Successful entrepreneurs may hate hierarchies and structures and try to destroy them. They may garner the disapproval of MBAs for their creativity and wildness. But they have antennae in their heads. When they walk down the street anywhere in the world, they have their antennae out, evaluating how what they see can relate back to what they are doing. It might be packaging, a word, a poem, or even something in a completely different business.

It's about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it. Now 30 years on The Body Shop is a multi local business with over 2.045 stores serving over 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. And I haven't a clue how we got here!

I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses and made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.

Be daring. Be first. Be different.

First, you have to have fun. Second, you have to put love where your labour is. Third, you have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else.

My goal was livelihood. We don't use that word often enough. If I could give one piece of advice to anyone it's don't obsess with this notion that you have to turn everything you do into a business, because that ends up being a small version of a large company. But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.

I wake up every morning thinking...this is my last day. And I jam everything into it. There's no time for mediocrity. This is no damned dress rehearsal.