Mediaboss Marketing

By 27, serial entrepreneur and CEO Steven Bartlett had created and grown his social media marketing company, Social Chain, to a valuation of more than 300 million. A university dropout, Bartlett cut his teeth running student events and an online messaging board called Wallpark before founding Social Chain, eventually stepping down as CEO to pursue opportunities in blockchain and biotech. He now runs a weekly podcast, The Diary Of A CEO, and in May was announced as the newest and youngest-ever Dragon on the BBC series Dragons Den. A vocal proponent of reskilling (consistently training employees in new digital skills to stay competitive), Bartlett is a Vodafone Business ambassador, working on a digital training initiative called Business Connected. He explained to GQ just how intensely the pandemic accelerated the need for entrepreneurs to develop new skills...

When did you start your first businesses?

I was born in Botswana and I came to the UK when I was about two years old. We werent a very well-off family... It was one of the key factors that I think shaped who I was. The other thing was that we had 1,500 kids in my school and my brothers and sisters and I were the only people of colour, per se. That makes you wonder why youre different and creates a desire to fit in.

At a young age, I learned that we didnt have things, but I really wanted them. You make this connection that if Im going to get things, whether its a nice pair of shoes or whatever, thats going to be a direct consequence of something that I do something that I sell or create. At the age of 15 or 16, I started my first businesses in and around school, using the students as my customers. By age 16, I was running pretty much all the school trips in my year group and I would take a cut of the money and give the rest to my school. I was doing all of our school parties. Then I started launching businesses on the internet at about 16 or 17.

You later cofounded Social Chain. Why did you choose a social marketing business?

I started a business called Wallpark when I dropped out of university. In trying to figure out how to get people to come to my website, I tried flyers, posters, all facets of traditional marketing, and none of them worked. One day, I saw a Facebook group called Things Manchester students dont say and 8,000 or 9,000 students were on there. I needed students to come to my website, so I met the guy who started the page [and] gave him 50 [for it]. I posted about Wallpark there and it was the most traffic Ive ever had.

I went and acquired every social media page I could and in doing that I realised its power very early. The channels I was acquiring were more valuable than the business I was building, so I dropped Wallpark off the side and my business became Social Chain: that chain of social media pages. I went in that direction very early, when a lot of brands didnt have social media pages. They thought it was a scary place, a dangerous place to be.

Read more here:
Steven Bartlett: If you want a successful business, you have to instil a culture of learning - British GQ