# The DNA of an entrepreneur: young Al and the need to be popular

- **Episode:** [16](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/16.md) (2022-12-13)
- **Type:** other
- **Tags:** entrepreneurship, early life, personality
- **Time:** 2:11–3:42 (start 131s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/16?t=131](https://truthliesandwork.com/16?t=131)

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[2:11] Al Elliott: Okay
[2:11] Leanne Elliott: And get to know, get to know Al Elliott. So to steal a question, and if you're a regular podcast listener, you'll know exactly where this question is from. What do I need to understand about young Al to better understand the man that sits in front of us today?
[2:29] Al Elliott: Oh, that's a good question. Well, I'm stealing that for the next time I do the interviews. Um, I think I noticed that a lot of the decisions I made tend to be around, um, sort of trying to be popular or trying to be cool. Because as a kid, I was never popular. I was never cool. Um, I was the biggest nerd ever up until about the age of sort of like 19, 20. Still, I'm a huge nerd, but I was like an uber nerd. Um, and so, but so I was never particularly like in, in the comprehensive school, which is, um, I, I think for Americans that's public school. I think for the UK, it's public is different. So for just like your general bog standard school
[3:10] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[3:12] Al Elliott: Um, and I say it because I went to one. Um, so with that, I was never particularly popular because I was never good at sports. Um, I wasn't like— I looked weird in my teens. I still look weird now. Um, I wish I could have grown a beard in my teens. Um, and also, um, so I was never really popular there. And then when I went to a grammar school for my A-levels, what my parents wanted me to do because my little brother went to grammar school all the way through, then I came from the comprehensive and I wasn't particularly intelligent. And so I only scraped by to get in there. So I wasn't particularly popular there either
[3:42] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[3:42] Al Elliott: Um, so when I left university, I think I went into pub management. So I had a few pub, um, pub jobs, uh, that's bars. So I had a few, few jobs in bars and then, and then went into like a bar management and then went into the actual— got a job as a pub manager. And I think probably that's a lot of that is to do with the fact that I wanted to be the person who sort of everyone— to put the party together, I suppose. So my first pub job was in Manchester in a busy student bar. We used to get sort of 2,000 or 3,000 people a night in there. And my job was to make sure that everything was running right. And everything. And so I suppose that was the beginning of it. And I really enjoyed the fact that people, you know, thought I was important, uh, that people thought that, you know, that essentially I looked down and go, if, if I hadn't done all the bits and pieces today to make this night happen, then they wouldn't, you know, it wouldn't be happening. So that's, I suppose, with my, my working career. When I left that and I started building businesses, I think it's a similar kind of thing. My very first business was a, a beer delivery company, um, And I had maybe sort of 20 or 30 staff in there, and it was a similar sort of thing. I felt like, you know, I was paying— or I was paying people to be around me, but I felt that it was— I was creating an environment where people wanted to be and probably wanted to be where I could be part of. Does that make sense?