Interview with Adam Mlamali
Early Inspiration and Motivation
Q: What originally motivated you to start experimenting with e-commerce and investing at such a young age?
A: So e-commerce and investing, I think it was just curiosity. I think genuinely it's just seeing a lot of different things onlineA:, whether its people sharing their results and their successes and it was more just me just being curious very early on and just wanting to explore what other people had going on. I started off working as an investment banking apprentice in finance.
And from there, there were a lot of traders, people getting involved in investing, etc. And I just wanted to take part. I was 18, didn't really know what was going on and just was inspired by what everyone else was doing. And that just got me into it. If I'm being completely honest, it was nothing too crazy. It was just saw a lot of people doing a whole bunch of cool stuff.
I was just really curious about what was going on and just wanted to get involved myself, to be fair.
Q: You turned £200 into £200,000 by age 19. What mindset helped you believe that was even possible?
A: Yeah, so to debunk that a little bit, the £200,000 to £200,000 was, at first, it was the whole curiosity of the whole investing world, the trading world, etc. At the time, my first balance in my portfolio was £200. I was arguably lucky at the time that I was investing in.
I invested during the whole COVID crisis. And during that time period, you could have bought almost any stock or investment, and it would have just rose massively by the end of that year. And when I first got into investing, I would see a lot of my investment’s uptake by quite a lot. In some cases, they would do 10%, 20%, 30% in just a day, very speculative investments of that. But just the fact they performed so well made me want to invest more. So, I would be running for my job, trading on the side, and I just want to put that money into the markets because I've just never experienced anything like it before.
And everything just seemed to be going up. And it did come to an end when markets did start to correct themselves and stabilise. And I think this was the same year that SPACs came into play, which was special purpose acquisitions, which was a type of investment where investments would list on the stock market at $10.
They wouldn't necessarily make any revenue, but they would list investors of SPAC that were mainly based on management teams. And then they would just shoot up. They wouldn't necessarily make any money.
A lot of them were actually scams and didn't produce anything. But just the fact that if I was investing at a time when you could have bought almost anything, it would have gone up. Since then, obviously, I made a lot of money at an early age.
And I have tested sort of my investment thesis to make sure that it still works under normal market conditions. And even this year alone, I was able to start an investment and double it. So, the theory behind what I've done still works.
It was just a case of right time, right place. And a lot of people in finance would have heard of something called a DCF valuation, Discounted Cash Flow Valuation. And with that, I did drop a lot of DCF valuations during the time period that I was investing in. And everything did just genuinely seem undervalued. So, there was an element of not so much luck and actually value in companies. But I think it was that luck element that did come into play.
And just getting in at a good time, not necessarily the right time, because the right time to get started in investing was probably yesterday. There's never a good time. It's sort of better to just be invested in the market and to ride out different cycles.
But it was just genuinely a luck of time. I was able to value companies and noticed a lot of undervaluations. And even when companies didn't have that valuation because they were a few years back, it seemed like a great idea. Got lucky genuinely. I was able to ride out the waves. But I think that was the motivation, just getting in at a good time, to be fair.
Leadership, Setbacks & Resilience
Q: How do you stay disciplined when managing high-spend ad accounts, private equity investments, and your own ventures simultaneously?
A: It is a lot. However, I think at times you don't manage things and it does get really overwhelming. You do get burnt out. There's a lot of times when I'm having a twitch in my head. It's just sleep deprivation. It's absolutely insane. You just need to get some rest, shut everything off.
I think with time, you do start to develop processes. And you just learn more about yourself, what are your mind, and how best do you operate, and how efficiently you operate, and what you need to do to just keep yourself in check. Over time, I have developed little plans. I do try and plan my week. Never goes to plan, I'll be honest. I don't necessarily wake up 5 a.m. and go for a jog and that kind of thing. I'm just awake when I'm awake, and I get done what I need to get done when I need to get it done. It's okay to not do everything yourself. And I do have a really good support system behind me. Team's great. Everybody I work with is great.
When it comes to private equity, I don't do any of the analysis myself. The analysts are great. I've spoken to them, had interviews with them. I trust their work. I believe in them. Even when investments don't go to plan, we can't necessarily help it. So it's just a good support system, being able to understand yourself and learn how to keep yourself in check when things get hard, when you feel burnt out, et cetera.
Staying motivated. Again, I listen to a lot of other people's stories, and I think that's what keeps me motivated the most. I've tried to read books and stuff, which can be helpful. Self-help books are great. Some are not so great. Some are really amazing.
