Since the release of Urban Outlaw, I have been presented with some incredible opportunities, many of which I have told you about in this book. One of the most enjoyable was some two years after the film came out when I was asked to give a Ted Talk. Truth be told, I literally had no idea what I was being offered, What’s a Ted Talk? Well, I can tell you now that it’s a series of talks given by a variety of high-profile individuals and luminaries, organized on a non-profit basis, where the idea is to encourage debate and an open forum for new ideas that may be hugely beneficial to society and the wider population. So some of these talks are about poverty in the developing world, famine, global warming, pandemic health challenges, economics and everything in between. Needless to say, the list of names who have given Ted Talks is pretty impressive, including Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, people from the entertainment world such as Bono and J. J. Abrams, leading scientists, politicians, charity workers – it’s really an amazing selection.
What happened was the people organizing a Ted Talk at UCLA contacted me and asked if I would be interested. Like I said, my initial reaction was, ‘What’s a Ted Talk?’ They sent me a couple of samples, but I didn’t say yes straight away because I’ve never spoken in public. As you know, I stuttered as a kid and, although it was one of those things that I got over, the experience made me kinda nervous about standing up in front of a crowd. So the idea of a talk wasn’t exactly something that I was naturally drawn to. By now, I’d probably done about thirty TV shows or website interviews on camera, so I was a little more comfortable, but it was still not what I would call a natural experience for me. I might sound fluent and coherent in Urban Outlaw, but that’s because Tamir was super-talented and was able to edit my rambling and just get the great soundbites. But in all honesty, I wasn’t quite confident that I could do that myself.
I watched these sample videos and to be fair it’s not all intellectual stuff about molecular biology and stem-cell research. I could see that some of these talks were super-positive and mostly informative and inspirational. So I said, ‘You know what? Fuck it, I’ll do it. How bad can it be?’
A couple of days before my talk was scheduled, they said that I should really go in and rehearse, and I initially said, ‘No thanks, I know what I want to say,’ but the point they were making was that you only have eighteen minutes to give your talk, and they are really strict about you going over time. So I go down there on a Friday around two o’clock in the afternoon for a run-through, I get up on stage and I just start telling my ‘eighteen-minute’ story.
Well, I just ramble on and eventually, about forty-five minutes later, they go, ‘Hey, Magnus, you’re really going to have to edit this down!’ I also had a hundred slides ready to show people, but they said, ‘You need to edit those down to six slides.’ This was a bit daunting, so I went back to see Karen and we started writing all this stuff down, trying to edit the story. The problem was, the more I wrote down, the more forced and contrived it felt. When I was rehearsing the script, I was stumbling over the words. At about six o’clock that night, I just said, ‘Do you know what? I’m just gonna wing it.’
So that’s what I did.
I knew if I didn’t get to the Porsche part of my story by ten minutes I was kinda fucked. That was my plan. As always, on the actual day I got there early, then sat through everyone else’s talks, which was kinda nerve-wracking. Then it came to my turn, so I took to the stage with no cards, no notes and just ten slides. One of my opening lines of the talk is ‘Eight weeks ago I didn’t know what a Ted Talk was and, to be honest, I’m not quite sure why I’m here today.’
For the first minute, I was a little bit nervous because you look across this big room, it’s a very unfamiliar environment, there’s maybe five hundred people in an auditorium, I’m on stage, everyone’s looking at me, I’m the only sort of car-related, rock ’n’ roll guy there. In some of the talks before mine … I gotta be honest here and say I was a little bored, I was actually dozing off during one, so I was very conscious of not being another one of those. At one point early on, I stumbled a little, then I cracked a joke and the audience laughed and I just broke into a more natural calmness. I slowed my speech down and started to enjoy myself.
Up to that point, every interview or on-camera piece that I’d done was in my own environment. Also, I could stop the camera at any moment and do a retake. This was live. However, I just kept reminding myself that I was comfortable with what I was talking about – leaving school at sixteen, no education, no direction and what happened next – everything I’ve told you in this book. They had a little laptop in front of me that was counting down the time, so occasionally I had to look over and then speed up my story, but I got there in the end and only went a minute over, which was no big deal. When I’d finished, people cheered their support – it was unbelievable. Of course I breathed a sigh of relief, but I had actually quite enjoyed it.
