Interview with Kate Lester of Diamond Logistics
Our Managing Director Stephen Humphreys recently caught up with Kate Lester, CEO of Diamond Logistics and award-winning entrepreneur, for a chat about books, business, and smashing the glass ceiling. Take a look at the video below or read the full transcription!
S: As a winner of so many awards and such a successful businessperson, you must have received lots of advice along the way. Could you give me an example of some bad advice you’ve been given?
K: The worst advice I ever got was that PR just for people with enormous egos. So this is one of the most important lessons I think I ever got, and that is to be really careful about who you listen to. There’s an awful lot of people out there who want to give really good advice and sometimes we use the wrong filters and listen to the wrong people.
I was told PR was just an ego thing and only people lacking in substance would pay attention to it. Actually I believed that if you don’t put your head above the parapet, which is effectively what PR does, then you’ll be like an awful lot of companies that nobody knows anything about. That was a really bad bit of advice that I shouldn’t have listened to earlier on.
S: Conversely, you must have had good advice along the way that you can give to other people?
K: I think we are all born with two ears and one mouth, and I believe you should listen in that kind of proportion so I have listened to a huge amount of it, but I do apply my own filters and that’s incredibly important. I think people make mistakes when they listen to advice and they don’t apply their own filters to it. The best advice that I’ve had would have been, and this is really boring by the way, to actually write down the processes of everything you do in the business as they happen and you have them.
When we franchised our business we had to create this enormous manual and although we had some loose practice documents written around, the comprehensive process notes that we’ve had have been a very valuable bit of not only how to run the Diamond Logistics set up but also our IP so writing everything down is good.
S: What advice would you give your 15 year old self, your 20 year old self and your 25 year old self?
K: 15, 20 and 25, oh blimey! The advice I’d give to my 25 year old self would be respect yourself. I was a bit of a wild child and I think I could have had a little bit more self respect, that would have been cool, but then actually the partying that I got up to at that point in time led me to who I am today and I always say that if you’re really happy with who you are today then all the paths that you’ve taken have got you there, so it wouldn’t have made any difference.
To my 20 year old self, god I was so brave at 20. My advice would be you’ll make it, because if I’d known that at 20, it would have saved probably me the first 20 years of thinking “oh my god, am I always going to be able to pay the wages, or the bills or whatever because I started my business at 20, right?
At 25, don’t get married for the second or the third time! That will cost you a fortune.
I hope that what I’m doing at the moment continues. I hope that being an empathetic and love-based kind of person that means that I’ll always have a business and a life that I’m really proud of. And I hope that I’m surrounded by grandchildren. That would be a really amazing thing. Currently speaking that doesn’t look that likely but that would be a really amazing thing.
What would I like to tell my 45 year old self? It’s ok to go grey now, and stop spending so much money on botox!
S: How do you get in the zone?
K: You know the zone’s a myth, right? I genuinely believe that it’s absolute nonsense. It’s just routine. Whenever you look at great sportsmen, the thing that leads to the amazing result that they have on the day that they race is not that ten seconds of time during a 100m, it is the 3 years worth of training that they’ve done before that point, and that is the setting the alarm, getting up at 5, working your plan, following your training, eating right, focusing on the goal, etc. It’s all of that stuff, it’s all that boring stuff, so if you ever get that beautiful meeting of peak physical health, and feeling amazing, and great motivation and all the rest of it, THEN you get that zone but the reality is it’s all the boring routine and practice and following the plan that is what makes people really great.
So I think the zone is potentially a myth and that actually, most people are not as successful as they should be in business because they don’t like the sheer boredom of doing stuff that they have to every day.
I think the reality is, and this is why most people stumble before they reach magnificent success, is that most people just don’t like doing the hard work that isn’t exciting. that people don’t write books about, because in the end it’s really tedious, and the reality is that most success is really boring, so it’s the grim reality of it really.
S: Moving on from that, with regards to doing all the boring mundane stuff, how do you structure your day so that you know you’re making progress all the time? I find a lot of the time work gets in the way, I want to get to a certain point but don’t because work gets in the way.
K: Do you have a plan of where you’re going? Do you have a destination?
S: I do, yes.
K: That’s great, so you absolutely know where you’re going. So I was presenting in front of 25 business people last week, and only one person out of the 25 actually had a business plan. I find that absolutely staggering. I have good days, I have bad, I have mornings like this morning where I got up at quarter to 3. And I should probably have done a good couple of hours worth of work but instead I did some interior design of my new house, because I’m allowed to do that girly stuff too.
