one was the turnaround which was brutal in a way because it had to be, we had to let a number of, a lot of people go, about 60% of the workforce in the office go, but as we explained to them, it was either 60% in January or everyone was going to be out of a job in April so, so we did that and we did those difficult things and making big decisions and cracking on with it and having difficult conversations with people but always you know with that solid intention and it was, in some ways it was very simple once you sort of took it, looked at it under the bonnet and understood what wasn’t working. And then the other thing that we did, having done the turnaround was from a sort of conceptual point of view for the business was we got right back to the basics of the business, which was focussing on the environmental niche and focussing on the client base that were profitable and getting back to treating our drivers very much as part of the team and just have it, it became more like a startup again, it became much more personal, intimate, drivers who I’d known ten years before came back or stayed and they sort of, you got that family feeling around the business to some extent and I’m always a bit sort of careful about describing families like businesses and businesses like families but there was certainly an improvement in that culture, it became much more personal rather than being this big PLC running things from, from afar, so that was really how we got it back in line.
Elliot Moss
Touch decisions make things more personal. Sounds pretty good to me. Jonny Goldstone is my Business Shaper, we’ve been talking about taking tough decisions, making things personal again, refocussing. Talking of focus though, I look at you and I go you know people use the word ‘serial’, you have done a bunch of stuff, Jonny, you have gone for Truckstars, a platform matching HG drivers with transport operators. The Piccnicc business you alluded to, 2016, obviously you’ve got Green Tomatoes, you’ve then got your consultancy. Is this just because you have lots of ideas or is it because stuff needs fixing?
Jonny Goldstone
I do have lots of ideas and sometimes it’s a good idea to try and turn those into a business and sometimes it hasn’t been so, the Piccnicc stuff came out of me returning from the US to the UK and had a really nice idea for a business with that which was sort of Deliveroo style food delivery in airports, that nearly took off, no pun intended, but Gatwick pulled the plug on us the day that we sent out our share certificates to our friends and family who kindly helped us with the fundraising, so that, that was a, a painful moment and then we spent a year trying to pivot that and didn’t happen so we had to pull the plug, but I do have lots of businesses, I try, or lots of ideas rather, I do try harder now I guess to really moderate and understand which are the ones worth chasing and which are the ones that you just sort of have to put in a drawer somewhere.
Elliot Moss
And is that, is that an instinctive process or is that a practical process?
Jonny Goldstone
Now it’s a bit of both so, now because I’m so focussed on EOS, unless something comes along that’s just going to be amazing that I would potentially consider doing alongside EOS then anything else is just going to be something that I’ll think about and then and shelve in my mind and there’s nothing that’s come close so far, my focus for now really is on building my EOS practice because like I said at the beginning, it’s what really suits me in terms of where I’m at now so.
Elliot Moss
And we’re going to be talking lots about that in my final chat with Jonny Goldstone, which is coming up very shortly as well. We’ve got some music also thrown in from Bill Laurance, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Jonny Goldstone is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. You talked earlier about the feeling now, this chapter of your life Jonny where you go I’ve moved away from the, the buzz of the operating, running a business operationally to advising other people. Why has that happened for you? What light switch went off and what light switch went on to pivot you away from that?
Jonny Goldstone
So, the light switch that went off was that we sort of achieved what I think was the pinnacle for running a taxi company, which was when we operated all the transport for COP26 in Scotland in 2021 and we were responsible for running an operation for over 100 world leaders and that was something we’d never done before and we had to recruit over 500 drivers and get 300 cars and set up a whole operation in Scotland and we didn’t have any operation in Scotland so, to do that and it worked seamlessly, I sort of think there was an anticlimax from that point on and I sort of thought, just felt that it was never going to be that interesting again and we ran that operation using EOS, which I had learned about as part of the time that I was moving back into Green Tomato and so I’d become more and more interested in coaching, I’d had a personal coach, I’d had a business coach, I’d found that I’d opened up to that in a way that in my thirties I would have just thought it was all fluff and I realised the value you can get from that and so I became more and more interested in coaching and that coincided with becoming less and less interested in continuing to, to work in an operating role in a business.
Elliot Moss
And what’s the joy of coaching for you? What does it give you?
