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Gabby Logan speaks to Greg Jackson, the founder and chief executive of Octopus Energy, about the energy and cost-of-living crises, why he is investing in renewables and how having the family home cut off as a youngster has inspired him in his working life.
Join Gabby Logan every week as she speaks to some familiar faces about their relationship with money, the financial lessons they've learned on the road to professional success, and how they're investing for their family's future.
Visit ii.co.uk for more investing ideas and information.
Gabby Logan: Hi, I’m Gabby Logan and this is The ii Family Money Show. In each episode, I speak to a familiar face about the role money has played in their family life and professional success. And in this episode, I’m joined by the founder and chief executive of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson. Before building one of the UK’s fastest-growing energy firms, Greg enjoyed a hugely successful career in the world of digital start-ups as both an investor and manager. In our interview, Greg tells me how he started out writing video games, why he was partly inspired to work in the energy sector because his family home was cut off when he was younger, and why he sees time as his most valuable asset.
[Pause 00:00:48] Let’s go back to your early life and your early career, and then maybe we can work out how you got so interested in energy. What kind of school life did you have? Were you a brilliant, studious young boy?
Greg Jackson: You know what? I was the cheeky kid that did well, I think. So I really didn’t like school and I didn’t enjoy the discipline. I left when I was sixteen but I always did well in exams and tests, and so I kind of got away with it?
Gabby Logan: So why did you leave at sixteen?
Greg Jackson: I just didn’t like the constraints. By the way, I ended up going back a year later. But I left to write video games. And my mum and dad weren’t together, and I told my mum that I wasn’t going to university, and my mum was incredibly liberal and progressive and she was like “sure. That’s cool.” I told my dad and my dad had been in the Army, and he said, “Why don’t you join the Army?” I said, “No, I want to write video games.” So I did that for a year, and then realised that even then, technology was moving at such a pace, I could probably do with an education. And I ended up going to sixth form and then to university.
Gabby Logan: So you very nearly slipped out of the education system and kind of became – an early entrepreneur I guess you would have been, if you’d kept in tech at that point. Which is possible, but obviously you recognised the value of having an education. At that time, while you were at university/doing your A levels, did you have those early signs of being an entrepreneur, of wanting to start things?
Greg Jackson: Yeah, I think I always knew I wanted to do it, because I think there’s that burning desire as an entrepreneur that says, “Hey look, I can see something here. I can see an opportunity where I think I could do better. I want to do something about it.” And I think that’s the second bit, isn’t it? It’s not just spotting something – we all sit in the pub and say, “Why don’t they do X?”, or, “They should do Y,” but sometimes you’ve got that thing that says, “I’d like to do something about it. I’m going to take the decision not to go down the normal path and instead will tackle this problem.” And I think wherever I’ve been in life, I’ve always wanted to change stuff?
Gabby Logan: Mm-hmm.
Greg Jackson: So yeah, at university I guess I – around our equivalent of the student union or after I graduated, I was involved in local campaign groups. And I think all these things are ways of getting out there and changing something.
Gabby Logan: And what were the – was it energy at that point that was fascinating you? Was that always something that you’d read about and wanted to learn more about?
Greg Jackson: No, to be honest it was tech. So I always had this kind of hankering that technology – I guess because of the video games background, really. The technology enabled you to take existing bits of the world where there’s a problem and improve it. And it wasn’t a trade-off. We’ll get on to energy later I guess, but a good example would be in energy where when we started Octopus, people thought that the only way you could provide better service was by having higher prices, and they thought it was a trade-off. But through technology you can drive down prices, and you can improve service. And so I think technology lets you change stuff, and that’s always been a passion of mine.
Gabby Logan: So the young gamer, did he at that point – because nowadays of course, gamers make so much cash, don’t they, from just sitting there and having YouTube channels. When you were gaming, did you think that was a possible job? Was it ever going to lead to an income stream?
Greg Jackson: Yeah, so I was writing games, and even then, there was this kind of – there was a generation of bedroom coders that grew of out teenage kids in the UK that had got computers like the Spectrum and the Commodore, and had learned to program, and then started publishing the games, often entrepreneurially, sometimes through software houses. And I think the legacy of that is that today, the UK still has this kind of position as a country with disruptive, innovative tech companies, whether it be in – for example, we lead the way in financial services technology, and increasingly I think in energy technology. And there are lots of sectors – ARM, the global giant that designs the chips that are in virtually every mobile phone, grew up as part of that computer scene. So I think we’ve got a lot to thank the computer companies of the Eighties for.