But the reality is when I get into work a) I know what I’ve got to do because I’m working to a 5 year plan of where it is that I’m heading, but then we have a strategic plan for the business this year. We’ve got objectives and key results again for everything from corporate social responsibility, to accounting targets, key performance indicators in terms of our sales etc. All the projects that I’ve got on my board, and all the things that I’m doing on a day-to-day basis are encompassed within that plan. Then I’ve got the list of daily tasks that then does the micromanagement of that and that’s how it kind of works.
It literally starts from my big 5 year goal of where I’m going, to our annual strategic plan, to what my quarterly objectives and key results are, to my monthly planner of stuff to my daily list of things to do. That’s quite comprehensive planning.
S: One of the issues I find which I’m sure other business owners have as well, is that I’ve got a to-do list where I think “I’ll definitely get this done today”. Then it’s 5 o’clock and I’ve not even started it, and then it rolls over to the next day and then the next day and it becomes this big beast where I think “what do I do?” and then I just don’t do any of it. Have you got a strategy on how you do that? Or do you just make sure it’s done?
K: I think anybody who says that they get it all done is just completely lying. A couple of reasons why people mostly don’t manage their to-do list very well, one of them is that they put too much on them. So, I find it far better if you just put three key things you need to achieve in the day and actually manage that you do them because then you get a sense of accomplishment and it doesn’t feel like it’s really overwhelming.
The other thing is that in your to-do list, if you’re a bit like me, a proper I-dotter and T-crosser, we can’t switch that off. I’d like to say it’s because we’re like Steve Jobs, but it’s not. That man was magnificent. But I am a little bit kind of detail-orientated so I’ll have like 30, 40, 50 things on my to-do list, but you’ve got to go through it and understand which ones you can get rid of. There’s got to be a delegate list, which ones really aren’t that important because time isn’t infinite, and what are the core ones that again are going to directly impact on your strategic plan.
S: Mmhm.
K: I want my team to have more sense of unity so we want to have communal lunch times. We need to put lino in the kitchen area that was previously carpeted. So I went down there and there’s like some sticky glue substance on the floor and all the rest of it. I wanted to brief the cleaners. Now that’s a bloody stupid thing for me to do! I can’t afford to be that kind of micro manager, so that goes on my list of to-do things, but I delegate it to Charlotte, who manages the business for me. So yes, you can note all these things and all these details, particularly if you’re fascinated by your business, but delegate, delete and do. Delegate, delete and do, there you go. I’ve just come up with your three words. Delegate, delete, do!
S: With regards to the delegate; do you then follow up to make sure it’s done?
K: Yeah, you should do. I’m a really bad manager of people so I have really good people that I know that manage the business for me and they’re going to do it. But also give them a time frame that they need to achieve that in. I find again a weekly review of meetings is a really good way of doing this. So, if you have a project list, we have one with all the people I delegate stuff to, so they write everything down, because it can be quite voluminous, so they write everything down on that project list and then we just update it with a status report once a week when we have our meeting.
The one thing I would say as well is that I have so much stuff going on in my head and Diamond is not lacking for lack of information. One of the greatest disciplines I’ve learnt in the last five years is particularly to keep stuff super simple. You literally get down to the minimum amount of documents the business can run on rather than having massive amounts of information everywhere.
S: So, after writing your first two books, your third book Manicured Fist is due out later this year and is a handbook for women in business. In what ways do you think it will help women like yourself in business?
K: I don’t think it’ll help women like myself because we’re out there doing it now. I’m hoping that what it’s going to do is to talk to people about how we’re raising our daughters, and talk to people about the constraints they’re imposing on themselves, and talk to people about empowering themselves to ask for the things that they need, encourage people to look at self-employment, and to really say that in this country particularly that the gender challenge is almost a construction of our own. I think of all the women that I interviewed for it (fellow women in business such as myself) the big thing that all of us had is there was not one person in any of our upbringings that thought we couldn’t do it. I think that’s the key bit.
Success for women in business and their careers is absolutely out there, should they choose to have it, but it starts with the way we bring up our daughters. I wasn’t doing hair on Barbie, I was reading books, and I think that’s pretty much the same for anyone.
The Manicured Fist, by the way, thank you to Hilary Devey for that. I saw her being interviewed once and she was saying that the glass ceiling doesn’t care whether it’s a hairy lorry driver’s arm that smashes through it or a manicured fist and I kind of like that.
S: Your answer has really answered the next question about how you’ve not faced discrimination?
