From Burnout to Bold: Bold Bean Co. on building a Culture That Actually Lasts

0:14Hello and welcome to the Tomorrow Brands podcast where we explore what it takes to build a brand of tomorrow. I'm your host, Ruth Bittock, and in today's episode, I'm talking to Ed Welton, co-founder and COO of Bold Bean Co., one of the UK's most exciting food brands and a team that's quietly rewriting the rules on what growth can look like. We get into how Ed and his co-founder, Amelia, scaled from 5 to 25 people in under two years, all while staying remote, staying close to the brand and staying true to their values. We talk about founder burnout, operational beauty, how to build a team and then lead them from another country, and the early hires that gave them space to build something genuinely different.

0:49If you're thinking about how to scale your team, protect your culture, or just be a better COO, this one's for you. Before we get into it, it'd be great to hear a bit more about your background and how you got to where you are now. Hey, Ruth. Lovely to see you. Yeah, I am co-founder of Bold Bean Co. We're on a mission to make people obsessive beans by giving them the best of beans. How did I end up here? I got very lucky where I worked as an intern at a company where Chris Miller, our founder, was working before and she had this crazy idea for beans and would just constantly talk about them in the office.

1:23And I couldn't picture anything else apart from baked beans. So I was quite confused that she would go on about the health benefits, soil health benefits, why we need to be eating more all the time. We'd have these long debates about beans. Anyway, fast forward, she decided to, during lockdown, to go and set this business up and asked me to come along. She looked after sort of sales and marketing at the previous company and I looked after operations and finance. She very fortunately saw that we had these skill sets that complement each other and asked me and it was a bit, I felt a bit strange telling my friends and family I was going into a bean business.

1:57It wasn't what I'd always imagined as a young boy growing up but I'm very glad that I did and yeah we've had a great time so far and worked very well together and it's just continued to have those differing skill sets but the same way of thinking and that I think makes us a pretty good team. And so you're now COO, fast growing business. You live in Spain. How did that come to be? So when we set up, Amir and I would often go out and visit the suppliers as you do the manufacturers in Spain. Our beans are all produced there because that's where they make the tastiest beans in the world, in our opinion.

2:32And so we'd go and visit the co-manufacturers and we'd have these lovely lunches, drinking a bit of red wine chatting in spanish because we both studied a bit of spanish and one of our second hires at that time was an npd consultant rosa who lived in spain and she was just consulting for us and uh we decided that actually we wanted to hire her full-time and in order to do that it's very complicated you have an entity etc and then we also wanted to put more effort into into our relationships with the factories we knew one day that we'd begin to look at exports so these three different factors all came in and thought actually we should set up a Spanish subsidiary.

3:10All the arrows sort of pointed towards that and last year we set up an office out here and Amelia and I live out here. We've got six of us in Spain now which is great and the rest are in the UK and yeah as living near the sea is very important for mental health and we get a bit more sunshine than you do in Brighton I have to say but yeah it's been great. Subsidiary office in Spain but most of your business and employees are in the uk has there ever been a moment where you thought i can't do this unless i'm in the uk full time i think when you're like hiring quick we we jumped i think in 2024 we had six employees and now the end of 2025 we're at yeah about 25 and i think hiring those that quick can be a challenge not being in person but actually you just have to lean into the fact that you're remote there's so many benefits about being remote wasting two hours on the tube every day is just nothing that like anyone wants to do we definitely don't want to do that so we were like okay that's a benefit so what is the cost the cost is that you have to spend a bit of that time in focusing on like these sort of presentations and making sure you're onboarding in like notion is really good using these tools to make sure that people hit the ground running and actually i think in those first three months of any new hire it's way easier if you're sat across a desk from someone you have this osmosis of ideas but if you put that effort that you would have spent on the tube those two hours commuting if you put that effort into creating amazing onboarding and really putting effort into checking they're happy and they're aligned with the mission all that on the values then I find that it pays off but that was the only time where I thought where we thought god this can be quite tricky but we've managed it now we've got a great team set up and they all say on our surveys that they thought onboarding went very well which is good and so you're fully remote how does remote leadership actually work day to day as i said that sort of effort thing i think when you join a business you see the mission the vision like there might be a few things on a poster in the wall saying about what you care about but it's very surface level hard to understand that really deep cultural thing we talk about like the iceberg and you have all that sort of stuff at the top which is what you say or you put on your website that you care about and then below the iceberg, below the water, is all this stuff about what time do people get in, what sort of things do people do for lunch, how do we talk to our customers, how do we talk to our suppliers, what happens if something goes wrong, how do we react, and all of those sort of things are so important.

