Childs Farm Founder Joanna Jensen's Blueprint to Make Business EASY

0:00Joanna Jensen:I want to save you time. I want to save you money. But also for those people that are already established, this is a fantastic way to kick the tyres on your business plan. There's a whole section on drawing up your business plan. It kicks the tyres on everything. I want you not to have to spend money when you don't need to. And I want you to think out of the box.

0:24A few seasons ago, we had the founder of Child's Farm, Joanna Jensen, on the show to talk to us about how she built that business and how she exited. Since then, she's written a book. It's called Making Business Child's Play. And in it, she shares with founders who are on a startup and scaling journey how to make sure you've got all of the basics sewn up. we're talking about market validation we're talking about making sure that your IP is sewn up, that you've got the right partnerships in place, that you're building relationships with the right people and that your P &L is right and at the back of the book she even has a little black book with all of the vetted contacts that she's used over the years to make your lives easier.

1:06So we got her on the show to talk about the book, to give us a little taster the reason I did that was, I don't know, there's a lot of business books out there, I personally don't always have time to make space for them in my life. I like to hear a little bit about them before I dive in. So doing that for you. Let's have a listen.

1:25Joanna Jensen, founder of Child's Farm and recent business book publisher. Welcome back to Brand Growth Heroes. Oh, thank you for having me, Fifi.

1:37Joanna Jensen:It's so good to see you. It looks like a very sunny day there. It's a lovely sunny day. It is quite bracing, but it's a beautiful day. And we've just had our lawn seeded and we've got about 4 ,000 birds on it. Oh, Jesus. I think they've told all their mates. I mean, literally. Yeah, it's a total bird party. So how did your book launch go? Oh, wow. Do you know, it is just... Look, running a business, founding a business, is that's quite hard work. Launching a book is not that dissimilar. It is. There's so much you have to do. And of course, you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you're meant to do.

2:22Joanna Jensen:There's no, nobody's given me a blueprint. No, there's no one's given me a playbook. This is how you launch a book. So we've been making it up as we go along. I've got an amazing PR. I've got an amazing Girl Friday marketing gal, Tilda, who's brilliant. and it's a lot of self-promotion. It is just like launching a business. But it's funny that you should say that, that you don't have a blueprint or a map because isn't that just what you've just done? Oh, so clever. Yeah. This is the new book, Making Business Childs Play. How to Build Winning Brands by Joanna Jensen, founder of Childs Farm. Tell us, the reason we have you on the show is because when you told me at the Brand Growth Heroes Mini MBA final ceremony this summer that you were so kind to come and be one of our expert panellists at, you said you were launching this book and it was a blueprint on how to start and grow your business.

3:23I was like, okay, we have got to share this with our listeners, particularly those who might be at an earlier stage of their business.

3:36Welcome to Brand Growth Heroes, the leading podcast for the founders of Challenger Grocery Brands. I'm your host, Fiona Fitz. My 25 years at global giants such as Nestle and Challenger brands such as Goo Chocolate Puds, Chobani and Strong Roots, as well as coached over 400 scaling brands, means I have the experience to ask the questions that truly matter and get you the insight that will inspire you to think differently and drive serious growth for your brand.

4:08Talk us through the premise of the book, the things that you want to share with everybody. You said earlier, 15 years, you know, of experience in one chapter. Like, tell us about that.

4:17Joanna Jensen:I think when you're setting up a business, you're starting your business, you don't know what you don't know. And I remember when I started doing Child's Farm, I didn't even know what FMCG stood for. I'd never heard of fast moving consumer goods. And I felt every meeting or every conversation I had, I felt like a complete Luddite and that I really was just making a fool of myself. And I had to write things on my hands when I went to meetings. And, you know, it was one of those things where I was just spending so much time learning rather than doing. and I thought there must be an easier way to help other entrepreneurs bypass this sort of months, if not years of learning and give them a bit of a fast track.

5:01Joanna Jensen:So that really was the motivation for the book. It is certainly not going to be something that I'm going to be retiring on. That's for sure. That's the other thing no one tells you. You write a book, you may as well just sort of, you know, start burning 50 pound notes. But it's kind of my give back to entrepreneurs. it's something I wish I had had when I was on my journey. So let's talk it through because I know there's so many business books out there and I always get terrified going, oh God, I'm just going to be totally overwhelmed. I need to hear a little bit about what I'm going to learn from a business book before I dive into it.

5:36Before I say I'm going to actually put aside some time or money to buy it, how does it work? Right.

