The Grocer Gold WINNERS Bold Bean Co: The People Power Behind the Beans!

0:03Amelia Christie-Miller:As the founder or leader of a scaling challenger brand, finding the right people to join your growing business can be much harder than you think. That's why we've teamed up with FMCG specialist recruitment consultancy, MKJ Ignite, to bring you the best people and recruitment insights from some of the most successful founders out there. It's really hard to get the right people in business? When you're starting out and you're a young founder and maybe you, you know, maybe you're naturally very good at getting the right people on board. But I think a lot of us in our 20s and 30s, we haven't done a huge amount of managing people.

0:38And sometimes you need someone

0:41Amelia Christie-Miller:to fill a role. You're hoping against hope that the right people, they're the right person. There seems to be a massive dearth in getting the right people right now in FMCG in the UK. How do you guys know that they're the right people? Because I think, I feel like you've got it right. I think a couple of things.

0:58Ed Whelpton:Firstly, it's something that we've definitely had straight from the beginning is the amount of external advice that we get into the business. Like see the amount of voice notes we've sent you over the years saying, can you help us with this? But we lean on so many different people and so many different advisors from different areas and ask them their advice in exchange for beans or something else and get them to help show us. because you're absolutely right. Like when you're starting these businesses, you probably manage maybe two, three, four people, like very small number of teams. And I didn't really know what a successful one-to-one looked like or anything like that.

1:37Ed Whelpton:And so you need to bring people in who are going to help you. We've had an amazing fractional head of people who's come in and really revolutionized the way that we manage and that leaders run meetings and manage their teams. which has been incredible. But yeah, I think that external advice is probably the biggest thing.

2:00Amelia Christie-Miller:So just, that's really interesting what you say. So you've got this fractional, again, you're spending money on something that most people wouldn't spend money on. So this is the second thing now that we're discussing. The first was the whole product quality function. And now we're talking about a fractional head of people. Give me a day or a week or a meeting or where are all the instances that that makes a difference to the way you deliver good business and the way people feel? It might be worth sharing that when we first brought in Kate, we weren't thinking we wanted a fractional head of people.

2:33Amelia Christie-Miller:We actually brought her in for her supply chain experience. So I think, but it was one of the best things we did. You know, she helped build, you know, everything from our kind of scorecard that everyone's working towards with their OKRs into a lot of other things. But it was almost accidental. And I think that that has been incredible for us. And that's why we would urge, you know, founders who think, oh, I'll deal with people down the line. I need to fix this problem first. It's like, actually, if you deal with it from day dot, you're going to have a team that are proactive, are making the right decisions and doing a lot of that thinking for you because they're in a really great place.

3:13Amelia Christie-Miller:What's a week like at Bulbean, though? You know, are you all on Slack? Do you have regular meetings? Do you have like belonging or feeling meetings that, you know, I heard this expression recently that I hadn't heard before a belonging meeting. How do you bring it alive? And also this idea of leadership and team in meetings. Talk to us about that, because I think the fact that you take this so seriously is really working. And I want to share it with the listeners.

3:37Ed Whelpton:Totally. I think classically your working week might be that you go into the office five days and you see your team. But we are fully remote. So we meet online, but we have a connectivity budget, which is something new this year. And we're putting a lot of money into making sure that actually if someone from another business saw that amount of money for connectivity, like office parties or whatever, they think that's crazy. But we're using this budget to encourage team leaders to take their teams into New City and go and work there. I think Amelia, they did that in Edinburgh last week. Right. And we've done one in Spain where teams meet up and spend a week in a co-working space, working, eating out, having a night out, whatever they want to do.

4:23Ed Whelpton:But existing together. And I think that emphasis from money that you might have spent on an office, which costs a huge amount of money these days. actually if you take that budget and put into fun things that people want to go and do like going to a new city or whatever that's really exciting and the reason I'm talking about this is I think when we're discussing these sort of things Amelia and I we think what what would we really like from an employee perspective or from you know from a team perspective what would really motivate us and we both like well I would hate to spend five hours commuting every week so why would we ask a team do that and you know i actually need to do my laundry once a week so working from home is really useful and you know if you just put yourself in in that situation what really works for you and and that also comes into the shared parental policy that we've been talking about we we build these policies that we would like ourselves and we think that's a you know that that's the way it should be done really i'm delighted to be partnering with mkj ignite

5:24Amelia Christie-Miller:an FMCG recruitment specialist who supports challenger brands just like yours. MKJ Ignite has worked with some of the fastest growing brands in the industry, including the likes of Real Superfoods, Purdy & Fig, Hunter & Gather, Lucky Saint and Untamed. Recently, I asked co-founder Paul Jones to explain the real value that a specialist recruiter like MKJ Ignite can offer founders.

5:46Ed Whelpton:Maybe what people don't realise is that the best candidate for the brief may not be applying for their job. indeed may not be in their networks. They're happy being successful in their role. So that's where a business like MKJ Ignite comes to the forefront because the network, the ambassadors, the relationships we have gives us access to this passive talent audience or hidden talent, as we like to say it. So when a founder asks us to help them support and we shape the brief, we have then a build a sense of who they're looking for and how to get them. We can take discrete references along the way, building not just a sort of a technical set, but also a behavioural set, because obviously that's key in a small business that the cultural fit and the mindset is bang on.

6:31Ed Whelpton:And quite honestly, that's why businesses do continue to use this on a repeat basis. And 85 % of our business currently comes from the same clients.

6:41Amelia Christie-Miller:Honestly, besides the obvious value of having a deep network and tons of experience in recruitment, so much more time and effort goes into finding the right people than you might think. No matter what stage of the journey you're at, MKJ Ignite can help you find the right people for your marketing, e-commerce, sales or operations teams, whether that be at middle management or senior leadership roles. They have an extensive network of deep personal relationships in the space. And I think that's because they are really lovely, genuine people. So if you want to chat to Imi, Paul or Billy about all things recruitment, or indeed, if you just need a piece of advice, then please do reach out to them.

7:17Amelia Christie-Miller:There's a link in the show notes to book a no obligation chat or you can email them at info at mkj-ignite.co.uk. Thanks to MKJ Ignite for bringing us this nugget of brand growth value today. Don't forget to hit follow so you won't miss the next one.