Elliot Moss
That was Gregory Porter with Concorde. 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, I am extremely pleased to say is serial entrepreneur, Charles Dunstone, Co-founder of mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse, you may have heard of them, and Founder of broadband and TV provider, the TalkTalk Group. It was while working as a salesman for communications company NEC, selling mobile phones to Vodafone and BT, who then sold them to other large organisations that Charles saw a market that wasn’t being addressed, the people most empowered by having a mobile phone were the self-employed or small businesses. In 1989 with £6,000 of her personal savings, Charles launched Carphone Warehouse with business partner Julian Brownlie from his flat on Marylebone Road. A success from the start, the company floated in 2000 on The London Stock Exchange, valued then at £1.7 billion and expanded into Europe under the Phone House brand and into America with Best Buy Mobile, before merging in the UK with Dixons. In February 2003, the Carphone Warehouse Group launched TalkTalk, a cost-effective residential fixed line service to compete with BT – my parents are still very happy – their unique service proposition that all customers talk to each other for free forever. Charles joins me imminently to talk about all of this and indeed his joint venture to bring Five Guys, the American burger chain, to the UK and Europe. And the music in today’s Jazz Shapers comes from Peggy Lee, Hugh Masekela, Little Richard and here’s Van Morrison with Days Like This.
The inimitable sound of Van Morrison with Days Like This. I am very pleased to say, as I said earlier, Charles Dunstone is my Business Shaper today. It’s lovely to have you here. Behind this person – we’ll talk about your businesses – extraordinary success, great British successes, great international successes. I mention the 1989 founding. Why? Why did Charles Dunstone decide in 1989 he was going to do this? What was, was it in your blood that at some point you were going to run your own thing?
Charles Dunstone
Yes, I think it, to some extent it was in my blood and I did actually run a business at school that sold sunglasses and cigarette lighters and pens and stuff. My head of sales was Johnny Vaughan, who I was at school with and…
Elliot Moss
Was he well behaved?
Charles Dunstone
I mean, obviously, as well behaved as ever.
Elliot Moss
Chatty.
Charles Dunstone
Very chatty. He is and obviously as you might imagine, an amazing salesman.
Elliot Moss
Yep.
Charles Dunstone
I had always been interested in business and what made it work and yeah, we learnt a great lesson. The school didn’t know what to do with it because they didn’t want to stop enterprise but they didn’t want us ripping people off so, we learnt to have two sets of books at that stage on that we showed the school and one that was the real books with the real margin that we made.
Elliot Moss
Which, rumour has it, was a 100%.
Charles Dunstone
Yes, we doubled the cost price of everything.
Elliot Moss
Such a simple strategy.
Charles Dunstone
Very simple. No, and even better, we had our great pitch which was to say “So, you’d like a pair of these,” you know, “photochromatic sunglasses” or whatever they were and Johnny would go and he’d say, “Great, no problem at all, we’ll get in, ohh, they’re really, really popular those. Erm, we’ve got more coming in next week but you’re going to have to wait four or five days. Also, I’m afraid we’ve been let down by a few people where they’ve ordered things and then when they’ve arrived, they haven’t had the money to pay for them so, I’m afraid because of that, we have to ask for a 50% deposit now, with order.” That was our working capital to buy the stock and then as we handed it out, we could enter the profit. It was a beautiful, beautiful little business and obviously, until the school was saturated with rubbish sunglasses and cigarette lighters but I think weirdly, the most important thing was that I didn’t go to University. So if you don’t go to University, you haven’t got anything to lose because you’ve got a job on your wits and I was a salesman and if it hadn’t worked, you know I’d have got a job selling something else. It wasn’t as though I was on the graduate scheme at Morgan Stanley or, and I was going to give up something that would be very difficult to go back to. So I think that’s why you find a lot of entrepreneurs don’t have very formal education and don’t have great education qualifications.
Elliot Moss
But gravitating towards sales then back when you were sixteen/seventeen, had there been something in your childhood that you’d seen or that you’d thought about, I mean I want to come back to the lack of formal education, I totally agree with you, I think me going to University meant that I’m sitting here and you’re sitting over there. A ser…, no but in seriousness, but most of us don’t sit where you’re sitting and I think you’re right, once you’ve got something to lose and you get that graduate role and all that, things do change but if you go back a little bit, why was it when you were at school that you gravitated towards selling stuff even then?
Charles Dunstone
I don’t know. I was just…
Elliot Moss
Family? Anything that?
