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 Nick Hird, Co-founder and Managing Director of ViDrate, the natural hydration supplements created to help you drink more water, he says in his stern voice. Passionate about fitness and nutrition, Nick a fitness model and the head of sales for a large drinks company was delivering hydration nutrition talks to as he says, anyone that would listen. It became clear to Nick and to his colleague and then future Co-founder, Rob Bennett-Baggs that people weren’t drinking enough water and the hydration products on the market were loaded with sugar, calories and artificial ingredients and had no real functional benefits. They saw a need for a hydration drink with vitamins and electrolytes that was free from junk and despite 30 factories telling them their holy grail was impossible to create, they persisted and ViDrate was officially launched in 2019 having developed from a ready to drink product to a sachet you add to water. ViDrate now comes in at least 15 flavours and counting and inversions tailored for children, for caffeine fans and for sleep support. It’s great to have you here.
Nick Hird
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
I thank you and I caught you when you were in London, you’re north based, based in the, in the fine county of Yorkshire which is brilliant. Why did you get into this thing called nutrition and hydration. Why is Nick Hird a fanatic and a geek as you called yourself in this space?
Nick Hird
I think to be honest it came from I’ve always had a passion for health, fitness, wellness from playing sports when I was younger and then I was the, I probably say it fifteen times but a geek in everything so I was the one playing rugby that didn’t go out drinking, didn’t do anything, was, I had a glass of water after the game and that kind of thing and always been if I’d played something or done something I’ve always gone full in. I’ve got a very addictive personality so I am either all in or not at all and just got into nutrition for that originally so got into nutrition just for performance.
Elliot Moss
How old were you at the time Nick?
Nick Hird
Probably about 13 when I started getting interested in nutrition. Always been fairly healthy, always been ridiculously active, played every sport that you can imagine, so I’ve played cricket, rounders, football, rugby, just literally and sport.
Elliot Moss
Anything.
Nick Hird
Absolutely, dodge ball, anything that I could really. I just loved it and just got into nutrition more and more. Started playing okay level rugby league and that’s when I really got into nutrition, I was probably about 16 where it became a bit of an obsession.
Elliot Moss
And what does obsessive look like when you’re 16 years old? Does that mean…
Nick Hird
I’d research everything just, it was, the internet wasn’t probably as readily available as it is now so a lot of things were just reading books and if some… I always say that I was the geek when people were out, going out drinking, I was sat at home reading the effects and benefits of stevia and things like that and that, that was literally me, I’d just, my little boy is exactly the same. We will watch documentaries and things like that. We’re just…
Elliot Moss
Hungry.
Nick Hird
…geek out on it. Yeah, just for, just for knowledge really.
Elliot Moss
Yeah.
Nick Hird
So just had a massive passion for nutrition and then it developed into an obsession with how the body works from a selfish, personal point of view. Without fast forwarding too much, got into fitness modelling but the whole, I had an okay following online on Twitter when Twitter was…
Elliot Moss
I was going say, I should at this point interject. So Nick is easy on the eye, I think that’s the phrase.
Nick Hird
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
If we are allowed to not objectivise you of course, I would only do it…
Nick Hird
Please do, please do. Please do.
Elliot Moss
Oh Nick you’re very handsome. No he’s got lovely blue eyes and if you google him, you’ll go Nick Hird, oh yes I see why they wanted him in underpants. So you did a bit of that.
Nick Hird
Yes. Yes so…
Elliot Moss
He’s blushing.
Nick Hird
Yeah just a…
Elliot Moss
I’ve just made the man go red.
Nick Hird
That’s it absolutely um, it’s because I’ve been married for 5 years, I don’t get attention anymore so it’s just brilliant, I’ll take it from wherever it comes but um, so from that it was one of the things I had quite a big following on Twitter at the time before Instagram became a thing and I was I suppose an influencer before influencers became a thing but my whole thing was I never wanted to make any money from the fitness modelling, it was all about I’d book photoshoots four months in advance to keep me motivated and keep me in shape and then along the way I used to set up blogs and things like that where just everyday people could come on and I’d help mentor them and guide them with nutrition free of charge. So I had a big following that used to essentially, and it ranged from people that their level of fitness was I want to walk up and down the stairs twice a day when I don’t need to through to people who wanted to do 10k so I had a, it was an accountability group where everyone had their own challenge and each day I’d be on the treadmill at 5.00 in the morning for 40 minutes then be sat replying to messages. So it kind of came from there. So it was a geeky obsession with nutrition and how the body works and then this kind of belief that you can help people, help people to be better and what kind of transitions massively into ViDrate is the fact that my entire belief is you don’t have to change your entire lifestyle to be healthier if you make lots of little changes to your day to day, the impact it has on your life is, is phenomenal and unbelievable and that might be doing an extra few hundred steps or 1000 steps a day, drink a little bit more water, cut out a few more calories and sugar. If you do one of them you won’t notice, if you do 10 of those kind of things the difference will be massive.
