Lara Morgan, founder of Pacific Direct
Story
Lara Morgan: if you don't ask, you don't get, from a granny flat in Bedford to a £20 million exit
Lara Morgan, founder of Pacific Direct
In 1991 there were no jobs, so Lara Morgan made one out of sewing kits and shower caps, a hundred calls before she would let herself have a drink, and a granny flat in Bedford. In conversation with Aleksandra King on The BEYOND Podcast, she explains the discipline that built Pacific Direct and sold it for £20 million.
Lara MorganSerial entrepreneur and wellness brand investor, founder of Pacific Direct
Aleksandra KingPodcast Host and Producer, The BEYOND Podcast- Source
- The BEYOND Podcast, hosted by Aleksandra King, with guest Lara Morgan
Takeaways
- Two ears, one mouthHer first sales job taught her to listen twice as much as she talks, and she says a seller who listens for what the customer wants and adds value authentically will never fail.
- Make a jobIn 1991 there were no jobs, so she made one, selling sewing kits and shower caps made in China and taking them to the Dorchester on her grandmother's advice.
- A hundred calls before a drinkThe rule she set herself in a cold borrowed office could mean a hundred rejections before mid-morning, and the first year's business came to £108,000.
- Ask, get three quotes, meet three stylesFor any decision she does not know how to make, she meets three people with three styles and takes the best of each. She found her first lawyer that way more than 30 years ago.
- Walk the wallThe exercise she learnt at Stanford means writing the five-year goal on the wall and working backwards with the whole team, because nobody scales a business alone.
- If you don't like the relentless, get a bloody jobA product business needs stock, newness and money to grow, and she treats the relentlessness as the price of running one.
Lara Morgan, founder of Pacific Direct, in hotel supplies, told podcast host Aleksandra King on The BEYOND Podcast about building and selling a business. Lara Morgan sold Pacific Direct, the hotel supply business she owned 99% of, for £20 million, and on The BEYOND Podcast she still refuses to call herself successful. She tells Aleksandra King that she is doing the best she can. She gives the credit to an international upbringing and to parents who were determined she would learn that hard work pays off.
That lesson was tested while she was still at school. Her father took a long time to go bankrupt, and through it her parents kept her at a Scottish boarding school, with her grandparents and then a bursary paying the fees. When the money ran out she was paying them rent two weeks after her A levels. Sports science at Loughborough was out of reach, so she went to work, and at 18 she was selling baby food in Hong Kong.
What lifts the conversation above a founder's story is the method she keeps coming back to. She reduces it to a handful of rules she still lives by. She listens twice as much as she talks, makes a hundred calls before a drink, takes three quotes before any decision and plans on a wall with the whole team. The shortest of them, the one the host quotes back to her within the first three minutes, is simply to ask.
Why does Lara Morgan refuse to call herself successful?
Aleksandra King opens with the question the episode is built on, why Morgan has been successful, and Morgan's humility, as she calls it, kicks in at once. She does not see herself as successful, only as someone doing the best she can, with no fluffiness and no claim to perfection. She gives the credit for the exit to the people who helped her grow a global hotel supply company.
I sold a business for 20 million quid that I owned 99% of.
Lara MorganThe upbringing she credits for that outlook was far from comfortable. Her father had left a good salary at a big company to build a computer hardware sales business in Asia, and from the age of about 12 the family knew there was nothing extra. Her parents chose to keep her in education anyway, at a Scottish boarding school among children of immense wealth, with the fees paid by her grandparents and then by a bursary.
I think we need to learn that there are resilience things that come through the negatives.
Her father went bankrupt just as she finished her A levels. Loughborough and sports science were out of reach, so she found a job, paid the bills and was paying rent back to her parents within a fortnight. She tells it without complaint and will not have the stress of that childhood counted as a negative, because for her it was what motivated her.
What did selling baby food teach her about selling anything?
Her first proper sales job was in Hong Kong at 18, straight out of school. Her boss, the man who ran the company, handed her a book and told her to sell to the top 500 companies in it. She shook in their receptions, physically afraid, until a rule she still uses got her through.
Two ears, one mouth.
If you listen to what the customer wants, and you are genuinely and authentically looking to add value, you'll never fail.