Charles Dunstone
Family. My dad worked for an oil company, he was very professional. There was always lots of people at our house so, I’ve got a younger sister, we learned early on to be good at talking to adults and there were always lots of people round the table so, we sort of learned the skills of communicating with people and what made them laugh and what they didn’t like and how to be polite. So I think if you become a good communicator then that’s 70/80% of sales really is to be able to empathise with people and get them to like you and get them to want to engage with you. So, probably some of that. I liked, I just was interested in business and why, why things work, why people did things, why something was where it was in a shop. I don’t know, it just appealed to me. Perhaps my dad was very, you know had a sort of very serious, senior, professional job and he’d been to Cambridge and that sort of thing so, you might say it was a reaction perhaps against that.
Elliot Moss
I’ve just discovered and you have too that Charles Dunstone is actually just a rebel, he’s just hidden it, he’s just hidden incredible well behind this very polite, charming exterior. Stay with me for much more insight from my Business Shaper today, it’s Charles Dunstone. Those businesses called Carphone Warehouse and TalkTalk, well that’s down to him and obviously a whole bunch of other people too but he was the Founder. Time for some more music right now though here on Jazz Shapers, it’s Peggy Lee with It’s a Good Day.
Peggy Lee, proper Jazz Shaper there, which is good because it’s called Jazz Shapers and this is Jazz FM, I’m Elliot Moss and Charles Dunstone is my Business Shaper today and he’s the Founder of Carphone Warehouse and TalkTalk. You were talking there about the sales piece and empathy and the exposition of what it takes to be a great salesperson, you make it sound very simple. You still get a buzz by selling stuff? What is that buzz?
Charles Dunstone
Yes, I get a buzz, I think perhaps also go back is that I went to boarding school and when you’re at boarding school, you basically spend your time fighting the system and whatever they want you to do, you try very hard not to do it, whether it’s the uniform, the food, going smoking, going to the pub, whatever, whatever, and that I think breeds a great rebellious nature in you to say well why not, why can’t I do this and so, when we set up Carphone Warehouse and we’re very young, there was something about it where we tried to do sort of the opposite of what everyone else did and we always used to say, “when they zig, we zag” so we would do things, so we were obsessed about the honesty of the proposition to the customer, the fact we didn’t pay our people in the stores any commission, that they were just going to give advice and all the sort of stuff, you know our big competitor, weirdly, was Dixons. So whatever they were like, our instinct was to be completely different to them. Partly from a principle that we didn’t really like the way they did things and secondly, it was just funny and fun to sort of tweak them and do, do things that they thought were a kind of anathema to running a good electrical retail business.
Elliot Moss
So there’s a bit of a contrarian in you on the one hand and then boarding school sort of sounds like prison, without, I mean you know, there’s that bit of working the system and then saying enough, we’re going to do it differently.
Charles Dunstone
Totally. Yeah.
Elliot Moss
But the, the ideas you had, the zigging when zagging, partly borne out of the rebellious thing but also partly because fundamentally the industry was a bit upside down.
Charles Dunstone
Yeah and we were, you know, so we started it in, right at the end of ’89, you know I guess Richard Branson was a sort of entrepreneurial hero to everyone, there weren’t that many entrepreneurial businesses, there were kind of Julian and Sinclair doing Pret at the same time as us, a few of the, the big Pizza Express with Luke and Hugh and we knew all those guys. It was an interesting feeling that we were sort of pioneering people that could do things differently and you could be little and you could challenge the big people and there was a subtle shift, I really felt, in the public whereby probably ten years previously, you’d only go to big companies, you trusted Marks & Spencer’s, you trusted the police, you trusted the Government, you trusted… and there was a thing where people were losing faith in big institutions and were prepared to give the sort of enthusiastic, cheeky startup their money and their time in a way I don’t think they would have done previously.
Elliot Moss
Did you see that then or do you see that now that you are looking back?
Charles Dunstone
I think we saw that then and did see that then.
Elliot Moss
You did see that then, so you went actually, it’s good being the David, it’s good over here challenging the institutional and the structural?
Charles Dunstone
Yes. And I must say at this point, you know, the mobile phone market just had the most explosive growth, so growth that you know, if you’re in a very fast growing market, it covers a lot of errors, it gives you a lot of permission to do things so I’m not, weirdly, what the guys at Pret did, is much more impressive, is to stop people buying supermarket sandwiches and buy freshly made sandwiches because it wasn’t, it was just doing something that already existed better. We were selling something completely brand new that everyone had underestimated how many people wanted.
