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Grace Beverley
Interview Phadria Prendergast
The young entrepreneur that is leaving her mark within the fitness industry with her 3 businesses Shreddy, TALA and B_ND. WOTC spoke with Grace Beverley about her starting a business whilst at university, the ‘new CEO’ and what has kept her motivated over the years.
Phadria: If you can tell me how it all started for you. Now, you don’t want to be viewed as an influencer, so before your business and knowing the road you wanted to go down.
Grace: So, I think I’ve had quite a roundabout journey. It’s not that I don’t want to be referred to as an influencer but if people come to my page expecting that they will be quite disappointed because I’m working all the time and I won’t be sharing that content. I’m in the office doing something much more boring. The influencer thing can stick for a while and personally in some ways I am but my day-to-day job I don’t do what is officially seen as influencer stuff.
My journey did start on the influencer side, not intentionally. I started off my social media to keep me accountable and it just grew more and more based on the fact that things were quite aspirational I feel and the way I share things is quite natural and organic. Like oh, I forgot to do this again, or missed the gym again and I think people found that quite relatable. Then it grew and grew. Because I started so young, I started something that looked like a career but actually wasn’t because I wasn’t old enough, I hadn’t even come out of uni.
I started my first company about four years ago, with a very slow start. Started with more oomph last year.
P: Four years ago, you were how old?
G: I was 19. Then I started my second company properly in May last year and that was Tala.
P: Being 19 years old and starting a business, I know that a lot of people don’t want to work for themselves, they want to do their own thing, but you made it happen. Would you say your lifestyle was quite different to your friends at the time?
G: I ended up having a business where I didn’t necessarily start it thinking like that. I was just sharing monetizable content. I was at university, so my workload was different from other people, but I’ve always been big on balancing things. I may want to do this, this and this but I have to make that work. It wasn’t necessarily when I started it that I was conscious about it and it wasn’t about me wanting to be my own boss but I was at university and I thought let’s start monetising this and make it into something really special and see where it takes me. So that’s the advantage I had because I was at university anyway. So usually when people talk about entrepreneurs they talk about risk and taking a big leap of faith and that’s why it’s important to look at it differently now in a different context. For example, I was at university at the time, it wasn’t a leap to change my career or leave my day job, yes, I had been in full time work before, but it was more about me just doing it. If it didn’t work, I was in a fortunate position that after university, I could just start again or continue with what I had done before.
P: So, the main reason for starting it wasn’t a business idea, but it was that you were providing…
G: ...Monetizable content?
P: So, you just wanted to help people?
G: It’s a mixture. There’s quite a lot of stigma of saying you started something because you wanted to make money out of it. I don’t think it was individually that – at the time I had a big problem with my student loan so that was part of it and gave me a kick to want to do something about it considering I wanted to stay at university and I had essentially worked the year before for exactly that reason. It didn’t end up covering it and was more expensive than expected. So it was the kick I needed at the time I didn’t think about monetising my content I was just posting on Instagram but this was the decision that made me think – people ask for this content everyday so how about I make my normal content available but I provide a more comprehensive and personalised information feed based on that.
P: So, did you have to support yourself during university?
G: Yes – I worked the year before uni. In my family, my parents don’t pay the fees and especially because we had worked before. Before it was more about making it, all work and making ends meet but it was just more expensive than expected. I was getting a student loan but I didn’t get maintenance at the beginning because I had a particular amount of savings, so I didn’t want to get out a loan and then it just wasn’t enough and this kicked in.
P: So, you just needed something to push you then?
G: Yes, essentially and I think a lot of people probably do. I think a lot of people don’t even consider it, but it changed my mindset for me.
P: What did you study at university?
G: I studied music. Probably not what people expect.
P: What was it that made you choose music?
G: I think the majority of people do it because it’s something they love. I’ve always been encouraged to do things that I love, and I originally thought that I would go into something like law or corporate or one stage. I wanted to be an MP which obviously didn’t turn out very well. Or at the time, I was applying for more vocational or something like philosophy. I applied in my gap year and then changed the course I applied for and worked full time. In the year I was doing corporate work, the fact that I applied with a provisional music degree hadn’t turned anyone off, but people had said that they wanted to have more well-rounded views and wanted different types of people as part of the team. So, I thought, I’ve got the rest of my life to do something I don’t really enjoy so why don’t I do something based on what I’m passionate about. That was the change – hoping I would make it work, get a good degree from a university and be able to do something I loved for three years.
P: I love that you’re shaping your own idea of what a CEO should look like so tell us about that? Tell us about creating the new CEO.
