Hyble’s Craig Letton on Surviving Burnout, Building a Profitable SaaS Company, and Winning Against Market Leaders

Craig Letton took over his parents’ struggling print business and transformed it into Hyble, a profitable technology platform serving major alcohol brands like Bacardi, Carlsberg, and Diageo.

In this candid conversation, Craig shares his journey through severe burnout while scaling the company, landing a massive contract with the largest US wine distributor, and building a award-winning workplace culture. He discusses the realities of bootstrapping growth, the challenges of raising capital in the UK, and how he overcame multiple crises to achieve 96% growth and profitability.

Let’s get into it…

Mark MacLeod:

In this episode, I sit down with Craig Letton, founder and CEO of alcohol marketing platform Hyble. We spent a lot of this episode going deep into Craig’s experience with burnout. Many of you listening have experienced this in some ways, and Craig was really open, really vulnerable, and pretty specific about how he dealt with this.

We also talked about other challenges. You know, he comes from Scotland and the access to funding over there is very different than it is in North America. This was a really great discussion. I hope you enjoy it.

Mark MacLeod:

Craig, welcome to The Startup CEO Show. It’s a true pleasure to have you here. How are you doing today?

Craig Letton:

I’m great. Great to be here, Mark. Thank you for inviting me.

Mark MacLeod:

For folks listening, you can’t tell because of my accent, but I lived in Scotland till I was 11, and so it’s a true pleasure to have a fellow Scottish person on the podcast because there’s only one type of Scots person, which is a proud Scots person. And we’re very proud of our heritage and all of it.

So anyway, it’s a thrill to have you on, Craig. I wish I still had my accent. I actually joke with my producers that I should just pound a bunch of whiskey and bring the accent back before this. But it’s two in the afternoon, so I didn’t bother with that.

Craig Letton:

Yeah, I can still hear a wee faint accent there. We actually have some team members from the Isle of Lewis. I’m tuned into the accent, so I can hear it, but yeah, mine’s not particularly strong either, so people will be disappointed. There are no Braveheart accents here.

Mark MacLeod:

That’s awesome. Yeah, my wife, when she first met my parents. So, you know the Lewis accent, it’s subtle, but they speak almost very quietly and very fast, and the words just sort of like flow into each other. So my wife’s got it now, but in the beginning, I’d sort of like just nod and wave. You’ll figure it out, I’ll catch you up. It’s all good.

Anyway, that’s not why we’re here. Maybe for folks who don’t know, just take a second and tell us what your company does.

Craig Letton:

Sure. So I’m a CEO of Hyble. We’re a technology-enabled marketing business, specifically working in the drinks industry. So, our platform helps salespeople create customized marketing materials for their customers. So those are bars, restaurants, hotels, and nightclubs.

And our technology essentially allows it to do it faster and cheaper than the traditional method, which uses graphic designers. So, the simple way to think about it is it’s like Canva, but specifically built for the needs of the drinks industry and enterprise customers.

Mark MacLeod:

I love it. Now, I understand that this business actually goes back a long way and used to be a print business. Not many technology companies have that legacy, so I’d be curious to hear how you made the transition. And I guess a sub-question would be like, presumably, the skill sets needed for a low-growth print business are very different from those needed for a high-growth tech business. So, did you have to completely reboot? Just tell us about that journey.

Craig Letton:

I’ll give you the short version, but essentially, I kind of started my career in sales and marketing for big consumer goods companies. And after doing that for four years, I realized that the corporate world wasn’t for me. And I kind of looked up that greasy pole or the corporate ladder, if you will, and realized that I didn’t want to go up that path.

So I took some time out and spent some time backpacking in Patagonia. And just by real coincidence at that time, my parents were looking to retire from their business that they had started 10 years prior, which was as you said a digital print business, but did have a sort of tech element to it, but they were really pretty too far ahead of their time, so it hadn’t really quite gained the traction that they wanted to.

So, they were looking for someone to take over the ownership of the business and run it. I was looking for a job. I also wanted to return back to Scotland. I was in England at the time, so I took over the running of the business, and they actually left to sail around the world, which they are still doing. They’ve been going for 13 years, so there was no handover.

Mark MacLeod:

Oh, here you go. Amazing

Craig Letton:

Just gave me the keys, then see you later. So, yeah, I came on as the manager essentially of the business. So I spent the first two years kind of learning the ropes. I’d never managed anybody. Suddenly, I had a whole business to run. But again, it was a small business, under a million dollars, seven or eight people. So kind of just took it over and spent the first two years kind of fixing it up, returning it to profitability, kind of making it a little more professional based on some of the learning that I had from the corporate world.

And after two years of doing that, I said to my parents, I think the best thing to do is actually to sell this business. Because I couldn’t really see much growth opportunity for it. And we tried to sell it, but it wasn’t really valuable enough. We did get an offer for it, but it was very small.

So I said to my parents, look, I can probably make more money in profit in the next year than we could for selling it. So why don’t I buy it from you, I will take it over, and I will take it in a new direction. The reason I kind of felt confident to do that is I saw that they had a solution which was actually a technology solution that they built specifically for the drinks industry that enabled sales reps, particularly at wine wholesalers, to create wine lists in a couple of minutes online and then be able to print that, send it to us, and we would ship it two days later.

