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Rule Number 6: Persevere
There’s a saying that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. There’s another one too, expect the best and prepare for the worst. There’s a lot of truth in both of them. What they’re both really saying is, tough times happen, difficulties, disappointments, disasters, too.
This might sound obvious but the people who really grasp this reality and deal with it well are exceptional. It’s easy to pay lip service to this truth but applying it and living with it are something else altogether. In reality, many people fall at the first hurdle and flounder when things don’t go exactly to plan. One of the untruest sayings is that the first step is the hardest.
That’s nonsense. It’s really the 4th, 5th and 25th that are the hardest, once the initial excitement has calmed down. The simple truth is, people who succeed are those who have persevered.
I’ve brought four fascinating people to the table here. Each one is completely different from the other in terms of their life experiences and challenges. But all are inspiring examples of perseverance. You cannot read their words without being touched by the power of their perseverance.
The capacity to pick yourself up after a setback or push yourself to keep going beyond the limit of what you think you can achieve is vital for success in every area of your life, from working for a promotion to running a marathon to writing that novel you’ve been planning. Michelle Mone’s story of determination and persistence illustrates that perfectly.
Michelle Mone grew up fast, developing her perseverance muscle when she set up a business in the competitive and highly lucrative lingerie industry.
In 1996, at the age of 24, as a mother in Glasgow, Michelle dreamt up a revolutionary bra which created a high-street sensation. Her gel-filled bra used moulded silicone of the kind used in breast-enhancement operations to give a cleavage that was comfortable, and convincing, unlike any other bra in the market. Three years later the Ultimo went into production and is now sold in stores across the world.
Its launch in New York’s prestigious Saks department store racked up a six-week waiting list, no doubt boosted by Julia Roberts having worn an Ultimo in the film Erin Brockovich. Sales have now broken the £10m barrier and Ultimo products are on the verge of going global. Michelle left school at 15 to go out to work and look after her father when he woke up one day to find himself paralysed.
She grew up in the ‘tough east end’ of Glasgow, and her home didn’t have a bath until she was 12. She went on to become a sales manager for Labatts lager, covering all of Scotland, before being made redundant and using her redundancy money to fund her dream. But her dream came at a high price, which threatened her health and her marriage and included a car jack attack when all 30 of her new design samples were stolen.
Michelle Mone
‘Had I known the truth about the lingerie industry when I started out nearly ten years ago, I would certainly have thought twice about what I was letting myself in for. The word ‘lingerie’ conjures up images of beautifully buxom young women, their curves clad in lace, but the reality is that this is a male-dominated industry where dirty tricks, backstabbing and industrial espionage are rife.
Back in 1996, I was a naïve young girl with a dream. One evening I was at a dinner-dance and was wearing a well-known make of cleavage-enhancing bra. It was so uncomfortable that I had to take it off. I remember thinking, “There must be a comfortable bra out there that can give me a cleavage and not feel as if it’s killing me.”
That night I told my husband Michael that I wanted to design a bra that would fit properly. I’d recently been made redundant from my job as Manager for the Scottish arm of a brewery company, which had been taken over by Whitbread.
I could have stayed with them, but I jumped at the chance of redundancy, so that I could use that £15,000 to finance my dream. I funded the research and worked with a team of scientists to find a substance which would mimic breast tissue.
We lived off my redundancy money at first. Michael kept his job for three years and we formed MJM International, working from the bedroom of our house. To survive, we took out a second mortgage and lived off credit cards. It was touch and go –until the day in 1999 when the Ultimo bra went on sale at Selfridges.
That was my real breakthrough. I was interviewed on radio that morning by Chris Evans on his breakfast show and he asked me what I’d do if it wasn’t successful: “My house will go to the wall,” I told him. And I wasn’t kidding, even though I’d just had my third child, Bethany. At that time I was about £35,000 in debt because I was sinking everything into the business and I’d put my house up for security. But when we got to Selfridges, people were queuing around the block. The store said they’d never seen anything like it; we sold out in under two hours.
It was an instant and huge success and quickly became one of the country’s biggest selling cleavage-enhancing bras.
It was worn by Julia Roberts in the Oscar-winning film, Erin Brockovich, and soon other actresses and celebrities ‘came out’ as fans and everyone was talking about it. The press loved it.
But our success alerted our competitors to what they were missing out on. Suddenly other firms saw us as a threat, and things got really nasty. The first problem came in 2002 when a big name UK brand took umbrage at our success. Annoyed by the design awards we were winning and the publicity we enjoyed, they decided to try to sink us. They began legal proceedings against us on the grounds that our name was similar to theirs – in fact the two names are nothing like each other – and took out an injunction forcing us to remove our products from stores nationwide.
It was a clever move. Industry giants can afford to be locked into costly legal wranglings for months and at that stage we couldn’t. They thought the costly legal battle would send us under.
They thought we’d be off the shop floor for at least three months while we created new packaging, but to their surprise within a week we had our new packaging delivered to every store in the UK. I even delivered some to stores myself.
When you stand up to bullies they invariably back off and it’s the same in business. When the company involved saw the lengths we were prepared to go to to protect our brand, they dropped proceedings. We were safe for the moment, but we’d had a serious wake-up call.
Later that year came the event which nearly sank us completely. After careful research we were due to break into the American market. It was an exciting time – I’d been courted by all the major department stores and the president of Saks had even phoned me to ask for the product. It seemed we were on the brink of major stateside success.
