Moments That Made Me - Oliver Mennell, NEOM Wellbeing

Oliver Mennell is the Founder and Chair of NEOM Wellbeing, the natural wellbeing brand built around better sleep, lower stress, more energy and a balanced mood. He started NEOM in his early twenties with co-founder Nicola Elliott (the name comes from their initials) and £30,000, and spent 18 years as its CEO. For most of that time, NEOM grew without outside money, before selling a 20% stake to private equity firm Piper in 2018.

In this conversation, he shares how his dad's escape from the steelworks gates gave him the drive to build, why he's proud to be the tortoise rather than the hare, the hiring compromises that cost NEOM dearly, and how he handed over the CEO role without a single day of ambiguity.

Early Life & Entrepreneurial Beginnings

Q: What was your childhood like?

My parents separated when I was a baby, so I was raised mainly by my mum and my sister in a little village before we moved to Harrogate when I was ten. Mum worked incredibly hard as a maternity nurse for not a great deal of money, so there was always some money anxiety in the house.

At weekends I saw my dad, who'd dropped out of school at 16 and built a big business. Those were my two exposures from a very young age, and both ended up shaping me.

Q: Were there any early signs of entrepreneurship at school?

Truth be told, I was the class clown. My GCSE predictions weren't great, so my dad offered me £100 for every A, £75 for a B and £50 for a C. I came out with all As and Bs.

At A level it happened again. I was predicted DDE, so this time the deal was that he'd match whatever I'd saved towards my first car. I got AAB. We went to a car auction, bought a £1,000 car, and I did it up and sold it on.

There were always little entrepreneurial lessons. When I was 13, my dad gave me £30 to buy a pair of £40 trainers from a Nike shop and told me to negotiate the difference. I was mortified. The answer was no, so he sent me back to ask for the manager. I explained I'd been doing odd jobs and saving up, and asked if they'd take £30. They did.

Suddenly a whole world opened up where you don't necessarily have to abide by the rules all the time.

Q: Was there a single moment that gave you the drive?

Yes, a story my dad told me when I was ten.

At 16, he was living a very happy life in a pretty little market town: fishing in the stream, picking apples, making cider with his girlfriend. But he'd dropped out of school and had no job. So his dad, wanting a better future for him, moved the family 200 miles to the steel town of Scunthorpe.

On the first day, his dad drove him up to the steelworks gates and told him this was where he could build a career. My dad begged him not to make him work there. At that moment he had a choice. He got out of the car and ran as fast as he could, with no idea where home was. He told himself that by the time he got back, he had to have a plan, because it was anything other than the steelworks.

He started buying and selling motorbikes, and eventually built a big chain of Kawasaki motorbike shops importing from Japan. By 22 or 23, he'd made it.

That story really stuck with me. You can create your own job. You can create your own future. Combine that with the money anxiety from growing up in a single-parent household, and I knew I wanted financial independence too. At ten years old, I decided I was going to do that myself one day.

Building NEOM

Q: Where did the idea for NEOM come from?

Nicola and I are family friends. Our dads are close, and we grew up together with a pact: if either of us had a business idea, we'd call the other. I was the business guy and she was the creative.

I went into private equity at 21, and Nicola became a magazine journalist who'd also trained as an aromatherapist. When I was 22, she called and asked me to come and see something. She'd developed little aromatherapy tinctures, one for sleep and one for stress, and friends kept coming back for more. I tried one and had a great night's sleep. So did my mum, who was working late shifts.

We looked for a format for the oils and landed on candles. Most candles on the market are made from paraffin wax, a derivative of crude oil, and most premium ones use synthetic fragrance. Burning one at home is like running a mini diesel engine in your living room.

So we made candles from a blend of vegetable waxes (soy, rapeseed and castor) and replaced synthetic fragrance with pure essential oils. The result was a clean-burning candle that doesn't just smell great, it also helps you sleep or lowers your stress.

