BOSH!’s Challenger Brand Playbook: Founders Henry Firth & Ian Theasby

16:02Ian Theasby:And then how did you decide which SKUs to launch? and then how many stores have you got? Bring us through that journey because I think those are decisions that founders who are about to roll out nationally are going to be asking themselves, you know. How did you decide, for example, pizza and curry?

16:16Henry Firth:One of the useful ways to build a range or to build a new business really is to take it back to first principles. And we can all get a bit lost in data if we're trying to find the right niche of a niche using information that we've found online. The first principles approach that we took is this food should exist and should be on shelves. Our meals are completely natural. There's no additives. There's no artificial ingredients. They're just made with plants. It's like you made it in your own kitchen. It's like, you know, if you take a Tupperware to work the next day after you cooked the night before, that's what our meals are like.

16:52Henry Firth:They're kept safe because they're temperature controlled through the manufacturing process, but there's nothing nasty in there. High in fibre, high plant points, and a source of protein. so just generally it's good food that should exist at an affordable price so that first principles approach got us to that concept of the meals the range was fairly straightforward to put together because we've made hundreds if not thousands of recipes so we looked at our best performing recipes and then pizza is in the mix as well it's it goes next to our meals both in the chilled category and we've got some additional products also in chilled as far as we're concerned because we've sold one and a half million cookbooks.

17:32Henry Firth:We have the right to have a broad range across the supermarket. So that's what we're trying to build.

17:38Ian Theasby:That's probably something that we haven't really spent enough time on. So talk us back to 2016. We're doing this kind of in a roundabout, upside down way, but that's OK. Conversations can be like that.

17:52Ian Theasby:If this episode is inspiring you to think about new ways that you can drive growth for your business, don't forget to click follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app and even leave a review your small gesture has a big impact on me and my business and will be truly appreciated how did you guys know to start making videos in 2016 and why were you into plant-based cooking and then how did you decide to do cookbooks and like talk us quickly through that so the plant-based

18:19Henry Firth:food thing happened um off the back of a news resolution a new year's resolution to eat less meat or a trial of vegetarianism. Now, when you have grown up eating basically meat and two veg for every single meal, or certainly every evening meal, adopting a vegetarian diet is actually very difficult. And if you want to sort of see through a challenge, you need to learn about why you're doing it. So we watched a film called Cowspiracy. And the Cowspiracy film opened our eyes to just how irresponsible large-scale animal agriculture is. So we doubled down on vegetarianism by eating a solely plant-based diet.

19:02Henry Firth:Now, the plant-based diet, it was a bit of a revelation, really, because both of us felt absolutely fantastic. We lost weight, our hair got thicker, our skin got clearer, we had better sustained energy throughout the day, and we were sleeping better and waking up fresher. There was a whole host of benefits that we didn't expect that we received from eating plant-based. And over the course of a year of being plant-based, Henry and I were living together at the time, cooking food for one another. We had developed some skills and some techniques to make vegetables really, really tasty. And what was lacking in the market at that time was food that blokes would appreciate.

19:39Henry Firth:What we started to do was thinking, right, we've got this skill set here. We've got these delicious recipes we've done. Let's share them with the world and build a business off the back of it. So we started filming ourselves cooking food. We put the first video out on the 16th of June 2016 and within one month we had 100 ,000 people following us on Facebook which was the proof point that what we were providing people with was something that they were really appreciating and could take value from. So over the course of the next few months we just continued to churn out recipes. The channels kept on growing and after about a year of doing that, somebody suggested, have you ever considered writing a cookbook?

20:20Henry Firth:So we thought, well, maybe we should consider that because a few of the people had asked us in the comment sections and in our message box, are you ever going to do a cookbook? We put together a world-class book proposal, which was largely put together by Henry, who had raised money into a business that we mentioned previously. That went out to eight different publishers, eight different publishers came back to us and said we want this so we had a bit of a bidding war and we signed a book contract with harper collins and the book contract led to our first cookbook which is now the biggest selling plant-based cookbook of all time from then we've just done more books we've carried on putting valuable content into people's social media feeds off the back of that we've got a bit of positive notoriety in mainstream media we hosted the world's first plant-based cookbook.

21:10Henry Firth:We've been on TV show. My bad. We've cooked food on American TV and we've done it proudly. We can say we've done it because we want to put more plants on plates because we believe it is the best thing for people to do to reduce their carbon footprint and improve their own personal health.

21:29Ian Theasby:So how big is the Bosch food business going to get then? Because I can imagine you could have Bosch anything, right? You could be across any category in all the retailers, on Deliveroo, you name it. I mean, the sky's the limit in terms of how stretchy this proposition is, right?

