Jackie Fast: ‘I can say that I didn’t love being in The Apprentice house’ [Video]

Anna Jordan talks to Jackie Fast, an entrepreneur, author, speaker and candidate on The Apprentice in 2018. We discuss how to build a business at home and how to get started with sponsorships.  

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Read the transcript for the podcast interview

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

In this episode we have Jackie Fast, an entrepreneur, speaker, author and former candidate on The Apprentice.

She came to the UK from Canada in 2007 as a first stop on her European backpacking tour but decided to stick around and work as a sponsorship director at the Data & Marketing Association instead. In 2010, Jackie began building her business, Slingshot Sponsorship. She sold the firm in 2016 and is now running REBEL Pi, a Canadian ice wine company. 

We’ll be talking about building a business from home and how to make sponsorship work for you.

Anna: Hello, Jackie.

Jackie: Hello, Anna.

Anna: How are you doing?

Jackie: I’m very good, thanks.

Great. Let’s start with your arrival in the UK. What made you decide to give up your backpacking adventure to work in London and build a business here instead?

Jackie: Honestly when I arrived – I’m from a small town in Canada – my experience was minimal. I’ve always been very ambitious and very determined. A lot of the people around me were not so much. So when I came to London it really was to explore Europe because obviously people talk about it and I’d never been to Paris.

When I landed in London I was just overwhelmed with the energy of the city – not necessarily the energy you’d get from a city like New York but the people and the views that the people had here and the types of work that they were doing. I met a lot of people in finance and I didn’t even know that was a job that you could have and I was just blown away.

It wasn’t an immediate thing. I was supposed to be here for two weeks and then travel the rest of Europe and then I was like: ‘Oh, I love London, I’ll stay a couple more weeks, that went on to a couple more months and then I was like: ‘I don’t want to leave’ and then over time I thought: ‘I just really want to stay here.’   

When you launched Slingshot Sponsorship you only had a laptop and £2,000. How did you support yourself financially in the early days of the business? I’m sure a lot of our listeners will want to know.

Jackie: Not well! I’m pretty frugal, actually – generally. But basically, over those initial months I just cut back hardcore. I didn’t really leave the house for weeks on end. I wasn’t eating beans on toast, but I was certainly eating a lot of ready meals and stir fries and cereal. But for the first, I’d say, year and a half, I wouldn’t even go to Starbucks. I couldn’t even afford takeout coffee, quite frankly, because every single pound I saved was going towards hiring my first employee and it was really hard. Slingshot got successful early, but I didn’t really have personal money for at least two or three years, I’d say. And you know, I only literally just bought this house when I sold the business. Up until then, all my friends owned houses and I couldn’t afford to – I was renting. But I always had it in me that I’d make that sacrifice.

We’re recording in Jackie’s house, by the way, just for a bit of context. What about income?

Jackie: So, £2,000 could pay the rent for four months, basically, and I took a couple of commission-only things. I had a lot of small clients. It took me nine months to secure my first client. So, I’d take small jobs that’d pay £500, £600, £1,000 and I’d just live off those kinds of things and those kinds of projects.

I worked hard to try to get people to give me money, like all small businesses do, but I was really conscious about how much money I spent. And our website is a great example. When we launched Slingshot I went out to loads of agencies, everybody was quoting something like £7,000, £6,000 and I didn’t even have the money. I ended up going to a digital agency who I knew through the Data Marketing Association and asked to swap, to be kind of like a case study for them. It was kind of like a guinea pig thing and I ended up paying, like, nothing for it. I just bartered for everything.

Anna: It’s interesting because they say entrepreneurs, even when they start earning a lot more money, still have the frugal mindset all those years later.

Jackie: Yeah, I’ve always been lik…