The Joy Of Running A Business – With Alex Packham, ContentCal

In this short clip from a recent episode of our podcast “Are We Rolling?”, Rowan speaks to Alex Packham, CEO & Founder of ContentCal. Alex talks about the realities of running a business – the joy, the stress, and the pride that comes from growing a company. We think many entrepreneurs and business owners will relate with Alex’s experience.

About Alex

Alex Packham is the Founder & CEO of ContentCal. Alex founded ContentCal in 2016, and has since raised over £2.5 million in venture capital for the business. Prior to ContentCal, Alex ran a social media marketing agency, ASTP, which had a revenue of over £1 million, and worked for Sky’s Now TV and Odeon running social media for these major brands. He’s also a Board Director for Prop Store and Kindred.

Alex also recently launched his own podcast titled “Audio Blog” which can be found on his website astp.co

Transcript

This transcript for “The Joy Of Running A Business – With Alex Packham, ContentCal” has been edited lightly for clarity.

[Rowan]

Do you look back and go “this has been” – I was gonna say “fun”. I mean, no business is always fun. But have you enjoyed the process of growing this business and getting the investment and so on?

I imagine it must have been pretty stressful as well.

[Alex]

Hah. Yeah, to say the least.

Yeah, I mean… You know what it’s like as well. You run your own business. So you don’t do it for the fun as much as people think.

I’ve loved every second of running ContentCal – from the good bits to the bad bits. If you win a new piece of business or you get past a new milestone or something amazing happens, the high is like some of the best highs you’ll ever experience. And the emotions and like the endorphin rush and everything else is like… It’s brilliant.

But then the lows, they are bad – they’re like “oh my god are we gonna survive?”

“Are we dead?”

I can’t go into too much detail, but we’ve had moments where we’ve been nearly dead many times along the way. And, as an individual, when you run your own business it’s attached to you. It’s part of you. Like it genuinely is part of your being.

So if you have success it’s like it goes right into you. But if you have a failure, or a moment where you’re worried about what’s actually going to happen, it’s also right inside of you and it causes all sorts of crazy strains and stress.

So I’ve had all of that.

But the day you kind of don’t want to keep doing that, or you can’t see the good is better than the bad bits, is the day you should probably stop doing it.

So, yeah. I love it and I enjoy it and the things you learn and the experiences you have. They’re like no other in my opinion.

You know, if you work in a company, obviously you’ll go on that journey and do that sort of stuff. But like the entrepreneurial rollercoaster of life is amazing.

And that’s why nowadays you see all these famous – like you said – Elon Musks and Tim Ferrises and whoever. You know, they become – you become semi-famous if you’re successful because you’re able to talk about these journeys which are just unbelievably mental.

[Rowan]

Absolutely.