5:41Joanna Jensen:There's lots of pictures in it and they're not pictures of me. You'll be delighted to hear. They are pictures of what it looks like. So for example, I've done chapters, which is say from right from the very beginning, you've got this idea, you've had this brainwave that we need to make strawberry marmalade. And strawberry marmalade is going to be the next big thing. I take you through the whole validation process. Is that the right thing to be doing? This isn't a case of just asking your mum and your best mate whether they think it's a good idea. you have to go a bit broader than that you need to understand is there a market for strawberry marmalade so there are huge amounts of pieces of remarket research you can get hold of by going through the british library but people don't know that so you don't know what you don't know the inside secrets when you launched child's farm did you do market validation or have you learned this kind of by trial and error no that's the first thing i did okay how did you do it so went to the British Library and one of my investors, Andrew Leake, helped me and we sort of tag-tailed going to the British Library because at the time you could only look at three things in one go, which wasn't really enough.

6:54Joanna Jensen:But if you think about the research data that comes from Euromonitor or Mintel, anyone that's done as a generalist, not bespoke, but any general piece of research, the British Library buys and they buy it so we can utilise it. And so what were you looking for? What are you suggesting people look for? Because I always think this is interesting. People go, oh, I don't need that. You know, I've got a feeling. I've got a good feeling. Why would you need that data? Okay, let me give you the example of Child's Farm. So Child's Farm, baby and child toiletries business. How big is that market? So I discovered it was 150 million.

7:29Joanna Jensen:We could therefore write our business plan based on the fact that within five years, we reckoned we could get 15 to 20 % of that market. is. Now, if you plunge in without doing this data and your strawberry marmalade idea and you find there is no market for it and there is no data on it, you're taking quite a big risk. But you can also see how big the marmalade category is. What you need to understand is, is all your blood, sweat and tears worth the outcome you're looking for? In my case, I was looking for an exit. would I be able to build a business that is a justifiable exit to a trade purchaser?

8:12Joanna Jensen:And you start this process right at the very beginning. Or your idea may be, I just want a business that pays me a steady income and I can make something out of it over 10, 15 years and I'll carry on doing it till I'm dust. That is, again, you can model that too because you can understand what sort of income you're going to be getting out of it. But if you go into this blind you haven't got a clue. You also need to understand your competitors because if you don't understand their market share and the impact and how much they have in different retailers you don't know and you can't judge what your business could get and therefore it's going to be really hard to write your business plan because your assumptions are going to have no backbone.

8:57One of the things we do on the brand growth here is Mini MBA actually. And this is probably for brands that are further along and scaling, which I know your next book is going to be about. We make our founders look at their competitors in terms of the assets and capabilities and partners that their competitors have and their P &Ls. We get them to imagine what the P &L of their competitors is and then what assets and capabilities they have. And we see, okay, well, if distribution, say you're in a chilled drinks and distribution in chilled drinks is like a key success factor to winning, do your competitors have a partnership with a chilled drinks distributor, a merchandiser?

9:34Because if they do, it's going to be pretty hard to win against someone who has a capability that actually ticks one of the massive key success factor boxes. It's so important, as you say, to know about your competitors, not just who they are, but really to think about it quite deeply, I think, and map out what they would do in the next two to five years as well. as you build your business plan.

9:58Joanna Jensen:Totally. And you've got seasonality as well. So if you think about part of our offering was sun cream, but sun cream isn't an all year round sale. And if you get a rubbish summer and it pours with rain, your sales are going to decrease exponentially. So it allows you to really understand seasonality. And a lot of the data that you find is done on a category will average out over five years. And that's what you're looking for. It will identify who your major competitors are, how much market share that they have, what that actually equates to in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. It is giving you everything you need to know.

10:41Joanna Jensen:And that is a great start. I'm thrilled to introduce Brand Growth Hero's newest partner, Jolson. Jolson is a leading B Corp certified commercial law firm that specializes in guiding the founders of scaling CPG brands. With long-term relationships with clients like Little Moons, Trip, Eat Natural, Bear, Graze and Pulsin, Jolson is also famous for advising the Innocent founders in their landmark sale to Coca-Cola. And believe it or not, they still work with the Innocent founders at Jam Jar Investments today. I'm especially impressed by how Jolson sets founders up for long-term success and by their commitment to championing female founders.

