Grace Beverley: Entrepreneur and content creator who founded sustainable fashion brand Tala and fitness brand Shreddy while studying at Oxford; author of a book on productivity and hard work.
What this episode covers
Grace Beverley joins Steven Bartlett to trace how she gradually built two multi-million-pound businesses starting from monetizing free fitness content at 18. She is candid about the personal cost: burnout, a period where work-as-validation culminated in PTSD-induced seizures, and the trade-offs of being young, female and successful. Much of the conversation critiques hustle culture, productivity-as-status, and the lack of boundaries social media creates, while acknowledging her own complicity in perpetuating it. She also reflects on learning to hire people better than herself, delegate, protect weekends, and resist the urge to constantly start new businesses.
The guest's own work
Working Hard, Hardly Working
Grace Beverley
“then i sat down to write the productivity method and i was like i feel like gordon ramsay telling someone he's like an idiot sandwich”— guest
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Work Rules!
Laszlo Bock
“i realized how much confidence i have to have in people based on talking about how shitty some of google's rules are actually in work rules the book about google working culture”— guest
Rework
Jason Fried
“i've been reading a lot about this recently actually general things you know like rework work rules like all of those types of books talking about working culture”— guest
Matilda
“it's like a you know what's what's she called like mrs trunchbull you know from matilda that you like have in your brain”— guest
Big reveals from this episode
- Grace developed PTSD from a traumatic event that manifested physically as seizures, which finally forced her to take her mental health seriously.
- She calls launching a business a month before her Oxford finals the worst decision she ever made despite being constantly praised for it.
- She stepped back from social media and stopped posting on YouTube for about 11 months as both a wellbeing and a long-term business decision.
- She admits she doesn't understand half of what happens in her finance meetings and had to let go of the fear of seeming illegitimate.
- She openly says she used work as a coping mechanism through the worst times of her life.
- She identifies marketing and branding as the irreplaceable thing only she can do across her businesses.
Worth remembering
- She started by monetizing free fitness content via an ebook during an IBM internship at 18.
- Her second set of ebooks was written purely because her student loan didn't come through.
- During her launch period she had 40,000 words and five three-hour exams due within two weeks.
- She went vegan about three years earlier to support a friend who couldn't eat dairy.
- She didn't get into Oxford the first time she applied and reapplied the following year.
- She is strict about taking weekends off despite running effectively three businesses.
- At Bartlett's company they made mental-health therapy opt-out, and his co-founder received around 11 messages from men who had been silently struggling.
- She estimates roughly 40 percent of her work each week is unexpected.