21:46Henry Firth:Yes. Yes, hopefully. As Ian mentioned, these videos have got a lot of views. And to date, it's about 4 billion views. So that's a lot of people that have seen our videos. And our most recently measured UK brand awareness was 38%. That's incredible. So that's prompted brand awareness. and in fact the word boss just keeps going around social media even unrelated to us which is great so there's a lot of awareness out there and i would say that until about a year ago when we started working on this range we haven't had the right range in front of people the sky is the limit hopefully i hope in the next year or two will be up to eight figures in terms of sales which is great the team will keep it lean and we will just continue to make products that we believe in.

22:34Henry Firth:As Ian mentioned, the presentation for that book was a really good presentation. Making strong presentations and just crafting good experiences for people, whether they're consumers in terms of food and video, or whether they're customers in terms of presentations and being a good supplier. Creating good experiences is core to what we do. It's one of the things we believe in. Like I say, I believe we can be in a number of different places in the supermarket. We're already in bakery, dried goods, ambience, chilled, hopefully soon frozen. More breadth is what we're looking for, as well as more scale.

23:10Ian Theasby:Obviously, you already had a marketing and social media team, I presume. Who is dedicated to, or what roles are dedicated to the retail and the manufacturing and retail side of things?

23:21Henry Firth:That's correct, yeah. So we've got a head of retail sales, who's got 25 years experience in the retail industries. We've got a head of operations who is very very detail oriented but he actually has been with us for about five years and he didn't have massive experience in ops but what we have done is we've got a few contractors in to learn from and to build our core skill set with we've got a lady that we used to work with previously who's got 20 years in ready meals we're working with her so our team is really diverse It's got a great skill set and we've got a lovely atmosphere with everyone working towards this common goal of putting more plants on plates.

24:04Henry Firth:It's a good place to work right now, Bosch.

24:06Ian Theasby:That sounds fab. And how many Tesco stores are you in?

24:09Henry Firth:About three quarters of the super stores we're in. So a pretty big launch. Yeah, look, it was a huge project to get live. We did so in record time. So we already had some concepts that we'd been working on. But from the moment we had an inkling there was an opportunity to build something together, we pulled it all together from idea until launch in nine months, which was very fast. And I think everyone appreciated having a very clear goal and a clear target to deliver to. And the whole team really operated with grit, pulled together and achieved great things.

24:49Ian Theasby:So how do you guys split your roles then? Who looks after what?

24:53Henry Firth:We've evolved this as the business has grown. Obviously, when we were more just a social media business with a bit of product licensing, Ian did more of the food and more of the social media. And I did more of the finance and commercial and sales. Now that we're a bigger business, Ian acts more, Ian basically runs the whole team, day-to-day operations, acts like a managing director. and I tend to work on investment, raising, finance, strategy, product strategy, moving forwards. The CEO role, really.

25:25Ian Theasby:This is a good question. So you know how it takes a humongous amount of day-to-day time to run a funding raise, right? Raise and manage investors. Given that you guys have each other and you've been able to split that, can you imagine being able to manage the business and raising money? Because a lot of people try and do that and then one or the other suffers.

25:49Henry Firth:As an individual, do you mean? Just as a sole founder?

25:52Ian Theasby:Yeah, like I suppose the point is that you guys are in the lucky position that you ended up being co-founders and you ended up having a business that built over time and had enough, I suppose, cash flow to allow you both to split your roles so that one person's looking after the day-to-day and managing the team and one person's doing the finance and the fundraising and the strategic stuff. And that's the way probably it should be for everybody because an individual founder on their own trying to do both is incredibly difficult. So my question was, can you imagine from your position, which is a great position to be in, actually having to do both, do you think it would be possible from your perspective looking inwards?

26:28Henry Firth:I think that it is very difficult to build a business as a sole founder, you know, and I did it before, but obviously Ian joined me very, what was it about? Early on. It was very early on. Yeah. But, but I was in technically a sole founder, although Ian was like, you know, very, very high up in the business. And I would not advise anybody to be a sole founder. I think one of the first things a business founder should do is find a co-founder, because ultimately you're trying to sell stuff to people. And if you can't sell your idea to another person who is ambitious, then maybe that's a sign that the idea isn't strong enough.

27:07And with a co-founder, you can share the load, you can have strategic discussions,

27:14Henry Firth:you act as kind of support for each other as well. I just think it's very difficult to do it alone. And I'd recommend anyone find a co-founder. But do be careful about who that co-founder is, because it is like a marriage. If you find the wrong person, it can destroy your entire business. and one of the ways to find the right co-founder is to become the right co-founder and what that means is working on yourself as well as working on your relationship with your co-founder so that you don't find that arguments or flare-ups become breakups.

27:46Ian Theasby:God just so much wisdom I'm loving this do you guys have a coach that you see together or a therapist that you see together?

