An interview with Charlie Horrell, Vita Mojo: Dialled In edition #1

Big decisions don’t appear out of nowhere. You don’t wake up one day and suddenly need to pivot your business or replace a key team member – it’s usually something you see coming. So the real question is: Is now the right time to make this call? Should I act today, next week, next month – or am I procrastinating?

For me, decision-making is 50% analysis and 50% gut. The analysis side is about gathering data -performance metrics, market trends, people’s track records. It’s not always factual, but you can identify patterns and trigger points that indicate whether action is needed. The other half is gut instinct, which is really just experience by another name. The more times you’ve faced similar decisions, the more confident you become in trusting your instincts.

I also ask myself: What happens if I don’t make a decision? Because in my experience, most problems don’t get better over time. If you wait too long, you get backed into a corner with fewer options. The only exception is if there’s a real chance of a lucky break – some last-minute opportunity you couldn’t have anticipated. But 95% of the time, delaying just limits your choices.
That said, I don’t rush big decisions. If I’m deciding whether to expand into the Netherlands or Spain, I’ll think about it for weeks, consult with people I trust, and weigh the data. But at the end of the day, as a CEO, the final call – and the responsibility – rests with me. If I get it right, great. If I get it wrong, that’s on me. You can’t delegate those decisions.

To make the best call, I need the right headspace. A busy day in the office isn’t ideal – too many distractions. I think best when I’m running in the hills of Sussex, completely unplugged. That’s when I have the clarity to process everything properly.

And one final lesson: I once ran a business that got into financial trouble. We needed a cash injection, so I emailed 50 shareholders in the morning. By lunchtime, a motorbike arrived with a cheque from our second-largest shareholder. I wrote to thank him, and he said, If I have the data, the belief, the means, and the time, I make the decision immediately and action it. That stuck with me. If you’ve got everything you need to decide – make the call.

I’d say there are two, actually.

The first was after an incredibly successful first 15 years of my career. By the time I was in my mid-30s, I was about 20% ahead of where I could have reasonably expected to be – partly due to skill, but largely due to being in the right place at the right time. The last seven of those years were spent working for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, specifically at Star TV in Hong Kong, playing a role in shaping television in Asia. It was an incredible time – making decisions and taking on responsibilities that, even now, I’d find daunting.

But after a while, I felt I’d reached the end of my natural run in Hong Kong. It’s a small island; I’d been to every bar, every restaurant, met everyone. I decided to come back to the UK. But rather than taking the safe route of transferring within News Corp – perhaps returning to Sky – I let hubris get the better of me. I thought, I’ve got this. I’ll take a year off, travel the world, then stroll back into London and find the perfect job.

Except it didn’t quite work out that way.

I landed back in London and quickly realised no one knew who I was. I had no network, no connections in private equity or executive search. I’d been away for too long, and I’d massively underestimated how hard it would be to break back in. In hindsight, I should have played it smarter – used News Corp as a stepping stone, built a network, and then made my next move. Instead, I wasted time, lost momentum, and whatever early advantage I had, I let slip.

The second “one that got away” was a poorly timed career move. In February 2000, I was persuaded to join a US dot-com company. At the time, everything looked fantastic – the business was soaring, the stock price was at $125. But by July, after the dot-com crash, it had plummeted to $5. If I’d joined a couple of years earlier, I’d have been cashing in stock options at $125 instead of watching them collapse. I completely misread the timing.

I wasn’t the only one who got caught in the dot-com bubble, but I should have seen the warning signs. I got swept up in the excitement without fully understanding the underlying risks. The silver lining? I didn’t personally lose money, but I certainly lost an opportunity.

Both of these moments taught me a valuable lesson about timing. Success isn’t just about making the right decision – it’s about making it at the right time.

I think age gives you perspective on what truly matters. The health of my loved ones – that’s the one thing that really keeps me up at night. Business concerns are important, of course, but they pale in comparison.

