FROM THE CEO
By Nick Orton
public. My design was lightweight
and cheap to produce but would
provide a visual deterrent and
a degree of security, which
at worst would slow the thief
down. I got everything done but
suffered the same wave of
negativity, dismissal and setback.
I gave up on it. A few years later
and they were being sold in
Halfords.
Start something,
take action!
S
o many times in my
life I’ve had people tell
me ‘it won’t work’, ‘it’s
not a good idea’, ‘very
risky’ etc… it still happens today.
You shouldn’t take much notice
of comments like those, yet most
people don’t follow their dreams
because they let others talk
them out of it. When I was just
14 years old, I had an idea to start
delivering pet food door to door.
In those days, you could only buy
from shops and in cans. We had
three dogs and a cat in our little
terrace house and carrying a
weeks worth of food for them
back from the shops was heavy
work. It made sense to me to
6
FLEX | APRIL 2018
start a delivery service (nobody
did that then), but I was only 14.
I told friends (who all thought it
was stupid), and after more
knockbacks I ditched the idea.
A year later Pets at Home
started…
At age 17, I had my own car
(funded by my carpet cleaning
business), looking back, the
accessories that I added
(spoiler, skirts, fogs, spots)
were ridiculous, but I still loved it.
I wanted to make sure that it
wouldn’t get stolen. At that time,
car crime was very high. I drew
up a design for a wheel clamp.
They existed but were very
expensive and not available to the
These were hard lessons and
I learnt from them - I never gave
up on anything that I really
believed in since then. Eleven
years ago, BodyPower, the
company I now run, was just a
concept, which I was very
confident about and it formed
part of my first really big deal.
In 2008, I sold my trade show
businesses to a private equity
firm, to form a company called
Closer Still Media. Part of the
sale included the concept called
BodyPower. The guys behind
the deal were big hitters, highly
experienced and they told me
(after the sale) that they did not
believe in the idea and had in fact
commissioned a report by
industry experts, to ascertain if
the concept (the show) would
work – I looked at the report and
it summarised that the market
was too small and that it would
not work. The opinion was shared
by a team of experts. Fortunately,
I had been astute enough to
include in the small print of the
sale deal a clause which meant
that if the buyers decided not to
continue with my concept, that
I could ‘take it back’, and that is
exactly what I did. Those hard
early lessons had shown me that
if you truly believe in something,
you should do it.
Ten years later and I can say
that if you have a dream, then
don’t let others talk you out of it…
BodyPower is a global success
from a business point of view but
most importantly for me, it has
helped huge amounts of people.
Our 10th Anniversary show
takes place at the NEC 11th – 13th
May. I hope to see you there.