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 Maxine Laceby, Co-Founder of Absolute Collagen – what a great name – the liquid collagen supplement and a lot more, which we’ll be hearing about. Having embarked on a Fine Art Degree aged 50 – a very great age indeed – and drawn to boost her self-esteem and wellness, Maxine learned about the health enhancing qualities of bone broth and began making her own. Health improvements followed, due she discovered to the broth’s collagen by-product. Friends came to Maxine seeking the same benefits and she saw an opportunity. Despite having no business experience, Maxine set out from her kitchen to create a pure collagen product sold in sachets directly to consumers. Absolute Collagen was founded in 2015 by Maxine and her eldest daughter Darcy, a recently graduated food scientist. They are now a multimillion pound business and named 4th in The Sunday Times 100 list of the fastest growing businesses in the UK. Not bad, eh.
My guest today on Jazz Shapers, Maxine Laceby, Co-Founder of Absolute Collagen. It sounds like a hit TV series, as I say it. I know, I know it’s obvious but I just had to say it and I know it’s not that, it’s a serious business, it’s lovely to have you here. Her face already. She hasn’t said a word, she’s going ‘Where’s he going with this?’ Hello.
Maxine Laceby
Hello. Thanks for having me and I’m happy with a hit TV series.
Elliot Moss
I know, not bad, eh.
Maxine Laceby
If we can make it into one, that would be great.
Elliot Moss
But you’ve kind of embraced it. If people haven’t heard about, of collagen and of course 7/8 years ago, people were vaguely aware but now it becomes part of the wellness movement a bit more in people’s sights.
Maxine Laceby
Definitely.
Elliot Moss
You’ve gone, ‘This is what I’m about’.
Maxine Laceby
This is definitely what I’m about.
Elliot Moss
How did it become what you are about Maxine? We heard about bone broth but how does it be that the mum of two becomes an entrepreneur with a rather successful business? That seems a bit, a bit easy.
Maxine Laceby
Do you know, I think when I tell the story it does sound easy and someone stopped me the other day and said, “You say it like it’s really easy” so…
Elliot Moss
You get used to saying it and I don’t, I want to know the truth of this story.
Maxine Laceby
Yeah. So, no, the truth is, at 50, my children sort of left the roost and I was like wow, really exciting, what shall I do? And I’ve always been quite interested in art and I decided to embark on a Fine Art Degree. During that first year in Wolverhampton, during that first year I did this project called ‘Dare to Go Bare’ and don’t worry I didn’t take my clothes off, that would have been shocking. I stripped myself bare…
Elliot Moss
Not in the privacy of your own home, you can do what you like.
Maxine Laceby
Well, I stripped myself bare and let my hair go grey and I used to have long, dark curly hair and everybody used to say it was your crowning glory, which I really didn’t like actually. So I chopped all my hair off, I took the colour out, it went a bit yellow and I let the grey bits come through and I wore no makeup for four months and I wore really, really dowdy clothes for that period of time and what that made me realise, I just, Dare to Go Bare was all about, as a woman of a certain age, would I disappear in pupil’s vision if I didn’t make an effort, if I became, would I become invisible? And what it made me realise is that I was desperately insecure about who I was and I got it all wrong. So I gave myself a talking to, I still carried on the project and I looked at myself emotionally, physically and spiritually because I just felt awful and the first physical thing I did, is I started making and drinking my own bone broth and I just had this most amazing sense of wellbeing and that really was the start of the whole journey back in 2015.
Elliot Moss
Chicken soup, in my family…
Maxine Laceby
Nice.
Elliot Moss
…is very, very important. Jewish family, you know Friday night, yeah, chicken soup and at other times as well. Where did you get the idea to start making your own bone broth? Had someone said, ‘You know what Maxine, you’ve got to do that’.