I listen to other people's stories, whether they're in a career, whether they've started a business. Podcasts, I think, are great, just listening while you're eating and doing stuff around the house and whatnot. Listening to other people's stories motivates me a lot.
Even just speaking to my friends and other people that are in business, they motivate me massively because everyone's doing really amazing things. And even average people, ambitious people inspire me, whether it's ambition for starting a business, even if it's just somebody wanting to be a musician or, I don't know, but they just want to do whatever they do the best they can do it. That's what inspires me. So, I just have a lot of ambitious people around me. Just speak to people, see what they've got going on, whether they're making cakes or whether they're playing tennis. They all inspire me, to be fair.
Q: Was there a failure that ended up being the biggest catalyst for your growth?
A: Yeah. So when I first started getting into private equity, I invested in a food delivery company. I think I was 19 at the time. I invested £20,000, put it on YouTube. That whole investment went to zero. Genuinely, the company failed during COVID. COVID was a killer for that company. Other than that, it was based in Mayfair, London. At the time, I was living in Mayfair. I'd used the service myself. I was always ordering from all these fancy restaurants directly to my door. And I just wanted to get in, invested stupid amounts of money into the company, ended up going to zero. But I believe with that investment, there was a lot of things I didn't really depict.
There was a lot of data that I wasn't really taking into account. Whereas even now, I'm investing in companies that I do really deep dives. So, other than financials, valuations, just learning about the company generally, I'll do a deep dive and look at Google Trends and see how many people are searching for that company. And if I can see upticks in percentages as in all people are searching for it, great. I look at domains that link to different companies. So if I see a company that's, there's a lot of talk, it might be talking about a government contract going into play. And then if I see a gov.uk domain linked into that website, then it's like cool. That's probably not public knowledge yet, but it's most likely the fact that they are going to pair with the government and then have some sort of announcement at some point in time. But I can literally see people clicking from a gov.uk website to this company. So there's something happening there.
So, the company that I invested in, huge failure from there. And it made me then do like more of a deep dive analysis into my investments. So even if it is a private equity investment, I'll still run my own due diligence. And since then, like I've said, I've had talks with the private equity company that I was working with. Well, I still work with a limited partner as part of the company. And I've just made sure that I avoid taking on excess risk because that was a risky investment. I didn't just spot it at the time.
But with my analysis now, I would have most definitely have picked it up and then probably not invested so heavily. But even with that, so when I invest in stocks and my stocks and shares, I saw stocks in general, private equity investments, I always run my own due diligence. And not even with the investing side of things, but with any kind of business that I do, I look at it from like a very data heavy perspective.
And even now, as part of my job, I work with insurance companies all building out the machine learning models, their data models, and I scrutinise their data all the time. And so it's just something that stuck with me. I've learned from it. I was burnt heavily by it. If I just looked at the data, then I would have uncovered so much. And so that was like a big loss for me at the time.
It was incredible. But yeah, learned a lot from it at the same time. And that stuck with me to today with any business I do, any venture I do, any investment I do, and it's paid off massively, to be fair.
Entrepreneurship, Strategy & Real-World Execution
Q: You’ve taken brands from zero to six and seven figures. What separates brands that scale from those that never break through?
A: So, I remember when there was a big hype around dropshipping, and there still kind of is. And a lot of people said dropshipping is dead. It's oversaturated. And I agree from the perspective of the old school way of e-com and dropshipping, where you've just got one product store that's not really optimised. It doesn't really feel like a brand. There's not really any kind of shopping experience. They fail.
And what I work on now is, again, heavily scrutinising data. So, I'll look at data from other companies where they're heading over eight, nine, 10 figures, and I'll look at how they're advertising. I'll take their advertising methods, look at the data.
And again, if they've got an advertisement campaign where they're spending £50,000 a month on that campaign, and if I see them scaling up, so going from £50,000 a month to £6,000 a month, £70,000 a month, something is going right, and there's a trend. And if we can take what they've done and make it our own and then brand it and give people the right customer care, the right shopping experience, that will then cause for us to almost a no-brainer. There are a lot of basic things that work, like having the right call to actions, having the right product market fit, just general branding.
On a website, it's hard to obviously get people to convert just with a standalone product description, etc. So, genuinely little things like a call to action, loads of sales, trying to entice people to actually buy now rather than later on. So, if they have an hour where there is a sale for this limited time offer, etc., that's going to make me purchase in that instant rather than wait later on.
And so, with e-comm, there's just these very small minor details that make such a big difference to conversions, which will then help you scale faster. And a lot of times when you're just starting out with a small business, you don't have a budget, like you don't have a big budget. And so, trying to compete against these people that do have the bigger budgets, you have to play it smart.
