Brand Alchemy: The £Multi Million Formula for Challenger Brand Success, with big fish Perry Haydn-Taylor

21:43Yeah, exactly. I think that the summary of that, coming back to the original question of founders articulating in their vision and being understood, I think is a question of being able to translate exactly that, something into a sentence or two that, as I said, the audience that are listening will value. Now, innovators and investors are very different beasts. We tend to work with three types of businesses, startups, transformations and growth businesses. And they're all growing, but the startups are obviously very different beasts to the transformational ones. And then the ones where you're sort of squeezing the last drops of the lemon out, they're the harder ones, to be fair.

22:30But those are three very different phases of a business's life in discovery and validation in that first phase. And you've got efficiency before you scale. And then you've got scale and squeezing the last drops out in monetization. And I think what founders forget is where they are on that journey. And they just see the end. They just want to get this message across. And especially in consumer brands, they are really speaking on behalf of the consumer. And a lot of them are so passionate. They don't actually know much about business. They have people like you who come in and really know about business because what they know about is product.

23:07yeah so i think it's important to put the best person forward who is for that audience going to be opposite their opposite number and speak the same lingo you know you wouldn't put someone who speaks french in front of someone who speaks italian you'd find somebody who speaks italian so again i think advice to founders is always look at your audience and decide not only where you are in your cycle and what's important to that audience and therefore what's going to unlock the growth that you need and and if it's money the classic one is you know how do i how do i convince someone to unlock a load of cash and put a massive great valuation on my business when it hasn't even started which is my least favorite conversation yeah yeah but that happens yeah you know and and that's always about selling you know the opportunity and saying you know i've got this unfair advantage i've got some tech or whatever it is but you've got to find the what we call yeah well we call it the unfair advantages and then i think the other the other end of the spectrum is when you're standing in front of retailers you know and you're trying to get if you're talking about food and grocery or whatever uh and it's like you know what's in it for them because so often founders are going to talk about the consumer directly and actually retailers quite often are yeah okay that's great but there's a logic leap particularly if it's a relatively junior person because they've just got a target to hit i love this how are you going to make that person sitting opposite you their bonus.

24:31Fiona Fitz:I just want to write that down illogically.

24:36Fiona Fitz: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. One of the things we're talking about with the cohort on this year's mini MBA is this idea of how do you sell a category story to a buyer who doesn't want to hear it and they just want to do one in one out and the idea that you need to chunk up chunk up chunk up into a much bigger solve for them around getting new people into the category or driving category value growth in a new way logic leap yeah it's a logic leap one of our lines I forgot to mention at the beginning was when it comes to the team and our strategy and we've got you know i know 30 40 50 people depending on the time of year and i just say to them look we have a very simple job if you if you don't strategy is a very tedious word we just need to make the right choice the easy choice that's all we need to do that's our job our job is to make the right choice the easy choice for our clients for consumers for the planet for anything just do that and you can't go wrong and everyone gets that and i think the same thing is for uh you know if you're sitting opposite at a retailer and you know my niece actually is a very senior um buyer at um well she's head of a whole bunch of stuff at Sainsbury's she's amazing when I speak to her I was like you know what tips have you got and she's like it's really big and hard being you know on this and you and and you know I think a lot of brands forget what is important and I mean it doesn't directly come from her actually I think I'd be wrong if I was kind of going to quote her I won't quote her but you know i would just say that the person sitting opposite you has got an agenda and don't make them have to do the calculations and and work out why your strategy is good for them yeah because it's just they haven't got time and they might not even have the experience so just make it easy for them and make the right choice the easy choice by saying what is it that this person wants to get out of this meeting and focus on that that's it do you have any tools to help people reframe an opportunity and this is like adjacent really to what we're talking about so tony's chocolate only came in and decided to talk about chocolate in a totally different way new lens a new frame it was about whether there was child labor in the value chain or not have you come across that in your work over the years where you've had to talk about a product set or a category in a completely different way all the time let's talk about that that is our job and i suppose the annoying thing is one of the best ones we've done recently had an unfortunate series of events not as a result of the branding but i'm going to talk about it anyway which is typhoon um so what happened with typhoon is they came to see it's been built by um a family office actually and this business typhoon used to be one of the biggest tea brands in britain and it had lost its way and it ended up as cheaper than own label and the kind of surrogate-owned label of the pound shops.

