Most Replayed Moment: A Guilt-Free Way to Handle Work and Life

The host asks Nicola Kilner what advice she would give her two children if, at 18, they wanted to become entrepreneurs. Nicola says she would usually recommend spending a few years in a corporate environment first. Her own time at Boots taught her both what a large organization did well and the drawbacks created by its scale, history, and established culture. She says her two placement years and subsequent work there taught her “incredibly so much,” perhaps more practically than university would have. Nicola began at Boots as an assistant buyer and became a buying manager. The role involved building relationships, collaborating across departments, finding new technologies and brands around the world, and helping entrepreneurial founders bring products into Boots. Through a program called Latest Finds, a new product could receive a three-month trial stand; if consumers responded well, it could receive a long-term Boots listing. Nicola learned that getting listed was only the beginning: founders still had to drive consumer demand and create a complete launch plan. She worked with PR, supply chain, finance, and legal teams, learning how consumer-goods businesses create and test demand. She says the role suited her entrepreneurial skill set and showed her the energy of startups, where people can make a more immediate impact.

Nicola met Brandon Truaxe while working with his previous beauty company, Indeed Labs, and remembers being drawn to his unusually energetic emails, which he signed “smiles, Brandon.” Their Indeed Labs launches were among the most successful in the Latest Finds program, and Nicola recalls Brandon bringing infectious enthusiasm whenever he visited Boots’ Nottingham headquarters. She also felt he cared about doing good and making the world better. When Brandon left Indeed Labs, Nicola was shocked because the company had seemed like a “rocket ship.” They met in London, where she explained her idea for a beauty-rating platform modeled on TripAdvisor: a service that would rank beauty products so consumers could choose products based on ratings and reviews. Brandon told her he wanted to start DECIEM, a name derived from the Latin word for ten. It was initially intended as a broader “beauty engineer” or even multi-category concept involving technology and food, built around doing ten things at once. He invited Nicola to help with DECIEM while he helped with her beauty concept, later called Beauty Wise. Nicola left Boots at 23 or 24, despite family members warning that she already had a good position, because she knew she was not meant to stay there forever.

The host points out that launching ten brands seems to contradict the usual business advice to focus. Nicola says DECIEM’s Melbourne office literally had the phrase “focus is overrated” on its wall. The multi-brand structure allowed the company to build an ecosystem with manufacturing, research and development, communications, and other capabilities in-house. A single brand might not be able to afford a full communications team, but ten brands could share that cost. Similarly, if Nicola traveled to Australia, she could present ten brands instead of one. The structure also created a relatively cheap and fast way to experiment. In consumer products, Nicola says, research and insights cannot tell you with certainty what will work until something gains traction in the market. Having ten products gave DECIEM room to fail, learn, and move on without betting the entire company on one idea. Hiring inexperienced people helped reinforce this approach: because the startup could not afford experienced staff, many employees came directly from university or college without fixed assumptions about how the beauty industry should operate. Nicola believes their practical, unconditioned approach helped them do things differently. She does identify a major downside. Once The Ordinary became enormously successful, it consumed attention and workload, pushing the other brands aside. DECIEM now wants to restart its incubator engine, but Nicola says that will require a dedicated team so new brands are not continually deprioritized behind the company’s biggest revenue driver.

Nicola describes Brandon as more eccentric, hot-headed, and absolute in his thinking, while she was calmer and more likely to smooth things over. He was a science and technology expert who tended to see issues as black or white rather than gray; Nicola says that could be useful when approaching the science behind beauty products. He also made work feel fun, planning trips around restaurants and ice cream as much as meetings. Although they initially intended to build separate projects, they became co-CEOs of DECIEM. Brandon had previously built and left several companies, including a technology business and two beauty businesses, Uoko and Indeed Labs. Nicola says what hurt him most about leaving was losing the relationships and people. At DECIEM, he wanted to build a work family and a place of belonging. The company’s “north star” remains that every employee should feel they belong, regardless of who they are or what they believe. In the early years, employees traveled, ate together, went to Niagara Falls and theme parks, and worked as friends rather than treating the job as a purely transactional relationship. Nicola compares the resulting dedication to a “cult,” while stressing that she does not mean manipulation or the harmful aspects of actual cults. She means that people shared a mission, believed in the work, defended the company, and felt they were all in it together. She says Brandon gave the team a great deal of love and passion, and they returned it. That made the later crisis especially painful because DECIEM was not simply a workplace or a group of colleagues.