Elliot Moss
Just tell me very briefly about what is ViDrate and where can I find it?
Nick Hird
Very briefly so, ViDrate has been created to help you drink more water that is kind of the one sentence answer. It’s been created because 99% of the population UK and worldwide don’t drink enough water because it’s boring and until we came along, every product out there that’s designed to help you drink more water, it’s full of sugar and artificial sweeteners and calories and junk essentially. So we made the first in the world, still to our knowledge, that’s zero sugar and natural, only natural ingredients with added vitamins, electrolytes but the core principle is get you to drink…
Elliot Moss
Drink more water.
Nick Hird
…more water.
Elliot Moss
And I was, I mentioned earlier on about the fact that you went to 30 factories and it reminds me of a, stories I’ve heard of Founders sitting where you’re where it was Lucky Saint and it was Luke Boase many years ago saying, I couldn’t find a brewer who would be able to produce beautiful non-alcoholic tasting beer and then I did. When you found your person, how did you convince them that they were indeed the person. Did they know they were going to be the person who was going to make your product for you?
Nick Hird
Well no initially interestingly I did it in my kitchen so I actually tried, which, which was hilarious and a big learning curve so I didn’t realise that adding citric acid to a drink you put a couple of granules in so when I dipped half a tea spoon of that in, it nearly turned me inside out.
Elliot Moss
Blew your head off.
Nick Hird
But, yeah absolutely so I played around for it was probably 6, 7 months with things in my kitchen I thought would go together and then found a factory and said, I think I’ve got something, I don’t, my knowledge isn’t enough to do the next bit and put it together and tweak things and then found a factory that could do that and yeah, so I think it was about 14, 16 months, something like that from…
Elliot Moss
But you didn’t give up?
Nick Hird
No absolutely and we were told it’s physically impossible.
Elliot Moss
So why, why did you not heed that warning which was wrong?
Nick Hird
I think it was at that time, it wasn’t just about creating a business, it was just the challenge of trying to do it and it was one of those, there’s a lot of stories you hear where people are told it can’t be done and I genuinely, sincerely believed it could be done. I see why no one did it at the time and that’s why all of the factories said, why do you think nobodies done it? And we kind of to, to get the product where it is, it goes against science in a lot of ways so even if we move factories now, to a new supplier it takes me 6 months to teach them how to put it together even though I am talking to a formulation scientist and technician that’s been to university for years. A lot of the ways the product is put together isn’t too conventional.
Elliot Moss
Is that, that sense and you know, as people know I read a lot about the people I am going to meet and I get from you there’s that kind of quite calm but deep inner steel. You’re from a family of builders, that’s a pretty hard thing to do. I’ve spent three days of my life on a building site right, that was it, I was crummy. You’ve obviously lived and breathed that. Is there something about the tough, it sounds silly but the toughness that you get from that family values and the family environment that just said, of course I’m going to keep going on, I may not be building but that’s just the way Nick’s built. Is there something of that?
Nick Hird
I think, I think if anything it’s probably the opposite to me so I wanted to be a builder, we’ve got a long line of family builders so my family is the oldest building family building name in the town that we’re from which is they built a lot of the bridges back before cranes existed and things like that, it’s quite fascinating and an interesting one that generationally the first born son is called Tim Hird in my entire family going back dozens of generations and that first born son is a builder until my elder brother, Timmy or Timothy decided to be a doctor and kind of blew that out of the water. So I was going to take over so I worked with my dad, it’s a very, it used to be a big business, now it’s a small one. It was him and his dad and I was going to take over that and it was literally my dad saying, ‘you don’t want to do this when you’re 60, it’s good now but when you’re 60 doing what you’re doing it, it’s not too good’. So I think the main thing was I worked in a lot of jobs, I taught first aid for years and I just got fed up that I got bored, I learn everything and there was nothing more to learn.
Elliot Moss
You got to the end of the internet.
Nick Hird
Absolutely yeah and then so, so I went into sales because there’s no cap on sales and then it was just kind of, it was self-taught really, it’s not something that is in my family. In fact most of my family told me I was stupid to be starting a business and ‘don’t do it, it’s never going to work’ and even to this day a lot of them, not all of them but quite a few of them say, ‘you’ve been working for 5 years and you’ve got less money than all of us and you can’t afford to go on a holiday’ or ‘you’ve not taken a day off in 6 years’ kind of thing so yeah I suppose it’s, there’s part of it there that comes from family but a lot I don’t, I don’t know where it comes from to be honest.