Jonny Goldstone
It’s, that’s a great question, I think like I said I’m curious so, coaching is especially about asking questions, working out how to ask those questions, like you do, to let people work the answers out for themselves so, rather than advising or consulting, I see coaching as very different, it’s enabling people to come to the answers for themselves, especially by asking the right questions and also about challenging people so, having difficult conversations which I alluded to earlier and a lot of people running businesses just step away from that, they don’t want to go there, they’ll avoid making a decision for months and possibly years because they’re sort of afraid of the pain of tearing that plaster off so, what I get to do as an implementor and a coach is to have those challenging conversations with people that I know they won’t have by themselves so it’s a lot of responsibility but every time it happens, it tends to be quite an intense conversation between the leadership team that I’m working with and at the end of it they are always relieved and grateful that they’ve gone there and sometimes it’s like “oh my god we haven’t discussed that ever and we can now sort of see the light” so, it’s really fulfilling to help other people do what I as a business leader, you know, often fail to do myself.
Elliot Moss
And this Entrepreneurial Operating System in a nutshell, I was, it reminded me of an ad agency that used to talk about “processes that liberate creativity”, it was BBH and John Hegarty was a guest here many years ago. Is that what it does? Because obviously you need to have the space to explore and to have the challenging conversations to think about new ideas, to challenge those new ideas, is it, is it that? Is it the framework or is it much more than that?
Jonny Goldstone
It’s a lot more than that but that’s part of it, I mean there’s, there’s sort of three key elements. One is getting the leadership team aligned around the vision for the business so they know what on earth actually they’re trying to achieve. The second is getting them to execute and gain traction in going there because it’s one thing having the idea and even being clear about it, but then how are you going to make that happen and a lot of that is about focus, discipline, prioritisation and accountability. And the third part that’s often overlooked is about the sort of the way that the team works together, the leadership team works together in a healthy way so that people are prepared to put their hand up, raise issues, challenge each other, where in a you know less functional or a dysfunctional leadership team, they just avoid those conversations so, you know, if only 50% of what you’re concerned about is out there on the table then you’re never going to get to the bottom of the issues properly. And so those three elements together will, when you’re executing properly, give you the freedom to then go and be expansive, to have really good strategic thinking, to let the people in your business do what they should be doing so that you as a leader can do what you should be doing, which is leading the business and really, it gives you, it gives you all of that together but you know in a comprehensive way so that each element is reinforcing the others and it’s, it’s just a great framework, I mean when I read the book, I just, I couldn’t believe that I didn’t know such things existed, I thought when you started a business and ran a business, you just made it up as you went along and maybe had some good advisors but actually doing it through an operating system and being intentional about taking the right steps at the right time, it’s a, it really is a gamechanger, it was for me and I think is for my clients as well.
Elliot Moss
You’ve revealed the secret now though, that means everybody, I’m going to have millions of people on this programme and they’re all going to be successful.
Jonny Goldstone
Absolutely, well wouldn’t that be a lovely thing.
Elliot Moss
That would be a lovely thing. We’ll have to do it every hour of every day for the rest of our lives. It’s been great talking to you, Jonny. Thank you, thank you for being so open as well and I know that I’m going to get a treat, a book, the book you just mentioned, I’m going to be, going to be looking at that later, it’s called Traction isn’t it.
Jonny Goldstone
It’s called Traction, you’ve got the book and I’ve given you a pile of books to give to your future guests so that they can make even more success out of their businesses as well.
Elliot Moss
How about that. How lucky, how lucky are we? Just before I let you disappear to go and do more good things I hope, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Jonny Goldstone
So, my song choice is Fly Me To The Moon for two reasons, if I may. The first is, the number one thing I teach my clients is about simplifying and Fly Me To The Moon actually came about because the songwriter was told to go and write a song that was simple, so he wrote Fly Me To The Moon and he actually says, “It took me twenty years to learn how to write a song in twenty minutes.” And the second is, we talked about the ‘us’, I’ve given my business partners lots of credit and some of the people that I’ve worked for, the person I’ve given the least credit to but that deserves it is my wife so, I thought the idea of giving her a shoutout, Sarah, here in front of or in the ears of hopefully millions of listeners, would be a nice thing to do so, this is for her.
Elliot Moss
Fly Me To The Moon from Frank Sinatra, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Jonny Goldstone. Lots of wisdom. He said, “I’m a curious person”, “I’m an optimist”, “I like building”, “I’m a collaborator”, all those things critical if you’re a founder of a business. And a couple of lessons he learned along the way. “Do your due diligence”, whatever that means for you and “keep things simple”, go back to the basics of what makes a business successful. And finally, “have the challenging conversations”, really important and great stuff. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.