When asked how another founder could create the same deeply committed culture, Nicola says it is difficult to manufacture deliberately. At DECIEM, the culture arose naturally rather than from a formal plan. The host agrees that founders often overlook fun: relationships formed through dinners, weekends, and activities outside normal working hours can produce trust and creativity that workplace perks alone cannot create. Nicola says people spend so much time at work that it matters whether they genuinely enjoy being there. She also acknowledges that the early culture involved very high expectations and a lack of balance. In DECIEM’s startup years, people worked evenings and weekends because they were young, excited, and deeply invested. When the company began seeing results, that success created even more energy. Nicola says the early culture and lack of balance were probably necessary to achieve DECIEM’s success: everyone sat around the same table, including people working on formulations, communications, and brand, and decisions could change from one day to the next without creating bureaucracy. The people who succeeded in that phase had to be willing to “wear every hat.” When DECIEM accepted orders from Boots before knowing exactly how to fulfill them, the team said yes and solved the problem afterward. Nicola recalls employees working all night in the factory, using a hand-crimping machine to make products; roughly one in ten containers could explode if squeezed too hard, so they tested them one by one. Even later, during busy periods such as November and Black Friday, the whole company would help in the warehouse. Nicola identifies willingness to do whatever the moment requires as the key early-stage skill.

Nicola agrees with the idea that there is no universal work-life balance. In her twenties, she was happy to sacrifice nights out and other activities because traveling, working inside the DECIEM bubble, and building something felt like both her job and her hobby. She says the right balance changes with life circumstances: someone may later need to care for an elderly parent, deal with personal challenges, or raise young children. A family-like workplace should allow colleagues to support one another during those periods, with people saying, in effect, “I’ve got you,” and covering responsibilities until the situation changes. The host asks how that family idea fits with the need for a high-performance team. Nicola says family means belonging, safety, and being loved, not avoiding difficult decisions. She distinguishes being kind from merely being nice. If an employee is struggling, kindness may require a direct conversation about performance, additional coaching, a different role, or the possibility that they should leave. DECIEM has tried to support terminated employees through counseling and career help where appropriate. Nicola learned the business side of this principle after DECIEM’s rapid growth slowed following COVID. She realized that if the numbers did not recover, people would have to be let go because a company cannot lose money indefinitely. Headcount is often where cost savings come from. For her, being kind to employees therefore also means making the business perform so it can continue supporting them; when difficult decisions are unavoidable, leaders should carry them out as helpfully and respectfully as possible.

Nicola calls herself “the least qualified CEO ever,” but explains that she means she is not qualified by conventional large-company metrics. Leading a 10- or 20-person startup is different from leading DECIEM after it grew to 1,500 employees, gained majority ownership from Estée Lauder Companies, and became part of a public-company environment. The company had moved from a fast, intuitive startup to an organization that required planning, structure, and operational discipline. During a difficult period, Nicola repeatedly told Stefan, an Estée Lauder leader, that she would resign because she did not feel capable of running the business. She says she was not naturally strong at numbers, planning, or the more technical aspects of managing a large organization. In a startup, changing your mind quickly can be useful; in a larger organization, it can create chaos and demotivate teams that have already invested in a decision. She was therefore relieved when DECIEM brought in an experienced general manager about a year earlier. He was surprised by how many basic systems the rapidly grown company lacked and helped establish them. The new arrangement let Nicola focus on her strengths: brand, innovation, people and culture, belonging, and social impact, while the general manager handled supply chain, scaling, new markets, and operational complexity. Nicola says there is nobody more qualified than she is to understand DECIEM’s history, but that does not mean she is the best person for every function. She compares her role to conducting an orchestra: a leader must understand the strengths and weaknesses in the group and bring in people with the expertise needed to make the whole organization work.

The host observes that Nicola’s statement about being unqualified may sound like imposter syndrome, but it may actually be self-awareness. Nicola agrees that she has always tried to assess whether a role suits her skills and makes her happy, beginning with her decision at Boots to think carefully about whether buying was right for her. She says authenticity matters because pretending to be good at something she is not would help neither her nor the company. Nicola openly says finance is not a strength, while noting that DECIEM has an excellent VP of Finance and general manager who understand those areas. Her job is not to be the expert at everything; it is to recognize where she contributes most, trust capable people, and let them use their own strengths. Her team specifically praises her delegation, self-awareness, and willingness to bring in knowledge and talent to cover her weaknesses. The host reads their description of her as “literally a ray of sunshine,” then jokes about whether she paid someone in marketing. The final leadership lesson is that a founder’s skills can be exactly right for creating a company but insufficient for leading it at scale. Nicola’s early strengths—relationships, energy, brand instinct, and the ability to create belonging—remain central to DECIEM, but the company also needed experienced operators and formal systems as it grew. She treats acknowledging that limitation not as failure, but as the basis for building a leadership team that is more capable than any one person could be alone.