Bum Butter Business School: Lesson No1.

If you can’t find what you want… damn well create it yourself. F*** ‘em.

Welcome to the Bum Butter Business School. You will be relieved to know I don’t want your credit card details or email. I have nothing to sell you other than Bum Butter.

No lesson this week, I am just going to set the scene… hold on. Actually… this is a lesson…. How I ended up as “Mr Bum Butter” is a lesson in itself. And then, once a week (the schedule you experience may differ from that advertised) I am going to pass on one wise thing I have learnt along the way.

Hey ho… Let’s go.

Hi, I’m Charlie and I have messed around in business all my life. It’s one of my “sports”.

At school I bought woven friendship bracelets off travelling pro skateboarders returning from California and sold them to my classmates. I studied business/marketing at school, college and university. I went on to make the LV= Car Insurance TV adverts…  stop… I gotta show you my first advert.

We had a dreadful extra who could not act, so I ended up in the advert. Can you spot a short haired Charlie drinking coffee with a newspaper? The neat tune was my idea. The tattoos, ladies and motorbikes came naturally. Kinda odd for a CAR insurance advert isn't it.

Meanwhile while being a poor fit in the corporate world I invented weird cycling events like the Clunker Classic and OrienBEERing, and started “Charlie The Bikemonger”. You see no one was putting on races for guys who liked to race downhill on 1930’s rod braked post office bikes. I could not find a cycling event where beer was encouraged, and no one could supply me with the niche singlespeed bike parts I wanted. So, I damn well created what I wanted: Clunker Classic, OrienBEERing and the Bikemonger shop.

But let’s double back a second. Why was I a bad fit in the corporate world? It boils down to a few things. Let’s run through them.

Achievers Vs Dicks.

Someone once tried giving me a corporate bollocking for arriving 20 minutes late. I used to catch a small ferry across a harbour to get to work, and if a bigger boat was coming into port… we just had to wait. But that is not important. The important thing I had been surfing double overhead (that’s  12+ feet) waves the previous afternoon. Now, surfing really aint easy, and it is not some chilled out laid back hippy hobby when it gets big. You need a similar set of skills to a mountaineer. 

Anyway… I was still super jazzed from the surf session. I looked at the guy trying to put me down and thought… I am good at my job, I’m nice to everyone I work with, I often work late, and yesterday was bloody brilliant. You however are just a prick with a BS job title, and a w@nky tie. What the hell have you done recently. F*** you. I really do not have any respect for you, because of what you are doing right now. You think you have one over on me. And that would be sort of true if I cared what you thought and if you were not a sh1thead weasel.

Don’t hang around with sh1theads. Stay away from their cr@p. Let them wallow in their world of snide shite… you are better than that and better than them.

“You are not entrepreneurial”

So, LV insurance sent me on a 2 day course, so I could discover my corporate superpowers. I did a task and slid some paper tiles around, answered questions, evaluated things and scored points. I scored really highly on being entrepreneurial and autonomy. I had to google “autonomy” as I only knew it as a punk song by the Buzzcocks. And even then, I was not sure if the lyrics were “I want you on top of me” or “I want autonomy”. Video below… you decide.

Anyway… I presented my results to the group and this “colleague”… jeez I say colleague, but this talentless twat bag of pernicious nonsense piped up and said “But you are not entrepreneurial”. If I could remember her name… it would be in here, she has earned that honour. I explained I am not saying I am entrepreneurial, I am just presenting my results. She cracked off another bitch bollock word burp, almost repeating herself word for word. I turned to the lady bought in to run the course and said “do you wanna say anything”. What I meant was… take control and tell her to shut up. She did nothing. So… I did something.

It was not scripted, shooting straight from the heart… and I surprised myself in two ways. Firstly, it turns out I can be really direct while staying calm and not swearing (And there was a hint of Frank Zappa in there). I will tell you about the second thing in a moment.

Charlie in a suit: “Look here, I made more money out of my bikeshop last night, than I made all day sat here with you clowns”

Twat sack: “You aint got a bike shop”

Charlie (in a cool tweed suit with blood red Doc Martin boots): “yes I bloody have, it’s on the internet, it’s called Charlie The Bikemonger… google it. Clown”

The second thing… Oh, blimey… what!!! I have a bikeshop… my small niche webstore was growing but I had never really thought of it as an actual bikeshop, until the moment I blurted that out and told myself I had a bikeshop. Plus, a really big plus, was…  and what the hell am I doing here with these idiots.

Yeah… how did I end up here? Why the hell am I not a surf instructor, or mountaineering guide. Who chose this… certainly not me? So I looked back and it was my Dad, back when I was 13 years old, 20+ years earlier. He said “son, you aint doing sociology GCSEs you are doing business studies”. That was a very good call by Dad. But it led from one thing to another. I would take jobs because I was edging closer to getting sacked from my current situation, and every jump would make things bigger/worse and further from the path I should have been on. With a hearty mortgage and two children necessity was making choices. I was not making the decisions. That has gotta stop.

From that “you aren’t entrepreneurial” moment onward I knew my days were numbered at LV. I had a super brilliant boss (Guy Hedger) and an equally cool guy assisting me (thank you for everything Nick Whitnell). Everything I did from then on, while doing a good job, was with an eye on the Bikemonger escape tunnel.

Hell… I took a six month secondment. They held my job open, with no pay. Let’s see if Bikemonger can pay the bills. I rode every hill, became a local in every pub, entered my dogs in the carnival dog show, and made sure Bikemonger worked out. The deal was I could extend it up to 12 months, but had to give them a months notice for an extension. I called HR, because I really did not want to go back, gave them 30 days notice. But get this… no, you need to give a months notice. Sh1t it… it’s a 31 day month. 

So I went back and saw Guy (my cool Boss) and he said “F***ing hell what are you doing here? I thought we would never see you again”.  I replied… “yes me too, not my fault, HR made me do it, quick meeting?”

In the meeting I broke the news to him that he was laid off.

Guy: “What?”

Charlie: “yes you are all laid off, I am laying off LV”

Guy: “Ahh..  you are quitting, excellent… pub?”

Charlie: “pub indeed”

I went on to explain to guy… Imagine you have a cute little puppy you play with after work, and then it becomes a great big bicycle business St Bernard. I can’t sit here and do a good job for you and the bike business. To stay here, I would have to kill my business puppy. And you know what? I would never be happy because I would always be wondering… what would of happened if I let Bikemonger grow and fly. I gotta go. I gotta do this.

Next lesson…

I guess this should go in some sort of chronological order from LV to Amanda Holden. Errrr. Next lesson could be (look I am going to be honest with you, this is my half-baked list of lesson ideas, actual lessons may differ from those illustrated)

• Then Kevin the pirate came into the shop.
• "Iceland that's kinda near you aint it bitch"
• Do one thing well. 80:20
• Read 4HWW
• No one is better than you.
• Say yes to everything.
• Your personal brand is everything.
• Managing a growing business is easy, managing a declining business is nasty.
• Be the outlier.
• Gaye Bykers On Acid.
• Right time right place.
• You don’t need more more more.
• The entrepreneurial myth
• You are a bikepacker… they can take it all away, you will be fine.
• Gear up to your scarcest resource… time.
• That time I accidentally helped Jonathan Ross quit the BBC.
• You are already the luckiest person ever.
• Advertising does not work.
• What now? Where is the new happiness?