And that took the kind of previous process which used graphic designers, which could take maybe four weeks, maybe six weeks, of back and forth down to like a couple of minutes and delivered a few days later. And I could see that this was adding a ton of value for the customers we had.

And I thought, you know what? This could work. This is a real-world problem that I understand from my experience at Kraft Foods. And this problem exists for drinks companies all over the world. So if we could build a solution that could solve this problem at scale, this could be successful.

And so I took over the ownership of the business, which has a whole story in itself. Buying a business from your parents is…

Mark MacLeod:

It’s not in the standard startup script at all.

Craig Letton:

Yeah, yeah. Negotiating with your own parents over their baby, which is the business, and you are also their baby. A very unusual dynamic. I wouldn’t recommend it, but we managed to get through that. I took over the ownership of the business, and the first thing I did was shut down the printing operation.

We did it in a month, sold it all, and transitioned to a cloud printing model where we send those orders to printers all over the world. And what that enabled us to do was to globalize, serve any market in the world, just plug it into a printer in that country, and off we go,

So that gave us the kind of platform for scale. And then the second thing I did was that the technology we had at the time was built in a way that we had to have a separate instance for every customer. So we had to rebuild it pretty much every time. And if you had one bug, you had 10 bugs, it just sucked. And we were doing that with an outsourced team in India, and I was very frustrated with everything that goes with managing an outsourced team.

So I said, you know what, if we’re going to do this, I’m going to build a team here in Edinburgh, in Scotland. I’m going to build my own development team, and we’re going to build a product that could be scaled so we can just replicate it over and over again. And that’s exactly what we did. So we went out and bear in mind, we had no money because I just used all the money in the business to buy it from my folks. So this was done on an absolute shoestring.

So, yeah, so we did this with very little money and actually started up a small dev team in a place called Code Base, which is an incubator in Edinburgh, and started off with just two of us, me and our CTO Chris, and then built it out from there.

And we built a product over maybe, I say, a 12 to 18-month period, and launched it into the market. And thankfully, my thesis was right. There were companies looking to solve this problem. And we managed to do big deals with Bacardi, Carlsberg, Pernod Ricard, and Diageo, all within the UK.

And then we were able to expand that across Europe, going one market after another. So I think we expanded into 18 countries in less than 18 months. Total transformation, the business was completely different from what I took over.

And we’ve just kind of been on that growth journey for the past, I don’t know, seven or eight years, really, just building on that success mostly through globalization, winning new customers, expanding the product. And that kind of brings us up to kind of recent times, which is our expansion into North America.

Mark MacLeod:

What is it about this industry that gives it needs that are like a can that can’t be serviced? What are the bespoke needs here?

Craig Letton:

Yeah, well, the first one is that we’re dealing with very large enterprises, and these are multiple billion-dollar businesses based in many countries around the world. So they have specific enterprise needs around budgeting, reporting controls, approvals, integrations, all security, all that kind of stuff that you kind of need to build from the get-go. It’s quite hard to reverse from a B2C business into an enterprise business. Obviously, someone like Canva is trying to do that right now, but it’s a hard transition to make. But we started in that place from the beginning.

The second part is that there are a lot of legal and regulatory controls within the alcohol industry, particularly how alcohol is marketed. And those are different by country, and they’re also different by state or province in Canada. So our system is built to handle all those different regulatory environments from the outset.

And then we also provide the full service. So we provide the technology, but we also provide the customer support, customer success, and implementation, and we also manage the print fulfillment as well.

So we also have a huge network of printers where we manage the order all the way through to the delivery. So it’s really a one-stop shop. We’re not just providing the tech, but the tech is what enables the benefits for the customer.

Mark MacLeod:

There are a few topics I want to hit on. Let’s talk about funding for a second. You know, I’m trying to imagine, you were backpacking, you took this business over from your parents, you’re probably personally not swimming in cash, and the business isn’t swimming in cash. And now you are trying to serve these giant billion-dollar companies, and it’s hard to bootstrap for SaaS.

Often, one of the decision criteria for a large enterprise customer is like, hey, does this vendor have the balance sheet to be around in a year? And then I couple that with you being based in the UK, where the amount of capital for companies like this is far less than in North America. So, how did you navigate all of that?

Craig Letton:

Yeah, I think with regards to trading with big companies, when I took over the business, we had contracts with some big companies, and my mother and father had done a great job of securing those, and that gives you really great proof point, and you only really need one. And for other customers to feel comfortable. And so I guess I had a bit of a head start in that respect.

I’d also spent the previous four years of my career managing big customers, so working for big multinational CPG companies. But my account was Tesco, which is the biggest retailer in the UK.

Mark MacLeod:

Yep. Big grocery store.

Craig Letton:

Yeah. So I was used to dealing with big customers. I spoke their language, and I kind of knew how they operated. I understand the organizational politics, structure, and all that stuff. So we were able to navigate that pretty well. And to be honest, I still have never had a customer ask to look at our balance sheet in the 13 years I’ve run the business.

Mark MacLeod:

Come on. That’s amazing.

Craig Letton:

Which does kind of blow my mind. And then in terms of funding, as we had no money, like none. The way that I financed the buyback was through a bank loan and using the profits of the business to buy them out over time. So we were left with nothing. So the way that we kind of funded this development really was profits.

But the second one was government grants. So, the Scottish government, in particular, is very supportive of entrepreneurial companies, and we were able to actually secure a lot of grants that weren’t 100% funded but part-funded. And that enabled us to hire developers and build on that.

