Matt Hunt (Co-founder Protein Ball Co)
What do you like most about this industry?
I love the people, the majority of people you meet in the food game are amazing, full of stories, real endeavour and passion regarding what they do and for the most part they do it really well.
What other job would you like to try and why?
At some point, I’d love to jump into a fast-growing, high-energy start-up that’s doubling year-on-year. One of those places where money, hiring, big offices, and marketing budgets aren’t a limiting factor, where you have the luxury of dreaming big, growing fast whilst seeing great ideas come to life without taking all the stress home to the family each night as it would not be my company!
Who did you admire growing up and why?
I’d have to say Richard Branson. I actually met him once in Hong Kong while I was working in a bar and he turned up with his cabin crew to party.
Growing up, I read his books and studied his companies, and I was in awe of how he could move across completely unrelated businesses and be successful in most of them, not all of them. An incredible role model.
How do you define success?
Honestly, that’s changed a lot over the years. If you’d asked me in my 30s, I’d probably have said how much money is residing in the bank. Nowadays, it’s about my family – my wife and our two amazing boys and how we do everything we can to make our family life better. For business it’s now more about the people, is everyone in my inner circle happy and doing well? What about our outer circle, like our distributors and partners. We are simply the sum of everyone involved.
You become more humble, more respectful as you grow older, and I’ve built some really deep connections in business that make me feel content and yet still ambitious about the future. I love that the future is unwritten and so I want to write a good one!
What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received, and how has it shaped you?
I remember listening to a US business philosopher called Jim Rohn and he said “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.”
If you could master one skill overnight, what would it be and why?
TikTok 😀 I want to understand the younger demographic and what makes them tick but I can’t work out the setup and how to manage TikTok!
What’s a memorable challenge you’ve faced in your career, and what did it teach you?
So many. We have had bad payers to the tune of £140,000 and £50,000 legal fees and not received a single penny, we have had suppliers produce 200,000 bags of olives that have been expanding and exploding across the USA, we have had co-packers produce porridge for us and put the wrong flavours in the wrong bags!!! I think the lesson is simple that we have to take control and be the masters of our destiny and manage and produce the products ourselves so that we know what leaves our factory and goes out to our customers is signed off to our highest quality standards.
Which part of your daily routine brings you the most joy?
Sometimes it’s getting into bed at the end of a long day, knowing that I pushed it or worked as hard as I could. Made as many calls as I could and spoke with the right people in our company and then got home and spent time with Hayley my wife and our kids.
If you could invite one person – past or present – to dinner, who would it be and what would you ask them?
Strange as it sounds, I’d probably invite my older self to dinner. I’d want to ask: Did everything work out the way I imagined? Should I have worked more, or less? Did I spend enough time with my kids and take more holidays with my wife? I feel that I am chasing my backside everyday and it only really makes sense if at some point you can take your foot off the gas and wake up and smell the coffee without the daily stress and heavy shoulders that running a business comes with.
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