K: Of course I’ve faced discrimination. I’ve had people pat my arse and wearing leather jumpers, not being able to have a conversation with me because I have substantial bosoms, and have been spoken to like I’m a personal assistant rather than a CEO for years.
S: But have you ignored that?
K: It’s just funny, isn’t it? Of course you’ve got to ignore it. I started my business in the 90s, the sexism was incredible. But we have moved on exponentially since then, and there is no way that my daughter and her generation are facing the same kind of discrimination now. I think we have a sea of political correctness in most places and that’s a welcome change. There’s still room to go but I absolutely faced discrimination. It’s just part of the journey. I think the people that were being discriminatory were not worth raising an eyebrow to, when I could raise my eyebrows!
S: So with Diamond Logistics and yourself having a lot of awards to your name, how do you feel in yourself to have built your empire from scratch?
K: Empire! I really like that word, but I don’t think it’s very much of an empire! How do I feel about having built it myself? Really proud now, actually. Really proud of my team and all that sail on the Good Ship Diamond Logistics. Pretty brave of the 20 year old me who started Diamond in 1992. She was very brave. I can’t wait to see where it goes.
I’ve got a few years left on this journey and I’m still only a young lady. I’m only 46, so I’m in a really good place. Really enjoying it, really loving my work, really loving the business, really proud of what we’ve maintained in terms of our culture and our values. That’s really important to me and I’m very proud of the business model that we’ve got. It’s very partnership-led. It feels like the zeitgeist for Diamond is now.
S: With regards to deciding on a franchise model, what thought process did you go through a few years back to scale up? I’m thinking that myself and I’m sure there’re a lot of other small businesses thinking on that route. What was your deciding factor to choose that route to scale up?
K: Two main bits. I believe in skin in the game. If you want quality of service delivery, I think if people share ownership, then they have skin in the game and they will be more motivated to deliver excellence of service. I know that our franchises around the UK really care about their businesses because they’ve got ownership of that and that’s that shared success principle, which is one of our founding principles.
The other thing, quite frankly, was the speed of which we could establish the network and the self-capitalisation of it. So their investment in terms of our franchise fee and setting up their own depots means that we’ve got a relatively low capitalisation level. We’ve got this sort of non-asset based fast-growth platform that is scaled by our network partners. That’s a really big benefit.
S: So the revenue streams are from a percentage of the revenues from the land?
K: No not yet, I’m not doing a McDonalds although I’d really like to! It’s quite funny. I’ve got a few entrepreneurial mates who are pretty divided 50/50 where half think it’s a tough field and half think it’s great. I think it’s great. One of the first books I read when I was getting involved in franchising was Grinding It Out by Ray Kroc and that was really fascinating. For those of you who don’t know, McDonalds made most of its money not on the franchise fees. It was that they owned the property that the McDonalds franchises were established on. But we’re yet to buy up industrial estates around the UK yet, but you never know. Watch this space.
Ours is very much about recruit network partners. Network partners recruit customers in that area, and they’re facilitated by the Diamond Logistics platform.
S: Excellent. So, you like to read a lot.
K: Love a book.
S: Do you use that to help give you motivation or is it there just for a way for you to relax or expand your mind or is it a mixture of all of that?
K: Depends what I’m reading. I’ve got a terrible habit currently speaking of this guy called Ben Aaronovitch that does these kind of mystical London police stories, that’s my wind-down at the moment. But actually, I’d say primarily it’s business books that I read. That’s because I don’t have a business degree, I’m self-taught, but I’ve read thousands of books and I’m a proper business geek. Also fascinated by business and fascinated by other businesses, and business changes.
The reality is that the classic business models of 20 years ago don’t exist, and I need to be at the forefront of all of that and what I’m reading at the moment, quite a lot of it’s about data, platforms, AI etc, robotics, so I’m reading a lot about that kind of stuff. But I genuinely find it fascinating.
S: Do you find when you read things that maybe conflict with views you’ve got you then take another viewpoint? I sometimes, where I read a lot of different books some of them say the same but in a slightly different way and then I think there’s not enough hours in the day to incorporate everything I’ve learnt and I don’t know how you sort of cope with what you think will work.
K: As you say, there’s often a very big thread of similarity through a majority of books. I would suggest that thread is the good advice because it’s consistent regardless of who is advising it. I think there’s probably 10 commandments in business that people can follow and end up with a good outcome, but in terms of what we apply and what we don’t apply, it goes back to the plan.
Thank you so much to Kate Lester for taking the time to sit down and talk to us! In the meantime, why not follow SHMS Accountants and Diamond Logistics on social media via the links below?