Gabby Logan: Do you think we celebrate that enough? Do you think we shout about that?
Greg Jackson: It’s interesting, isn’t it? We know more about the kind of consumer-facing businesses: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, that grew out of the United States. A lot of the UK ones I think are in the background, like ARM, and because of that, we perhaps don’t realise the extent to which the UK still does have something of a powerhouse in technology. And so that’s one thing. I think the other is that we do have companies that grew up here like Deliveroo, and perhaps people don’t even realise that they started in Britain. And so we should celebrate it.
Gabby Logan: Going back to your interesting combination of parents there, one very relaxed and liberal, the other one with an ex-Army background: how aware of money were you from them growing up?
Greg Jackson: Yeah, so my parents split when I was probably eight years old, and I had a brother and a sister, both younger than me. So my mum had three kids: eight, seven and one, no income, so we lived on benefits. She then got a job in a pub in the evenings, and we really were at the –
Gabby Logan: The breadline. You were –
Greg Jackson: Yeah, we were on the breadline.
Gabby Logan: Basically every week was a struggle, was it?
Greg Jackson: Yeah, one of the reasons actually that energy’s a passion to me now was that we got cut off more than once, and literally had no gas. And I think that leaves you with a real sense of a couple of things, for me anyway. One was of course that I know that when people talk about energy bills, it’s not just theoretical. It’s unbelievably stressful, and people making decisions about what are you going to feed your family or ...? I mean, frankly not being able to afford a school uniform versus paying for the energy bill.
I think the other one is that there are many sectors where technology and improved operations give you the opportunity to drive down costs, and I think Jeff Bezos put it really well actually, the guy behind Amazon. He said, “Look, there are companies who work hard as possible to charge customers as much possible, and there’s companies who will work hard to charge them as little as possible. We, Amazon, will be the latter.” And that really has resonated with me, because of the difference you can make to people’s lives as a company if you relentlessly work to push costs down. And that really came from that early experience.
Gabby Logan: Yeah, and when you talk about being a kid who’s experienced having the heating or the electricity cut off, it has so many ripple effects, doesn’t it, because you think about the ability to be able to do your homework properly, the ability to go to bed at night and fall asleep quickly because you’re not freezing. So those experiences I imagine must have shaped your need for some kind of security in your life, and to want some certainty. So it probably would have been easy to go through a very normal route: leave university, go work for one of the big consultancy firms or something, or go and do something that’s quite steady. Did you have to fight that, because you had this entrepreneurial spirit, do you know what I mean? Because there was certainty in another career route. You chose a career that perhaps wasn’t going to have that natural progression.
Greg Jackson: Yeah, you know what? I think interestingly for me, it went the opposite way, which was having lived with basically nothing, I was never scared of it. And I think – so for me the opportunity was that – whereas maybe people who had come from more comfortable backgrounds felt they needed that security, a very good job, and might imagine becoming an entrepreneur, but never feel comfortable taking the risk. I think for me I always knew if it went wrong I’d be fine, and that really has been a great strength, actually.
And actually the other thing was the resourcefulness. When we were, I don’t know – probably I was about ten year, eleven years old, my mum said, “Look, there’s this thing I get every week, the family allowance.” I think it was a payment from the state. And she said, “Look, I’m supposed to spend it on you guys, but if I give you the money instead, but from here on you’re responsible for buying your own clothes, doing your own washing – you make your own decisions.”
And I think that – for example, early on I stopped buying clothes with that money, and I bought little bits of electronics instead, and learned about technology like that. And similarly, my sister, amazing woman, she – when she’d graduated, instead of finding somewhere to live, she bought an old removal lorry, a second-hand removal lorry for very, very little money, did a deal with a farmer that she’d park it on his farm and help him with the cows and in return not pay him any rent. And then she learned the woodworking and metalworking skills to turn it into a home, and she lived in this lorry. And I think that kind of creative resourcefulness and comfort in a different environment, perhaps has really helped foster the ability to be an entrepreneur.