There's been stores where I've spent thousands of pounds and seen no results. And obviously, I know a lot of businesses do have like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of pounds to spend on marketing and can't afford to burn it.
For us, just starting out on our journeys, we genuinely don't have that kind of capital. So, losing that is a big burn. But at least if we can either learn a lesson from it or try and calculate and analyse data, and the only data that we can get other than spending money and making our own data from advertising campaigns that either go well or fail is to use our competitors. And so, with that, it's just looking to other companies, seeing what they're doing, what they're not doing, so that we can make an informed decision from there.
Transition Into Investing & Private Equity
Q: After your viral trading success, what drew you toward private equity investing?
A: So, private equity investing, for me at the time, it was like the world of the unknown. And there was a private equity firm that was based in Milton Keynes, which is where my family were living. And they also had an office in Mayfair as well. And at the time, I was living quite close. And with private equity, there were so many different sort of interesting businesses that you could invest in.
So, there was the food delivery company that failed. But there was also another company that we were able to invest in, which was a company that would invest in bionic limbs. So, if somebody had lost an arm, lost a leg, and actually got to experience working with a bionic limb and just seeing the experience, and even hearing about some of the stories of the kid who had no arm, but then was able to get a Marvel-branded bionic limb.
And it was almost life-changing for them. So, I think, for me at the time, it was also investing in things that I believe in. It was almost like a passion to be able to see my money work for the good of the world, rather than just some defence stock that was sending arms to another country, which isn't really my area of interest, to be fair.
So, I think I was able to invest in things that I'd never really experienced before and able to also gain experiences. The returns are great and the money is great. I'm not going to deny that.
I'm all here for it. And I think outside of being able to come across really interesting businesses that are actually beneficial in the world, there was also a lot of tax advances in private equity. You pay zero capital gains tax, which I didn't even think was a thing. Even when I did lose my investment, there was a loss relief, which I think was 50 percent. And there was also an income tax relief, which was 30 percent. So, even though I put down 20k, I was able to recover 80 percent of that. So, it's like risking 80 percent for the potential reward that I could have got at the time was absolutely insane. Those things are still relevant today. It's called enterprise investing, enterprise investment scheme, scheme by the government, very, very low tax. And you can reclaim a lot of tax. When I found out about the company dissolving, I think it was in 2024. I think it was actually last year.
So, it's definitely worthwhile for people that are looking for tax advantage investing and things of that nature.
So, yeah, there are a lot of different things that drew me to it. Initially, it was the businesses, how interesting they were, actually beneficial in the world, tax advantages, and obviously, the gains.
Q: What’s the biggest misconception young investors have about investing?
A: I believe there is a misconception about overvaluation sometimes. There's a lot. I feel like the biggest one that could probably be the most detrimental is predicting a company's overvalue when it's not simply off of its price-to-earnings ratio.
So, price-to-earnings ratios, what I tend to do, and it's probably the norm for more seasoned investors, is that you take a basket of companies in the same industry, you take the average of their PE ratios, and then that's the company's valuation. The only reason why I'm saying PE ratios is because there are a lot of people that are like, it sounds like a good company, but its PE ratio is too high. And it's because it's a company that's on its growth trajectory.
So, it's actually normal for its PE ratio to be high because it's expected to grow from 30% year-on-year to 40% year-on-year to 50% year-on-year, which is an insane level of growth. And so, the market, the stock market generally tends to price in the future for certain investments. And so, you could really just shoot yourself in the foot by avoiding a company just because you think it's overvalued because its PE ratio is high.
In a lot of cases, a company just may genuinely be overvalued, but there are so many cases when it isn't. And even for myself, I've made life-changing investments. And a lot of times, its PE ratio looks too high, I'd rather avoid it.
But if you look at its long-term growth trajectory, it's absolutely insane. And there are certain companies that I have sold out of because I do believe that they are overvalued. I would have loved to have held them for a long time, but it just, in my opinion, makes no sense.
But I believe just having that strong understanding of why you're investing in a company, its long-term growth trajectory, how long you want to invest in that company for, just having that deep understanding. So, yes, getting your valuations right is key, but also making sure that you've got like a strong thesis for your investments, you understand why you want to invest in that company, you understand all of the risks, all of the benefits.
Another thing is index investing over stocks. They're both great, and for different reasons. Index fund investing long-term is amazing, consistent returns, you're more than diversified across copious amounts of companies depending on which funds you choose to go for. However, individual stock picking has made me consider a lot of money. Not to say that it's better than index fund investing, because in a lot of cases, it's not. If you do want to refine the skill of individual stock picking and valuing a company and understanding why you want to invest in a company, I wouldn't shy away from it. And you can always do both.