Elliot Moss
Being little though and obviously then you got big and I’ve heard you talk about, I’d rather have six people in my business than ten thousand, don’t tell me that the scale is a good thing, it’s complicated. Where do you go with that when you start to get bigger? What happens then as you realise you need scale but still want the intimacy and you still want to feel like the David?
Charles Dunstone
I mean it’s difficult. All businesses as they get bigger are sort of increasing compromise, really. You get more and more frustrated. I used to, we always had a upside down organisation chart, so we had the people in the stores at the top and the people that, in what I called the support centre that everyone in the stores still called head office, and I tried really hard to make the people that worked in the middle understand they were only there to support the people in the front line but it is, it’s difficult and I used to hate it that you know our busiest day probably was Saturdays and you’d go into the support centre and there’d be really very few people working and that always I hated that disconnect. So it’s a compromise and I think sadly as you get older, you get more prepared to accept compromise and things not being perfect, whereas in your twenties, you fight that, you just have that zeal and belief.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much more from Charles Dunstone, my Business Shaper today, founder of Carphone Warehouse and TalkTalk. He’ll be coming back in a couple of minutes. Right now, we’ve got a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series, it’s available on all the major podcast platforms. Natasha Knight 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 in retail, we hear from Taymoor Atighetchi, founder of Papier, an online stationery brand.
You can hear all our former Business Shapers and enjoy them I hope on the Jazz Shapers podcast and indeed you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice or if you have got a smart speaker, why not ask it to play Jazz Shapers and there you will find a taster of our recent shows. But back to today, it’s serial entrepreneur, Charles Dunstone, Co-founder of mobile phone retailer, Carphone Warehouse and Founder of broadband and TV provider, the TalkTalk Group. You mentioned earlier about not going to University and the informality and the kind of ploughing your own path and all that. That grit in the oyster, that sense of well, I’ve got nothing to lose, how do you retain that Charles, as you go through and you’re one year in, three years, five years, ten years, twenty and now, now you are looking at young businesses and you are investing in them, I mentioned Five Guys, you’ve got other stakes as well. How do you keep the fire burning?
Charles Dunstone
In one way it’s easier because if you had some success, you can be more prepared to have some failure, you know, that you’d made some money so if you lose some money, you haven’t lost everything. I think it’s, I think it’s probably about three years of Carphone Warehouse until I actually thought, this might make it. It’s really hard, it’s hand to mouth, I didn’t you know didn’t pay myself for probably two years and we started the business, hope I’m allowed to say this here but basically on Capital Radio and, there was just Capital Radio and LBC in those days.
Elliot Moss
And now the programme ends. Thank you so much.
Charles Dunstone
But we would put an ad on Capital and the phones would ring and they’d ring for about three minutes and then it would stop and then we’d look on the wall when the next advert was and…
Elliot Moss
Pops up again.
Charles Dunstone
Pops up again and we would drive them mad because we always wanted the 7.58 slot just before the news, that was the best slot and then I remember one day sort of just standing there and realising that the phone was ringing and people were coming in even, even not when there was an ad and I thought oh actually, this thing has got a bit of its own momentum now, it’s sort of becoming, it’s having some fame in its own right but that took a long time, so there’s a huge amount of insecurity when you start something as we did, so I think as you get, you get wiser but you’ve got other things, you can accept some failure but it’s hard to have the passion that you have in the, in your first ever little baby business.
Elliot Moss
This may sound weird but when I was preparing for this, I kept coming back to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ poem and I don’t know why, I don’t even know if you’re, if it’s a…
Charles Dunstone
I know it, yeah.
Elliot Moss
I’m sure you’ll know it but whether it resonated because it strikes me that for those first three years you’re charging ahead and you don’t know and then you get this thing and you suddenly go hold on a minute, this is going to be super successful. Did you in your wildest dreams, not that moment, I’m sure that took a lot longer but did you in your wildest dreams, Charles, think it would be as successful as it has been or that you be as successful as you have been?
Charles Dunstone
No, not at… I mean, not at all and the thing is, the mobile phone business always grew bigger and bigger than anyone imagined. I think when the licences were first given, the Government who were licencing them, thought that ever, ever there’d be 400,000 mobile phone users in the UK. So, the whole thing was a sort of constant surprise to people. So it started off with self-employed and business people then I remember it was a thing about well, what if you break down, so it became this sort of emergency thing that you had a phone in case to keep in touch in case something went wrong and then it obviously grew and grew from there. So, no but I don’t think you ever, you don’t ever relax, you don’t ever sit back and think phew, great, we did it, we made it and there’s always the next thing and the next problem and to overcome this and I think probably, most successful people spend a lot of time focussing and worrying about what’s wrong, not what’s right.