Maxine Laceby
No. I kind of read somewhere and looked somewhere and Americans were drinking bone broth and I thought well I make a bone broth every Sunday, you know when I do my gravy for my roasts when my children were growing up so, I kind of knew how to make a bone broth and so I literally was just boiling down the bones and letting the jus, bring it to boil and letting it reduce right down and then drinking that and then whenever I left the bone broth to go cold, a jelly would form on top and I knew that jelly wasn’t fat and I always poke the bear, I will never leave, I’m so curious and I was like, what is that, what is that, what is that? Friends started asking for it, I started making it for them, I literally felt like THE collagen dealer, they would bang down my door for my booty and if I didn’t have it, oh my god. And I was making these big vats and I’m not one for the kitchen. I cook but I haven’t got a passion for it and I just thought god this is really hard work, what am I going to do? So it was about creating something for me and my friends and as you said earlier, my eldest daughter Darcy was coincidentally studying Food Science at university and she…
Elliot Moss
As luck would have it.
Maxine Laceby
As luck would have it. The starts were so aligned. And she had all the skills that we needed so, one I needed to make sure we didn’t kill people and two, what is this stuff and we, that’s when we worked out it was collagen and that’s when the idea first came really and then we started, I started saying to myself, what did I want, so we looked, I then looked up from a pot and looked up from my laptop that I could barely switch on at the time, and I looked out into the world and there were skin supplements but none were liquid collagen and that’s what I wanted, I knew it was the collagen that was making the difference and it was the collagen, liquid collagen supplement I wanted so, between my daughter and I we researched collagen, we spoke to scientists – this is like a two year kind of journey before we launched in May 2017 – and I knew I wanted it ready mixed, I didn’t want to have to keep it in the fridge, I wanted it really, really easy to take otherwise I was not going to take it. 8 grams of collagen was what we needed and that’s how Absolute Collagen came to be.
Elliot Moss
So, for the numpty like me, I mean I’ve heard a little bit about collagen, I’m not a scientist, none of my children are food scientists, just give me the kind of the A, B, C of the benefits of collagen as the scientific community describes them because of course, it sort of, it is scientific but there’s still a whole bunch of what is it for? Does it work? Is it, you know has it been independently verified? Which you yourself have talked about.
Maxine Laceby
Yeah, definitely. So you are 80% collagen, your body is collagen, it’s in your skin, it’s in your organs, it’s everywhere, it’s your hair, it’s your nails, it’s everywhere. When I first came across collagen in my kitchen, I traced it back to the Greeks. The Greek word for collagen is ‘kolla’ meaning ‘glue’, it’s the glue that holds you together and I was like why have we not been taking this since the Greeks discovered it? And so if you look at collagen, when you get to about 25, your collagen levels start depleting. You’ve got collagen, your skin looks good, you know look at a 7 year old, they can bend into different shapes and as you get older you get a few lines and you’re not quite as mobile, that means your collagen’s depleting and the only way to put it back is literally via a supplement. So when you take Absolute Collagen supplement and not all collagen is equal, you have to make sure it’s really high grade, you take the collagen as a supplement, it goes into your bloodstream, so collagen is a protein, so protein’s should not be absorbed but the collagen we use has undergone a stage of hydrolysis so it means it’s been broken down to such tiny particles that it will get absorbed, so it gets absorbed and then what it does is it’s attracted straight to your fibroblasts that sit under the skin and it says ‘wake up, create collagen’ so that is really how it works and you are quite right, it’s, you know when I started there was no pure collagen supplements out there and it did have like a, is this, does this work, is it just a bit of fun? We’ve done our own clinical trials so the manufacturers who produced the collagen do their trials but of course they’re manufacturers, they’re going to get the trials to say what they want, we have done our own clinical trials on our supplement and it’s the biggest clinical trial on a collagen supplement ever and we’ve done that ourselves at of respect for our product and out of respect for Absoluters. So we have created the industry, we launched a formula that I created in my kitchen into a market that did not exist.
Elliot Moss
Just listening to you, you talk very eloquently about all of this stuff which is very important and the process and the production and it’s this thing that you make, what also hits me, and you’re very, you’re glowing – of course because you take your own product.
Maxine Laceby
I do.
Elliot Moss
But you’re really focussed on the benefit, like you’ve taken a consumer’s view of this and gone ‘What do I want?’ like you said it when we were speaking earlier, how have you managed to combine the necessity of all the stuff to get you there with this eye on the prize?
