Do you believe in your business? Would you do whatever it takes to save it?
Amelia Sordell is fully invested in Klowt, a personal branding agency launched during COVID-19 which turned over almost £400,000 in its first year with no external capital.
The London business builds authentic brands for entrepreneurs and leadership teams within the likes of SkyBet and Paddy Power as well as startup founders, venture capitalists and LinkedIn Top Voices.
Sordell, who has 122,000 followers on LinkedIn alone and a personal website which points people to her Branded podcast and social media feeds, is adamant that Klowt would not be a success had she not experienced failure with her first business.
Eitherside was an online women’s wear boutique founded in 2013 which she bootstrapped for eight months before raising investment. With four collections a year and ASOS among its clients, where did it go wrong?
“From the minute I launched, if I’m honest,” she tells the Secret Leaders podcast. “Hindsight is a beautiful thing: you can look back and find lessons. I am a firm believer that if that business hadn’t failed, my current business Klowt wouldn’t have succeeded.”
Naiveity
The Australian-born entrepreneur had a background in PR and marketing and managed to get her business featured in the Daily Mail three times.
However by 2015 it all began to unravel. “I obviously was very excited to have all these orders and all these people wanting to buy our products. As a 21-22-year-old, of course you don’t vet your clients – ‘Oh, someone’s wanting to buy £60,000 worth of stock from me, that’s bloody brilliant!’
“We had a massive order come in from quite a large online retail store which included things like leather jackets, skirts and suits, fur coats – quite high-end items which cost a lot to manufacture.
“In the six-to-eight-week period between them making that order, and us delivering it, they ceased to exist.”
Eitherside had 30% of the deal value upfront, which paid in part for the manufacturing of the product, but was then stuck with the clothing. “In retail that is like £100-120,000 worth of stock, which was my cash flow – we simply couldn’t shift it because we didn’t get enough traffic to the website,” she explains.
“I was faced with this really difficult decision: do I go and get bailed out with a loan, which I was told I’d have to personally guarantee; or just liquidate everything and shut the business down?”
Recent separation from husband Marvin, a former Premier League footballer, and a conversation with her mother pushed her towards the latter choice.
“I didn’t actually believe in the business – I just wanted to work for myself,” she admits. “I’d split up with my then partner, lost my house, had to move back in with my parents. I lost my car just to keep myself afloat because I couldn’t afford to pay my salary anymore.
“I remember calling my mum and speaking to her about it. She said: ‘Do you want to do this for the rest of your life?’ And I said: ‘No.’ She said: ‘Well, that’s your answer, then.’”
Cigarettes & alcohol
Sordell sold the stock on platforms including eBay and Overstock. “It was a sad day because our existing customer base – the B2B side and B2C side – were really loyal: we had a really high return customer rate,” she says.
“But even if I’d gone and got the loan, just based on my outlook of that business, and my lack of passion for it, it would never have succeeded – regardless of whether I’d been profitable.
“It would have got to a point where I was like: ‘I can’t be a**** to do this anymore, because it really doesn’t feel like my purpose.’”
She moved back in with her parents with 26p in her account and asked them if she could borrow £500. “I was numbing the pain of my entire identity being ripped away from me with alcohol, cigarettes and late nights. It really felt like a death – that’s the best way I can describe it,” she says.
“I was just a shell of myself. I’m a very bubbly person – but I didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to see anyone. My friends did their best to cheer me up, but it didn’t particularly work. I felt like a real victim. Like I’d been really hard done by.
“I wallowed in self pity for the next three months before I slapped myself around the face and said: ‘You need to go back out and get a job because no one’s going to come and save you.’”
Regaining confidence
She carved out a career in recruitment but it took a decade before she had the confidence to launch Klowt (above). “It’s taken me 10 years to grow a pair of balls big enough… and recover from that wound,” she says. “Confidence just killed me… to the point where I was worried about asking for promotions and pay rises, even though I 100% deserved them.”
She adds: “Anyone that tells you that you can run a [scaling] business nine to five is f****** delusional. And so, inevitably, your identity does get wrapped up in that business.
“Even now, I am Amelia Sordell, founder of Klowt – I’m trying very hard to separate the two, so that at some point my business has equity without me being attached to it, which is ultimately the dream for everyone.
“If you’re blessed enough to have on average 80-90 years on this planet to make as big of an impact as you possibly can, why on earth would you want to waste a decade like I did moping around being sad about something that didn’t work out?
“Just f******* do it.”
Secret Leaders is available on Apple, Spotify and all major podcast platforms.