Gabby Logan: I think that can only work, can’t it, with a background or an underpinning of love and security. So you felt there was – while your mum didn’t have much materially, there was obviously a lot of love in the house.
Greg Jackson: Oh, Gabby, it was all – you know, what? That was absolutely the essence of it, which was knowing you were loved. I mean, the amount of love we felt meant that you could feel confident doing anything, really.
Gabby Logan: You could do anything, yeah.
Greg Jackson: Yeah, and you know what? That carries today, so not only with my own family life, it’s giving my boys the most incredible sense that they’re loved regardless of anything else. But also even the way for example we run the company, which is – you know, with our team, like really letting them know that they’re going to get looked after through thick and thin, and that it gives them the freedom to make the decisions to for example help customers or build new products and services, rather than having to go through lots and lots of stuff that’s – forgive me for the phrase, but kind of arse-covering stuff. So I think that approach to life is certainly one that has worked so well for me.
Gabby Logan: Let’s talk then about the business, about Octopus, and why energy. And you’ve just kind of alluded a little bit to it there. It was just something that you really understood about. What was the attraction specifically? Because there could have been lots of other different things that you could make a difference to people’s lives on.
Greg Jackson: Yeah well, fortunately I’ve basically built and run a series of businesses over the years. And the one before Octopus, the big one before Octopus, was a company that built technology platforms for large companies. And when we sold that business, we’d done well enough that we could really think hard about which sector do we care about most? Which one can we make the biggest difference in? And frankly for me, I was kind of thinking “this is probably last really significant thing I’ll be able to do with my career, so I want to make it matter.” And it was in the early 2010s when we started thinking about it, and there were the stories in the media about energy companies back then being excessively profitable. And I knew that the flip of that was what had happened to our family when I was young.
And at the same time – by the way, I joined Greenpeace when I was sixteen, because I care enormously about the damage that we do to other people, other species on our planet. And by the way, I should say that was slightly disappointing. I thought joining Greenpeace would mean you get to go on rubber dinghies, and instead it was a monthly newsletter and a quarterly direct debit. But I’m a member now and I’m very proud of what they do. But briefly – sorry, the – but in energy, it was about then as well that we were beginning hear companies blaming the need to move to renewables for high bills. And yet what you could see is if we – first of all, we have no choices as a species. We have to reduce the damage we’re doing to the planet, otherwise it will not be here. And it’s not centuries away. By the end of this century, large parts of the world could be becoming increasingly unliveable if we don’t deal with this. Right now, there are countries that are facing disappearing underwater.
But not only that, you could see that the investments that society were making in the technology behind renewables, meant we were tantalisingly closer to renewables being cheaper than fossil fuels, and we shouldn’t row back from that. We needed to double down on it. And the last bit was that because I’m from a tech background, you could see that energy companies were using outdated technology, and that was pushing costs up. And it was making service poor, so we had the ability to create technology, drive down costs, provide better service, help move to a renewable world – I mean, it felt pretty exciting to me as an opportunity. And so we – I and a couple of co-founders decided energy was where we wanted to be.
Gabby Logan: And that was how Octopus was born. And that was 2010, did you say, when you were formulating all of this? Which was early in the sense that – not early in the sense that there are already renewables around at that point. But now feels particularly relevant, and people are desperate. Personally we’ve just been looking into what we can do in our house. Can we use a wood chip burner? Can we do – and can we have some solar panels? And these are conversations we’re having with all of my friends. And so you must feel that this is absolutely in the zeitgeist right now.
Greg Jackson: It is, and I think a couple of things – so we were looking at the early 2010s, but we didn’t actually start the business till late 2015. And part of that was, very candidly, despite what we were talking about earlier about being comfortable taking risks, to start an energy company that had a chance of really being successful, we needed to raise ten million pounds of investment. And all we had was a PowerPoint. We’d never worked in energy before. And my fear of failure I guess meant I didn’t set out on that journey as early as I should, and I really – I don’t have many regrets in life, but we should have started this earlier, and had the confidence to go and raise that money. But as it was, we met brilliant investors in 2015, and fortunately, that’s really paved the way to where we are today. In terms of today, look, I cannot speak strongly enough about the extent to which the global fossil fuel crisis is – there’s no words to express it. You could say it’s going to be tough, it’s going to be brutal.