Maxine Laceby
Yep. It’s interesting you picked up on that actually because I was the consumer, I was Number 1 consumer, I was the Number 1 Absoluter, is what our consumers call themselves, ‘Absoluters’. And the focus now is not about me, it’s about them. So everything we do is for the Absoluters. So we had to educate the market. That cost a fortune, you know, we were the first people there and so we keep our eye on it but making sure we do the right thing for the consumer, making sure we do the right thing for the team, the right thing for the industry because we grow, Absolute Collagen grows the industry, we’re grown it, we’ve created it.
Elliot Moss
You are the category.
Maxine Laceby
We are, we’re the Number 1 collagen experts and we have a duty, so it’s just making sure that the Absoluter is absolutely at the pinnacle of every single thing. So I guess the shift has moved from myself to the Absoluters.
Elliot Moss
But it’s still at the end and it’s still all about the benefits. Stay with me for much more from Business Shaper today, Maxine Laceby, she’s Co-Founder of Absolute Collagen. She’s coming back in a couple of minutes but right now we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Sessions, which can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Lydia Kellett invites business founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry and starting your very own thing. In this clip, focussed on the wellness industry, we hear from Richard Chambers, founder and CEO of Get a Drip – it’s a good name isn’t it - the first UK high street vitamin drip and booster shot provider.
You can of course find all our former Business Shapers – there’s about 500 of them now – on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz’ and ‘Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Maxine Laceby, Co-Founder of Absolute Collagen, the marine liquid collagen supplement. Now, what we’ve presented so far is a Hollywood version of life. There she is, she’s 50, she’s a mum, she says I’m going to branch out, I’m going to do this and hey presto, here it is. Life wasn’t quite like that for you for quite a while, and you’ve spoken about your own childhood, I think publicly so it’s a matter of record, public record as it were so it’s okay I hope for me to ask you about this, and also of your own, your kids’ dyslexia, your own I think…
Maxine Laceby
ADHD.
Elliot Moss
…ADHD and so on and so forth. Your mother was an alcoholic, which you’ve talked about. Recovering from the parent of an alcoholic is a thing and I say ‘recovering’, I chose, choose my word carefully, people usually go one of two ways, as the child, how have you ended up here talking to me and not somewhere else?
Maxine Laceby
That’s such an interesting question. So, I was brought up on a council estate in the seventies in Bath and we were the wrong side of the council estate, there is one trust me, and my mother was an alcoholic and nobody really liked us, I don’t know what her behaviour was like when I wasn’t around so, maybe that sort of figures. She’s no longer alive by the way, alcohol killed her in the end, fifteen years ago.
Elliot Moss
I’m sorry.
Maxine Laceby
I adored my mum. I’m adopted. I never, ever, ever felt adopted. I knew I was loved. I also knew I was needed. And when I reflect on that, that need goes back, so a typical scenario would be at 9 years old the iron blowing up and we could not afford a new one. There was nobody to pick up the phone. We didn’t even have a phone. My mum was the Black Sheep of the family, she had thirteen, fourteen siblings but she was the outcast, there was nobody to phone up and go, ‘How do we fix this? What do we do?’ We couldn’t buy a new one. At nine years old, I took the back of the iron, I wrote down the wires, I took all the wires out, I clipped them and put them back and it worked. That gives you a sense of how solution focussed I am, you just have to get it done, there’s nobody else to do it, you have to do it, and that is definitely who I am. Sometimes to my own disadvantage I can be really quite an island and I’ve, with the business there’s 63 of us now and letting people in was quite difficult for me, not with my family by the way.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, and I get all of that and I understand it and it would be that you’re literally, you’re having to look after mum and you’re having to look after the house but the looking now as an adult back on that child and then now as you’re young and then becoming a mum, the emotional part for you, how have you taken and managed that trauma, which it is, and kind of put it to such incredibly positive place for your own life, for your kids’ life and for you know the 63 people that you employ and on and on. How, how have you managed that, Maxine?
Maxine Laceby
Do you know I don’t, I think when you live it, you don’t see it. You know, there has been trauma and as I said, one of the sort of by-products of that is I don’t trust, I really, really struggle to, when I trust, I trust. There’s very few people in my circle, like really, and I’ve always been like that.