And again, it was quite a gradual growth at that point. But in 2017, I think, we grew 100% in a year, albeit from a low base. But I quickly realized that we couldn’t cash flow this any further. We’d maxed out our invoice financing facility, and we’d maxed out the grants. I was like, we’re going to grow ourselves to death here. We’re just massively underfunded.

That’s when I started looking at the idea of taking funding for the first time. The challenge that we had was that we were not a new business, which meant that we didn’t qualify for a huge number of venture funds, or VCT funds, as they call them in the UK, because we were older than seven years.

So we didn’t qualify for certain programs like EIS, which allows investors to put money in and it’s very tax-friendly to do so. We didn’t qualify for any of those funds. We weren’t big enough for even the lowest level of private equity.

It wasn’t necessarily a unicorn opportunity that the VCs were looking for, so we had such a small slice of the market to look at. So we were looking very much at growth equity. And we ended up getting sort of two-term sheets in February 2020.

Mark MacLeod:

Good timing. The world was just starting to fundamentally change then.

Craig Letton:

Exactly, yeah. And I was actually in Vancouver, of all places, in March 2020 when everything fell apart, right, the borders were closed, the NHL closed, and this market closed. I headed back to Scotland, and we went into a really very challenging period because obviously, all of the hospitality accounts closed. All the restaurants and nightclubs closed. Our customer base just disappeared.

Mark MacLeod:

I will say my alcohol consumption went up considerably. But yeah, that was at home.

Craig Letton:

It wasn’t just you. What we call off-premise is like a retailer’s stop. The shares went the sales went through the roof. But unfortunately, in the on-premise where we work, decimated. So we lost between 80 to 90% of our revenue overnight for about three to four months. And we hadn’t gotten that funding yet, so that’s a whole other story about how we survived that.

In August 2020, we finally secured that first round of funding. And folks in North America will laugh. But we raised two million pounds, which in dollars is maybe two and a half million dollars or something, as our first-ever round of funding.

And that money actually got us through Covid. It allowed us to keep our foot down, keep investing in the product, and keep investing in the team. And we ended up actually growing the business by 40% over that two-year period, despite having six months of no sales.

Mark MacLeod:

That’s great.

Craig Letton:

So that money allowed us to survive, really. And then since then, we’ve taken two subsequent funding rounds to fuel our growth, each of £2 million. We’ve taken £6 million of equity total, which is probably smaller than the average seed round in the U.S.

Mark MacLeod:

This shows you what you can do a lot with a little.

Craig Letton:

You can. Yeah. We’ve had no choice. So you’ve kind of got to make it work. And we have taken a bit of venture debt as well, which has been really helpful. You know, as you become profitable or close to profitability, you can start doing that.

But I wouldn’t advocate for this type of funding model. I refer to it as the drip-feeding model. It means you’re constantly up against it, you’re fundraising all the time. You know, over the last four or five years, I’ve probably spent a third of my time raising money. It’s not time well spent. You know, I’d be better selling.

And the analogy I use is it’s kind of like going to the bank and asking for a loan to build a house. But they’ll only give you a loan to build the basement. And once you’ve done a good job of the basement, they’ll allow you to build the first floor. So it’s pretty stressful, and it means you can’t invest quite as long-term as you’d like to. But it is what it is.

It was a situation we were in based on the maturity of the company. So if I had to do it again, I’d liquidate the company, start it as a new one, and raise a different type of capital.

Mark MacLeod:

Good for you. And was that cap, but were the investors in the UK or did you cross the Atlantic?

Craig Letton:

Yeah, no, our investors are called the British Growth Fund. So it’s one of the largest and most active investors in the UK, specifically looking at businesses that are more mature, a little bit less risky, much less risky than a typical VC would look at.

And their LPs are essentially the five biggest British banks in the UK. So they operate a little bit more like a bank in terms of how they work and their risk profile. So it’s worked for us. If I did it again, I’d maybe do something different, but you just get scrappy and you figure things out along the way.

Mark MacLeod:

I don’t want this to be a chronological discussion, so I’d like to go to a really important topic, you and I have chatted before, and you’ve talked about your journey going through and to the other side of burnout. And many people listening have gone through that or are currently going through that, or hey, something’s wrong, but they haven’t diagnosed it yet. I’d love to just turn the floor over to you, like story time, just walk us through that.

Craig Letton:

I think most people running a business they’ve been through some hard times, and Covid was one of those. That was two years of really challenging times for the business. As I said, buying the business from my parents was brutally painful; it left some scars. But I would say the last 18 months to two years have probably been the hardest of my 13-year journey.

And to kind of provide some context for that, as I said, we were kind of growing organically at a decent clip. We got to about 5 million pounds of revenue back in 22. And during Covid, I actually, through some outrageous networking and some serendipity, managed to get in front of the biggest customer in the world for what we do, which is actually the largest wine and spirits distributor in the U.S., a company called Southern Glazers.

It’s a $25 billion family business. I think it’s the 10th largest private business in the U.S., so it’s a phenomenal business operating in almost all of the states in the U.S., plus Canada and the Caribbean. So phenomenal business.