27:43And the value had gone. And they needed something pretty serious to get this business back, you know, kick-started back into some sort of life form. And when we arrived and met them, the chairman actually was the ex-chairman of Clipper, Mike Breen, who was the founder of Clipper, who had founded the Fair Trade team. He was an amazing guy. And so he said to Mike, you're a passionate individual who was like all about Fair Trade, et cetera. You're now the chair of this tea business. And all it's got is you get anew with a typhoon. You know, it's got some advertising that was meaningless and a history of 100 years of being Britain's favorite tea for however many years it was.

28:20And we said, but actually, the thing is, we've got to get the focal point, the clarity on what do we need to happen, was we need to get people to pay the right amount of money for tea. And tea has become way too cheap, which means the net effect of that is that workers are being exploited. and we then you know played this panorama documentary and said do you know that you know six million workers are being exploited and live in fear and there'd been this horrific case of rape uh where a unilever employee had basically uh forced employees to have sex with him and it was so shocking it was around the time we were doing this work and we said look the only way you're going to get this tea back on the supermarket shelves is if you displace pg or or one of the incumbents and how are we going to do that the only way we're going to do that what we call make tea right you know another three and so we said well what about we ask people if their tea is fear-free rather like talking and very much of tony's playbook similar thing and because if we raised awareness that what you're drinking you know someone suffered for your cuppa you're probably going to leave a bit of taste in your mouth so we went on to that um

29:29Fiona Fitz:video research business um it's called viper brilliant and um one of the guys at typhoon said you've tried this that's great and when we got a whole load of people and we just said did you know uh you know is your teeth teeth free free and people were really shocked and then obviously when you walk into a buyer can you imagine what you're going to say which is we've presented this really potent new brand and what you know by the way just to be clear i always say you know can everyone remember that a brand is just a set of associations in your head it's not your logo it's not your color it's it's like all the things people associate with your business and the way you do business and we walked in and said look you need to take those teas off the shelf and you need to put this one in here because this is the only fear-free tea that and our mission is to help these six million workers get out of fear in the same way that tony's was solving it or highlighting a slavery problem.

30:25And the packaging was very, very different. There's a big speech bubble and it said, is your, you know, 100 bags of fear-free tea. Big placard saying, did you know 6 million workers live in fear? And on the side, it said, we've got 100 years of heritage we're not proud of.

30:40Fiona Fitz:Oh, wow. Bleakly and utterly, kind of going, look, this is transparent. And it was brilliant and it got distribution, which was the fundamental focus. We need to get distribution if we're not on shelf. We haven't got availability. We can't do any awareness building. So for me, that was an extreme one. But on another level, we work with Powder, who is a one for one give back a new snack. I love their snacks. Exactly. And we fed over a million children a school lunch and it's made a profit and it's now turning over three million quid. So what were you reframing there? Well, basically turning hunger into hope.

31:13So it was this idea of, you know, it's not a snack. It's a child's lunch in India and you can get them back into education. or we work with unbelief you know grow up farms and we created a brand called unbelievable i love that brand it's uh yeah and it's unbelievable because it doesn't go off in your fridge and it's unbelievable because it tastes bloody good and tesco rang them up and said there's something wrong with the data sorry we can't get you our report but we've got a problem with our systems this was after it launched first few weeks and marcus told me he said they rang back and said um there's nothing wrong with our systems they just weren't set to calibrate zero waste Hilarious.

31:50Or candlesticks. So basically, these brands have found a way in that might be functional in the case of, you know, this tastes better. And by the way, it won't go off in your fridge. You won't waste money.

32:03Fiona Fitz:Can we just talk about that for a second? So it won't go off in your fridge. Now, don't tell me, is that because it is in an environment that is bacteria free? Yeah, it's controlled. A controlled environment. So when they bag it, it is not going to have any bacteria. Okay. So we did that with Chobani. We had 60 days on Chobani yogurts, bringing them over from the States. And everyone would say, well, that's not possible. You know, it's 35 days in dairy. It was only 35 days in dairy because that's all anyone was asked to test to. You know, the Nestle and the Danone factories would have asked there, or the brand managers would have asked there, or the sales managers, can you do extended shelf life testing on that to how many days?

