I started NEOM Wellbeing as a side hustle with £15k of personal savings.
My co-founder Nicola Elliott had the other £15k and a spare bedroom.
No office. No warehouse. No team. Just a product we believed in and a trade fair we had scraped together £2k to attend.
I set myself one target for that fair. Get 20 retailers to place an order and I would quit my job. If not, NEOM stays a side hustle.
We got 50.
The next morning, I handed in my resignation.
But here is what I want to tell you about those early years that nobody talks about.
For the first five or six years I quietly wondered if I had made a catastrophic mistake.
I had walked away from a well-paying job in private equity at age 23.
I had taken a 75 per cent pay cut. And NEOM was growing, but steadily.
Going from £1m to £1.4m to £1.9m while watching other companies seemingly rocket upwards felt like standing still.
What I did not understand then was the power of what was happening underneath the surface.
We were putting down roots. Building margin discipline. Learning our customer. Owning one geography before touching another. Reinvesting every pound back into the business.
20 years of 30 per cent compound growth does not feel dramatic in year three. It feels enormous in year 20.
The tortoise does not make headlines. But the tortoise wins.
If you are in the early stages of building something and it feels slower than you expected, stay with it.
Most people quit just before the compound effect kicks in.
What is the moment you nearly talked yourself out of continuing?
• Oliver Mennell co-founded NEOM Wellbeing in 2005 with £15k of personal savings. Over 18 years he built it into a global wellness brand with over £50m in revenue. He transitioned from CEO to chair in 2023.
NEOM Wellbeing was founded on a simple idea: that 100 per cent natural fragrance could do more than smell beautiful and actually help people sleep better, feel less stressed and live with more energy. NEOM has offices in London and Harrogate.