Q: How did you know it was worth quitting your job for?

We put a couple of grand into a 1m x 2m table at the Harrogate gift fair and agreed that if we signed 20 retailers, we'd quit. We signed 50. We handed in our notice the next day.

I took a 75% pay cut at 22, and I honestly don't know how I lived in London on what we paid ourselves. For the first five or six years I kept thinking: what have I done? But entrepreneurs have a burning desire to do it themselves, and a real propensity for risk.

Q: You bootstrapped NEOM for years. Why take that route?

We started with £30,000 and didn't take any outside money for seven or eight years. Even then, it was less than £200,000 from an angel investor.

The way I see it, there's a hare and a tortoise in entrepreneurship:

• The hare raises Series A, B, C and D quickly. That's fine, but you have to build a really big business or there's no exit.
• The tortoise never really gets talked about. You bootstrap, reinvest the profits, grow within your means and put down really deep roots.

We've been the tortoise. NEOM has grown 30 to 40% every year for nearly 20 years. In the early days, going from £1m to £1.4m to £1.9m doesn't feel like much while you watch others shoot past you. But compound growth over two decades becomes huge, and we still own the majority of the business.

Q: So why bring in private equity in 2018?

We sold a 20% stake to Piper, and the reason was personal rather than commercial. We'd always reinvested the profits, so by then Nicola and I both had young families but hadn't sorted our family homes or put anything aside for education.

When all your eggs are in one basket and you haven't taken care of your family, everything starts to feel very risky. Taking a little money off the table actually let us take more risk with the business. Otherwise, we didn't need to do it.

Scaling Lessons

Q: What was the recipe for success in the early years?

• Complementary co-founders. I see a lot of founder teams with the same skill set, and they end up fighting over each other's turf. I was CEO building the business; Nicola was creative director owning products and campaigns. We input on each other's areas, but we trusted each other to run our own.
• A genuine USP and a simple proposition. Nobody was doing what we were doing. The brand is built around four ranges (better sleep, lower stress, more energy, balanced mood) and it's made in Britain and 100% natural. Those are strong reasons to buy.
• Narrow and deep. We focused on the UK because it was all we could afford, and that became a strength. Too many founders go after multiple markets from day one. Win one market first.
• Fewer, bigger. It's my mantra. Start fewer projects, and execute the ones you have in a bigger, better way.

Q: Tell us about a time you got it wrong.

It took us about 15 years to reach £15m. Then COVID hit and we went from £15m to £30m to £45m. When you grow that fast, every piece of operating infrastructure is under stress.

Our third-party warehouse badly let us down during Christmas 2021, our most important trading period. We needed to move, but the e-commerce boom had swallowed almost all available warehouse space. Most of the options we met were put off by our November and December peaks, when the team has to swell seven- or eightfold in a matter of days.

We were stuck between a rock and a hard place. Stay with the warehouse that had let us down and sign a multi-year extension, or move to the one that would have us. They were unproven in our category but investing heavily in new sites, systems and people to win our business. We moved, and it was a disaster. Fortunately, within a year we found a Premier League warehouse that's doing a marvellous job.

Two lessons. First, sometimes it's better the devil you know. Second, it comes back to people. The business had tripled in size in no time, and I didn't have a Premier League operations director or a great person in every senior seat. I do now.

Hiring & Senior Leadership Lessons

Q: How do you approach senior hiring?

It's hard when you don't have big funds behind you. I found the £10m to £20m phase especially tough. The business needed a full senior team (product, marketing, commercial, operations, a CFO) but I couldn't afford everyone yet. So I made compromises on the people we brought in, and a year or two later, those compromises cost us dearly.

What I should have done is apply fewer, bigger to hiring too. Put your resources into one or two brilliant, high-calibre people. They can't do all the work, but they'll find smarter ways of working and hire brilliant people underneath them as they can. Top-down beats bottom-up.

Q: How do you see past a strong interview?