Afterwards, everyone came out to meet me by 277, which I had driven there that day. I would say 95 per cent of these UCLA students had no idea who I was; they were not car people, but they seemed to relate to my story, which I’d summed up in the title of my talk: ‘Go with your gut feeling’. A lot of people were coming up to me with similar stories, very different backgrounds but similar ideas. Quite a few were telling me their parents wanted them to be doctors or lawyers but that they were miserable, they weren’t enjoying themselves or their courses. For me it was a super-positive and uplifting experience to see that I had had some influence on people thinking about changing their career and actually doing something they wanted to do in life.
The Ted Talk has gone on to be perhaps the most-viewed thing that I have done online, with over three and a half million views at the time of writing. It might have even topped Urban Outlaw. People shoot me emails all the time, and a lot of them are from people who have watched the Ted Talk. That day at UCLA has been a very positive experience and in turn it taught me a few things: one was self-editing, the idea of ‘less is more’; it also encouraged me to learn to become more comfortable and enjoy being in front of a live audience rather than freaking out. I get asked to do motivational talks all the time now, by big corporations and often in front of a lot of people. That’s a new challenge for me, but I really enjoy those talks and especially enjoy meeting people and making a connection with them.
At times, I still feel like, What words of wisdom do I have? I’m just a geezer that left school with two O levels at sixteen, what do I know? Sometimes people say to me, ‘Maybe you got lucky, Magnus?’ Well, maybe I did … but I don’t think I got lucky three times. I can see now that people relate to my story on a number of levels. That is really rewarding, and I feel humbled that what I have tried to achieve in my life has in some small way maybe inspired or at least influenced others. I am delighted when magazines suggest their readers can be motivated and get ideas from what I have done. In 2014, the Smith Journal called me ‘the most interesting man in Los Angeles’, and that same year LA Weekly did a feature on ‘The People of 2014’ and very kindly put me in there. So it is a real thrill when other people give me credits like that.
I’m not claiming to be some management guru or inspirational speaker, far from it. Long story short – and let’s face it, you know the story by now – it’s about what you actually do, not how you talk about what you do. However, if you asked me to condense my half-century of life into a few pieces of advice, then it’s pretty simple stuff.
First, crucially, go with your gut feeling, as the guy with the beard and tattoos said at the Ted Talk. If something feels right and your gut is telling you that this is the best course of action, then go for it. When we bought the warehouse Downtown, it felt right; when we opened the first clothing store, it felt right; and, yes, it felt right when we wound Serious down. We didn’t necessarily know what was coming next, but we still trusted our instincts. Most obviously, I went with my gut instinct when I got an unsolicited email from a guy called Tamir about his idea to film a short five-minute YouTube clip. You can trace it right back to my teenage years, when I was a kid in Thatcher’s Britain struggling to find a focus. I went with my gut instinct and got on that plane to America. That felt right. I wasn’t sure why at the time, but it felt right. It also felt right buying those old Levi’s and putting patches on them on Venice Boardwalk. Reselling those pants on Melrose that I’d bought up the road for ten bucks, that was just a flash of inspiration, that felt right. I certainly hadn’t planned to sell them, it had never even occurred to me, but inspiration sometimes comes along when you least expect it. I didn’t set out to run a fashion business, a film-location business, or gather a huge collection of Porsches and become known around the world for my modifications. My life has been a series of decisions based on gut instinct that have led me to where I am today. This sometimes means not over-thinking things – don’t take months to make a decision that only really needs a few days or even maybe a few hours. Does it feel right? What is your gut instinct telling you?
Of course, at times you will need to be brave and take risks, depending on what your gut instinct is saying. You might need to take a deep breath and seize an opportunity. In my opinion, it is a reality that if you want to succeed, then you have to take risks. By this, I don’t mean be reckless with yourself, your career or your money. That’s not risk-taking. A risk is me leaving that City & Guilds course in Sports Management, Leisure and Recreation at nineteen to come to America and then find myself scrabbling around for loose change just to survive; let me tell you, that didn’t exactly feel like a good risk at the time. But at least I’d had a go. At least I was trying to do something instead of staying back in Sheffield on the dole or on the construction site, playing it safe. I didn’t know anybody that had come to America. It wasn’t like I had a friend that went there the year before and told me how great it was. I came to America really with no preconceived plan, I didn’t know what I was coming into. That was my first leap of faith and, truth be told, if I’d never come to America I don’t think I would ever have done half the things that I have. I was only a kid, but I took a risk.