5:36I think as a leader, as a manager or member of the senior leadership team, you've got to really be able to talk to your team about that because they're not going to see you speaking on the phone to a supplier, they're not going to see you speaking on the phone to a retailer, all these sorts of things are hidden, So you've really got to push them above the water. You've got to really publicize them. And then, as I said earlier as well, you've got to pay back. So you've got to put that time into doing these sort of lunch and learns, talking about your vision, mission, values. We talk about them the whole time and really put effort into, as a leader, talking about the way you want to go about business, basically.

6:12You guys do workaways, don't you? We do. Yeah, they're a lot of fun. That is actually, I looked into the cost of an office for 25 people in London and it is pretty eye-watering. So what we say is that we take some of that cost and we put that into four trips, three or four trips every year with a team for a week or so working and living together and hanging out and playing games to allow everyone to get to know each other basically. What structures or rhythms keep things moving without having to micromanage? Yeah, it's a very good question because you can feel that those things I talked about, like giving those presentations, you can feel like you're really telling people exactly what they want to do, which obviously would cause demotivation.

6:55That's not a great way to manage. So I think the whole thing about how you talk about your mission values, how you do business, etc, is using guide rails, like setting certain things of what is important, what's not important to you and trying to really just give the guide rails to let them run free. I think you really need to be careful to think about what exact info or what things do people need to do their job well and how is it received. It can be very easy in a remote setting to just plaster things over Slack the whole time and just pay and get loads of messages. Everyone's sending, receiving and you actually don't do any work.

7:32People feel micromanaged. So I think you've got to be really careful about how you communicate, not just what you communicate, but how often and whether it's best to just get in a huddle, give someone a phone call rather than just So I think that form of communication is so important. I feel like from everything you've said and everything I know from working with you guys a bit as well, it's a really refreshing counter to this hustle culture or this idea that when you're building something really successful, everyone has to work really hard all the time. And it feels like you guys are a lot more focused on balance.

8:08Is that something that you guys actively make an effort to build a business for everybody? totally yeah i think like this like hustle culture is something that i've always been like attracted to a part of i've always worked in startups and me and i both come from the tech world as well and it's definitely those sort of hustle culture and that really energized me for a time but then i then actually went and worked somewhere else in between and i burned out there and got really, suffered from really bad burnout. And I thought we always think about long-term, like we want to create the best team because we look at people like Innocent and see the alumni from those sorts of places.

8:50And we want a team that's like that. And think about how do you build a team? If people are going to burn out and you're going to have loads of employee churn, it's A, going to be really difficult. It's also going to be really expensive. People come for six months and leave because they're burnt out from trying to chase unrealistic goals. They're going to be demotivated. They're probably going to leave. So it doesn't really make any business sense to do it from our perspective. The thing that makes sense is to create an environment where people genuinely want to stay, want to hire a team, want to manage their team, want to keep everyone in it because they're having a great time, but they're also getting that growth.

9:24And I think that's a really important balance that lots of people hear, I think, us talk about team on LinkedIn and podcasts and don't understand that balance. We've had it a lot of times where people have said, you guys obviously don't really care about growth, but that's really not true. We're really ambitious and everyone on our team is really ambitious. We've got Kate Voss, who's our fractional head of people, and she is the queen of goal setting and makes sure that we're really setting these ambitious targets every year to keep getting better. One of our values is be hungry, which means that you're keeping on chasing the next thing and making sure that you're always challenging yourself.

9:57But so we try and have this great balance of, yes, we want to always be better, but it's not growth at all costs. We do not want to burnout. And we say that, look, it's actually as a team, it's your responsibility to manage your calendar. If you need to take an hour to go for a walk in the morning, because you're completely fried and really struggling with a budget or something, then go and do it. And I think that's the beauty of remote because it is just a lot easier to do if you're where you are now. It's like a lot easier to go and have one of those walks and do that and clear your mind. It's a bit harder to do in the office, I'd say, especially if you're all in the office five days a week so it's another benefit remote but yeah we want to create this environment where people take responsibility for their for themselves and whether that's hitting their own goals or managing their own well-being and the reason we do that is because we've worked in environments where that hasn't happened and actually how motivating would we find that if we were working at Bold Bean Co.