Elliot Moss
It comes from Nick Hird, he’s my Business Shaper and he is who is he is and we’ll be finding out a lot more about this very self-driven person in front of me here on Jazz Shapers. Much more coming up from him in a few minutes. Right now we are going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series which you can find on all the major podcast platforms. Lydia Kellett invites business founders to share their practical advice and industry insights for those of you thinking about 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, the first UK high street vitamin drip and booster shot provider.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again with Nick if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your favourite podcast platform. So it’s Nick Hird, he’s my Business Shaper today, Co-Founder and Managing Director of ViDrate, the natural hydration supplements created to help you drink more water. Now I know that over the years you have been on a mission to educate people for good reason because you want to help them, because you know that they’ll lead a better life. In parallel to that mission of it’s just going to be better, obviously the business has grown and as the business grows Nick, and you move into some of the biggest stores that we are all familiar with, whether it’s Tesco or Whole Foods, whatever else, things get more complicated. Scale brings complexity. You’ve brought in some people from industry. What’s it been like talking and now interacting and having mentors. Those people being from worlds that you’ve never inhabited. How’s that developed for you?
Nick Hird
It’s, it’s been a very interesting journey. I’ve been very lucky to have come across some very senior influential people so our main investors we’ve got Bob Wigley who’s the Chair of UK Finance, we’ve got Andrew Morgan who’s the ex-European President of Diageo. We’ve also got Guy Lawrence who’s the ex-CEO and very high up of Jägermeister, Guinness, Brockmans Bacardi. Guy over the last 18 months I’d say has become a mentor, very, very fortunate and interestingly in January of this year became Chairman which if you’d have told a younger self, er my younger self drinking Jager bombs in a nightclub with no idea where I was going to go or what I wanted to do that the person responsible for, for the growth and launch of that would be on my team and my board, I just wouldn’t have believed it. I think one of the big things I remember the conversation with Guy when I asked if he’d become Chair and be on the board, one of the things which I think kind of ties into what you was asking, one of the things I said to him is ‘my big belief is that you can do business without being ruthless’ – it’s not the words that I used but you can be, you can be in business and actually do the right thing is my belief and had a chat with Guy and anybody that comes on board and said that’s something I’m very passionate about.
Elliot Moss
And what did he say when you said that?
Nick Hird
He absolutely agreed, I just said ‘if, if we do this, that’s one thing I’d like us to bear in mind’ and he completely agreed. Guy has been involved as I said, for the last 18 months and knows that we’re a different company, we actually care. We care about customers and that’s where customer first, every flavour’s chosen by my customers and our community. They put the flavour forward. I go develop it. We still put a handwritten note in every single online order which is something that myself and my business partner started when I was working six jobs and packing an hour a night on the floor. We still wrote a handwritten note. Our in-house fulfilment team, we’re the only brand that has that of local people who work for us in our headquarters picking every single sachet to order, still write that handwritten note and that’s, that’s the one thing that I refuse to lose and I think that’s where we’re different is the answer that it doesn’t matter who is coming on board, if it doesn’t fit the ethos it doesn’t happen and we’ve turned down a few big companies we were going to raise investment, seven figures recently, myself and Guy did probably fifty calls, we got a lot of people interested and actually we had the value that we wanted committed and we turned it down in the end because we felt (1) the business is going in a very positive direction and (2) it would completely change things if we are answering to people outside the business that don’t understand it. So we actually got the yes and then turned it down.
Elliot Moss
Stick to your principles…
Nick Hird
Absolutely.
Elliot Moss
Nick Hird is my Business Shaper, Co-Founder of ViDrate. Those worlds Nick, sometimes people say if you don’t see it you can’t be it. You’ve come from a part of the world where you weren’t involved in entrepreneurial life really although your, obviously a very famous building family, I suppose that is a, I mean it’s a different kind of business but kind of straight line. You’ve gone and made your own future as it were and you’ve met people like Guy and some of the other investors. Are you surprised by how similar you are rather than how different considering they come from such different worlds?
Nick Hird
Yes absolutely, we did, I’ve been… and again I can only speak for the, the people that I’ve come into contact with, Guy and that kind of thing yeah I’d say the big similarity is the kind of morals and the reason that we do things which so happens to be, again Guy is an example, you’ve just mentioned very family orientated which is brilliant and that’s the entire reason that I do everything. And I’d, I’d say there’s a lot of similarities there. The work ethic but the main thing is those kind of morals I’d say.
Elliot Moss
That underpin it.
Nick Hird
Absolutely.
Elliot Moss
And beyond that, that combo there, what else do you think all these people are backing because obviously the last year has seen ViDrate go through the roof. I mean I think I read somewhere there’s a 120% growth on one side at least, is that right?
Nick Hird
140% last year. I think we’re on 210 so far this year.
Elliot Moss
So, so what, what are they backing? Why is it happening for Nick and the business?