Gabby Logan: The urgency of this.
Greg Jackson: But the urgency of it, and also the difficulty it’s going to cause for so many families. We started off by my own background, and I know that the bills that companies like ours are going to be sending people are going to be as painful as they were when I was a child, and that in the short term we will do everything we can. Like, we’ve set up – I think we’re the only energy company that have charged significantly below the price cap. We put all of our resources into doing what we can to keep prices low. But there’s nothing you can do in the face of the – that’s going to make a difference in the face of the crisis. What it does speak to is the urgency of moving to renewables. You mentioned there for example, solar panels for your own home. As a society, every single wind turbine we build, every solar farm we build, will reduce our need for gas.
Even before the crisis, renewables were now cheaper than energy from gas, sorry, electric from gas. So going forward, let’s never make this mistake again. I’m hearing the media now, like, you know, “Let’s get more gas.” And it’s, like, gas has caused the problem. We need to do everything we can now to make the most of cheap renewable power. So in the short term, help customers through. And I think maybe we should talk about some of the ideas there. And then in the medium term – and it could be as little as – you can build a wind farm in a year, but with the bureaucracy it takes five, six, seven years. We need to learn from what we did with the vaccine and the pandemic, to speed up this process.
Gabby Logan: And let’s go back to what you just said there then about helping people in the short term. Is this just government intervention? Are the government going to have to come in and put a cap? Are they going to have to come in and subsidise? What do you think the best thing is to do?
Greg Jackson: First of all, the government’s energy price cap has at least dampened the impact of the crisis. It’s now beginning to flow through to bills, but it – we had more time to prepare for it than we would have done without the price cap. The government has introduced a couple of measures; you know, the £150 council tax rebate, the £200 energy bill rebate. I think we need more. That £200 I think is very welcome, but in the face of – that was actually decided before the invasion of the Ukraine pushed prices even higher, and I think we maybe need to respond to that by more support. And then companies like ours: we’ve set up our own hardship fund. Originally two and a half million pounds, we’ve doubled it to five million pounds to help the households who need it most. But there’s only so much companies can do in the face of this global situation, and we need to react to this crisis with the same societal drive as we reacted to the financial crisis.
Gabby Logan: And can we talk about whether or not it’s still a good sector to invest in, energy? Clearly Al Gore thinks so; his clean energy fund bought a considerable stake in Octopus last year, I think 13%. So that would indicate that it is still a good area to invest in for people listening. Would you say so?
Greg Jackson: So I think first of all, the move to renewables is only going to be accelerated by the current crisis, and so investing in energy companies that are driving the change and are going to enable society to decouple from fossil fuels is a long-term wise move. I think certainly what Al Gore saw and his investment fund saw, was that we were investing not only in building that generation, but also building the technology, the means that will drive costs down for customers. And we should be clear, shouldn’t we, that when you’re running a gas generation plant, you’re burning gas to make electricity, you’ve got to pay for the gas. When you’re running a wind farm or a solar farm, you don’t have to pay for the inputs. Wind and sun are free, and increasingly the costs of the hardware is coming down.
Now as a society at the same time, we’re adopting electric cars, and we’re going to be moving to electric heating. That is the perfect complement for the renewable generation. So you’ll be charging your car’s battery when it’s windy and sunny, and the electrons will be cheaper than they’ve ever been. So I think that’s the future we’ve got to aim for, and investing in that is a long-term wise move.
Gabby Logan: What about you personally then? You’ve mentioned your family and your kids and your kind of ethos to them about life and a house filled with love. What about investing your money, your personal money? Do you invest in energy, or have you always maxed out on things like ISAs and pensions?
Greg Jackson: Until recently, Gabby, being really candid about it, I did very little in the way of investing. I invested in building the businesses that I ran. And I think that’s because it gave me a sense of control. Whether that be rational or not by the way I don’t know, but – so I invested everything in every business I’ve built, including Octopus. I had to put a lot of my own money in to start this, and so I think that’s been the backdrop for me. Over time, I started to invest in other start-ups, because I thought if I invested in entrepreneurs that I can get to know and I can help, and that enabled me to not only put money to work, but add something [cross talk 00:20:08] –
Gabby Logan: Some value.