G: I think that’s been a huge thing for me in the past year because I knew the job, I did but I didn’t necessarily know it as well as I thought I did. I knew what you’re meant to be when you’re a CEO or founder and I projected that not to myself. So, when I left university, I realised this was my full-time job now and I’m responsible for other people’s livelihoods as well and I need to be the best I could possibly be. I still do stand by that, but I realised that people think of CEO as one in business or finance, definitely wearing a suit. The important thing to realise is a CEO can be so many different things, even within the same company. For example, a CEO can come up through the finance side or the operation side, the product side whatever it might be but, in any business, it often changes where that CEO comes from. That’s something I didn’t know but now I’m being more informed as a CEO rather than just being myself at the helm of business that I created. 14.01 And so for me, this whole year has been about learning that and that whatever your company is, it’s based around you, the team, the product you're selling and the audience. You can make it what you want to make it. For me, it’s now about concentrating on being creative, talking to our audience well, the brand itself and the tone of voice is through and through the brand. But before I saw it as being a professional, suit wearer in the city. I think that’s a key thing to remember, especially if people feel worried about calling themselves a CEO or director because they are creative but if you’re making the executive decisions for the business then that is your role and you don’t need to conform to the white man in the suit that is usually portrayed as the CEO role. For me, it’s more about being myself and being fine, not really about breaking the stereotypes and the more I was performing to act like something it was the worst job I was doing because the actual intention wasn’t there. I’ve learnt a lot through this year about just being true to myself in this CEO role and that’s the best strength I can bring to the business. Impostor syndrome can make you feel like you need to look a certain way and I have a lot of that when it involves the fact that I’m on social media and when I might post a bikini picture, people don’t want to take you seriously and they don’t feel comfortable when you break their stereotypes of what they want from a CEO. So that was a lesson for me, not falling into that and it’s been a huge learning curve for myself and my confidence in the role.
P: Who is it that advises you or mentors you?
G: Probably one of the best things I’ve ever read is to always find people that are better than you in their respective roles and that’s what made it possible for me to also do my CEO role which is based entirely on my strengths. So, if I can find a way to do that based on my strengths all I need is to get people who fill my weakness with their expertise. So, I think that every single person I work with is better than me at their specialty so there might not be one person I go to about everything and as the business world changes so much, it’s harder to go to traditional mentors about these types of things. I do still have traditional mentors, people I’ve met through different things, but I think the most help I get is from my surrounding team and that’s why I’ve been careful to build it. I’ve wanted to build it in a way that it’s never a one man show and I make that clear across my social media even though I get a lot of the kudos because I’m the face but there’s a reason we do what we do with few people and a large majority of young women, in both my teams for both companies, and that’s the importance of it. Being able to be ourselves whilst being the best we can be at our individual strengths.
P: And what would you say your leadership style is?
G: In line with that, quite friendly. I’ve made mistakes before. People always say you can’t be friends with the people you work with but I think the important thing is establishing that you can be friendly and cultivate those relationships because you’re going to be working with people every day in a small company, you’ve got to tell them your vision and trust them with that. I want to be able to trust everyone. I rely on that and I try to show that, and I think they all feel trusted. There might be a period of time in the beginning when we’re focused on getting them in to their role but there’s also allowing people the freedom to do what they want to do whilst being able to work together as a team. We try to avoid too much hierarchy whilst also knowing there needs to be control and procedures and protocol in general. It’s a collaborative effort.
P: What advice would you give to startups about collaborations?
G: For us, collaborating with other brands has just been about whatever works. Brand on brand collaboration is usually only right at the top like two absolutely iconic brands or two brands trying to grow their brands, probably before they’ve started or trying to grow their social media following and that’s a great way to grow and be excellent together. But for us the most important thing was collaborating with people that it makes sense with, if they share our ethos then share that ethos. Something like DEPOP for example, we both wanted to do things to be more sustainable and we recognised what would be more sustainable than buying new recycled clothing would be buying second hand clothing and we wanted to work with them to be able to sell our samples and to think of creative ways to keep clothing and samples out of landfill. So organic. So, a lot of the time people advise not to do things that will detract from your brand or bring the concentration elsewhere but for us it's always been about does this work? Do we share an ethos? Great, let’s talk about it then. And there’s so many that haven’t pulled through but there are many that have pulled through. So, it’s been about going through the conversations and not ruling anything out before we have had those conversations even if at first it might not feel like the right fit. Because having those conversations, we want to be able to learn from everyone around us too.
P: What is it that has kept you motivated throughout the years, because of course, when you launched your first business you were still at university and I know the workload so I know it was very easy for you to give up. I’m sure no one would have said that was a wrong thing because they would have probably said it was understandable, what was it that kept you focused and on that track to keep you going?
G: I’m quite rigid in my organisation, I think when people think about rigidity they think about really strict rules and this and that and whatever and that is not necessarily what it was for me. It was about understanding my priorities and making those work together and it might have been that my priority was launching the business and only I could have been doing that at one stage so I needed to delegate this I needed to delegate that and whatever it may be I needed to hop on a call with this person and give them the equipment to also then take what I wanted for this further. My main thing was that in this particular situation what should I do, well ok in this particular situation I need to do and everything else can be delegated even if it involves a long Introductory call or a mood board from me. So, it was really about pushing the control of it but also about planning and prioritisation and time management. I have a very specific way of doing things and rituals and routines and all of that and those can help me maximise my output to what I often see when people say how have you managed to do all of this, being to translate that because something was all under my company or it could have been my initial idea it doesn’t mean that it’s all me and you have got to be able to know how to balance that.