And for us, that was the ideal customer profile. I literally had it written down as our ICP, and I managed to get introduced to the son of the owner. And they were looking for a product just like ours. And they’d been doing this with another vendor for 15 years and prior to that, been doing it in-house, and they were doing it all manually. And they were looking for some technology that would enable them to really kind of make this more efficient, increase their speed to market, capture data, all the benefits that we provide.

And you know, this opportunity was roughly 10 times the size of our next largest customer and was in the U.S., where we didn’t operate, and at the time, we couldn’t even go there. We weren’t allowed into the US because of COVID.

So one thing kind of led to another, and we ended up doing a kind of four proof of concepts in Arizona and Florida to kind of prove out that our technology would be adopted. And then we went through an 18-month kind of tender process against their incumbent vendor.

Mark MacLeod:

Who must have been very firmly entrenched, I assume. Like, they’ve been there for a while, so that’s tough competition.

Craig Letton:

Yeah. And they were the market leader. There was nobody else in the market. And I think of the top 10 distributors, they probably had a 60 to 70% share. And so yeah, this was a major incumbent. But they had failed to invest in their technology and their service. In fact, they’d offshored a lot of that, and they failed to invest in the relationships, and they got complacent, which created an opportunity for a wee company from Scotland to get in there.

And I knew at the time that this was an opportunity of a lifetime. I’d spent a lot of time researching the US market, I’d done a couple of trips over the years, and I knew that this was our one shot, that was our mentality at the time. And we took the view of kind of go big or go home, right? Let’s make this happen, or we fail.

And so as we’re going through that 18-month tender process, we also had to invest in the business in order to be able to deliver it should we win it. And obviously, I was always confident we would, and my confidence increased over time, but it was never guaranteed until that contract was signed. But we couldn’t wait till then.

We decided to rebuild our technology. So we rebuilt the front end of our application based on the feedback from those proof of concepts. That was an 18-month process built on a brand-new progressive web app platform. And it was intense. We had to build out a supply chain because obviously, we managed the print, we had to find the suppliers, do all the integrations, get that set up, build the team, tax infrastructure, finance infrastructure, all that stuff you need to do to set up in a new market at scale we had to build while running the tender process with no guarantee that we would win it.

So, as you can imagine, that takes quite a bit of investment. So we did put in another round of investment, and we just doubled down, doubled down, and we really were all in. If we didn’t win that, we were toast. So, as you can imagine, that increases your stress levels a little bit. The good news is we won it.

I moved out to the US three days later with my family, so I’ve got three young kids. So my wife and I moved to just near Boston, and another member of our team moved out, and we got started on the rollout immediately. So that was kind of July 23rd.

By November we began the rollout, which was a 48-state rollout of our technology with over 10,000 users. To put it in perspective, they had more users in Texas than Bacardi did globally, which was our next largest customer. So this is just like epic levels of scale.

And I was very conscious of the Andy Grove phrase, more companies die of indigestion than starvation. And we were at real risk of that. And bearing in mind how little funding we’ve had, we were on a tightrope the whole time. So by the time we got to say, October time, I was like, the revenue’s not coming quite fast enough to catch up with the cost base that we had built. And we were starting to run out of money fast. We were burning cash at quite a rate, and I could see we were going to run out of money by quarter one of the following year.

And while that happened, while that’s kind of going on, so we’re doing the biggest rollout ever that we’ve done, I’ve moved my family to the US, the kids are settling in at school and all the challenges that go with that, like finding a car, getting a driving license, all that stuff. And also doing a ton of travel around the US and back to the UK.

We had a couple of what I would call Black Swan events happen. So these are the types of things that do happen in a business. But just infrequently and usually outside of your control. And like most British companies entering the US, we made some hires that didn’t work out, and some senior hires that were expensive that didn’t quite go the way we hoped.

And we ended up getting broiled in two lawsuits, but neither of them was kind of our fault. But we got pulled into them. We never had a lawsuit in our entire history.

Mark MacLeod:

The US is a little bit more litigious than the UK.

Craig Letton:

Yeah, yeah, we found that out pretty quickly. And then, unfortunately, we had a bereavement. One of our C-suite members had a tragic bereavement, and he obviously had to step out of the business for some time. As a result, another C-suite member jumped into his shoes and then had to take some time out. So at that point, we didn’t have a CFO, we didn’t have a COO. We’ve got months of cash left, and we’re trying to run this rollout.

So it was a little bit, kind of felt all the weight on my shoulders, as you can imagine. And we had no guarantee that we were going to be able to raise money even from our existing investors. At that time, if you looked at our business through a spreadsheet, you would have said this was not a fundable business because we were losing a lot of money.

But our board and I had huge faith in the business because we had just signed a multi-year contract with this huge customer. They were ripping out their incumbent as we went. You know, there was no real way back, and we had a huge amount of faith in our ability to deliver it. So we had to kind of look beyond the spreadsheet and just keep faith in the business.

And so we had a kind of a number of things that sort of crises all happen at once during a time when there was already a lot of pressure on the business and on the team, and on myself. And that has an impact on you physically and mentally, whether you like it or not. And I think some of the way that that kind of manifested itself for me, and I’m sure a lot of people listening will have been through these periods and felt the same thing, but it’s just this kind of constant feeling of exhaustion.

The analogy I use is kind of like when your phone runs out of battery and it goes into extreme power save mode, and the apps start closing down, and it goes black and white, your body kind of starts doing that as well in your brain. So I just felt exhausted all the time. I’d get to midday and I’d be like, I need to go for a lie-down. I’m just destroyed.