32:42Fiona Fitz:Oh, just to 35. That's industry standard. No one did it. So just to loop back very quickly to our... Meandering, sorry. I'm terribly bad at meandering. No, no, no, you're not meandering. I'm meandering. In specific market power, you talked about how tech, the unfair advantage. So their unfair advantage is they've rewritten the rules of the game. 0 % waste is possible. All they've done is they've looked adjacently to other categories. How do they keep waste low? They use a controlled environment, which basically means you've got incredible air filtration systems. People are wearing hazmat suits, et cetera, et cetera.

33:13Fiona Fitz:There's no introduction of bacteria or viruses into the environment. So therefore, when the things are bagged up, they're bagged with the normal gases that you put in salad leaves. Yeah, in the same way. It's about smart. That's what I was saying earlier about being smart and ethical is not about just having a passion for doing the right thing. What I would love to call out to everybody listening is if you do something like that, you can win in a completely different way than everyone else is winning. So everyone else in salad leaves is winning with distribution or with price or with the types of salad leaves.

33:48Fiona Fitz:And that's like Gillette was playing this game and the entire, and I think everyone knows this example really well, but the entire razor blade aisle was all about how much extra technology you can put on a razor. So, you know, rotating head and vibrating head and lights and stuff. And then King of Shaves came in and said, well, it wasn't King of Shaves first. It was Dollar Shave Club. Came in and said, you don't need all of that. They understood the consumer. You don't need all of that. They actually did research to say that people just needed three blades with a little moisturizing strip. They did everything else was diminishing returns in terms of cost and payback for the consumer.

34:24And by the way, I mean, God, it's so nice talking to you, Fee, because I could spend all day talking to you.

34:29Fiona Fitz:That's why we used to. Do you remember we used to do this and no one else would get a look in the boardroom? Because you and me would be like, blah, blah, blah. It's not going to get paid, it's fine. um thing i'd say is that for example freddy's flowers which i was involved in and still am it's a wonderful business i don't know if you know it's that's a 50 million pound business it's growing like a weed excuse the pun but it's grown you know grow out of nowhere it's 10 years old now but it you know and i did have the flattery of covid but it was growing like crazy and the point was it was very simple which was that again when you buy flowers from a supermarket or you buy them from somewhere else you know you tend to buy them for other people very few people buy them for themselves.

35:07And just saying, actually, do you know what? If I put a subscription your way and you had flowers delivered every week, no one does that. No one does that. Millionaires do that. No one does that for 25 quid. And actually, for the price of a round of drinks these days, I can have flowers that last not two. Sometimes I've got flowers that last three weeks. And I don't forget to order them because they arrive. And actually, yes, it's a luxury. It's a massive luxury having flowers delivered to your door but it's one skew it's a one skew business

35:37Fiona Fitz:but they change the conversation yeah and so in week three of of the work we're doing at the moment it is about before we dive into so once we've set out what are your motivating ambitions and then what's your vision and what does that look like for the business in terms of monetary um kind of economics yeah then we say right where are you going to play and the first thing we do rather than doing what everyone else does which is dive straight into understanding your own market. We say, let's not put on the blinkers. Let's first of all, look at category creation, right? Let's look at blue oceans.

36:09Fiona Fitz:Let's look at adjacencies. Let's look at how people are doing things differently. Because if you dive straight into, right, well, my market is growing by this much and there's an opportunity in lemon, then you're just going to think about lemon. Instead, you should be thinking about changing the conversation. How do you change the conversation? Which is all of the things that you've done. Talk to me about Bowdoin. So back in the day. That's not an old one. I know it is, but still, but still, like, before Bowdoin, was the conversation, well, I can go to Marks & Spencer's to buy clothes for my kids.