Impact & Vision
Q: What’s your 5-year vision as an entrepreneur, educator, investor?
A: So right now, I believe that everything I'm doing, like I do genuinely enjoy. There were times when I was probably doing things just because there was like a high pay attached to it, whereas at the moment, I do enjoy what I'm doing. So, I do wish to continue on my journey in terms of being an entrepreneur, sort of building businesses, and so on and so forth. So being invested in private equity has also made me interested in the actual private equity journey of building a business, growing it, bootstrapping the company, and just reinvesting all of your profits to seeing where it could get to.
I'm in the process of doing it right now. I've got a company that's turning over quite a bit of money every month, and we've had a few offers, but I don't think I would sell just yet. In terms of being an educator, it's something that I really enjoy. I don't think I would have a charge for any type of education, talk, or anything like that. I just don't agree with it. And I've seen the sort of rise of course sellers and then people that actually sort of perform with what they do. Not to say that they're all scammers, but it's a very great area that I wouldn't really want to experience or explore. And so I'd always want to educate people for free, literally just giving as much free advice as I can, whether it's advising somebody in an area that I have expertise in, or even just like motivating somebody by telling my stories, because I've heard a lot of other people's stories that have motivated me to do the things that I want to do, and they're not necessarily in the same line of business as me. But they're just, their story is just so inspirational, and I see the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes, and some people have just really had it hard, but then have been able to just overcome everything. It just seems amazing to me.
I'm looking at starting a business that can help people get into certain careers and areas of business that they otherwise wouldn't be able to. Because even myself right now, I've been able to get into data science, machine learning, without necessarily having any type of degree. But it has just been a lot of sort of project building, building things, networking with people to be able to get to those levels, those types of roles. And so just showing other people how to do the exact same or slightly differently, but in just a way that suits them.
And again, that would be a company that I want to build and not necessarily charge for it, to be honest. And with investments, I'm always going to invest. So within the next five years, hopefully just working on the business that I've got at the time, I do want to be sort of financially free to the point where I'm work optional, but I don't see myself ever retiring. I'm always trying to build something or work on something. I don't think retiring is ever going to happen, to be honest. But definitely being work optional, so I have the choice. So in five years' time, I've got a little family and I've got the time for them.
But yeah, that's really it, just work on my businesses, being able to be work optional, and also educating people completely free of charge through a company, charity, structure, whatever works, just in the process of speaking to people to see what the best way forward is.
Advice for Students and Emerging Entrepreneurs
Q: What advice would you give to a student who wants to start a business but feels overwhelmed by failure or comparison?
A: Yeah, there's always somebody that looks like they're doing better than you, genuinely. Social media is probably one of the best things in the world because you can get inspiration and motivation from it, but sometimes things are seen to be a lot easier than what they actually are. You never really see what goes on behind the scenes.
So it's never too late. You don't need to rush into doing everything all at once. For me, it was genuinely a process of I was dead set on just getting into my finance career, exploring that career for a few years, hopefully getting a promotion. But my curiosity just couldn't, I had to explore different things at the time. And I sort of did just take jumps and leaps and took risk. I wouldn't advise people copy me and just leave their career to go all in into something that they're speculative about, only because at the time I had a lot of expenses, apartment in central London, which was just ridiculously priced per month. And if things had gone south, it would have been really bad, to be honest. So I'd definitely stay motivated. I would start to explore things, but within your means.
I would avoid taking on debt unless it's a calculated move. Again, just sort of living within your means and just exploring things within your means for now. There are a lot of businesses, businesses that you can start completely free of charge.
And starting within your means allows you to explore things and maybe be a bit more creative. If you've got a small budget and you want to make a business work, you're going to be creative naturally because you just don't have the same budgets as a bigger business. And when it comes to investing, I would start as early on as you can with whatever you're comfortable with.
Doesn't need to be a lot. But I believe that when you make something off of nothing or investing very little, that will be your motivation to do more and to invest more and to build more. And there's always going to be a crash and an opportunity to change your life in these markets.
And so I wouldn't try and time anything. If the S&P has dropped 10% and you want to go all in because you think it's a once in a lifetime opportunity, it's not. I've experienced one significant market crash very early on. There's always opportunities, so I wouldn't second guess yourself thinking that it's a once in a lifetime opportunity, going all in, over-risking, and then just being burnt. And so definitely just starting off within your means, I would say, for me. And your results will motivate you to do more and to double down more on the investments that you've made, whether it be a business, stock market investment. If you've made enough to get involved in private equity, the result of your diligence will then make you double down.