Elliot Moss
Trying not to worry too much about what’s not right at the moment because hopefully you are enjoying this, this is Jazz Shapers and Charles Dunstone is with me but quite right too, it’s surely a characteristic of the people I have on this programme that indeed they are still worrying about stuff and making sure it works. Time for some more music right now before we come back to Charles, it’s Hugh Masekela with Grazing in the Grass.
Hugh Masekela, Grazing in the Grass. Charles Dunstone is my Business Shaper today. So the success comes and we’re sitting here now and you can look back at going public, going private, doing all these things, spinning things out, all that stuff and obviously the money that comes with that, it’s more than financial security, I think it’s something else. You strike me as someone who is full of principles, the work that you do, which is not about the money, the fact that you want to do things with your time that you feel have good attached to them. What is your relationship like with money as it relates to politics? And I don’t mean parties, and I know you’ve, you know, just in terms of that because I’m really interested in how you see the impact of politics today. We talked about the breakdown if you like in the late eighties of the belief in institutions and the belief in the big behemoths. How do you see the role of politics now in the state that we’re in and in terms of what you can do as a businessperson of note?
Charles Dunstone
I think as a rule and I sort of get frustrated when everyone always seems to spend their life saying the Government should do this and the Government should do that and I don’t think the Government can do all these things and Governments are use…, you know, as a rule, pretty useless. You don’t ask civil servants to do stuff, you know, they’re so risk averse, there’s so many of them, it’s all so complicated. I think the most important thing the Government needs to do, certainly in a business world is just get out, just get out the way and just let people get on with it, so I don’t, we always had a rule income, we never, we never are a member of any trade body, we are never a member of the CBI, we’re never a member of any of these things, it’s just like “No, we’re happy, we’ll just, we’ll worry about ourselves, we’ll plough our own furrow and I’m not going to get dragged into all this nonsense” and the older I get, like the policemen getting younger, they all seem to get worse. I used to, you know, used to look up to some of these people perhaps and they all seem to be worse now, so I very much just do what I can do, get on with it and don’t get involved.
Elliot Moss
And the people that you choose to do things with and get on with it, whether you are investing through your investment vehicle or the people over the years that you’ve worked very closely with, what is that you gravitate towards in other people?
Charles Dunstone
It’s a real, a gang, just people that like one another, think in a similar way and you know we just enjoy, enjoy working together, we laugh, we laugh a lot about it, we work hard, we try and be you know we think we’re smart but not always smart.
Elliot Moss
You must feel a bit smart though, I mean, you may have thought you might be smart in 1989, now looking back you go “well I’ve got some track record here,” Charles must wake up in the morning and go “oh Charles can’t be too bad and too shabby at this” or doesn’t it work like that?
Charles Dunstone
Err, I don’t know that it does work like that. I’m a good door opener and I have a, you know my sort of slightly rebellious imagination, I’ve got other, you know, other people so you know one of my business partners, Roger Taylor’s a sort of very financial legal, so he’s, I think the great thing in our relationship is he weirdly thinks what I do is quite clever and I really think what he does is very clever, so there’s a sort of lots of mutual respect.
Elliot Moss
And has that been the way and if you think about the key relationships along the line, have you always had that…?
Charles Dunstone
Yes and I’ve got people that I really, really, really trust and you can really work with, you know Andrew Harrison that used to run Carphone Warehouse, Tristia who runs TalkTalk, I mean these people are, these are people I’ve known for years and years and we’re just a tight group that really trust each other, can talk slightly in shorthand because we’ve done it together for so long, you know and as I keep saying, we really don’t get it all right but it’s fun, one of my hobbies is sailing and competing on a sailing boat, I’ve done for many years, where you know you’ll get anything from four of you and a really big boat, twenty two of you but you get a team together on the boat and it’s you, it’s everyone on that boat and it’s you against the world and everyone’s got their job to do and it’s the most fantastic feeling to get you on this island, little island together, competing with everyone else, everyone has to do their job perfectly, in a completely synchronised way or it all goes inside out. That is a, that’s a wonderful, the camaraderie and the fun and the joy of that, I absolutely love.
