An Average Day at YOLO
Recently YOLO’s founder, Scott Woodhead, won the 42 under 42 Award for Yorkshire. Scott is also one of only a few entrepreneurs to win the award in multiple regions, having been awarded it in the Northwest on a prior occasion. You can read more about the award here. If you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering – what does the typical working day look like for Scott? We’ll give a brief overview of what his day in the office here at YOLO might look like.
YOLO is an expanding business which incorporates many different companies, from tea and hammocks to healthcare and cosmetics. It may seem impossible to keep up with it all, but clearly, the method to the madness works! Let’s start at the beginning.
First and foremost, Scott starts his day by greeting the team members. If it’s a Monday, we’ll have a team meeting where updates are shared, and we prepare for the week ahead. Following the team meeting, Scott will hold department meetings to discuss information in more depth. If it’s not a Monday, it’s usually a case of responding to messages and emails. It’s important to Scott to set an allocated time to deal with internal and external correspondence – as with running so many businesses, he could easily spiral into spending his whole day trying to get to the bottom of it (lucky he’s got his PA to help lighten the workload).
A good businessperson sells a product that they would use themselves. That’s why we have our office hammock and loose leaf tea to hand. Scott drinks his tea plain; he prefers green but will also drink black. We have this hammock chair in our office, the reason being that it’s easier to work out of a hammock chair rather than when lying down in one. Hammocks can benefit your productivity by engaging the vestibular system, this helps you focus. However, back to what a typical day might look like, the next task would be to liaise with the relevant departments or external stakeholders. This could be anything from organising partnerships and global distribution to sourcing new products or software to be used internally. In fact, one of Scott’s ambitions is to get 50 brands under YOLO, so part of this liaison could be finding the next new company!
Generally, it’s best to get the most demanding tasks out of the way before lunch. So, for the rest of the morning, Scott tends to look at the analytical data for the companies. This might involve looking at website performance, what can be improved, pricing margins, traffic, stock levels and more. This is critical to measuring progress and making sure that each of the companies is on track for where they need to be to help build YOLO’s vision. Once the numerical business is completed for the day, this allows the data to be interpreted so that Scott can start planning out the next steps.
After lunch and looking at the statistical data, Scott will be able to create sales forecasts and adjust budgets accordingly. This will also be the time to consider customer wants and needs to help inform the next steps, as the market is always changing. We value our customer feedback, and once the customer service team have collated feedback, it’s passed over to Scott to consider in his planning process.
His day often varies quite a lot as the founder of YOLO, simply on the basis that there are so many companies and bases to cover. So whilst this was a generalised overview, we hope that you can get the gist of what it’s like on a typical day here at the office.