Nick Hird
To be honest the initially speaking to at least a couple of the investors, they said on various occasions that the reason that they back it was that they didn’t believe I could fail, was what they’d said which was nice and pleasant.
Elliot Moss
And why do you think they said that?
Nick Hird
Well he said, he said that Guy, that I, at the time I had an 18 month old son, I had a mortgage, quit my job so I was working six jobs at one point, sleeping in the back of the van, getting to meetings so when I won Holland & Barrett I slept in the back of the van the night before because I couldn’t afford a hotel and then went to a gym, £3 gym pass, showered, then went in there and did that three days a week without my wife knowing because she wouldn’t have let me do it so she thought I was staying in hotels, I was sleeping in the back of the van and one of the guys said, ‘you, you just can’t fail, you’ve got too much to lose’ and it was the, I don’t know the best phrase to use but I think it was the story of not coming from this world having no idea on business and things like that. I got, and again Guy and the team would vouch, I got, I think I got a D in maths and now my spreadsheets rival the finance directors. I am so data driven and analytical because it interests me, I’m very, very clever when I want to be if I like something and enjoy it, I’d say.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with my very clever when he wants to be Business Shaper, that’s Nick Hird, Co-Founder of ViDrate.
Nick Hird is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. So we’ve heard a lot about what makes you tick, I think it’s clear that you are pretty disciplined, you, you work really hard you know, it’s not normal to sleep in the back of a van and not tell your, and not tell your wife Nick but that’s okay she, you, you got away with it. What are the things that you would say to someone not to do? What have you learnt over the last few years you go, do not do that under any circumstances because you’re sort 6 years into this adventure and yes the family are going to go, you haven’t made any money yet. Well just you wait would be my guidance to the family. I’ve got a feeling Nick Hird may well just keep pumping up and going through this, this hard time. Tell me what it is that you would not do if you were advising somebody? Top one or two things.
Nick Hird
I think that I’d be very hypocritical because I still do absolutely everything that I shouldn’t do. I think, I think the don’t not set boundaries is probably the biggest thing.
Elliot Moss
To set boundaries?
Nick Hird
Yeah so set, so people need to set boundaries. I was and still am fairly terrible at it. Something comes up and I’ve just got to do it and got to be there. I am much better than I was. I’d say that’s one thing to definitely do.
Elliot Moss
Is there a sense just thinking of flipping it slightly, because that’s a big not to do and I think that’s really good though and I am happy with one. I’ll take one, it’s plenty. In terms of where this business is going to go, what’s going to ensure that you are successful over the next 3 to 5 years? When we, if I got you back here in a few years’ time and you said, ‘Elliot I wanted to do that then and now we’re doing it’. What would be that thing, where do you want to be?
Nick Hird
So the big thing is team, that’s the big thing. It’s the thing that we’ve done better than any other brand I’d say and we need to keep that going so Ollie is an example. Ollie heads up my marketing. He started with me at 17 as a digital marketing apprentice. He’s now head of marketing and we’ve got a lot of stories like that, people that are in senior positions who have grown through the ranks. We are at the point now as well where we need to surround ourselves with highly qualified people that are much more clever and better at their roles and remits than I am. That’s the next step and the next step is I love what I do, there’s not a day that I wish I didn’t, there’s not a day that I, I’m frustrated with the 16 hour days or anything like that but the next step is having people that embrace what we’re doing that can help drive ViDrate to that next step; one for the business but two, to let me kind of not to be as involved in things that I shouldn’t be involved in if that makes sense.
Elliot Moss
It makes perfect sense, it makes perfect sense. Good luck…
Nick Hird
Thank you.
Elliot Moss
…setting boundaries and good luck with the phenomenal growth, I hope it continues, you certainly, I think you deserve it. Just before I let you go what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Nick Hird
My song choice is James Brown, Sex Machine. Randomly I used to train kick boxing just to keep fit and the person I used to train with was obsessed with James Brown, that’s all I listened to and we, myself and my eldest Jacob who is 8, we cook fakeaway so we’ll cook Five Guys and things like that from scratch every Saturday and we have this blasting out, he’s obsessed so anything James Brown but this is the one that just makes you feel amazing I’d say.
Elliot Moss
Sex Machine from James Brown of course, the song choice of my Business Shaper today Nick Hird. He talked about being full-in, this is a person who is 100% committed. He wanted to help people, that’s the origin of the business and it still infuses exactly what this business is about. ‘You can be in business and do the right thing’ a really important tenet of his in his business and indeed of the people that have become invested in his business and advise him and why did they back him, because he was the kind of person that could not fail and that by the way, tempered with this thought he said about settling boundaries. So great that you’re full in, great that you’re not going to fail but make sure you set boundaries as a Founder, really important. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
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