Jamie Bentley - CEO, Stephenson Personal Care

Leeds Business Podcast

In this week’s episode we speak to Jamie Bentley, CEO of Stephenson Personal Care.

Jamie tells us all about how it feels to take over as fifth generation in a family firm, selling in the states looking like a cross between Tim Nice-but-Dim and Hugh Grant, the feeling when landing your first million dollar deal and how a brilliant ‘train set’ analogy sparked his Eureka moment.

Plus he tells us about a great opportunity to get MBA students to work on your new business idea.

INTRODUCING JAMIE BENTLEY

Having studied Business and Financial Management at the University of North London, quickly followed by a brief stretch in the hospitality industry as a ski guide and water sports instructor, Jamie joined Univar on their Management Development Programme where he spent 4 years learning about the specialty chemicals and ingredients industries.

In 1997, being the fifth generation of the Bentley family, he then joined Stephenson Group. Initially he began as a sales representative developing products for the personal care industry that did not exist at the company, eventually building what has become today’s Stephenson Personal Care business.

Slowly divesting the more mature industrial parts of the business over the years to focus completely on the personal care sector, today Stephenson Group exports personal care ingredients to 62 countries.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

[00:01:00] Introducing Stephenson Personal Care

[00:02:00] Jamie Bentley’s background story

[00:04:10] Early learnings

[00:06:00] Old school sales and a clever tweak

[00:08:00] Joining the family business

[00:10:00] How the personal care division started and grew

[00:17:20] The first $1m sales order

[00:19:30] The eureka moment

[00:24:30] The process of divesting non-core business and the learnings from it

[00:29:30] Using MBA students to develop a spin-out idea

[00:33:00] Managing people smarter than you

[00:36:00] The learnings from taking over a family business

KEY TAKEAWAYS & BUSINESS LEARNINGS

• Watch. Mouth shut, ears open, eyes open. Watch and learn.

• You learn most information from the shopfloor of your business and your client’s business (the people who are doing the doing)

• Take care of all your clients, but in the early days make sure you take most care of the big clients

• Think of your business as a train set. You cant break train set, you just change it

• Surround yourself with great people and learn how to manage people better than you

• You need proper trusted finance advice and the same with corporate lawyers when selling a business

• Strategy is as much about what you don’t do, as you do do

• Give staff the room to fail

BEST MOMENTS

“I was described as lazy or stupid at school. I then did an IQ test and they determined I was lazy”

“I worked out as a rep I could 8 calls a day. The trucks were doing 30 deliveries a day, so abandoned my Vectra and sat in the passenger seat of one of the wagons”

“We had a Drawing Room at home that was only used for Christmas and bollockings… and my dad took me into the Drawing Room…”

“If I’d had my eureka moment 10 years earlier, we’d have been 10 years ahead now”

“Yours is the most complicated loss-making business I have ever seen”

“He said 'come to the meeting to sell the business but don’t bring any lawyers or accountants' ”

VALUABLE RESOURCES FOR YOU

Website: www.leedsbusinesspodcast.com

Website: https://www.stephensonpersonalcare.com/ .

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-bentley-soap/

Instagram (business): https://www.instagram.com/stephensonsoap/

Shout outs;

Mike Hall - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikehall66 https://mjhartstudio.com/

Sally Bendtson - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallybendtson/ https://limelighthr.co.uk/

Rebecca Dalzell - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccadalzell1 https://www.myinternalrecruiter.com/

Martha Phillips - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marthaphillipssource / https://www.sourcemc.co.uk/

Katrina Lewis - https://uk.linkedin.com/in/katrinalewis https://www.katrinalewisinteriors.co.uk/

Hunslet Club - https://www.hunsletclub.org.uk/

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ABOUT YOUR HOST

Phil Fraser went from an accidental kitchen table start up, with no investment, all the way to multi-million pound sale to a PLC 18 years later. He’s travelled the full SME business journey of launch, growth, scale and exit.

As well as hosting the Leeds Business Podcast, Phil now works with ambitious SME-owners as a Business Sounding Board (think somewhere between Business Coach and Business Mentor). In simple terms, he’s ‘a pair of ears and an extra pair eyes’ for SME Owners helping them to be better at what they do. Phil’s mantra is It doesn’t need to be ‘lonely at the top’. He helps Business Owners to be better business owners, by helping with their clarity and focus.

As a Business Sounding Board, he gives SME Owners the time & space to regularly discuss their challenges and opportunities, with no sense of judgement or bias, and in complete confidence. This allows them to explore their options in full, culminating with a list of issues to address/clarify, a clear target in mind, a roadmap to success, and a renewed enthusiasm and confidence for the challenges ahead.

Phil has appeared as a guest on over 60 podcasts, webinars and interviews, from around the whole globe, talking on a variety of business subjects. You can view them all at https://philfraser.co.uk/watch-hear-phil/.

LEEDS BUSINESS PODCAST

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