Back then my attitude was, How bad can it be? What’s the worst that can happen, right? As you know, that has been a central idea in my entire life. When that production company phoned me at the Willow warehouse and asked if could they film a music video there, I didn’t take a month to decide. Instead, I thought, Yeah, why not? If we hadn’t said yes to filming, we probably wouldn’t be here today. Before that, if we hadn’t taken the chance on buying the building, we definitely wouldn’t have been here. If we had bought a house in West Hollywood, none of this would ever have happened. In a sense, it was also a risk to do the Ted Talk. I had no background, no training, no idea of what that entailed, but I was happy to take the risk.
To take risks, you need self-belief. I’ve owned over fifty 911s, but I’ve only ever done a pre-purchase inspection on one of them, the car in Australia. Too often, people second-guess and doubt themselves, ask for too many other opinions, get confused, derailed or sidetracked. They don’t have enough self-belief, so they ask a friend, but then the pal goes, ‘Oh, that’s never going to work’, and so a good idea gets shelved. We never asked anyone’s opinion. Karen and I were on the same page where we knew we could make it work. So many people thought we were crazy when we bought the building in Willow because it needed so much work. Self-belief and willpower can overcome any obstacle. Maybe that’s naïveté on my part, I don’t know, but for us we always knew that we’d find a way to make it work. Although my instinct tells me How bad can it be?, what I’m actually looking for is the best-case scenario.
I have been quoted as saying, ‘If it feels slightly fearful and, Wow, I don’t know if I can do this, then you should probably do it.’ Everyone has goals and dreams. Not everyone does something about them. It’s like I said earlier about when you are a kid and you walk to the top of the high diving board, you either jump or you don’t jump. Be the one that jumps.
At times, if you are taking risks, then you are also doing things unconventionally. They go hand in hand. What separated Serious from a lot of our fellow competitors and peers was that we’d use non-fashion-related material in our clothing. For example, one season we had this car-seat fabric, it was thick, heavy nylon webbing mesh in bright colours. It was in some funky car, I can’t remember which one, in all these garish colours such as pink, raspberry, yellow, it was kind of a very Mod/sixties look. Another time we used this upholstery fabric called swirl velvet that had never been used in fashion, but we washed it down and made it soft. So we did things that were a little bit different. You meet some people and you can tell that they don’t want to step outside that box. My whole adult life has been spent outside of the box.
That brings me to my next point: whatever you choose to do, make sure it has your style. If you look at all three of the businesses I have been involved in, they all started from and were based on my own individual style, whether it be in clothing, interiors or cars, which people then bought into and appreciated. That is the common thread, the mutual connection between them. I keep saying that all the time – whatever you do, the style has to be a reflection of your personality. The materials we used at Serious were literally woven with our personality, they were clothes that we would wear ourselves and, in fact, we very often did wear them out and about. People picked up on that, they could see that what we were creating had our personality stamped on there – same with Willow and same with the Porsches. Your own unique style is exactly that – unique – no one else has that, so this has to be your strength. You really do have to stand out from the crowd, and I have been able to do that in three completely different fields, with my own slightly different twist. So at all times add your own personality and do that with flair. Don’t try to emulate someone else or copy a trend. Ultimately, you have to add your own style, your own personality and don’t wait, do that straightaway.
Tied into this idea is the absolute need to do something you are passionate about. If you don’t, then people will sniff you out, plus – perhaps more importantly – you won’t enjoy yourself. Nowadays, I get approached by huge multinational corporations to go and do talks to their staff about passion, and that’s because these big companies realize that passion isn’t something that you can create on a marketing plan or figure out with a spreadsheet. It is essentially very simple: I am passionate about what I do. That has been another common thread between the clothing, the property and the cars – I have such passion for all of it. This has the double benefit of making your work more unique and also making it more energetic, because your passion will shine through. If you don’t have passion for what you are doing, then something needs to change … why are you doing it?