Greg Jackson: Some value, yeah. And in doing so, if it works out, then financially that’s great. And if it doesn’t work out, actually you’ve helped someone. You’ve helped create something. And so there’s always the double option there, so that was an important part for me. And certainly in recent – relatively recent years, I’ve started investing in a more traditional sense, and there it’s always in ESG, i.e. funds which are aligned with environmental/social benefits.
Gabby Logan: Always? Is that always an absolute –
Greg Jackson: Yeah, always.
Gabby Logan: – kind of non-negotiable for you?
Greg Jackson: Yeah, it’s non-negotiable I think for two reasons. Again, one is rationally, those companies are creating a world we all want to live in. And I believe in the long run, value accrues to those who do what we need. And the second thing is I can sleep soundly at night knowing that anything I’m investing in is doing the right thing.
Gabby Logan: And so would that include your pension, your personal pension then obviously? That’s got ESG consideration?
Greg Jackson: Yeah, so again, with the company, the only pension I’ve got is my company pension. And with our company, the provider we use didn’t offer an ESG option till recently. We’ve worked with them to get one, and all mine will go into that, yeah.
Gabby Logan: And your own family, tell us a little bit about that. How old are your kids now?
Greg Jackson: Yeah, so I’ve got a five-year-old son and a fifteen-year-old, and the fifteen-year-old is increasingly thinking about what he does next. It’s really interesting. Frankly, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this, but anyway, he used to be not very interested in education, but is now working really hard. And it reminds me of my own self, really, which was the way in which I had rejected it for a long time, and then at some point got with the programme?
Gabby Logan: The penny drops, yeah.
Greg Jackson: Yeah, but he’s chosen that for himself rather than being forced into it, and I think that really helps. And the five-year-old is incredibly creative, and letting him wreak havoc and chaos is probably a good way of capitalising on that skill.
Gabby Logan: And do they – different ages, different monetary needs in life. Do they have pocket money and do they have to do jobs for that? But at five, it’s probably a bit young, isn’t it? But the fifteen-year-old would certainly need a bit of cash.
Greg Jackson: Well it’s interesting, actually. You know the fifteen-year-old, right? I’m incredibly proud of our young generation. It’s not just my own kids, but when I look at the young people that work for our company for example, they are graduating. They’ve had to pay for university, they’ve got student loans, they’re facing more expensive housing than there’s ever been. And some of them have been through a couple of crises, financial crisis followed by the pandemic. I think many times you’ll hear politicians talk about the snowflake generations, but actually I look at these incredibly hard-working people who care more about each other and the world, and yet face these difficult scenarios. And when I look at my own oldest child, he’s so non-materialistic, if you give him money for his birthday or Christmas, he doesn’t spend it. You give him – he gets a small amount of pocket money, and we use the gohenry app.
Gabby Logan: Yeah, yeah. We use that.
Greg Jackson: He barely ever spends it, because he just says, “Well, what do I want?” And I think this less materialistic, harder-working generation, are actually some people we can be incredibly proud of.
Gabby Logan: And so does he have to do chores or jobs, or are you kind of easing him into that?
Greg Jackson: Well, [unintelligible 00:23:37] I would love to, but given he doesn’t actually want to have money –
Gabby Logan: Spend anything, yeah.
Greg Jackson: – it doesn’t work. Instead he – frankly if you ask him to do something because it’s the right thing to do he’ll do it, but yeah, it’s a fascinating kind of situation, [cross talk 00:23:53].
Gabby Logan: Maybe in a couple of years, he might start getting more interested in something that he wants to buy, or of course when he wants to start driving or if he’s a – I’m sure by then, they’ll all be electric cars, but –
Greg Jackson: Well, I hope so.
Gabby Logan: – I’ve thought that about my own kids, and actually they’re going to learn this summer. And we’ve been advised not to have their first car as an electric car because of insurance premiums. Apparently they’re so much higher, which seems counterintuitive doesn’t it, really, because they’re going to be driving electric cars pretty much for the rest of their lives, aren’t they? You’d hope, so –
Greg Jackson: It does. I think insurers are just learning about electric cars, aren’t they?
