Garden of Eden

Today, the Eden Project is admired and respected throughout the world, and featured at number seven in the Top 10 attractions last year in the UK – no mean feat, considering the majority of attractions are long established London landmarks, and London is a five-hour drive from Eden. The Eden Project describes itself as an environmental education centre, and it walks the walk when it comes to its eco credentials. In May, for example, it entered into a partnership arrangement with EGS Energy to establish a geothermal system power plant from which Eden can take the electricity and heat to power its vast site.

Co-founder and CEO Tim Smit wowed the audience at the recent IoD UK annual convention in the Royal Albert Hall, and was singled out by many fellow attendees as their star speaker, despite stiff competition that included the impressive Michael Dell and the highly entertaining Boris Johnson. He began by quipping with obvious relish that his credibility might be in question, as two years previously the Royal Bank of Scotland had asked the Eden Project to stop banking with them “because we were too risky”. It drew loud laughter from the hundreds gathered – bankers among them.

In his shirtsleeves, a laid-back Smit recounted how he had begun life as an archaeologist and anthropologist, turning to the music business when he discovered “you could not make any money out of that”, only to discover thatsuccess was not all it was cracked up to be. In 1981 he had a life-changing moment, when he was driving down the Champs Élysées in a chauffeur-driven limo, and his No 1 hit record in France, Midnight Blue, was playing on the radio.

“It was the biggest selling record in French history at that time, and the record that was going to knock it off the top spot was also written by me – and I burst into tears. I had never felt so miserable in my entire life, and I decided then I would give up the music industry. Very often people make a terrible mistake in their life. They have a vision of what success is for them. Then you suddenly have this success and you are wondering ‘Why does it not feel great? Why do I not feel changed?’”

It was the turning point for Smit. “Part of the problem is when you are 19 and idealistic you dream that you will be given a challenge that stretches every fibre of your being and makes you really grow, and what then happens is that the demands of the slates on the roof and everything else turn you into a different person. Eventually you have to look at yourself in the mirror, as I did, and say ‘I will end up 70 if I am lucky enough to get there, and I will not have done any of these things’.

On quitting the music business, Smit bought a house in Cornwall on a whim, and ended up breeding rare pigs. Then the opportunity arose to completely revamp a neglected but beautiful old estate, Heligan. “It felt like the Mary Celeste. I just fell hopelessly in love with it and decided I would restore it, which would have been really sensible if I had known anything about plants. I didn’t.

“However, that was one of my great road to Damascus moments, that people who do stuff like that should not know about plants because then they only concentrate on plants. What I had fallen in love with was the idea that this was a stage on which people had lived their lives for hundreds of years, and I loved it. I had learned from the music industry that if you personally love something there will be millions of other people who love it too. The issue is simply whether they will hear about it, so it is really a marketing issue.”

The project was a major success. “It is about trusting your instincts, and it is also about making sure you kill people who are negative – it is! You know all those f***ers in your companies who tell you that ‘It can’t be done, it won’t be done’ and so on? Kill negative people, because they get rid of your dreams and if you do not have your dreams, you are dead.” We were reasonably sure Smit didn’t mean this literally.

Smit believes opportunities come from where you least expect them, and he has a principle which he follows religiously, which is to accept every third invitation he receives – unless it coincides with a family occasion. “You look at the great inventions, the great companies that are built, they are never built by people who met people they were meant to meet; they are always built by people who met people they did not know they were meant to meet.”

As a result he has ended up judging dog shows and opening the wing of an old people’s home – even judging the West of England Orchid Society annual prizegiving. “But by going to all these things you meet these strange people and your horizons are always being opened. You build up this network of bizarre people, because great things come from having your eyes opened to weird stuff.”

As Heligan was nearing completion – renamed The Lost Gardens of Heligan – the BBC aired a documentary on the project. “The public poured in. They poured in because the BBC forgot to mention at the end of the documentary that we were not open yet.”

Not one to miss an opportunity, these early visitors were not turned away. “Eventually my builder ripped the toilet out of the Portaloo and we started charging people, and then they would come in and say ‘What the hell is up there?’, and I would say ‘No idea mate, but here’s a machete, why don’t you go and find out?’ So they were paying to come in and then doing the work.” The project was a huge success.