Associated to this idea of personality and passion is the need to never forget your roots. I always say it doesn’t matter where you end up so long as you remember where you came from. There’s a tattoo on my right arm that says, ‘Made in Sheffield’. It’s there for a reason – I love Sheffield and my background. Yes, I moved to America and that has opened doors that would not have been available to me back in the UK. However, Sheffield gave me that British Bulldog spirit, that northern, cross-country runner mentality, the self-belief to go it alone and to last the distance. Also the entrepreneurial spirit that was on my grandad’s side of the family is what got me into being a bit of a wheeler-dealer, a market trader, a grafter. On the other side, my dad’s mechanical engineering background and interest in cars and motor sports has, on reflection, had a massive impact. It’s very easy when you move away from your roots to lose your way, get distracted and lose focus. Never forget where you came from, because that is absolutely at the core of your personality.
Now, if you use your personality and are passionate about what you are doing, that is fantastic, but you also need to have what I just touched on – a tenacious, relentless spirit, the idea that you never, ever give up. Ever. Personally, I think I get that from my mum, truth be told. Her tenaciousness, dedication and single-mindedness to keep plugging away is where my gritty streak came from. We moved a lot as a family, as you know, but she would never give up, she always made it work. Even now, she is talking about selling a flat and buying this old, abandoned coach house in Sheffield. She is always getting shit done.
My background wasn’t necessarily great, I certainly wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I have been able to achieve ideas that I dreamt of. I’m a goal-orientated guy. Fight for what you believe in and never give up on it. Sometimes you’ll need patience. That’s just a fact of life. I didn’t build my Porsche collection overnight. I never thought I’d find a ’64 911, but I never gave up looking and in the end I paid next to nothing for it. When we bought that land by the Fourth Street Bridge, the legal side of the process was a complete nightmare, but I just kept going, Karen too. We were relentless, and in the end we got the deal done. Without doubt, at times you will encounter difficulties and this will be stressful, that is natural, especially if you are trying to do something that is considered ‘different’. However, you have to just keep on keeping on, right? There’s always a way out of it. Move forward, move forward, move forward, positive, positive, positive. You have got to get good at the hustle and never give up.
Remember, I’ve been down in LA with next to nothing, almost the ‘last dollar’ mentality, and pulled back from that and turned it around. There have been points in the past where I’ve had to sell a car to keep another project moving forward. If you are motivated enough, you make shit happen. I believe things will always work out … I never give up. Like I said, maybe it came from the cross-country running – keep on pushing and don’t give up. As you’ve seen, 2015 was the worst year of my life. Karen passed away, as well as my dog that I’d had for thirteen years. However, I have to keep going, keep trying to move forward. The instinct to survive is just naturally there.
Another piece of advice I like to offer is very simple – be nice to other people. What goes around comes around, you know. I’ve never slagged off other people online, especially about their builds. I never comment on other people’s cars or projects in a negative way. I do get criticism – some people don’t like my spirited driving on public roads and others take a potshot at my profile. There are always going to be haters and naysayers slagging me off, but I’m like, Fuck, you guys are doing all the talking for me. I don’t have to do anything! They seem to have all the time in the world to critique the way I look and talk, but I never get involved in these online battles; I just let people say what they want to say. A lot of it is from guys who wish they could have done the same but didn’t have the balls to go for it.
I’m not a religious man, but I do believe in karma. That happened to me when I found the ’64 911. It’s happened to me three times when those motors found me. Just be nice to people; even if you don’t think you’ve had any payback, the motivation to be nice and the good feelings that generates should be payment enough.
Now for the fairly mundane part: you can listen to your gut instinct, you can seize an opportunity, be passionate and individual about what you do and never give up … BUT you can only do that all together with hard work. Good old-fashioned hard work goes a long, long, long way. I think that people looking in on someone who’s been successful – in any walk of life – often severely underestimate the amount of sheer hard graft that the individual has put in. I’m talking about firing on all cylinders, year after year. Karen and I worked some unbelievably long hours for a very long time. This was never a 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday job or lifestyle. At some points, we didn’t have any time off for months. You can’t expect that if you have a vision and want to deliver on that and make it work. Be your own one-man army.