Elliot Moss
That’s a happy place.
Charles Dunstone
Really happy place, yeah.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with my guest today, it’s Charles Dunstone. We’ve got some Little Richard too and that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Zippy little number that. That was Little Richard with I Need Love. Charles Dunstone is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. So here we are, you’re sort of, I can’t quite work it out, is it thirty years? 199…?
Charles Dunstone
Thirty years.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, thirty years since, just over thirty years actually since Carphone Warehouse. As I mentioned before, you’ve gone public, you’ve taken a company private, you’ve got this investment thing going on. How do you see the next few years for you? What does, if you were to metrics on the wall of the rebel, what does the rebel want to achieve?
Charles Dunstone
I think definitely never, never do a public company again, I think that’s become a completely miserable existence and so different from when we did it in, you know when we went public in 2000.
Elliot Moss
And why is it different? Why do you think it’s changed so fundamentally?
Charles Dunstone
Because there’s so many more rules about remuneration, about ESG, about the board and you know I ended up before we took it private and you know, some little guy from some big investment fund going through the CV of our non-execs and so it was like, this is absolutely…
Elliot Moss
That’ll be the analyst then Charles, I may remember that moment in recent history, personally, yes, some 27 year old…
Charles Dunstone
But not an analyst, this would be someone from the ESG group, some investment fund, just who knows nothing and the thing became so much about box ticking, you can’t pay people as you want to pay them and you can’t really reward them so it’s become pretty thankless and I sort of think to those people, there’s not many interesting companies for you to invest in because all the good people are not going to put up with this. Anyway, so not, definitely not public, I mean I like smaller businesses in truth, so more you know getting behind more and just our business investing in smaller, private businesses.
Elliot Moss
I mean it’s a range, I mean I’m just looking at Five Guys, ME+EM, Strike, Osler Diagnostics.
Charles Dunstone
So some of them, some of them, they’re very different, so some of them like Five Guys and Strike, we’d be very active in managing. ME+EM or some… we’re an investor.
Elliot Moss
An investor, you’re giving money.
Charles Dunstone
And very, very, that’s very clear.
Elliot Moss
And do you like that variety as well? Is that something that keeps you interested, in terms of bigger interest, you know timewise less, is that intentional?
Charles Dunstone
Yes it is and also just what Clare has done with ME+EM, her sort of resilience and persistence and drive, is so fantastic, it’s a joy to support someone like that because they’re much harder on themselves than their investors ever would be. You don’t want to be a passive, sort of passive investor where you don’t, you’ve got to have real faith I think in the management team and what they’re trying to do and the business, so you need to, you need to be invested in it, you need to be passionate about what they’re doing and then other businesses, interesting, it doesn’t matter if you’d have a large stake in them, it doesn’t matter how small or big they are, they all take the same amount of time. In fact, the bigger businesses, so something like Five Guys, which is, does so incredibly well, probably takes less time because when things are going well, you don’t have to get involved as much. But that’s the real fun and you know, Strike is a great example of my sort of rebellious instinct. Every estate agent in the country hates Strike. We sell houses for free. We literally put, driving a coach and horses through the existing model and it is challenging to make the economics of it work but it’s, I love having something which is an, a really ridiculously audacious claim in business. We will sell your house for free. No quibble. No nothing. People are like “what? How can you possibly do that?” and we’re well, let us show you. I love that. And I quite like upsetting the establishment of an industry.
Elliot Moss
Does it actually just literally put a smile on your face? You can see it. I can see it.
Charles Dunstone
There’s a smile on my face now.
Elliot Moss
He’s smirking here, it’s like okay I’m just going to poke them. Because that sounds like the guy who set up Carphone Warehouse, exactly the same…
Charles Dunstone
The same thing. He’s still in there somewhere.
Elliot Moss
He still is, he’s still there, he’s popping up, he’s popping right up, he’s bobbing here.
Charles Dunstone
Yeah. That’s fun.
Elliot Moss
So it’s fun poking but also…
Charles Dunstone
It’s not just, it’s not poking, it’s, it’s doing something, having a proposition for customers that is so extraordinary, they almost can’t believe it. The average person spends £6,000 selling their house, that’s the sort of agent fee. You just go, that’s a new kitchen for you there. What if you don’t have to pay it? You don’t need to because everyone’s finding their house on Rightmove now and Zoopla, so half the job the agent used to do, which was to sell the house, they don’t even do anymore but they still charge the same amount, so it’s absolutely ripe for reinvention. So things like that, yeah, I love doing that.
