Spencer Matthews: 'Owning 100% of nothing is nothing, owning a chunk of something valuable is valuable'

In this episode, Anna Jordan meets Spencer Matthews – entrepreneur, TV personality and angel investor.

We discuss how his experiences with alcohol encouraged him to launch his low and no alcohol drinks business, CleanCo.

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Hello and welcome to Small Business Snippets, the podcast from SmallBusiness.co.uk. I’m your host, Anna Jordan.

Today we have Spencer Matthews – entrepreneur, TV personality and angel investor.

Spencer rose to fame on TV’s Made in Chelsea and has since appeared in other shows including Celebrity Masterchef and The Jump. These days, he is the founder and CEO of low and no alcohol drinks company, CleanCo, and an investor in Cheesies cheese snacks, mental resilience app, Halen and healthy meal delivery service, Munchfit.

We’ll be talking about starting a business post-pandemic and what Spencer looks for as an angel investor.

Anna: Hi, Spencer.

Spencer: Hi, how are you getting on?

Anna: Yeah, I'm doing really well. Thanks. Yeah, looking forward to the bank holiday weekend, How about yourself?

Spencer: Very much. So everything's slightly blurry at the moment, plenty going on. Delighted to be as busy as we are in this tricky time, but all is well.

Great stuff. Okay. First, I'd like to ask you a bit about your business CleanCo, which we mentioned in the intro. And I'm sure people are thinking, ‘Oh no, not another reality TV star jumping on the bandwagon over a trend and starting a business around it’. But yours comes from a more personal place and your own relationship with alcohol. Talk to us a bit more about that.

Spencer: Absolutely. I mean, I have that same reaction just in passing that many others do when reality stars or actors start businesses and expect it to be successful based on their personality, which often isn't the case. But no, my business – or our business, I should say – now we have an incredible team and fantastic shareholders and partners, which I look forward to getting on to, was born from a personal need.

I drank excessively for many years – alcohol, I mean – for many years. I decided to make a positive change, and move and throttle back my alcohol intake, well, to the point of teetotalism. For a couple of years, at least, I noticed that there was very little in the way of a credible alternative or replacement in the space. And I personally have always thought that change is quite a tricky thing.

When you develop behavioural patterns in society, it's often quite difficult to break them. And I think that comes from a lack of good products in interesting markets. The gap between desire and compromise is often quite vast. That's why people stick in the in the desire camp – because a compromise is a compromise. Who would want to compromise when what you're really looking for is desire? So yeah, I noticed that when I fancy a gin and tonic, that the next best thing was either jus