11:22Recently, I asked Jolson managing partners Phil Hellsmith and Paul Chappie why it's important that founders consider engaging with a commercial law firm that really understands consumer packaged goods. Ultimately, we're here to provide legal advice, but actually that legal advice is sort of irrelevant if you're not putting it into context. Thinking about how you make a consumer business, co-packing arrangements, understanding the supply chain, thinking about your sort of cost of goods, all of that is essential. to ensure that we're delivering how do you actually make a business work in the consumer space from a legal point of view but understanding the marketplace fully and having worked with consumer brands for the last 25 years we have a great understanding of the whole space whether that's manufacturing the customer the supply chain the branding part of it and all of that requires some legal input as well as understanding how the parts fit together at the end of the day if you don't have someone that's been in the trenches day in, day out for a couple of decades, you're going to be disadvantaged.

12:28Huge thanks to Brand Growth Heroes podcast sponsors, Jolson. Now let's get back to the show.

12:36Okay, so market validation. What's after that?

12:39Joanna Jensen:Oh, know your consumer, because you can see and say, right, there's a marketplace out there. But if you don't know who's going to buy your product. And that's not just one single person. It could be a collection of people. You don't know how to market to them. So again, if I use Charles Farm as an example, we were selling to parents, but we were also selling to caregivers, to grandparents, to aunts and uncles. But our consumer was actually a child. We had to think about all of those considerations and we needed to understand who our hero consumer was, which was a mother, ironically, when we launched, it was a mother who already had children.

13:21Joanna Jensen:And then as we introduced the baby range, we would have these dual heroes, one who already had children and one who was a first-time new mum just about to have a new baby. Because by that stage, we had two different ranges. So we needed to understand how much money she had, where she lived, what she read, what she ate, where she shopped. Because without knowing that, we couldn't effectively target her. And your marketing funds can absolutely evaporate in front of your eyes if you don't really take that time to understand and pinpoint and target those consumers. Meta has a place. It is not the sole form of marketing.

14:07Joanna Jensen:And again, I'm told very often Meta knows who my consumer is. Honestly, they don't care. They are just working on an algorithm to strip you naked of every penny that you've got. Let's be honest. I've never heard that before. No one's ever said to me Meta knows who my consumer is. Who says that to you? I've heard it from a number of brands that I've invested in, and I'm afraid it leaves me with my jaw slack on the floor. Because what it's telling me is, fundamentally, you have no idea who your consumer is, you don't think it's important, and you therefore are going to be wasting money. I think people don't, founders don't necessarily, at the first part of their journey, realise that knowing your consumer isn't just about, first of all, imagining that you are your consumer, because most younger founders think that everyone is like them.

14:58And secondly, they probably don't realise that most of the value bought through retail grocery anyway is bought by mums with kids in terms of the percentage of sales in retail grocery channel that comes from which group of consumers. It's usually parents. And thirdly, I think they don't realise, and this is that they come with a pen portrait, which is great, it's a good start of who their consumer is. But then when you say, what would that consumer be using currently? So what are you going to be an alternative or a substitute for? And they say, oh, well, there's nothing like it right now. And I say, yeah, but they must be.

15:29So what were people, when you came to the market with Child's Farm, what were those mothers using already?

15:35Joanna Jensen:They were using Aveeno and they were using Johnson's Baby. And for those children, and not forgetting Child's Farm, the premise of it was it was for eczema-prone skin and sensitive skin. So they would be using Oelatum, which was sort of medicated, sits on your skin effort and predominantly Aveeno and not really thinking about it and steroid cream so we were coming in with a natural ethical fragranced because we were using organic essential oils that didn't irritate even the most sensitive skin we came in with an alternative plus. Oilatum you kind of come away smelling slightly clinical I think you know we've all had to do this.

16:20Johnson's, lots of parents would use. I find it makes my skin really dry. And then Aveeno is great, but it's not available in all supermarkets, or at least it wasn't.

16:31Joanna Jensen:And it's expensive. We wanted something that was affordable for any mum who had a child. And this is one in five. So again, more research. I knew one in five under fives suffered from atopic eczema. So I could build my business plan around data. So I knew it was going to be a mum who was feeling a bit helpless and wanting to make a difference and a change to their child. And therefore, they needed something affordable and usable. But ideally, they didn't want to have something separate for that child. They wanted something that the whole family could use. So it had to be sort of universal. So when I thought about my packaging, I made it not look like medicinal olatum, you know, not blue and white, not a big neon sign saying, oh, you've got poorly skin.