Take the Serious retail stores. That was so much hard work. Likewise renovating and fitting out Willow – we spent a year building that out. Right from when they started sandblasting the decades of old paint off the walls, it was a long, hard process. Hours and hours, weeks and weeks, for months on end. The entrepreneurial, do-it-yourself route is not an easy path, be under no illusions about that.
How can you help yourself be prepared for what lies ahead? Well, when Serious was really cooking, we’d often get phone calls from people saying, ‘My kid is a huge fan of your work, she’s thinking of going to fashion school, she wants to be a designer, what should she do?’ Well, you can go to fashion school, but that doesn’t teach you how to have an idea. That route can teach you the basics of marketing and how to sell and set up a team, but in my opinion you either have the idea or you don’t. You can’t go to school and learn how to have a good idea. You go to school to learn about fashion – what came before, the history, the theory – but that doesn’t necessarily make you creative. Karen and I never went to fashion school. You don’t need a formal education to have an idea.
I fell into the fashion industry. It wasn’t planned. I bought a building, but we didn’t know we were going to fall into the film business. I wasn’t taught any of that in school. I was taught shit that, truth be told, was useless to me. Pythagoras’s Theorem … I mean, what the fuck is that useful for, right? Or the fact that Pi is 3.142. I can quote that number all these years later, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. Let’s put it this way, the two O levels that I gained at school haven’t really helped me much. I left school at sixteen, didn’t have any background in fashion but built a successful clothing business that was eventually doing several million dollars’ worth of business a year. I didn’t go to university, get an MBA in business or entrepreneurial management or whatever the fuck it is people do. I’ve no idea what they do, to be honest. It sounds a little blunt, but sometimes when people say they are doing business studies I think, What the fuck do you need that for? You’re either street-smart or you’re book-smart. If you do it all yourself, no one is really going to stop you. You are either going to sink or you are going to swim. You don’t have to have a PhD or take business management courses; they all help, don’t get me wrong, and I am not going to be an advocate for dropping out of education. However, if you haven’t got an MBA from a top college or university, you need to know that this doesn’t for one second mean you can’t still make a success of yourself.
In all these years, I have never done a business plan. Sometimes Karen and I would go to a bar and get inspired. When we were fitting out Willow, we might get a little napkin and maybe draw an idea out and then come back to the warehouse and meet with the contractor, then lay it all out with blue tape on the floor. All drawn up on the back of the napkin. It still worked.
This ties into what I was saying about being unconventional. Not having any specific background in what I have chosen to pursue means I didn’t know where the boundaries were. That way you are able to do whatever you want to do. You are not restricted by the accepted limitations. Just because no one has ever made miniskirts out of car-seat fabric doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I think that goes back to being an adaptive swimmer, where you can drop into an environment and kind of make your way through it. You don’t need to feel inferior if you don’t have a huge file of qualifications; if you have street-smarts, self-belief, a unique idea and a passion to work very hard, then that is as good as any degree in the world.
So, like I said, those are just a few suggestions to take away with you from reading my tale. Hopefully you don’t need to love cars, fashion or property to find something of value in these ideas. I don’t know how much of this will be useful to you, I don’t even know if you will agree with all or any of it. I am just trying to offer a few ideas that I have learnt from what has been, for me, the most incredible and enjoyable journey. It’s been a long run since those days training around the woods near my parents’ home in Sheffield, but it’s been worth every step … and I’m still running. It’s an open road out there, and I am excited to see what comes next.
What I do know is that, back in the seventies, if you’d told the story in this book to that stuttering kid timidly putting his hand up during the school register each morning when they shouted out ‘Magnus’ … well, I think he’d be pretty pleased. Wow. Dream come true, right?
You see, in many ways it’s real simple: listen to your gut instinct, take risks and seize opportunities, inject your personality into everything you do and make sure you stay passionate about your work, remember where you came from, never give up on the goal, never give up on the dream, stay motivated, stay dedicated, work hard, don’t be restricted by convention and tradition, never settle and always, always, always keep moving forward. How bad can it be, right?
And never, ever let dirt slow you down.