10:49Amelia and I think that is what how I'd want to work that's how I'd get the best results that would make me want to stay long long term in a business so we're trying to build this team for the future and thinking about what's going to keep them performing at their best for a sustained long period of time, but also having a great time motivated to work here. I have to say it sounds very similar to the culture at Popchips, which was also my boss at the time as ex-innocent. And I think it just shows you can have a high performing, successful team. We were growing year on year, almost doubling on size most years and yeah, no employee churn.

11:24But the atmosphere in the office and the culture was exactly like we're describing. It was like you're really ambitious and you grow. Everyone's really focused on that, but not at a cost to your mental health. Yeah, I think that is the main thing is like creating it. It's so possible. I do think they really come hand in hand. That's why I mentioned around like the ambition side is really important because most people who want to work in these sort of high growth companies, that it's so important to have the other side as well. And I think so often you see it as you're having one or the other, but you look at pop chips, you look at Innocent.

11:58These people that they churned out are all doing incredible stuff now. And I think culture played a massive part in that. And setting how you're going to go about achieving your goals is a big part of that as well. And I think giving people autonomy, like you say. So being able to say we were allowed, if you wanted to go for an hour and a half long lunch break, you wanted to go to a gym class. That's fine. You didn't have to tell anybody you asked permission. It was implicit that you would. We always said it was a task-based, not a time-based culture. So as long as you did what you had to do and everyone was performing, it didn't matter really within reason.

12:28And I think when people feel trusted and respected, they work. Yeah, no, I totally agree. So we talked a bit about building a team there. So let's get into that because I think this is a big question that maybe people who are slightly earlier stage than you guys or any point really have around hiring. how do you hire how do you build a high performance team especially when you're remote without breaking the culture so maybe let's start with how do you avoid hiring too fast or too late yeah so it's a great question it's so difficult i just in my experience of speaking to any founders in fmcg i haven't really met anyone who has hired too early yet i think we all hold on because we're trying to be running a business and you want to make sure that you've got enough money to pay the bills and it's difficult to invest definitely early stage it's something where Amelia is incredible at looking forward and thinking about what we would need in the future and it's incredible what hires open up like the amount of headspace it opens up for people to be more creative which you just don't have I think I was doing the customer service at Bold Bean for nine a year actually along in the first year i was replying to every single customer i wasn't even embarrassed to say i wasn't even using any good tech for it i was like literally on gmail replying which was actually probably great for some early customer relationships but actually it took a nudge me being like we should really hire someone because it will allow you to get up and think about more like strategic stuff and that was a great nudge but yeah i think it's i'm come from finance background so I'm always thinking about how do we keep costs low and I think from other founders I've spoken to that it's a confidence thing as well I think founders think what will I do if someone else is doing that as if their job's creative actually the beauty of being a founder is you'll always be thinking about the next thing and the more headspace you have for creativity to do that in your work day rather than your evenings and weekends it's gonna it's gonna pay back massively you're just gonna become so much more productive and you're gonna be happier you're going to be a better boss you're going to be all those things so in my experience it's always been try and do it earlier than you think for sure imagine where you are where you'll be a year from now is a good place for the person you want to hire because it's going to take three to six months to hire them it's going to take three to six months for them to get embedded and then you're already a year pretty much in so yeah that's my philosophy how do you think a year ahead when you're in a fast growing business where especially in fmcg where things can change really quickly.

15:10Yeah, I've never ever done this before, Bold Bean, but we have a chairman, James Robinson, and he challenged us to do it in the early days. And he'd say, just open a blank piece of paper. I do it on Word, but I can imagine a lot of people doing this on a pad of paper and closing your eyes and writing down, so write down 2030 and picture where you are. Where do you wake up? How do you get into work? What's the weather like? Like what are you listening to on your podcast or phone or whatever? When you go into the office, who's there? Or if you're working from home, who are you speaking to? What's your team look like?