17:21Joanna Jensen:I wanted it to be fun, all the colours of the rainbow, fresh and exciting, a little bit potty. And that is how the labels for Child's Farm came about. I wanted it to be, yeah, I have poorly skin, but nobody knows. What about your brand at the beginning and your brand as you grow and your brand when you exit. Did you have experience where the brand look and feel that you started with evolved over time? And how did you feel about that? Did you feel sad or did you feel that you'd got it wrong or did you feel proud that it was evolving? I know from the founders I work with, people find it very hard to let go of their original branding, but sometimes it isn't optimised for the marketplace and what they're trying to communicate.

18:03Joanna Jensen:I think we refreshed and tweaked throughout the course of our journey, probably too much, because every time you do a rebrand, it costs you money. But we never left the core element. So the images stayed the same. We just smartened it up. So we topped and tailed it with some color that matched the lid. The logo didn't change actually until six months ago. The business is now owned by Pizzo Cousins. They've changed the logo. They've changed the imagery on the labels. So it has all changed. but in the 12-year period that I was running that business it was just refreshed. Again we'd do our research, we'd understand what ethics and values were important to our consumers and we would make sure that they were highlighted in the hierarchy of the package imagery and messaging.

18:53Joanna Jensen:So nothing was done as a sort of cavalier gesture, everything, if we were talking about recycled bottles, where did that go? How important was that to our consumers? And we didn't guess, we did quantitative research. Now, I know a lot of people say, oh, well, doing quant research is so expensive. It's not as expensive of getting your whole brand messaging wrong. So when you say quant, was that like using a tool like Viper online or was it in-haul quant? I would use a third party and I still use that. I'm just about, I'm speaking to her this afternoon for a brand I'm working on at the moment. And she will pull together a thousand people who she believes could be the potential consumers of that brand.

19:40Joanna Jensen:Not that you're asking them questions about the look and feel. You're asking them questions about what they currently use, where they shop for those products, price points, absolutely everything. And also have they heard about it before? So you do your first brand awareness dip once you have launched and once you first got your distribution in place. I would suggest you do that every year to understand that everything that you're doing, all the money that you're spending is actually growing your business rather than doing nothing for your business. And you've got to ask yourself these questions.

20:17Joanna Jensen:You can't sit there and say, oh, I know. I know who my consumer is. I know everything about it. you don't unless you can actually get someone to validate that externally for you you could get it horribly wrong a lot of founders will use something like a test or i know that elm right now has a new platform not just for sales data that come or your your own sales data out and your sales data in but also brand dip as you call it and founders will go in and they will so let's just take a test and they will set up their questions and then they'll get the the answers back using that a thousand you know, panel of people who they have decided.

20:52There's a lot of margin for error there. It's like, first of all, if you're a founder, are they the right 1000 people? Secondly, have you asked the right questions? Do you understand the research objectives? Are you asked the right questions? Thirdly, are you interpreting the answers correctly? Are you missing any of the insights? And it's interesting, as you say this, I wonder whether there is a role for people to bring in just to manage a project. They can still use their test, they can still use their Elm, but to bring in an expert overseer who will help them with the methodology of that quant project.

21:23Joanna Jensen:We used a lovely woman called Samantha Rogers throughout the whole of Charles Farms history. And I tell you what, if you are intending to then go through an exit, so do a trade sale or get some private equity investment, it is vital that you have this third party data and that you can show that you've responded to it. That will give your investor absolute confidence that you are not being single-minded and not understanding who your consumer is and your customer is. It shows that you're thinking outside of the box. It shows that you're adapting, you're pivoting, you're listening to who your consumer is and what it is that he, she, they, it want from your brand and expect from your brand.

22:13Joanna Jensen:That's really interesting. So you think that's important at exit stage? I think it's absolutely vital. It's also, if you're raising capital full stop, you cannot present a deck to a potential investor without understanding who your consumer is and how they operate. And having some third-party research, I mean, I've looked at decks that have got, I mean, they have no source material at all. I know. And then what they're putting in, they make it up. They must think we're morons, that we don't go and look at it. This sort of stuff gives investors so much confidence. But you know what drives me nuts is actually, and a lot of the decks that come my way, and not anyone that I work with, but a lot of the decks that do come my way, it is all very, very vague and top line where consumer and pain points and insight and real understanding of market opportunities.

23:04And when I say I'm really surprised that this isn't very in-depth, it has never been brought up before. And there's plenty of people who've invested in their business. And I wonder, I think this is something that hasn't been called out enough. I don't think a lot of the people who are investing in CPG brands understand this stuff themselves. And if you don't understand it yourself, then how do you know that it's important?