This success led to the idea of the Eden Project. “Everyone says how visionary it is, but actually it is not very visionary,” says Smit. “I doubt there is a single person in this audience who at the age of 12 did not dream of building a mad Ludwig castle or a fantastic dam or something like that. The bit I suppose that could be construed as visionary was that we believed that we could persuade 300-odd people who are professionally trained to say the word ‘No’, to say ‘Yes’. Part of that is about understanding that if you treat people as corporations or the institutions they represent, you are on to a complete loser.”

“The modern world often blinds us to the fact that we are people, that if you stop categorising people and remember their name and their family and what inspires them, you can have a conversation in which you find they have similar dreams.

“I believe in the Tinkerbell theory. I really do,” continued Smit. “If you get three or four people to believe in something, it will happen. I also believe in last man standing, which is that if you have a certain amount of charm and people know you will not go away, they will eventually pay you large sums of money to do so.

“And you should never pretend to know what you do not know, because people are fantastically generous if you admit your ignorance, and they love pricking your bubble if you pretend to know more than you do.”

Smit believes the reason The Eden Project was built at all was because he and his co-founders threw themselves on the mercy of other people. “When we came up with the idea, people said to me ‘Tim, you are a little guy. This is £135m, construction, big grey people that sweat a lot. It won’t work. Your reputation will be in tatters, it will be over budget and it will be late’. It is amazing, only your children can do this. I went home and my eldest son said ‘But Dad, you haven’t got a reputation’. Somehow you need that!”

Smit and his team then went about talking to designers and construction companies with characteristic originality. They asked them, if they were starting a project like this and wanted to build it on time and on budget, what would they do.

“They asked ‘Are we allowed to make a profit?’, and we said ‘Yes’, and they said ‘Great’. We then did something that is unique, and which I do not think has been done for the last 100 years. We did a deal where we all took equal responsibility on building the project.”

Eden was built on time and on budget and “without a single row”. It opened on 15 May 2000 for an exhibition called The Big Build, where Smit copied what happened at Heligan by opening before completion.

“We had 600,000-odd people piled into the place to watch people doing the construction wearing hard hats,” says Smit. “It was terrific – the hard hats, the yellow jackets, bacon butties and all the rest of it. We knew it would be a success but the spirit behind it was about people. For example the ‘celebrity’ who opened it was Jerry O’Leary, the site manager, without whom it could not have been built, and it just felt right.

“One of the things I have learned about doing Eden is that if you treat people and work with people in the way that you would in your own home, things work very differently than if you do it with a series of third-party edicts.

“We run Eden in a very different way,” says Smit. “We have had 11 million visitors, we have put £900m-odd into the local economy. We are not simply a visitor attraction, we like to name ourselves the world’s first rock-’n’-roll scientific foundation because we are engaged in serious stuff. We have over 2,000 local suppliers, and we are very political. We insist on local supply if we can have it, even if it is more expensive than we could find somewhere else. Why? Because if you want your neighbours to look after you, you should look after them.”

All senior staff at Eden have to do what are called ‘Tricky Days’. “For 12 days of the year everybody has to go into a hat to work on the front line as troops, and you just have to work wherever you come out of the hat. You could end up having to take nappies out of U-bends if you are unlucky, or working on the ice cream stand and discovering all the stuff that bosses should learn, that the ice cream comes out at two degrees too cold and the poor kids who are working it are straining their wrists. It gives you respect for the people on the front line.”

And of what is Smit most proud? He recounts a time in 2003 when Eden was facing into a difficult winter with high costs, and the prospect of having to lay off 200 people. Characteristically Smit and Co. took a gamble, and put these people to work on building the biggest outdoor ice rink in Europe. “If it had not been successful we would have gone bust, but it was fantastically successful, so we had to lay off nobody – nobody. We are very, very proud of that. So many people talk about ‘Our people are our greatest asset’ but who are the first to go then? It is true, isn’t it?”

Smit sees himself as a social entrepreneur, and he is frustrated with the ‘hippy’ tag this sometimes gets saddled with. “Actually one of the problems we are all facing, all of us, including me – I am a capitalist – is that we treat the models we have been handed down in business, the public limited companies bit, as if they were tablets of stone given to Moses himself. We do not look at them bravely as if we could reform these things into something more suited to the coming times. What we need today are models that say ‘Profit is good but let’s see whether we can have a wider stakeholder benefit too’.”

I left the hall feeling Smit may well have created some converts.

This article first appeared in Irish Director magazine