Adrian Allen, MD of The Tomorrow Lab
Adrian Allen, MD of The Tomorrow Lab takes the Business & Finance 60-second interview challenge.
Q. What was your first job? My first job was in a butcher shop close to where I lived as a child. I started working there at 10 years old, calling in after school every day to clean and tidy the place up. It wasn’t glamorous or a great for my street cred, but it taught me a lot about hard graft. Q. What would you regard as your greatest achievement to date? Parenthood. I’ve two amazing children. A girl, aged 5 called Libby and a boy, aged 1 called Oscar. Q. In three words or fewer, how do you define success? Learn from mistakes. Q. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? Well my first accountant had an expression that he used whenever he thought I was attempting too much. It went something like “You keep trying to ride two horses and you’ve only got one arse”. Q. How do you motivate yourself and your staff? Growing up, I felt like I wasted some of my potential or had no outlet for it, so the majority of my motivation comes from focusing on strengths, making sure that we, myself and the wider team, don’t fall into our comfort zones. Q. If you could step into the shoes of one business person for the day, who would it be and why? I’d say Will Beckett. He founded the Hawksmoor steakhouse chain in the UK in 2006. Most of the chain’s restaurants opened during the worst recession in history and despite some significant hurdles along the way, grew the business to £20m turnover in less than eight years. On top of that, it has an unrivalled reputation for quality and the development opportunities for staff are excellent. Q. How do you relax? All the usual stuff. I adore cooking, music, running up and down hills, spending time with the kids and reading old books. Q. What’s your motto? Do the right thing by people. Q. What are your aspirations for the future of your business? Ultimately, I’d like to grow and expand our market share throughout the UK and Ireland as well as broadening our skill sets and areas of expertise. Despite being in the digital industry, we’re quite old fashioned in terms of our approach to business. We continually focus on solving our clients’ problems and engineering the right solution. As long we as focus on that, I’m confident that we’ll achieve great success.
Do the right thing by people.