Everyone senior has a good interview game. They present well, they have great stories, they take credit for the right things. So the real work is in the referencing.

As a minimum, I go two up and two down: two people they reported to and two who reported to them. How people manage up can be very different from how they manage down. Ideally I'll speak to three or four on each side.

Q: What does your hiring process look like?

• Meet and greet. A relaxed coffee to hear their stories and see if there's a connection and a culture fit.
• The deep dive. Detailed, open-ended questions, going deeper and deeper until there's nowhere to hide.
• Psychometrics. It's important to understand how the person thinks.
• A case study. A live example from the business, so you can see how they operate.

Q: Any hiring mistakes?

All of them. Early on, I treated hiring as just another job on the list, more time I had to find on top of everything else. In fact, it's the most important job you have.

I even caught myself answering candidates' questions for them when they were struggling. I made every mistake in the book.

The Game-Changing Hires

Q: What was the biggest hire of all?

My successor. I was CEO for the first 18 years, and I'm now chairman. As the business professionalised and needed more systems and structure, the CEO role became more about motivating the company and managing the senior team. There were parts of the job I wasn't enjoying, and I didn't feel my skills as an entrepreneur were being used at their best.

I had the self-awareness to see that if I didn't bring in someone who could do it better than me, I could hold the business back.

Q: How did you make the transition work?

It's such a big hire that we did it in stages:

1. Year one: she joined as commercial director, looking after sales, and did a marvellous job.
2. Year two: we promoted her to managing director, giving her sales, marketing and product. That was half my direct reports.
3. Year three: we offered her the CEO role, along with finance and operations. She took it, and I stepped up to chair.

Crucially, I never told her at the start that I was stepping down. We talked about an MD and CEO relationship. Saying "one day you'll be CEO" from day one could have created extra pressure, and maybe I wouldn't have been ready either. We were careful with our language.

The day we told the business was the day she was in charge. Not in three months' time. If you announce a future handover, you get months of ambiguity, especially when the founder is still a large shareholder and people keep coming to you. Behind the scenes, we did a slow handover, speaking every week and chewing over any difficult problems together.

Fast front-of-house change, slow back-of-house change. Because she'd already been in the business for two years, we knew the culture fit was there and that she was a high performer. It de-risked the whole process.

Q: Where did that approach come from?

I read and listen a lot. When something matters that much, I'll go out of my way to find podcasts and articles about it. The idea came from Reid Hoffman talking about handing over the LinkedIn CEO role to Jeff Weiner. Being curious and always learning is a big part of success.

Final Reflections

Q: What's something about you people might find surprising?

When I was 20, I won £100,000 on a Chris Evans game show. Fortunately it was pre-YouTube, so there's no evidence, although I do have the DVDs.

It was called Boys and Girls, a big Saturday-night show on Channel 4 hosted by Vernon Kay, back when there were five channels and millions tuned in. It was 100 boys against 100 girls. The boys won on my show, and I made the final, which meant recreating Vernon's 1960s-style opening dance on stage with 20 backing dancers, in a long black wig and a pinstripe suit.

I'm a bit of an introvert. I'd rather go deep with one or two people than work a room. Backstage, I eyed the fire doors and thought about bursting through them and running, just like my dad at the steelworks. But I got pushed out on stage, something kicked in, and I gave it my all. The studio audience voted me the winner.

The prize was a penthouse in Battersea, a chauffeur-driven car and £100,000 to spend in a week, with new rules every day. At the end of the week, you had to answer three out of five questions correctly or everything went back to the shops. I got all five.

A week later, a 40-foot articulated lorry pulled up outside our family home with everything I'd bought, including a Porsche 993 Carrera. I sold it and used the money as startup cash for NEOM. So Chris Evans was, indirectly, my first angel investor.

The takeaway? Patience over pace. Fewer, bigger. Remain close to the hiring process.

That's been Oliver's formula, and nearly 20 years of compound growth at NEOM is the proof.