36:40Johnny, 30-odd years ago, was a banker, and he loved clothes. I mean, he loves clothes. Someone said he had the mind of a 40-year-old woman, aged, you know, whatever. But no, he's an amazing man with a very strong opinion, like all founders. and he was just not satisfied when he walked into Blazer or something. He couldn't get a decent jacket. And so it started with him.

37:03Fiona Fitz:Okay. And then he looked at mail order and went, mail order is basically for Tupperware, jokes and pornography. It's grubby and it's only bought. You know, back in the day, mail order catalogs, land on your doorstep. Land's end and everything. It was just shit. Yeah. But there was no premium player in mail order because the act of buying from a catalog was grubby. And it was just not good. So what he did was he said, mail order catalogs. I'm going to premiumize mail order catalogs. And I think back to my friend, David Milner, who is one of the best people I've ever worked with, who did Tyrells and Lilies.

37:38And, you know, we did St. Pierre and we've just done Costa Malika. He's just amazing. And the thing he said to me when we first started working, he said, look, all I do is very simple is I find a big category. Like a really big, it's got to be a big category. there's got to be a small share of that big creative category has got to be valuable there's got to be an opportunity to premiumize and actually there's also got to be an opportunity to internationalize ideally because the world's a big place and then in a few other tips but and and he just said that he taught me the simplicity route very much working with him i was like there are only three people in this room i have not working with six people you know Like Tyrell's was sold, went from 45 million enterprise value to 120.

38:22And then we sold again for 300 million. You know, St. Pierre sold for 300 million. It's incredible, these businesses, because David has a very clear, simple formula of clarity, focus and effort, which I've obviously aligned with. But he doesn't have those three, actually. Weirdly.

38:41Fiona Fitz:You articulated them. Yeah. But I mean, he's better articulating. I mean, I love working with people like that because you're all aligned. You're all going for the same thing. And it's not about money, actually. He just loves working with people on great businesses and growing them. Are you involved in a lot of these businesses then? Do you have a stake in a lot of these businesses? Yeah, we've got stakes in about 14. So my business partner, Tim Hansel, who's amazing, he's my new-ish. Well, new, he's been with me for two and a bit years. He was a client. So his background was he was at Rothschilds and Grant Thornton and Lloyd as an M &A guy.

39:14and then he went and ran a business called Skinners for a client to grow it and sell it did too good a job of it we rebranded it and that's how we met him uh in fact David introduced us then when I was looking for a new business partner when my old one retired Tim immediately put his hand up he said I'm your man and we just hit it off what was great about you mentioned the settler and the three types of people that we were talking about visionaries and settlers and town planners Tim and I are very similar but we have very different skill sets okay but we have a very similar aligned view of what works and what doesn't.

39:48And so when he joined, it gave us another great boost in the arm, which is that the restlessness of wanting to be involved in more PE deals, which I'd done over the years and I'd taken stakes, I suddenly had someone who really knew.

40:01Fiona Fitz:So you could put manners on it. Yeah. And he was a PE guy who knew, an M &A guy who knows so much more than I do about that. Can I ask a question? If I have people coming through my programs or when I'm working with brands and they would love to work with a company like yours and there's this thing out there this is oh god no you can't work big fish because they don't take on anything for under 70 grand uh it's twice that so the proposals do you not remember fee who the bloody hell are big fish and why do they charge like a wounded rhino that was yeah the reputation we want is to be the most expensive and it turns out we're not so no but seriously I'm actually serious.

40:39Fiona Fitz:So how would anyone, does that mean that you will not work with any of the brands I work with because they can't afford it? No, no. What we do is we have, so for brands that can't afford us, that are on a growth trajectory, you know, early stage, not brands that are mature. No, the brands that I would work with. So, you know, they're probably under 5 million. Yeah. Okay. Well, so we've taken stakes in sort of thing. Well, in fact, you know, we should put them on your show, but people like Long Corot and in fact, you're involved in one of our competitors, of course, we've got Tiber. And I'm NED of Better Nature.

41:09Yeah, you're in Better Nature.