And also physical exhaustion. On a Thursday or definitely a Friday, I’d be asleep at the same time as my then 2-year-old. I’d be in bed by 7 pm, totally done. Saturday would be a write-off, and then maybe on Sunday I would feel a little bit of energy and be able to do something. So you’re just constantly drained.

Then, mentally, your brain starts to go into some dark places. Because you know, I think they use the phrase Elon Musk made famous, which was like chewing glass and looking into the abyss. I mean, you couldn’t sum up that time better. You know, the abyss with our lack of funding, the potential for the business going bust imminently, and the glass was all these challenges that we were having to work through simultaneously.

And so I was working around the clock, early mornings, late nights, weekends.

Mark MacLeod:

Jeez. With a young family in a new country.

Craig Letton:

With a young family, yeah. It’s hard, and your brain starts kind of going to dark places. And I’ve kind of learned a bit about psychology. I’m absolutely not an expert on this, but you know, people are familiar with fight or flight, but there’s also a kind of freeze, like a deer in the headlights. But there’s also a kind of fourth stage where your body just kind of gives up.

You know, almost like if an animal was about to be eaten by a bear, just roll over and pretend it’s dead, just to minimize the pain of dying. That’s why burnout, from what I understand, has multiple stages, and I was kind of going through those stages and getting towards the severe end of that.

And as the kind of CEO and the owner of the company, you’re thinking about the impact on your team, right? You’re thinking, if this fails, we’ve got people down in Miami, how are they going to get home? How are we going to pay them? You know, we’re going to be letting down customers, suppliers.

You know, we were close to 100 people at that point, there are 100 jobs going to go. When you start thinking about that, and I said to my wife, I remember saying like, I’d say there’s about 20% chance here that we’re not going to get funded and this is going to go bust and we’re going to have to get our asses back to Scotland. And I said, look, I can’t think about this because I don’t want to think about Plan B, because I need to put all my energy into Plan A, but I need you to make the Plan B for going home.

Mark MacLeod:

How did she react to that? You know, I talked to many CEOs who are very, very comfortable with risk, but their spouses may not share that risk appetite. So, yeah, how did that go?

Craig Letton:

Yeah, I mean, she’s always been incredibly supportive, and she’s been through these dark times with me before, but she hasn’t been through Covid and everything. And we were looking down the barrel almost all of that Covid period, particularly until we raised that funding.

So I think she’s got a lot of faith in me and a lot of faith in the company and our proposition. And I believed in it. I believed we were going to pull through and find a way to make it work.

So, yeah, she was incredible. And I think that’s so important, having that support network, whether it’s your friends, your family. My board was incredible. Our chairman was just wonderful at this time; one of our board members actually jumped into the CFO seat for several months, helped us with the fundraising process, and helped me run the business. He jumped in, having really not had much exposure to the business at all, and obviously came in at very short notice, so I’ll be forever thankful for him.

And then the wider network of other entrepreneurs, mentors, and everyone. It’s when things are dark that’s when you have to kind of call on those people for support. And thankfully, I had plenty of people who were willing to help me. So, yeah, it was tough, and it was very circumstantial.

A lot of this was stuff that was either outside of my control or things that if they went away, I wouldn’t be feeling that way, you know. So the good news is that we were finally able to raise that funding. It was extremely painful. There is a hole in the wall of my previous rental house as a result.

Mark MacLeod:

Oh, my God.

Craig Letton:

Yeah, it got quite intense. And there were a couple kinds of solutions that kind of helped us through from a business perspective. We were able to get some support from that customer, which was incredibly helpful.

Mark MacLeod:

I was going to ask about that. That seems to make sense. Like, they’re pretty invested in you.

Craig Letton:

Yeah. And that was an idea that came from a fellow entrepreneur. You just say, why don’t you ask your biggest customer and your biggest supplier for help? And I did, and I’m very grateful that they did. And that helped us get through that time.

And I also made an investment in the business myself. So again, I’ve not taken any capital out of this business. And the very little bit I have, I put back in, as did my mother, and as did one of our board members. So again, we’re going in, putting even more into this.

And I think what we also did is really just like got tight on the business, got tight on our costs, made some hard decisions. And because we were struggling to kind of get the hires that we wanted in the US we actually took some of our best people from the UK and shipped them over to Miami.

And that made a huge difference because those were people that we knew and trusted. They knew the business, they had the right culture, and we could rely on them to get the job done. So that really helped. But most of us were just grinding it out, just keep on going, keep on going. A massive team effort, and we got there.

I think some of the things that kind of helped me through that time, because it was, yeah, in total, almost two years of struggle. There were a couple of things that kind of really made a difference for me. And you’ve written about this a lot, and it’s about what gives you energy and what renewable energy sources you can keep going back to. And I think that’s different for every individual. But for me, that took the form of mountain biking, which is my favorite pastime, Skiing, going to the gym, and working out.

And people might say, oh, well, you’re exhausted. How could you go and do those things?

Mark MacLeod:

It gives you energy.

Craig Letton:

I would say it gives you energy. And they might have been quite slow rides relatively, not that intense workouts, but I felt better afterwards.

