In this instalment of our weekly video series, My Business Leader Secret, we talk to Timo Boldt, who founded Gousto in 2012 and remains its CEO. 

Gousto makes recipe boxes with the ingredients to make specific meals, which are delivered to customers’ homes.

The company has grown steadily and now has annual revenues of more than £300m, having raised more than $350m (£285m) in venture capital to scale the business.

Gousto has two main distribution centres in the UK, packing boxes with recipes that have been designed by chefs at their London HQ, but selected on a monthly basis by the company’s own AI algorithms, based on issues like ingredient supply. Its Warrington plant sorts more than 80,000 unique boxes each week.

Boldt used to work in banking at Rothschild before becoming an entrepreneur in his mid-twenties. He says that his approach to leadership changed after he took a one-year course to become a certified coach at the Oxford School of Coaching and Mentoring in 2019.

“It’s all about making the winning behaviours as repeatable as possible,” says Boldt, “and becoming a certified coach has hugely helped me understand myself better, understand where my biases are, but also how to positively impact people.”

The coaching has also helped him to “read” employees better, helping him in one-to-one meetings and feedback sessions, he says.

“It’s all about calibrating challenge and support in real time. Somebody might be going through divorce or a really challenging and complicated pregnancy, for example.

“If somebody’s cocky, how do you give feedback so that they listen to your feedback and take you seriously?

“So it’s your job as the CEO to really dial up challenge or dial it back down and increase support and constantly calibrate.”

Learning the skills of coaching has made it possible for him to help “make people happier at scale” in his business, he says.

Boldt is also a strong believer in mentoring and has had more than 50 mentors in his 13-year career as an entrepreneur.