Elliot Moss
And we will be exploring the really important point around trust, as it relates to your business. Stay with me for much more from my Business Shaper, it’s Maxine Laceby.
We talked about your mum and we talked about your trust issue. Darcy is your daughter. Darcy is the kind of the technology expert, the…
Maxine Laceby
The scientist.
Elliot Moss
The scientist, the scientist rather, the…
Maxine Laceby
She’s the professional one.
Elliot Moss
What is it like? You said, and you said your inner circle is really tight, what’s it like working with your daughter?
Maxine Laceby
Do you know, I wonder sometimes if because of my past and I divorced their dad about twelve years ago, it really has just been the three of us because I do keep quite a tight circle and both my parents have passed away, and it’s really weird, so we’re three, there’s myself, Darcy and Margot. Darcy is 26, Margot is 23 and I feel that we’re very fluid together, so we bought rat infested pit and everybody said what have you bought that for? Nobody wanted to buy it and we did it together and it sounds really crazy because they were only 11 and 13 at the time, I obviously had a builder but we’d go into that house and we put our hard hats on and we’d walk around and we discussed and I just feel this fluid like when one of us has a strain we come forward, when one of us doesn’t we go back and it’s just a beautiful, I can’t describe it, there’s a massive mutual respect, there’s definitely no hierarchy in my family so, right from when the kids had been like one or two, they with us, we’d go on hol… they, they are family, they’re seen and they’re mostly definitely heard, there’s no hierarchy…
Elliot Moss
Is that the same in your business? Because you’ve got 63…
Maxine Laceby
A 100%.
Elliot Moss
Is that how you look at it?
Maxine Laceby
Absolutely. We had somebody come last year and he said, ‘What I love about this’, he said, ‘there’s no hierarchy, walk in the office, there’s no private offices and nobody knows who’s’, you know the CEO is there, I brought a CEO in a year and a half ago now.
Elliot Moss
And if they come up to you and say, ;Maxine, listen, I know you’re the founder, Co-Founder, and I know you know A, B and C but let me tell why we shouldn’t do that’. What does it take to get a different idea, a different position across the line? She’s smiling now.
Maxine Laceby
I was smiling because I, right from the, the reason this business is so successful is because I know what I’m not good at and I’m not good at a lot and I’m okay with that. Does that mean I’ve imposter syndrome? No, it means I know myself so right from Day 1 I’ve brought a tech guy in because I was never going to do tech, I brought marketing in because I’m never going to do marketing, I just had the idea and created the formula, the rest is up to somebody else but what I am very, very good at and I do think this is my childhood, is I’m a damn good judge of character.
Elliot Moss
Do you see it? Do you just see people?
Maxine Laceby
I feel. But I have had to learn to really tap into that and I do think we’ve all got it. You know, my emotional intelligence is massive and that comes from, and I’m a patron of the Prince’s Trust and I work with their Young Enterprise and I often say to some of them, you know they get the kids there that have got really terrible background, you know really sad circumstances and I say to them, ‘I know you don’t feel this yet but the skills you’re learning are huge’. My mum left me on my own quite early on in the seventies, she worked nights as well which wasn’t great but I was terrified of being on my own, absolutely terrified but what I did, what it got me to do is I was able to walk into any situation and know who I could trust. It just, I had to learn that skill. And so when I say I feel it, it’s kind of you just get an energy about somebody and I can honestly say I’ve not been wrong, I really haven’t, so Absolute Collagen is built on the best people and knowing my strengths and weaknesses and bringing people in to marry my weaknesses.
Elliot Moss
Can you learn that, that judging piece? Because I mean we’ve all got super skills, that sounds like one of yours and that is a big one. Do you think you can teach it to somebody?