That said, I don’t struggle to fall asleep, but I do wake up at four in the morning with my mind racing. Not in a panicked way, but working through the problems and questions I’m facing. Right now, I’m running a loss-making business with a certain degree of chaos around it. But I have the confidence and experience to believe I can fix it. I didn’t create the problem, but I think I can solve it. So it occupies my thoughts, but it doesn’t keep me awake.

Now, if I were in a situation where I had to lay off half my team, that would be different. That’s the kind of thing that weighs on you. And I know this because I’ve been there before.

Cash flow is everything in business, especially when you’re loss-making or in the early stages. It’s the single most important metric. If you can see a path to having more cash at the end of the period than you do now, you’re in a good place. But if you’re running out and can’t see a way to replenish it, that’s when it’s time to start worrying.

I’ve been through the worst-case scenario before. I ran a business where, at its peak, we had 45 employees. Then things started to go wrong. First, we let 15 people go. Then another 15. Then another seven. Eventually, we were down to eight. I took myself off payroll, paying myself nothing for two years, until eventually, I had to shut the business down. We lost £7 million of other people’s money. It was brutal. Turning good people out of a job, not paying myself – it was stressful. That was sleepless nights.

In business, I don’t think it’s sensible to rely on external people for decisions – they’re rarely close enough to have an informed opinion. Sure, I might talk to family about something, but they don’t know the dynamics, the personalities, or the specifics. If I go home and say, I don’t think Will is doing a good job, they might say, Okay, if you think so, but they don’t know who Will is, what he does, or what “good” looks like in this context. So that rarely helps.

My approach to leadership is collaborative, but ultimately, I run things as a benign dictatorship. I listen to my team, I take in the inputs, but in the end, I make the decision. That’s the job of a CEO. I don’t rely on any one person, but I do have a handful of ex-colleagues and friends whose judgment I trust. If I really need to talk through a problem, I’ll find one of them and force them to listen for eight hours. But those moments are rare, because most tough decisions in business are about people, and it’s hard to talk to one person about another if they don’t know them.

That said, there’s one exception – the board, particularly the chairman. A good chairman is there to offer perspective. If I need to assess a sales director’s performance, I can ask, You’ve seen him in board meetings for two years. He says the numbers are down because of market conditions – I think it’s a capability issue. What do you think? That’s valuable. But even then, you have to be careful. If they give advice you don’t take, what was the point of asking? It’s like shopping with a friend – if they say, That sweater doesn’t suit you, and you buy it anyway, why did you bother asking?

Outside of business, I have a tight-knit group of friends I’ve known for 40 or 50 years. They’ve seen me through different stages of life – successes, failures, fatherhood, career changes. Those are the people I’ll turn to when I need real advice. And it goes both ways. One of my closest friends was playing fast and loose with his taxes years ago. I picked my moment, told him I thought he was mad, and explained why the risk wasn’t worth the reward. He listened, adjusted over time, and is now completely clean. A few years ago, he told me that was the best advice he ever got.

That’s the advantage of long-standing friendships – they allow for honest conversations. When we were 18, we fought like rats in a sack. Now, we tell each other the truth.

The internet gig? That was just wrong time, wrong place. I jumped on a bandwagon that had already left. That falls into the sh*t happens category.

But leaving Hong Kong – that was a mistake of my own making. I thought I’d land on my feet, that I’d walk straight into another big role. It didn’t happen that way. And that miscalculation led me to make a series of not-so-great decisions for quite a long time, including the internet venture. I was constantly running to catch up.

If I’d had the hindsight then, I would’ve used a cricket analogy: Add two wickets to your current score and see if you’re still in a good position. At the time, I thought I was at 160 for one, cruising on a flat pitch, heading for a big win. The reality? The wicket was about to turn, and I was actually 160 for four, chasing a target I might never reach.

That’s the key lesson: always factor in what could go wrong. If you lose your biggest client, if your most important employee quits, if an investor pulls out – are you still in a good place? Can you ride it out?

Same applies personally. If you leave a job, can you go a year without income? If the answer is yes, fine, take the risk. If you’d be broke in two months, you need to rethink.

So my biggest takeaway? Always add a ‘wet weather’ scenario to your current situation. If you can weather the storm, great. If not, adjust your risk.