What are the key takeaways from this The Diary of a CEO episode?

Key insights include: **Corporate apprenticeship over university:** Kilner credits two placement years at Boots — not her degree — as her most formative education. Working across supply chain, legal, finance, and PR while hand-holding entrepreneurs through a retail innovation program taught her how consumer goods actually function end-to-end, skills no classroom replicated.; **Multi-brand portfolio as a startup risk strategy:** Deciem launched 10 brands simultaneously, using a shared in-house ecosystem — manufacturing, comms, R&D — split across brands so each absorbed roughly 10% of overhead costs. This structure allowed rapid, cheap failure cycles. The downside emerged later when The Ordinary dominated revenue and starved the other brands of attention.; **Hire inexperienced people early, deliberately:** Deciem's early team consisted almost entirely of recent graduates with no beauty industry background. This eliminated preconditioned assumptions about how things "should" work, producing unconventional thinking by default rather than by design — a structural advantage that shaped the brand's differentiated market positioning.

What did Nicola Kilner discuss on The Diary of a CEO?

Nicola Kilner, co-CEO of Deciem and The Ordinary, shares how she built a cult-like startup culture from scratch, why running 10 brands simultaneously outperformed focus, and how self-awareness about leadership gaps — not imposter syndrome — drives better business decisions at scale. Key topics include: **Corporate apprenticeship over university:** Kilner credits two placement years at Boots — not her degree — as her most formative education. Working across supply chain, legal, finance, and PR while hand-holding entrepreneurs through a retail innovation program taught her how consumer goods actually function end-to-end, skills no classroom replicated.; **Multi-brand portfolio as a startup risk strategy:** Deciem launched 10 brands simultaneously, using a shared in-house ecosystem — manufacturing, comms, R&D — split across brands so each absorbed roughly 10% of overhead costs. This structure allowed rapid, cheap failure cycles. The downside emerged later when The Ordinary dominated revenue and starved the other brands of attention..

How long is this episode of The Diary of a CEO?

This episode is 32 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

The Diary of a CEO

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

September 25, 2026

32 min episode · 2 min read

Nicola Kilner

Episode

32 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Productivity, Investing

AI-Generated Summary

Published Sep 25, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Corporate apprenticeship over university: Kilner credits two placement years at Boots — not her degree — as her most formative education. Working across supply chain, legal, finance, and PR while hand-holding entrepreneurs through a retail innovation program taught her how consumer goods actually function end-to-end, skills no classroom replicated.
✓Multi-brand portfolio as a startup risk strategy: Deciem launched 10 brands simultaneously, using a shared in-house ecosystem — manufacturing, comms, R&D — split across brands so each absorbed roughly 10% of overhead costs. This structure allowed rapid, cheap failure cycles. The downside emerged later when The Ordinary dominated revenue and starved the other brands of attention.
✓Hire inexperienced people early, deliberately: Deciem's early team consisted almost entirely of recent graduates with no beauty industry background. This eliminated preconditioned assumptions about how things "should" work, producing unconventional thinking by default rather than by design — a structural advantage that shaped the brand's differentiated market positioning.
✓Redefine work-life balance as life-stage balance: Rather than a fixed equilibrium, Kilner frames balance as a shifting ratio across life phases — early career allows full immersion, while parenthood or caregiving demands redistribution. Within Deciem, this translates to team members covering for each other during high-demand personal periods, with the expectation that roles reverse over time.
✓Self-awareness as a leadership tool, not a weakness: When Deciem's growth stalled post-COVID, Kilner brought in a General Manager with operational and scaling expertise rather than defending her position. She now focuses exclusively on brand, culture, and people — areas matching her strengths — while the GM handles supply chain and market expansion, producing measurable organizational improvement within one year.

What It Covers

Nicola Kilner, co-CEO of Deciem and The Ordinary, shares how she built a cult-like startup culture from scratch, why running 10 brands simultaneously outperformed focus, and how self-awareness about leadership gaps — not imposter syndrome — drives better business decisions at scale.

Key Questions Answered

•Corporate apprenticeship over university: Kilner credits two placement years at Boots — not her degree — as her most formative education. Working across supply chain, legal, finance, and PR while hand-holding entrepreneurs through a retail innovation program taught her how consumer goods actually function end-to-end, skills no classroom replicated.
•Multi-brand portfolio as a startup risk strategy: Deciem launched 10 brands simultaneously, using a shared in-house ecosystem — manufacturing, comms, R&D — split across brands so each absorbed roughly 10% of overhead costs. This structure allowed rapid, cheap failure cycles. The downside emerged later when The Ordinary dominated revenue and starved the other brands of attention.
•Hire inexperienced people early, deliberately: Deciem's early team consisted almost entirely of recent graduates with no beauty industry background. This eliminated preconditioned assumptions about how things "should" work, producing unconventional thinking by default rather than by design — a structural advantage that shaped the brand's differentiated market positioning.
•Redefine work-life balance as life-stage balance: Rather than a fixed equilibrium, Kilner frames balance as a shifting ratio across life phases — early career allows full immersion, while parenthood or caregiving demands redistribution. Within Deciem, this translates to team members covering for each other during high-demand personal periods, with the expectation that roles reverse over time.
•Self-awareness as a leadership tool, not a weakness: When Deciem's growth stalled post-COVID, Kilner brought in a General Manager with operational and scaling expertise rather than defending her position. She now focuses exclusively on brand, culture, and people — areas matching her strengths — while the GM handles supply chain and market expansion, producing measurable organizational improvement within one year.

Notable Moment

When Deciem's numbers declined post-COVID, Kilner repeatedly offered her resignation to the board, openly stating she lacked the financial and operational skills the company needed at that scale — a move her team later described as self-awareness rather than weakness.

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Episode Transcript

When I sit down with CEOs, founders and working parents on this podcast, one thing that comes up again and again is the more you have to juggle, the more important it is that home and shopping for it isn't adding to that load. This moment's episode is sponsored by Wayfair, who understand that the spaces around us should support how we live. Here is Nicola Kilner talking about some of the systems that she's built to make work and home fit together better. What's your... opinion now on university when your children get to that age where they're about to make that decision you've got two young children when they get to 18 years old and if they said mommy i want to be entrepreneur like you what advice would you give them based on your experience so i actually would always probably recommend doing a few years in a corporate because i have to say at boots i learned so much you know, you learn the things that they do really well. You learn the things that they do, not necessarily wrong, but just the drawbacks of being such a big organization. So I think, you know, more than going to university, like those two, the two placement years I did at Boots, I learned incredibly so much. And depending on the kind of person you are, you know, if you go to a big corporate, it's so difficult to impact the culture there because there's just so many people, there's so much history. And if you are someone who's kind of got this strong drive to make a change, then, you know, entrepreneurship, I think, is just an incredible area. And even if it's not your idea, but going to join a startup, it's just incredible energy. I mean, it just would always be what I would recommend. At that point, if there was a key skill or a key set of skills that you took from your time working in a corporate app boots that then proved to be incredibly valuable as you went on, What were those skills? So when I graduated, I then stayed on and I was an assistant buyer to begin with, and then I got promoted to be a buying manager for them, which was really around relationships. It was about collaboration. It was about looking around the world, seeing new technologies, finding the innovation, new brands, and then really hand-holding those, which mainly were entrepreneurs, to come into Boots to actually show them, look, this is how we could launch. You know, we had a stand, it was called Latest Spines. We would launch a new innovation for a period of three months as a trial to see if it would work. Would Boots consumers like this? If it did, they would get a listing with Boots kind of long term. And that just really suited my skill set because it was a very entrepreneurial role. Because actually, you know, …

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