Mark MacLeod:

Sorry to interrupt, but is it fair to say that, maybe in the worst of this, you just didn’t have boundaries, it was just all work? And what I’m hearing now, kind of as you start to recover, you’re creating some boundaries. You’re making that time to go for a mountain bike ride, whereas maybe in the past you didn’t.

Craig Letton:

I think so. I mean, I think it’s fair to say that for that entire period, there were no boundaries. You know, we’ve got people all over the world, the UK, the US, Australia. I mean, I could work 24/7, and I practically was and had to. There wasn’t a lot of choice in the matter. At least that’s how it felt at the time.

But I started carving out time for myself, particularly in the early morning or on a Friday afternoon, to go to the gym, or go for a bike ride. And I took the mentality that I’m kind of in a fight here, like a fight for survival. I may as well embrace it and tap into that kind of competitive nature that I have and sort of embrace it.

So I would do things like, I’m a big rock guy. I would find rock music that really stirs my soul and gets me fired up. Things I would listen to before a lacrosse game or a rugby game, and I would tap into that and just get that kind of fight mindset in my head. I’d use motivational videos. I’m a big Arnold Schwarzenegger fan. I would watch his motivational videos and get myself fired up.

Mark MacLeod:

Love Arnold. I just listened to an audiobook of his, and he narrates it. So it’s Arnold for seven hours.

Craig Letton:

Yeah, I’ve read that book. It’s phenomenal. He’s got a brilliant mindset. Brilliant. And a lot of that just feels natural to me, that kind of stuff. A lot of it comes from sports. And the mindset that I’ve kind of built through playing contact sports for a very long time.

And I think it’s really kind of finding those energy sources and just going into them and using them and leveraging them. So, a lot of the time I’d wake up every morning and my brain’s saying to me, get out of here. It’s kind of moving into flight mode. You know, there’s dark thoughts coming into my head saying, your body’s like, I’m under strain here. I’m getting killed here. This is grim. Just run away. That’s what it’s trying to say to you.

And every morning I’m saying, I’m not going to run away. Like, I just have to lean into this. Keep on fighting. And one of the expressions I kind of kept saying to myself, I would almost say it was a mantra that I actually wrote by hand on the wall, was run the ball back.

And that came from when I was young, I used to play rugby back in Scotland. And I don’t know whether I was taught this or it just became natural. But anytime we were scored on and so it’s similar to American football. If there’s a touchdown or try behind your try line, I would take that ball and I’d run it back to the halfway line.

And for me, that was a way of saying to the team, let’s keep going, right? You know, we could be 10 points down, let’s keep on going. But it also sent a message to the opposition that said, I ain’t going to stop. No matter how many times you score me, I’m going to keep running it back.

So I kept kind of just going back to that mentality, no matter how many times I get kicked down, I’m just going to keep running it back, whether you like it or not. And I think for me, that was really helpful. But there’s only so long you can sustain that.

And after about 18 months, I hit a bit of a wall, thankfully, because we had by that point completed the majority of the rollout. So the business pressure was reduced. And we thankfully were also able to raise a round of funding, I think, kind of this time last year, April time, which again took a bit of pressure off, and the revenue started to catch up.

The plan that we had foreseen, and the revenue that we had foreseen coming, started to pull through, and the business started to perform as we had expected, a little bit later than we expected, but it started to come through. So those business pressures started to reduce and therefore I started to relax a little bit and have a little bit more time to myself so that maybe on a Friday afternoon I could go for a bike ride or I could start putting in some of those boundaries that I hadn’t had for a long period of time.

And as that kind of developed over time, I started to feel a bit more like myself. But I would say it probably has taken till now, from October last year, to feel like my normal self. So, yeah, it was pretty full on, but we made it through.

And from a business perspective, we grew the business by 96% last year. In 2024, we hit profitability in November, and we’ve maintained it through till now. To put it in perspective, I think in Q1 last year, I think we turned over 1.6 million pounds and lost 1.1 million. This year we did 4 million pounds of revenue and made 427 grand.

And yeah, just a complete transformation. And as I said, I always knew it was there. I always knew it was coming. It was just a case of keep going, keep delivering, and again, at the end of the day, it’s not just me, right? There’s a team of 100 people here pushing every single day to make this happen.

And that growth will continue. We’ll get another 50% growth just from that one account this year. We’ll remain profitable. We’ve doubled our headcount, and it’s now created just an incredible platform for growth. I’m now going after new business, and I’m able to go into these accounts like I did yesterday and say to customers, we’ve just delivered this ginormous rollout with the biggest player in the industry.

And actually, it’s been incredibly successful. You know, we’ve got all the metrics to show that, all the evidence and that just makes it a hell of a lot easier when you’re selling to have that kind of proof of success at scale.

So, from a business perspective, it’s totally been worth it. We’re in just an incredible position right now, and I don’t want to speak too soon because some other crisis will come up before we know it, but we’re in a great position, and I’m feeling a thousand times better than I did this time last year.

Mark MacLeod:

That’s understandable. Listen, I really appreciate you sharing that story. And I’m curious when you were going through that, were you able to name it, and were you communicative? Like, were you speaking with your wife, or were you just in the dark cave by yourself?

Craig Letton:

Yeah, I was very open with it. And my wife has actually just finished a three-year master’s in counseling, so I’m patient number one. And she has a very high level of empathy. And so, yeah, I was very open with where I am and the support I needed. And even though I wasn’t necessarily telling other people, they could see it.