Maxine Laceby
Do you know, I really don’t know because for my own personal journey, in order to have that skill or, it it’s a skill, whatever you want to call it, you have to feel the other side, so you have to be really, really scared. For my own, this is my own journey, in order to learn that I had to be scared, I had to be vulnerable, I had to be lonely because that’s the only way you can figure it out.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with my guest today, it’s Maxine Laceby and we’ve got some music from Kamasi Washington for you as well. That’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Maxine Laceby is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. Do you think it’s inevitable that you took this path? Just looking back, was there any way you wouldn’t have gone and discovered something that you were going to do which was going to reveal the truth of who you were to yourself? Do you know what I mean?
Maxine Laceby
Yes, I do know what you mean and I do think it was there. I absolutely think it was meant to happen but I had to… it was never going to happen till I was ready, until I could absorb it, live it, feel it, learn from it, accept it.
Elliot Moss
Because the art of creation, of creating something, whatever it is, is a gift we all get as humans and you discovered yours at a time and it was weirdly through a Degree that then morphed into something else. How do you encourage that in all the people that you get to talk to and that you want to inspire?
Maxine Laceby
So, my biggest thing is always bring news to the party, you are your biggest asset. When I first started my journey and from my own insecurities, I always felt I had to be somebody else and I would tell you that I’m not a conformist but you know what, when I’m at the school gates and I’m delivering my children, I definitely confirmed because I don’t want them to feel different and it’s just about being you, you’ve got your own skillset so whether you’ve got a brand or a service or whatever, you and that brand or that service are so linked, it just comes through and I think if you can’t stand in your own truth, people see it, people really see it.
Elliot Moss
And when you’re, and when you’re not at work Maxine and you’re not in those three and a half seconds a day not thinking about the business, what are you thinking about?
Maxine Laceby
Do you know, sometimes I just think about nothing, I love being outdoors, I think I was probably a gypsy in a previous life. I love being outdoors and I love to listen to the birds, I walk, I run when I can, I’m injured at the moment, I like, thinking of nothing is really important because creative people need that and I say that to my team, you know, you need to have nothing occupying your brain sometimes in order to sort something out or to be creative, so sometimes I do think of nothing and I like it.
Elliot Moss
Just before I let you go, I’m going to ask you what your song choice is in a minute but just one last question. You’re kind of doing it, you’re living it, you’re not thinking about what you’re doing because you’re just doing what you do. Where does this go? Five years from now, ten years from now, are you going to be quote, unquote, ‘working’ or are you going to be going, ‘next gen will get on with it and I’m going to put my feet up’ because I, your purpose is like it’s magnetic, I’m feeling it and I’m going why would you ever stop that but where’s your head on that?
Maxine Laceby
I think right now I don’t know and I quite like not knowing and the business is the business and my daughter and CEO have totally got that covered. Yes, I’m still involved. My job today is I’ve got the Absoluters on one shoulder and the team on the other and every decision is, ‘How is that going to affect them?’ I do have a purpose and my purpose is to empower women to be themselves regardless what that looks like and I don’t know what the future holds and I quite like that and I think let’s just see. There is no plan and I like that too.
Elliot Moss
Good luck with your no plan, plan. I think that’s a clever way of doing it. Much better, keep things open, as you have done, frankly, you’ve just kind of, you’ve just done it that way which I think is why you’re here. Thanks very much for today. Just before I do say goodbye, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Maxine Laceby
So I tried to think of something jazzy and blues but I keep going back to this song. Something Inside So Strong by Labi Siffre. The moment I heard this song years and years ago and there’s some lyrics in there and it says, ‘When they insist we’re just not good enough, well, we know better. Just look ‘em in the eye and say, I’m gonna do it anyway’ because that is my journey.
Elliot Moss
The uplifting and powerful sound of Labi Siffre there with Something Inside So Strong, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Maxine Laceby. She talked about ‘I always poke the bear’. You’ve got to be curious, you’ve got to keep going and doubling down when you want to set up your own thing. The importance of knowing what you want. ‘What do I want?’ she said as the consumer and building a business around that, and that’s a matter of opportunity and spotting that and a matter of taste as well. ‘I always knew I was needed’ she said and that was a really important part of her childhood and growing up and indeed it’s informed how she goes about her business now. And finally, I think one of her super skills, ‘I am a damn good judge of character’. And she is a damn good judge of character because trust is really, really important to her. Really great stuff. That’s it from me and 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.