41:11Fiona Fitz:Better Nature is a brilliant tempeh. We take stakes and because we can add value, I mean, occasionally we put a tiny bit of money in, but our money is not as powerful as our network and our expertise. If a brand who is coming up and is going to be the next challenger brand, but can't afford to work with a company like yours, you do actually look at taking us it is possible tim meets them all i mean tim is like an incredible powerhouse and since i've had him the amazing thing is he's just he meets so many people and he's brilliant he just basically kind of does this brilliant we call it the chemistry capability availability affordability chemistry is number one and that's what i was talking about and back to people because there's one last thing i'd love to talk about people so everybody that i'm talking to at the moment is really struggling to find people to man their business so you might have a great uh brand that's growing has real promise to be you know a challenger brand with some scale but they're not able to find the right people i don't know why that is why is it why is it so difficult values tell me about that values and i've got i tell you what this i did a talk on friday to my local business community who i'm a member of and i didn't understand a word i was talking about But anyway, ironic.

42:25Started off my talk to say seven or eight, nine years ago, I changed Big Fish quite radically because I basically fell out of love with it. And I got really depressed because it was, you know, same sort of life journeys that you've been on. You know, we have these moments where you go, what the hell am I doing? I've got to change this. And my daughter, my eldest daughter, very, very bright, is also challenged by perceptions of why I was doing my work. I was like, can't you do something a bit more sustainable? You know, why are you making all these people rich and they're just fucking up the planet?

42:59And so we went back to the drawing board and I met a guy on the train. I'll keep this as short as I can, please, sorry. I met a guy on the train who's a great friend of mine called Andrew Tillard. And he said, hi, Pez. I said, what are you doing? And he showed me this page that he was doing. He said, I get all these young people. I use a chair and a mentor. I get all these young people and I'm trying to advise them on careers. And these are my questions I've put together. What do you think? and I said show me them and the first one was um what are you good at yeah but you're not necessarily enjoying doing you don't necessarily enjoy doing what do you enjoy doing but you're not necessarily good at which companies or people inspire you what environments do you thrive in are you an outdoor person indoor person you're urban or rural those kind of things what are you under social pressure to do and how important is money to you and i was like oh my god that is the best set of questions i've ever seen in my life and you've solved my problem he said what's your problem i said that problem of well first of all that is brilliant and second of all in terms of career planning i want to be the answer they give to which company and people inspire you and i need to take that can i nick it and i branded it the tillard tulip and it's on the bottom of our website if you want it is absolutely brilliant okay i saw andrew the other day at this talk and i said you have changed so many people's lives because even grown-ups have come along and i've gone you want it this is a great career move you know these questions are diamond i'm going to

44:28Fiona Fitz:include a link to your tulip in our coursework oh that's been a marketing there i will though i will i'll give it big big branding but it's it's values it's values it's and and that's what and it It attracts the right people because they go, that company inspires me because they are doing things that I want to do. And your vibe attracts your tribe. And so I think it's really important. The person I just hired last week said to me, she was at Rothschilds and she said, at Rothschilds we said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And I love that. It's just brilliant. Well, on that note, that's a great place to stop.

45:01Fiona Fitz:I could talk to you all day. I could talk to you all year. We've got so much more to cover. I think I imagined we were going to be talking a lot about those kind of traditional branding and marketing stuff but this is way more interesting way more interesting thank you so much Perry anytime if you ever want me to help well thank you thanks Perry big kiss yeah big kiss

45:24Fiona Fitz:that was Perry Hayden Taylor founder of Big Fish relentless restless brand thinker and the man behind some of the most compelling challenger brands of the last two decades in the UK anyway What stuck with me? I love Perry's Power of Three framework. Clarity times focus times effort equals growth. I love his innovative take on founders. He says they don't fail, they just defy gravity. And that killer insight, if you want to get listed, your pitch needs to make a buyer's bonus, not just your case. So if you're a founder building a brand in food, drink or D2C, this episode was just like a blueprint.

46:01Fiona Fitz:So if it hit home, do me a favor, share it with someone else. don't forget to hit follow so you don't miss the next episode and see you next time

46:16Fiona Fitz:as always thanks again to my tech guru and sound engineer Jip Bagan of Bala Groove and my podcast producer Catherine of Social Cues