Like, my mom came over to visit, and she was like, Craig, you don’t look too good. And this was the point where I was starting to feel a bit better. I was like, you should have seen me last month. I was like, how do you know I don’t feel good? And she said I can see it in your eyes.

And I looked in the mirror, and I just looked kind of gray, like my eyes looked kind of dead. And I was just exhausted mentally, physically, and emotionally. But I didn’t stop, and I kept going. And we made it through the other side.

The reason I kind of wanted to speak about this is because this happens to most business owners. It is super hard to do this. And sometimes stuff happens that is outside of your control, like Covid.

Mark MacLeod:

I will add, for many founders, they don’t… Like, you knew it. You knew what was going on. Many don’t. They just normalize it. Oh, I’m just stressed all the time. I have no energy. I’m constantly in fight or flight. But I guess this is just what it means to be a founder. Like, they just think that’s the price of admission, and it’s not, necessarily, right?

Craig Letton:

Yeah. And I think I’ve suffered burnout many times, unfortunately, so I do know the signs of it. I know how my body reacts. I know when it’s starting. So, yeah, I was very cognizant of it. And I think what helped as well is I did have some help from a therapist at the time, and she kind of taught me some of the basics of the psychology around it.

And then it started to make very logical sense. At the end of the day, we’re just human beings. We’re animals, and we have very primitive responses to stress. And once you start understanding that, you’re like, okay, I get why I feel this way. It’s logical. And then you can start doing something about it.

So at Hyble, I’m very open with our team about this. They’ve heard this story. We talk about this a lot because it impacts members of our team. When you’re growing almost 100% year on year, this is going to happen to a number of people within your teams. You’ve got to look out for it. You’ve got to support people, and you’ve got to have those mechanisms in place to help them if it does happen.

So, I think a lot of people don’t talk about it because either don’t understand it enough, as you said, to know why they’re feeling the way they are, or they’re too scared to talk about it. But for me, I say to our team, this is a sign of strength if you can talk about it because then we can go and fix that. We can help you, and we can put a support network around you to get you to the other end.

Mark MacLeod:

Whatever you’re going through, naming it is actually very disarming. It starts to reduce the burden, right? Like, oh, I’m stressed. Oh, I feel fear, I’m afraid. Like, just naming it really takes the weight off. There’s like a lot more to be done, but it’s a really crucial first step.

Craig Letton:

100%. I think what was helpful for me is that my brain’s quite logical and analytical, and understand that I was feeling the way I was because of the circumstances I was in. I was like, okay, I get it. It’s not a weakness on my part. It’s not anything really to do with me. It’s the situation I’m in.

Mark MacLeod:

Oh, yeah. Like I said, thank you for sharing that.

On a much lighter note, let’s switch topics. And your company has won a “Best Places to Work” award. And I’m curious, what does that mean to you? Not what is the significance of the award, but, like, you are trying to create an environment that’s great to work at. What was it that you set out to design? And you know, in your mind, what does it mean to create a place that is great to work at?

Craig Letton:

Yeah, well, I think probably like a lot of founders, the kind of culture that I’ve tried to create here is based on a lot of the things that I didn’t like when I worked in corporate companies. One of those, for example, is when I worked in those businesses, there was very much a mold that they wanted you to fit into, and I didn’t fit into that mold and didn’t want to.

And I actually thought that created a lack of diversity of thought as a result. So at Hyble, one of our values is authenticity. You can probably tell from speaking to me that’s just the way I’m built. And I like people to show up as they are and be themselves.

And I was actually saying this to a colleague of mine last night. Like, I look for talent in places that other people don’t, because I think society can often judge people, and people get overlooked. You know, if there is a corporate mold and you don’t fit that mold, you’re going to get overlooked.

Some of our best people are people who do not fit that mold, and who probably would get overlooked for some societal reason in other companies. For us, that diversity is actually our greatest strength, and that enables us to build a really incredible team, but also for people to feel comfortable, to express themselves honestly, and to trust each other.

Because if people aren’t being honest and authentic, you can’t trust folk. And everything in business is based on trust. So, a lot of what we’ve done is really built around, like, where do I want to work, what type of company do I want to work in, what makes me feel good, what do I want to be there. And we’re sort of rebelling against some of these kinds of corporate ways.

And the big one for us is something that you’ve written about a lot, which is humility. It kind of comes naturally to Scottish people. We’re almost humble to a fault. But for me, humility is one of our values because I think the biggest kind of blocker to many people’s growth and learning is ego. Because if you think you know it all, you’re not open to learning, you’re not open to growth.

So, the biggest thing we look for when we hire people is somebody who’s humble, who’s open to saying, I don’t know everything. I don’t get this, I don’t get that. But I want to learn and I want to get better. So we have a bit of a rule around no egos. We do not hire people with big egos because we just know it doesn’t work.

It did take me probably a bit of time to get to the understanding that, at the end of the day, your company is just a group of people, and it’s based on the quality of those people, how hard they work, and how well they work together. You can have the best product in the world. But if your team sucks or is dysfunctional or hates each other or not enjoying themselves, then it’s for nothing.

So over time, and particularly in the last couple of years, I’ve invested much more of my time, but also the company’s resources into improving our culture, building out our people team, building out the structures around compensation, benefits, HR programs, maternity leave, paternity leave, all these other things that are really important to people.