Gabby Logan: Yeah.
Greg Jackson: So at the moment, they probably don’t know where to price the risk, especially for young people.
Gabby Logan: Well yeah, I don’t think our kids will be able to afford to fill up their cars anyway. So will energy prices ever come back, do you think? Or from what you’ve said earlier on, are we now in a situation where we’re going to have to get used to modifying our lives? I mean, are we talking about rationing energy?
Greg Jackson: I don’t think we’re talking about rationing, and I think they will come back. What’s happening at the moment is after the pandemic there were supply chain issues in every sector around the world. I’ve read a story about McDonald’s having to fly potato fries from the US to Japan because of the shortages. And we’ve seen these – you know, the chip shortage that means that – I mean, the microchip shortage, which means that the car industry’s slowed down. It’s similarly affected the gas industry, and so the world already had a sort of imbalance between supply and demand in gas.
And then about a year ago, last winter, it was a very long winter, very cold and very late in the year in both Asia and Europe. So you had a shortage of supply in gas and a massive demand. And that meant that we – basically, normally as a planet, we’re filling up our gas storage through summer. And [unintelligible 00:25:36] time we’re actually depleting it long before we’d normally be filling it. And that meant we went into this winter with not enough gas, very high prices, and then Ukraine happened.
Gabby Logan: Right, so it’s a perfect storm.
Greg Jackson: A perfect storm, and I think with Ukraine, look, obviously there’s far more important issues. I don’t know about you, but I woke up on the morning of the invasion just gutted for the sake of humanity. But purely in energy terms, what will be happening at the moment is everyone’s trying to work out what happens if we fully sanction Russia. And Russian gas will probably end up going to parts of Asia instead of parts of Europe. The gas that Asia would have taken from the Middle East will probably come to Europe, and that global system is reconfiguring as we speak. There’s actually a couple of – there’s the tiniest glimmer of hope, which is that Europe’s declared that they’re going to fill their gas storage to 90% of capacity before next winter.
Now in the short term, that’s just pushed prices up higher because there’s even more demand. But it means that over next winter, which is when things really matter, we may well go into next winter with more gas in storage and less shortages than we’ve had this winter, and then we may start to see things moderate. So energy bills that are going to be horrifically high for another – till the end of the year maybe? And there’ll be some lags in the system. I mean, energy companies buy their energy a year in advance often, so we’re already buying the energy for next year at these high prices. But the fundamental energy market will sort itself out. More importantly, we have to invest in renewables now. And I said to you earlier, we can build a wind farm in a year. By the way, there are six hundred wind farm projects, new wind and solar projects, in the UK that are kind of ready to go and just need the red tape unblocking. That will bring prices down much more quickly than for example investing in new gas generation, new gas fields.
Gabby Logan: And are you confident that this government is heeding those warnings and that advice from companies like yourself and from pressure groups, and whoever else it is who has the ear to go into these – the departments and say now, in the same was as you quite brilliantly put it, “We did that for vaccines”?
Greg Jackson: Look, I think first of all, I’ve been really heartened by a lot of the statements the government have made. It’s been very clear this is a gas crisis. It’s not caused by a move to net zero. It’s caused by global gas supply and demand issues. Fossil fuels have given us crises every decade. I mean, I remember the 1970s crises when we ate by candlelight. For the first time, we now have the ability to escape from fossil fuels because renewables are cheaper. They’re only cheaper because of the investment society made over the last decade or two, so unlike previous ones, we do have an alternative, and the government appear to be very intent on driving that direction.
In the short term, there’ll be pressures to for example get more gas out of the ground and if there’s low-hanging fruit, maybe we should do that. But what we should definitely not do is double down on gas. We should double down on renewables.
Gabby Logan: How do you feel over the course of your life your success and your increased monetary wealth has changed you, if at all? And how hard has it been to stick to that sixteen-year-old boy who joined Greenpeace, to stick to his values?