I was determined to get things right and took pains to choose a good distributor, finally settling on a firm who came highly recommended by the top industry trade magazine. My trust proved horribly misplaced. The company went bust and the owners ran off with almost £250,000 of our money.
My American dreams were dashed and because of our losses we were forced to refinance the company using our house as security. I also discovered that the distributor had gone bust before and that the editor of the magazine was a personal friend of the distributors.
At the time, I thought my world had collapsed. If I hadn’t had my family I’d have gone insane. Even once we’d recouped our losses after a year, the troubles were not over.
Our sales were dropping alarmingly. Research showed this was because people were ripping off our product and producing inferior look-alikes at much cheaper prices. We didn’t have the money to fight back with injunctions, so it took its toll. We decided to put America on hold, to come out of all the department stores in the UK and instead to concentrate on expanding our portfolio of designs.
I turned my attention to designing the backless body. The design was patented worldwide in 2002 and went on to become a massive best-seller.
Then, shortly before we launched, I had a call from a colleague telling me a major UK retailer had an identical body in their stores. It was identical in every way: cut, material, everything.
Once again, an industry giant didn’t think I had the money, time or energy to fight them off, but this time I decided to begin legal proceedings. When they saw I meant business they settled out of court and removed their copy from the shelves.
As if these dirty tricks weren’t bad enough, in February 2003 I was loading my car outside my office with £30,000 of samples of new designs when a hooded man grabbed me and threatened me with a knife before driving off in my car.
I struggled for as long as I could – the loss of those prototypes could have meant the end of our business – and received bruising and a cracked rib in the process. The car was found by the police, but the underwear had gone.
The police never got to the bottom of it, but industrial espionage was the first thing which crossed my mind. After all, the thief had stole a £54,000 BMW only to dump it but had taken the samples of underwear. It was all very suspicious.
Every one of those designs was a one-off so we had to work 24 hours a day for a week to remake the samples. Again we were lucky to survive. I put out a statement saying it was “business as usual at MJM.”
I’ve got to stay strong as I’ve got three young children to care for and I’ve staked everything I have on the business. I’m not prepared to just roll over and let my rivals win. I have learnt some harsh lessons and, although I would call myself determined rather than ruthless, I’ve really had to toughen up and realise that I can’t trust people so readily.
As long as my family, friends and staff know what I’m like, I can deal with the rest.
And I always come back stronger and more determined. The knocks strengthen me. The BBC filmed us for two years, and the programme has been shown in 40 countries and I got thousands of emails and letters of support following it. For the last five years I have been on the board of the Prince’s Trust in Scotland.
It’s important to me to inspire young people from backgrounds like mine to aim high. But I would warn any kid starting out in business: never think it can happen to you overnight. You have to put everything you’ve got on the line to make it work. You’ve got to be determined and if you don’t want it 120 per cent, don’t try.
You need to be ready to go on a white-knuckle rollercoaster ride. Because there will be bad times as well as good ones. But after the knocks, you just get straight back on the rollercoaster. Ride it through, take it in your stride and you will get through the worst. My message is – never give up. You have to go out there and make it happen yourself. No one else is going to pay your mortgage or do it for you.
As long as you’ve got determination and focus in life you will succeed. We have won Business Of The Year and I have been Businesswoman Of The Year; we have won scores of awards and accolades. The press say I’m the female Richard Branson. I had supper with Anita Roddick last night; now she is an incredible woman.
I’m sick and tired of all the successful people in business being men. Not all, but a lot of them look down on me and think, “who the hell is she?” In business I am the most confident person in the world. I feel I can take any of them on any day. I thrive on that; them putting me down, thinking that I must be stupid, having left school at 15. Oh, I love a challenge!
And, of course, I want to continue to prove that you can make something of yourself. No matter where you’re from.
I just want to show people that I can do it. Everyone was always saying to me, from school onwards, “No, Michelle, you won’t be able to do that.” But I was different, determined and highly, highly ambitious. I wanted my own business from the age of 10. I set up paper rounds, milk rounds and hot rolls in the morning; all sorts of things.
I’ve been working for over twenty years but it feels more like forty! All my family have worked for people, been made redundant and let down. There is no history of entrepreneur’s in my family.
There will always be competition and people out to knock us. And I’ve just got to live with that. As long as I can say I’ve had a go and done something with my life, I’ll be happy. You can’t put down a trier.’
I was introduced to the Ultimo by my friend Carole, who had a lingerie mail-order business. We knew it was a winner and would be sensationally successful. Over the next few weeks, we watched the media frenzy unfold, all the press had their own take on this incredible invention. I read about the woman behind all of this and knew that Michelle Mone was not only very smart to have created the Ultimo, but incredibly smart to be able to take it to market in this way.
Over the years I’ve kept an eye on the trials that she has faced, from competitor’s lawsuits and press snipes to the occasion when she was attacked and all 30 of her new designs were stolen. So, I was eager to spend time with her and hear for myself how she had weathered these storms.
The one thing that really struck me about Michelle was that this girl had fabulous backbone. I knew I was talking to someone who would never be beaten. Her glamorous, blonde model-girl appearance belies the tough strategist that she actually is.
Some will call her ruthless, or worse. I see it as the most awesome clarity and determination. As long as she knows she is right and her cause justified, she’ll not back down, but go full steam ahead to win through. Perhaps we’re just not comfortable seeing this in a woman? In a man, we admire it - it’s called ‘having balls’!
I suspect that leaving school at 15 to earn money because your father is no longer able to, would kick-start the sort of drive and resilience you just don’t see in the average teenager.