A baby food brand gave her the proof of that rule. Edward Keller wanted to sell more tins of it, and Morgan, who had no idea about babies and no interest in them, listened first and then suggested adding a bib or a mat. Common sense is not rocket science, she says, but it takes the nerve to speak up as well as the patience to listen, and her definition of selling grows out of that pairing.
It's not about a push. It's about a relationship.
Selling, in her account, means standing in the other person's shoes, understanding their goals and doing their job well by smoothing their path, and anyone who does that is a salesperson. Most of what follows in the episode is that principle tested under pressure.
From the recording
How do you start a business when there are no jobs?
Pacific Direct began in 1991, out of necessity rather than a plan, in a year with no jobs to be had.
There were no jobs. I had to make a job.
The job she made was selling sewing kits and shower caps made in China. She did not particularly want to sell them, but they were a way to test the market. On her grandmother's strategic advice she took them to the Dorchester, expecting to be off to the races, and found that the buyers thought in pence (20p, she says, before correcting herself to 18.9p).
What followed is the discipline the episode is remembered for, a target she set herself in a cold borrowed office.
I wouldn't have a drink until I'd made 100 calls, which might mean I'd been rejected 100 times before I got a drink in the morning.
It was miserable, and she counts that misery among the things that make a person. Her first year brought £108,000 of business, and the homes followed the numbers. A granny flat in Bedford gave way to a semi, a thatched cottage, a rectory and finally a manor. The manor came after a friend rang to say she was not going to buy a castle. She calls them stepping stones, and the family has since sold the unbelievable home at the end of the chain.
Why is momentum never pure?
Morgan's newer businesses run on the same relentlessness, and she is candid about what interrupts it. KitBricks, the kit bag brand engineered by Alastair, survived COVID and has just had its best year, with race series in the States among its customers, and even a best year brings its interruptions.
Momentum isn't a pure sport.
This year they have included a quality problem, a member of staff who is unwell and a colleague's horrendous riding accident at Christmas. The worst moment at Pacific Direct taught the same lesson on a larger scale, when September the 11th emptied the hotels she supplied. At one point she put the house up for six months and told her husband only once the six months had passed, so he never knew it had been on the line.
If you are surviving and keeping the lights on, you will thrive, because you're years ahead of the person that's still a startup.
Morgan now passes the same advice to a coffee shop owner cutting overheads across a number of places in London, on the grounds that a business still trading has survived and should hang in.
From the recording
Transcript
Lara Morgan: I remember when I interviewed my lawyers. I went to meet three different lawyers. This is, by the way, my random approach to everything that isn't so random. Ask, get three quotes, meet three styles, and then make good decisions, and sometimes combine all the learnings. Lara Morgan: And Nick Davis, who was my first accountant, was just thoroughly good; I liked his style and had a gut feel about him. No, he wasn't an accountant, he was a lawyer. And I still have a lawyer from that original relationship, over 30, nearly 40 years ago.
Listen
Lara Morgan: Building Pacific Direct to a £20M Exit
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Why get three quotes, and why walk the wall?
Her method for any decision she does not know how to make is the one that found her first lawyer. She met three, an approach she describes as random in a way that is not random at all.
Meet three styles, and then make good decisions, and sometimes combine all the learnings.
Nick Davis was chosen on gut feel and is still her lawyer more than 30 years later. Her rule about asking for what she wants comes from the same instinct. King quoted it back to her in the first minutes, and Morgan states it in full after King describes how much she learnt from her own early rejections.
If you don't ask, you don't get.
Her planning follows an exercise she learnt at Stanford and calls walking the wall. The team writes down where the business should be in five years and asks what has to happen to get there. Then it chunks the work into periods of time and puts it all on large sheets of paper together. Nobody does it alone, and she argues that the team's reward should be a share of what it builds.
You get your team to walk the wall with you.
Everybody should share in the profit pot.
What does she invest in now, and why?
Morgan now invests in products, and she describes the portfolio as the things that keep her going. There is a mask company that helps her sleep, a fragrance company that sets her mind for the day, a yoga company, a kit bag company and an outdoor coat. All of it, she says, serves one end goal, to die ungracefully at 127 having squeezed the most out of life.
The world doesn't need more bags, but it needs better bags that last much longer.