Elliot Moss
And if there’s one thing that you could tell a young, budding entrepreneur or someone thinking about doing it, what would be the one thing that they should be doing, above all else?
Charles Dunstone
I think you’ve got to have a, you’ve got have a point of difference, you’ve got to have a reason why your thing is better than someone else’s, you just can’t be the same, you’ve got to have something that stands out and makes it different and if like too many people start trying to do things that are the same as everyone else, it’s a very crowded world, it’s very hard then to articulate to people why they should come to you unless you’ve got a hook to hang it on. One of the interesting things of Five Guys also is this comes from the founding family, not allowed to advertise or do any PR, their rule is they only ever want someone to go there because their friend, someone they know recommended it to them.
Elliot Moss
Their children in my case.
Charles Dunstone
Exactly, but they…
Elliot Moss
Those fries, there’s a lot of fries. They’re great.
Charles Dunstone
A lot of fries. But then you get an authority out of that in the relationship and I think particularly young people are so sold to now that they end up feeling they discovered the brand, not that it was sold to them, so that’s also a very, sort of very interesting change that I’m, sort of witness this where you simply let the proposition and the product be your advertising and you put all your energy into that.
Elliot Moss
It sound so simple when you say it and yet we all know it isn’t. Yeah.
Charles Dunstone
It’s certainly not.
Elliot Moss
It’s certainly not. It’s been really great to talk to you. Thank you.
Charles Dunstone
A great pleasure.
Elliot Moss
For being here, for popping up. Or being there still with the ideas and the focus. Just before I let you disappear into the ether, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Charles Dunstone
So, when I was growing up, I absolutely loved this song, Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty. I think it was the saxophone that I absolutely loved and then sort of ironically, we opened the first ever Carphone Warehouse was the junction of Marylebone Road and Baker Street, so it’s always had a sort of special affinity for me and it, all our memories are rose-tinted so I look back on those days, they were hell a lot of them but I look back on them with incredible fondness and the simplicity the small size of the organisation and this song always just takes me right back there.
Elliot Moss
Gerry Rafferty there with Baker Street, the song choice of my fantastic Business Shaper today, Charles Dunstone. He talked about having not gone to university, he felt he had nothing to lose. A really interesting point about becoming an entrepreneur. He mentioned that growing up, he got used to talking to adults and how that has helped him become a great salesperson, a really interesting insight. He talks about fighting the system, he felt great when it was him against the world, whether that was sailing or whether that was coming up with the next category breaking idea. And finally, he talked about having an audacious claim and a point of difference if you are going to set up your own thing. Really disarmingly simple stuff.
You can hear my conversation with Charles all over again whenever you would like to as a podcast, just search Jazz Shapers or you can ask your smart speaker to play Jazz Shapers. Alternatively, you can catch this programme again Monday morning just before the Jazz FM Breakfast at 5.00am.
We are back next Saturday with my next Business Shaper, Mike Welch OBE, founder of Blackcircles.com and Tyrescanner.com, the online tyre retailers. Up next after the news at 10.00, Nigel Williams has great music – of course he does – interviews and live sessions too. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a fabulous weekend.
You can hear our conversation with Charles all over again whenever you’d like to as a podcast, just search Jazz Shapers or you can ask your smart speaker to play Jazz Shapers. We are back next Saturday with my next Business Shaper, it’s Mike Welch OBE, founder of Blackcircles.com and Tyrescanner.com, the online tyre retailers. The Jazz FM Breakfast is up next with Nigel Williams. Have a great one and I’ll see you on Saturday.
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 serial entrepreneur, Charles Dunstone, co-founder of mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse and founder of broadband and TV provider, the TalkTalk Group.
On this Saturday’s Jazz Shapers, I am joined by serial entrepreneur, Charles Dunstone, co-founder of mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse and founder of the TalkTalk Group, a broadband and TV provider. I’m Elliot Moss and I’ll have more of that alongside the music of the shapers of jazz, soul and blues this weekend.
On this Saturday’s Jazz Shapers we heard from serial entrepreneur, Charles Dunstone, co-founder of mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse and founder of broadband and TV provider, the TalkTalk Group. That programme is now available for you to listen to again as a podcast and through your smart speaker, just search or ask for Jazz Shapers or you can hear it again nice and early Monday morning, 5.00am.
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 serial entrepreneur, Charles Dunstone, co-founder of mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse and founder of broadband and TV provider, the TalkTalk Group.