And you know, as a result, I mean, you have like, I think, 4.3 stars on Glassdoor. You know, I think we had a 76% engagement score from our team, and we monitor that quarterly. We’re constantly looking at how we’re performing on that.

And if we’ve got problems, we get the feedback and we address it. So, for me, it took me a while to realize it, but people are your number one asset. So why would you not invest in that? You know, and I’m always shocked about how many companies don’t and treat their people crap.

Mark MacLeod:

It seems so common sense the way you describe it, but it’s not actually common. Yeah, so I like that.

Craig Letton:

And I think we’re up to eight boomerang employees now. So those are people who have left and then come back. Some shortly after kind of weeks, months, sometimes years. And that’s because a lot of the time, you can think the grass is greener. And you also think that you kind of get used to the environment that you’re in.

And they come back because of the culture and the people, and that’s what they tell us. Also, we’ve had a lot of people join us who have had really bad experiences at other companies. And when they tell us what happened there, I’m always shocked to hear the type of experiences that they’ve had, because that’s just not normal with the way that we work.

So, we’re not perfect. We’re always improving and getting better. But it is a huge priority for me. And I think sometimes it gets overlooked, unfortunately, in the name of revenue or profits or product. And at the end of the day, it’s all about people.

Mark MacLeod:

I love it. A final question, Craig. So, you became CEO because you were looking for a job. You don’t come from a technology background, and you’re running a technology company. You weren’t in Silicon Valley, where you could be surrounded by mentors and whatever, and just osmosis. Like, other than just putting the reps in and crossing the desert, what have you done explicitly to grow yourself so that you can be the best leader for this business?

Craig Letton:

Well, I mean, I am not a technologist. I couldn’t write a line of code to save my life. You know, that’s just not me. But what I do know is I understand the problem we’re solving very, very deeply. Not only because I was that user, but I’ve spent 13 years working with our customers day in and day out.

So I understand it very deeply. I understand the industry very deeply. There’s probably just through the time spent, probably few people who understand customer marketing, and the alcohol industry, quite as well as I do. And that compounds over time, your learning and your experiences, and your network.

But in terms of sort of technology, for me, it’s just a way that we solve this problem, right? This problem used to be solved by graphic designers and sort of large groups of people. It’s now being solved by technology, which enables the sales reps to do it themselves. It’s really just a solution to a problem.

I look at it from that perspective, rather than a product as being a sort of thing in itself. Because what I saw a lot, particularly when we worked in the incubator, is people creating technology for technology’s sake, or creating a solution and then looking for a problem. We started with a problem, right? This product started out as drawings for me, and we didn’t even have a designer.

And from the very beginning, we built that with customer feedback. We took those drawings to customers and said, if we built a technology platform that looked like this and did this, would you buy it? What do you like? What do you don’t like? What features do you need? What requirements do you need? So from the very beginning, I was kind of the customer interface. I guess I didn’t know it at the time. I never heard of the word product manager, but kind of that’s what I was doing.

And then we had our CTO, Chris, who’s still with us today, and I would turn around, Chris, and say, customers asked for this. Can we build it? Yes. Okay. And it was just that interface constantly. And we still do that today. We’re still taking prototypes to customers, still getting that feedback, still listening to it all the time.

So, I’ve learned enough technically by spending time in the same room as the developers, learning the code. Show me how this works, show me how that works, to understand the basics, to be able to kind of at least understand what they’re talking about. And then I think in terms of learning, I’m a voracious learner. Like, I’m a total business nerd. Like, I love business. Like, it’s fun for me. It’s a hobby, it’s a passion.

And so, whether it’s podcasts like yours, which are excellent, whether it’s books, magazines, LinkedIn, or blogs, I consume it all. I probably consume hours a day of business and industry content. And I just view it as like, again, my brain’s like a sponge, right? If I can fill it up with lots of useful information, I might not use it today or tomorrow. But see, in three years’ time, I might go back to that bit of information and use it.

And again, that comes back to that kind of growth mentality, right? How can I be better at what I’m doing? And as you’ve talked before, if you’re a CEO of a company that’s growing 100% year on year, you need to grow at 100%.

Mark MacLeod:

That’s right. At least a hundred percent.

Craig Letton:

Yeah. So, I’m always investing in myself in that respect, and I just see it just the same as I would sport. If you want to be an elite athlete, you’ve got to train, you’ve got to practice, you’ve got to work, and play with the best players.

Mark MacLeod:

What you’ve just described, as we wrap up, is another example of a boundary. One is making time to go mountain biking to do those things that give you pleasure, give you energy, and help you decompress. The other is to carve out time to sharpen your craft to learn to get better. You know, the company could consume all available hours if you let it. So I love that you carve out that time.

I really appreciate you sharing this journey Craig. I had some sense of it because you and I have chatted before but I really appreciate how open you were and I know many people who are listening or watching are going to resonate with a lot of what you shared and congrats on all of your success. It’s well deserved.

Craig Letton:

Yeah. Thank you very much. Appreciate the opportunity and hopefully our conversation today, if it helps one other founder or CEO then we’ve done our job.

Mark MacLeod:

Exactly.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Startup CEO Show. If you’d like to connect with me, be sure to visit my website at markmacLeod.me, or follow me on LinkedIn at The Mark MacLeod, or X account @markmacleod_, and if you want to tune in again next week, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time!