Better and different is her test, and she applies it to her own record. The mini shampoos and shower gels that made her money came from a time when nobody knew as much, and sustainability is now part of the test. Scentered, the scent brand, is her example of pushing water uphill as Henry Ford did with the motor car, building a product before people know they want it. Scentered named its balm a pocket rocket and then made too big for a pocket, a daft mistake in her words, though well meant and intelligently applied.
You will have none of those things if you don't see and gain a return on your invested effort.
What she means by a return on effort is resilience, persistence and determination. She sets goals above average and aims for the moon, and she came 10th in the world in triathlon. In her house, the family joke goes, anyone outside the top three sleeps in the tree house.
Watch the full episode
Watch the full episode on YouTube (opens in a new tab): Lara Morgan on The BEYOND Podcast · the episode page on the show’s site (opens in a new tab)
Why are British businesses shy of putting themselves out there?
The Savlon story is the one the host lifts from a single deal to a point about the whole country. David Tyler, a buyer, told Morgan her prices were too high to survive a procurement meeting. She sent him a tube of Savlon with a note saying she could help with the beating but not with the price, because she had met his brief. Eleven years later he gave her the business, and he still had the tube.
Why be boring?
King answers with a claim of her own, the one place in the episode where the host states a proposition instead of asking a question. Britain, she says, has a habit other markets do not share.
There is this thing about: "Ooh, you shouldn't really put yourself out there too much."
Aleksandra KingShe sees it in the clients of her marketing business, who grow shy about being seen. Morgan's answer is that everyone gets shy and that she has her own sweaty moments. King adds what the shyness costs, with everyone living in fear and convinced they cannot do this or take that risk.
What message does she leave?
Asked what she would say to people in jobs they dislike and to people thinking about starting a business, Morgan does not soften it. Anyone stuck in a job they do not like, she says, should stop whingeing and move.
What are you waiting for? What's the worst thing that can happen? Don't live in a world of regret.
To anyone afraid to scale, she says that nobody can do it alone, that there are only 24 hours in the day and that consultants had better find a different way because of AI. She is just as firm about looking after the finances and knowing the numbers behind them. Her own cashflow can run tight enough that she begs the odd supplier for breathing space, and she ducks and dives to find a way through.
Know your numbers.
A product business needs more stock, different colours and constant newness, and she calls it relentless before giving the line that ends her advice.
If you don't like the relentless, get a bloody job.
She closes on the sales opportunity in her own appearance, a discount code on her website, and on rewarding effort with a celebration. In the early days, when she had no beans to rub together, the reward was a leg wax. Her point is that a reward can start small and that rest matters as much as the work.
From the recording
About Lara Morgan
Lara Morgan is a serial entrepreneur and wellness brand investor and the founder of Pacific Direct, the hotel supply company she started in 1991 in a granny flat in Bedford. She sold it for £20 million, owning 99% of it, and has since invested in a portfolio of products, among them Scentered and KitBricks.
A former salesperson in Hong Kong who came 10th in the world in triathlon, she speaks about selling, goal setting and resilience. Her affiliation with Pacific Direct is self-stated in the record and awaits the subject's own verification.
Pacific Direct is the hotel supply company Morgan founded in 1991 and built from a granny flat in Bedford into a global business, which she sold for £20 million. The calls, the rejections and the rules in this conversation are its founding method.
The BEYOND Podcast and Aleksandra King
The BEYOND Podcast is a video interview podcast hosted and produced by Aleksandra King. The full episode is on YouTube and Spotify, and the show's own site carries the episode page.
King's method is to ask the plain question and hold it. She asks how watching a parent go bankrupt did not put Morgan off business, what the worst moment was and what message she would leave. King also makes the episode's one claim of her own, that a particularly British reticence about self-promotion holds businesses back, and Morgan takes it up.
Aleksandra King, host and producer of The BEYOND Podcast and co-author, with Elliott King (opens in a new tab), of Marketing Wins (opens in a new tab).
Cite this page “Lara Morgan: if you don't ask, you don't get, from a granny flat in Bedford to a £20 million exit”. Lara Morgan, founder of Pacific Direct, in conversation with Aleksandra King, The BEYOND Podcast, 17 June 2026. Sourced.media. https://sourced.media/the-beyond-podcast/lara-morgan/story/ (permanent identifier https://sourced.media/id/C_NN1A6DB46R)
Lara MorganGuest
Aleksandra KingHost