Greg Jackson: Yeah. So first of all, for example we talked about one of my sons, right? Both of my sons go to local state schools, and in terms of the way I spend my time, I still work incredibly hard. I think one of the things that I got from my mum – we didn’t mention this earlier – not only did she work in a pub in the evenings, she then started studying as a mature student and got a degree and then got a job, and began to earn her way and our family’s way out of poverty, I guess. And so I’ve always had this work ethic. That hasn’t changed. In terms of other stuff, look, I’m – Gabby, I pay myself minimum wage in this business. I’m well off because of the businesses we’ve built before. And I own a chunk of this one, and if it’s successful, I’ll do OK, but I don’t – I think it’s very important to stay – what’s the word?
Gabby Logan: Grounded?
Greg Jackson: Stay grounded, yeah. And so decisions like that are actually – it is painful, because you could choose to pay yourself. When you’re running the business, you could choose to pay yourself.
Gabby Logan: Well also, you must see other successful entrepreneurs. You must, you know – in the entrepreneurs’ club and the Dragons kind of lifestyle and think “well – ooh, that would be nice. Yeah, that would be nice to have that. Oh, I might ...” Does your head never get turned in that way?
Greg Jackson: Look, I think first of all, I’m well off because of other businesses I’ve built and that we’ve sold and done well with. I’ve invested a lot into Octopus, but in the long run, I really hope that pays off. And the other entrepreneurs, they look at what Octopus is doing to change the world, and I think – I feel really gratified that they value and approve that. And there’s a couple of things, so for example I’m more likely these days to get an Uber into work than I am to ride my bike. That’s just because I need to be able to get my laptop out and get some work done. I’ve got to use every hour. I leave the office at 3 pm on a Wednesday to pick my youngest boy up from school, and every other Friday. And trying to cram it all in is difficult. The number of times I’ve been cooking whilst holding a phone to my ear whilst trying to stop one of them injuring himself, all that’s still real. But I’ve done a couple of things –
Gabby Logan: Yeah. So it sounds like to me that actually the thing you value most is time.
Greg Jackson: Honestly, time is everything. First of all, it’s really interesting. I sometimes say actually in business, you can always raise investment. You can find ways to get people to put money into businesses, but you can never raise time. So the single biggest asset we have as a business and as an individual is time. Someone said to me, “We’ve all got the same amount of time on this earth per day as Marie Curie, and look what she did. Are you doing as much as she did?” And today, you can look at someone like Elon Musk, who – we think we’re busy, and then he’s simultaneously building the company that is revolutionising electric cars that people said could never be done. And the one that does space rockets, and then in his spare time doing satellite internet and building tunnels. I think we can all learn about how to use time better, right?
Gabby Logan: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think people can make excuses for themselves, can’t they, about time and what they’re actually filling their time with. So would you say that is actually – if you were talking to young people who have got aspirations to be entrepreneurs, that that’s one of the most important things, is to value time?
Greg Jackson: Yeah, I often say I think there are probably three things on that. So the first one is decide if you really want to be an entrepreneur, because it is risky and it’s hard work. I read a great book on entrepreneurship that said, “Look your friends in the face and then tell yourself you’re not going to see them again for ten years,” right? Look your family in the face and tell them they’re not going to see very much of you for the next ten – and so on. Mind you, it’s not ten years; it ends up being a lifetime. And really know that everything is on the line. Age thirty, Gabby, I’d had a business that had gone wrong. And I had something like a million pounds of debt and no job and no savings. And that’s part of the way that business can go, right?
Gabby Logan: Mm-hmm.
Greg Jackson: And I don’t think we should be rose-tinted about entrepreneurship. The second thing I say to them is, “Don’t be a wantrepreneur.” Time and again, I’ve sat there with people saying, “When I’ve got these three things sorted, then I’ll do it. And when I’ve got these three things ...” And it’s like you’re always going to have things you’ll need to sort. Either admit to yourself you’re never going to do it and enjoy that. There’s nothing wrong with not being an entrepreneur. Or just do it. And there’s a good friend of mine, and every time we went for a curry every few months, he’d say, “No, no, I’m nearly ready to do it.” And he’d been doing it for two or three years. And eventually I said, “Look mate, you’re either going to carry on doing this every time we go for a curry, or just do it.” Anyway, the next time we went for a curry he said, “I did it,” and I was a bit worried because I was like “how’d it work?” And he said, “I’ve never been happier.”
Gabby Logan: Yeah, is it going to come back to you?