27:54Henry Firth:I'm doing some coaching in a kind of on and off way with a very talented leadership coach who is building an AI powered coaching platform. I've been using AI creatively to do more or less the same sort of thing. ChatGBT when you use it creatively can act as a fantastic life coach, a fantastic work coach, a relationship coach. The technique for anybody listening would be just what I tend to do is on my walk to work I pull out my phone and I leave myself a voice note then I transcribe that voice note and I put that transcription into ChatGPT and ask it to give me world-class feedback and it's actually been very helpful.

28:36Ian Theasby:That sounds brill. I have a certification in executive coaching I've been doing it for a very long number of years now and one of the things that I would suggest that a great coach can do though is ask the right questions that you may never think to ask yourself and I wonder if with the ChatGBT, there's a little bit of you're only asking it about parts of the quadrant on that four quadrant grid that you know you don't know, but you might never be asking it about the bits that you don't know you don't know. It's a great tool, absolutely. But I do think it's really worthwhile everybody who's in a co-founder relationship and can afford to do it at a certain point in their journey, having a joint coach.

29:16Ian Theasby:I know that the Perfect TED founders have a joint coach. Midday Squares spoke recently on the podcast about having a joint coach and making sure that they're doing that every week together, at least for a period of time, to really get it out on the table to talk about their relationship, how they work together, what's working, what isn't working, as well as, of course, doing your walk-to-work stuff. When I'm walking the dog, I speak to ChatGBT, actually directly into the transcribe button on ChatGBT, and she speaks back to me.

29:44Henry Firth:I try and speak into ChatGBT directly, but then it comes back as Welsh.

29:48Ian Theasby:That is so funny.

29:49Henry Firth:Bizarre. But, you know, five minutes of, you know, heartfelt chat into chat CPT and it comes up as Welsh. Crazy.

29:57Ian Theasby:Could you say to it, and when you respond to this, I want you to respond in English, please.

30:02Henry Firth:I probably could do that. Yes, I could definitely do that.

30:06Ian Theasby:So, Henry, we started this by saying that we didn't realise that we were, you were in our NextGen CPG WhatsApp group, which is something I set up purely because that we're about to enter or we're already in without realising it. in this new age of what consumer packaged goods is going to be like as a founder, as a senior team, in terms of how we manage our employees, how we engage with our consumers, how we sell. And strategy stays strategy, right? You know, it doesn't change. Where do we want to be in the future? Where are we going to play? How are we going to win? What do we need in order to get there?

30:40Ian Theasby:But in each of those strategic questions, we have a new resource, a new context and a new resource. And it's a bit like, don't mean to be loose almost when I use global warming as an example, but it's a bit like climate change, right? You don't like crank up the heating and do all the things that you used to do in a world where climate's getting hotter. And as we move into a totally new era where AI is everywhere, we as founders need to do different things, manage our teams in a different way, engage with consumers and shoppers in different ways, or at least have policies and decisions in terms of how we're using it.

31:12Ian Theasby:How are you guys making decisions in the business and about AI in terms of how you recruit consumers, how you sell products, how you manage employees, what's changing for you? Or is it just this big, cloudy, starting to take shape in your head piece, which it is for me, by the way, which is why I set up the group.

31:30Henry Firth:I think it's probably that big, cloudy, taking shape in our heads thing for everyone in the world.

31:37Ian Theasby:Yeah.

31:37Henry Firth:But I think it's just how far along that process are you? We are certainly taking advantage of it in order to keep our team lean because we can all do so much more now we can do so much more so much faster so whether it's you know the obvious ai tools or having people use the ai embedded in other tools like design software or anything else like that we're trying to encourage everybody to use it as much as they can we're doing training sessions internally as a general rule for us in our business we want people who operate with grit that's important but we also want people who are in learning mode and take feedback and give feedback well.

32:19Henry Firth:And I think there are some people out there still who aren't embracing AI, but that is an indication that they're not in learning mode. And I think they will be at risk of getting left behind. We've had a few of them in the business and they're not here anymore. So I think it's important that people stay in learning mode and what a wonderful opportunity to learn. And I think that computers and large language models can teach us better ways to operate ourselves. Because as humans, we have the problem of being inconsistent and we also have the problem of being emotional and letting things like motivation or emotion or tiredness or energy can dictate how we move through the world.

32:59Henry Firth:And actually, we work better when we're just a bit more consistent. and I think AI can teach us to be more consistent and to have our own operating systems that we use to run our lives. So we're kind of letting AI create us to be better versions of ourselves, which I think is a very exciting place to be. So if people aren't having deep and meaningful conversations with these LLMs, I would say you should be.