Greg Jackson: Exactly. But actually, he’s never been happier and it’s been incredibly successful. And the last one I say to people is, “Don’t be an entrepreneur for the money, right? Do it because your heart’s in something, right?” And if your heart’s not in something, it’s only ever going to be a chore. But if your heart’s in it, regardless of whether it works out financially, you’ll have done something you care about. And back to time: you’ve only got one life. Spend it on stuff you care about.
Gabby Logan: I think time, as you say – I think that’s a common theme actually, to a lot of people I speak to on this podcast, how important time becomes as well in terms of balancing your life. Do you feel you’ve got that now, that kind of good balance that perhaps you didn’t quite have at the beginning?
Greg Jackson: You know what? Every time you get it – every time I get some spare time, I find a way to fill it. And the way I fill it usually creates a lot of demands on time in future. By the way, I think that’s a good way of getting things done, but it does mean there’s never a moment where you go, “Now it’s all sorted,” because –
Gabby Logan: No.
Greg Jackson: – look, given the opportunity we have to drive change in one of the most important sectors in the world – I mean, I’m not going to get this chance again, right?
Gabby Logan: No.
Greg Jackson: So I don’t want to waste it.
Gabby Logan: And also as you say, it’s – there’s so much still growing and moving in this area, which is fantastic because we need technology to accelerate even more to allow people to live more sustainable lives. So it’s never going to end, is it?
Greg Jackson: No, it’s not, and –
Gabby Logan: Greg, it’s never going – you're never going to reach a finish point.
Greg Jackson: And that’s – you know what? So there’ll be a finish point for me personally at some point when I’m no longer adding value, right? And one day our board or our shareholders will say, “Greg, –
Gabby Logan: “See you.”
Greg Jackson: – that day is ...” See you, yeah, right? But until that moment, I’m conscious that today something like eighty-odd percent of the world’s primary energy needs are not met by sustainable fuel. I’m conscious that fossil fuels gave Putin the resources but also the leverage to do what he’s doing. And they’ve caused all kinds of crises throughout our lives. So the chance to do something about that is such a privilege. And we now have – there's 2,800 people working at our company that have joined largely because they want to be on that mission. So yeah, there is an awful lot of opportunity to keep driving this change across the world.
And by the way, there are eight hundred million people in the world that don’t have access to energy, right? So once – I think energy’s going to be like telecommunications, where the solutions to the problems we’ve got in the West have actually been able to drive down the cost and bring entirely new opportunities for clean, green energy to places that have never had it, and they don’t have the legacy of your grid. And yeah, there’s quite a lot left in this job, I guess.
Gabby Logan: Yeah, a lot to do. You mentioned how important your workforce are to you, and how you want to create a wonderful atmosphere as well for everybody who works for you, and you want the customer also to have a great experience. That’s a lot of pressure, isn’t it? There’s a lot of people’s lives that you’re directly – it sounds like directly linked to.
Greg Jackson: Yeah, I think first of all, we absolutely are intent on doing good. And that actually takes a lot of the stress away, because if you try to do good stuff, and something goes wrong or it’s hard work, you can at least – you can look inside yourself and say, “We did it for the right reason.” And then I think – there’s a lot of research isn’t there, that says that a driver of stress is lack of control. And one of the great privileges of being an entrepreneur or a CEO is you’ve got a lot of control, and I think that’s less stressful in a way than for a lot of the team in many companies, who are kind of a servant to the machine. And so in a way, yes there’s a lot of responsibility, but there’s also a lot of opportunity to do something about it, and that’s not as stressful as people may think.
Gabby Logan: Well, you’re certainly doing it in a fantastically proactive and passionate way, and I think that is going to drive you on for many, many more years, Greg. So thank you so much for sharing your early life and what led you to be the man and the entrepreneur that you are today. I think it’s been – I think it’ll be a fascinating listen for anybody who’s with us today. So good luck in the future and thanks for your time, because I know it’s valuable.
Greg Jackson: No, no. Honestly, Gabby, thank you for the opportunity to talk. It’s been great meeting you.
Gabby Logan: Thanks for listening. If you’ve got time, please like and follow the ii Family Money Show, and leave us a review or rating in your podcast app. You can find loads of ideas on how to plan for you and your family’s financial future at ii.co.uk. I’ll see you next time.