33:24Ian Theasby:I was saying to myself last night as I was on my dog walk, what about the other side of it? You know, we're all very excited about how it's going to help us in our lives, in our work lives, help us to be more efficient, effective, learn. But what about the sustainability aspect? What about the privacy aspect? What about the data? Like who owns all the data? Who owns all the insight? I'm not going to even bring that up into this conversation. But I do think the reason I'm bringing it up now is because it would only be responsible of us to even talk about how it's helping us in our businesses. If we also consider learning more about that side of things, particularly if we're a business that has sustainability at its heart.

34:03Ian Theasby:Are you guys at B Corp? Yeah, you are. But I don't know whether B Corp is considering, you know, use of AI and sustainability. And that's one for after the show. But it's just it's an interesting space, isn't it? Because I don't know yet how we all sit with both things at once.

34:19Henry Firth:I think about the privacy part, it's right to be concerned. And we're going to be entering into some interesting times moving forward. But it is a bit like the beginning of the Internet. So I don't know if you remember when, you know, e-commerce was first around. Everyone was really nervous about the idea of typing their credit card information into an online shop. Yeah. And retrospectively, that seems a little bit silly now. Completely. It's kind of the same thing. yes, look, your information is going into chat TPT. Yes, somebody potentially could be decoding that 10 years from now and do something untoward with it, possibly.

34:55Henry Firth:But that information is already stored on Facebook, in your email, in your Google Drive, in your Teams. All of these companies have got most of that information anyway. So that risk is not a new risk with AI, in my opinion. And I think it's better to just be ahead of the curve and be mindful of it, but also not use that as a reason not to use the technology. From a sustainability perspective, yes, I agree that it's negative. And it's a shame that it takes so much energy to run all of these prompts. At the same time, I think we should put it into context. You know, banking, for example, as a sector, uses a huge amount of the energy in the world.

35:36Henry Firth:In fact, 10 % of the used energy in the world is for cooling. So, you know, just people who have their air con all the time. and artificial intelligence isn't anywhere near any of those percentages in terms of scale so it's still small compared to everything else at the moment but the other thing about AI is it is our best chance at finding big meaningful solutions to climate change so if we want to be finding our way to solve difficult problems like carbon in the atmosphere then using tools like this is going to be essential. So I think it's a necessary evil.

36:11Ian Theasby:That's brilliant. Thank you. I love doing those kind of temperature checks. And by the time this comes out, actually, because there'll be a few months lag, it'll be interesting to see the listeners. If everything has changed so quickly, things might have changed utterly. So that'll be interesting. Just to wrap up then. So how many weeks are you in Tesco now?

36:29Henry Firth:Yeah, we launched on the 6th of October. We have some more products launching, which is very exciting. And hopefully some more launches to tell you all

36:36Ian Theasby:about that's amazing so when this goes out live we'll be able to um put links to those products uh well that'd be quite cool actually why don't we put some tesco links in the show notes so that people can buy the products that would be good wouldn't it thank you so much early indications

36:50Henry Firth:in terms of rate of sale happy we are ahead of forecast which is wonderful um we're very excited about that um and people are giving us good feedback it's it's it's just products that should exist, food for normal people that's convenient and healthy should be what is being sold in supermarkets as far as we're concerned.

37:11Ian Theasby:Well, on that note, I will say thank you so much both for your time today, for coming and sharing your story, your launch, your thoughts and your wisdom on leadership, on co-foundering leadership, on the use of AI and on what it's like to build a business with intent, iteratively in stages. And yeah, just generally being all around great guys it seems so thank you so much for coming on the show today thank you for having us it's been fun thanks it's been a real pleasure see you in the group okay well what did you take away from that episode i think for me it's you know the impetus to start thinking like i said at the beginning just even asking yourself if we were to do this differently and if we were focused on content and audience and engagement and kind of creating a change within a particular group of people through media and content.

38:06Ian Theasby:How would we do that? And then what would come from that in terms of, you know, having a market that was that newest and that was ready to engage with us, and that was excited by the types of products that we developed? And also, what insight would you have into that market, into their preferences, their frictions, the jobs that they need to have done and what products would you develop differently as a result. I'm not saying that's what we can all do. Probably very few of us can run our businesses that way, but it is an option. And sometimes even the exercise of thinking differently about how you run your business or what it would do for you if you did it differently, like another brand like Bosch have, sometimes that exercise on its own is enough to spark some new thinking.

38:50Ian Theasby:If you enjoyed this episode, please do like, follow the show on your favorite podcast app, write a review and even share it with a fellow founder or colleague via WhatsApp or email, we would really appreciate it. It makes the world of difference. Thank you.

39:08Ian Theasby:As always, thanks again to my tech guru and sound engineer, Jip Bagan of Ballagroove, and my podcast producer, Catherine of Social Cues.