15:43What does your day look like? Are you speaking to this bank or these suppliers or these customers, these retailers? And then from that, you start to break down all these different aspects. What products are you selling? And then you break down your NPD strategy and your supplier strategy, your customer strategy, your finance strategy, which when he showed us how to do that, that really makes you, forces you to say oh we need three people managing all those different suppliers we need a national account manager and whereas if I'm like now I'm thinking we don't have the money for that but I think that's sort of allowing yourself to really dream and I think Fee Fitz calls it blue sky thinking she always talks to me about blue sky thinking that is the only way that as a sort of pent-up founder looking to keep costs down that's the only way that you allow yourself to really look forward and make those really good long-term decisions I think and you guys have made a couple of hires that probably people wouldn't advise you to do earlier on like a head of finance and a fractional head of people how did you make those decisions why yeah it was that sort of long-term thinking like it was definitely finance is something where you could probably manage yourself and I'm sure a lot of people listen to this will be work with a bookkeeper and they'll do some sort of analysis themselves but really they'll just get what needs to be done and then having spoken to people who are a lot further ahead of the curve than us, a lot bigger businesses than us.

17:06We always ask them, looking back over the last five years, what higher do you wish you made sooner? And the answer was always head of finance. And Amelia was incredible, again, talking to these people and understanding why. And it's just the sort of things that make you so much stronger. They just make you operate better. Having a head of finance, we've got Flo in now, and she partners with the rest of the team to give them all the data that they need to just make better decisions. And actually something looking back, like when Amelia and I started out, I was doing these sort of models and scenarios, sort of situations of what would happen here.

17:42And actually, if I'd had someone who was an expert doing that, then I would have saved so much time, stress and horrible, clunky looking spreadsheets would have been saved if we'd had that. And so I think that was a really important one. And then also head of people, again, And it's probably a symptom of being remote. If we weren't remote, then maybe it would be slightly different. But we made a decision very early to get some advice from Kate Voss when we had, I think we had four employees or five employees. And Kate was just aligned with the values and the mission that we were just like, we have to get her in somehow.

18:15And she was incredible with people strategy and thinking ahead. So that was a high that we made very early. I actually don't know if anyone would have a fractional head of people with six employees. It seems very indulgent. but yeah it was one of the one of the best hires we made because because it's it shaped our culture so much and it's meant that we're we're creating this sort of place we think we're creating a place to work where people really want to be and that's down to Kate and the work she does definitely and so let's talk about culture because in the last couple of years you've gone from five people to 25 and that's a really rapid change how has the culture had to change over that time yeah it's a it's a scary number isn't it that five to 25 but it's over two years but it's been incredible it's been such a different sort of journey that I think I expected that we'd go on when we started I'd imagine us all just in a basement for a few years just doing this sort of problem solving every day cracking on with the work whether you're founders or with your small team.

19:18And I think the big difference is that culture piece now that you probably don't need to think about when you're five people, like culture just happens. You probably are all in this sort of, we were in this basement. I remember with fluorescent lights for about a year with five of us. And it was, we were all just getting along, doing our work, meeting out, and you didn't really have to think about it. Now with 25, your job, I think as founders is to continue like setting those guardrails and being really clear on the vision and where you want the business to get to. But in terms of the culture, what's really interesting, I think at the beginning where Amelia and I would be probably trying to set it and having these meetings about what sort of expectations we want.

19:59Now it's coming from those early joiners. We had four people who joined in 2022, Hannah, Rosa, Martha and Jess. And those people, along with all the people who've joined since, are really setting the culture, the way they want to treat the suppliers or the customers or the retailers filters through to the new joiner. It's so interesting because you have senior leaders joining and they're chatting to all these people and getting this sort of osmosis of beliefs and values through those early joiners. As you grow, your team set the culture and I think that's a really cool thing. And how has your job as founder changed?

20:33Obviously, you're not doing customer service emails anymore. What are you doing with your time? that's a good question i think your job changes from doing managing and i think you you asked a question earlier about micromanaging i'd try and say that actually rather than managing your i think your coaching like you're trying to ask the questions and basically you're hiring people who are a lot better doing the jobs that you were doing than you are because they've got lots more experience they come from that industry but me and i come from tech so we're not exactly exact We're not exactly classically trained, I think they say, FMCG people.

21:08So you're hiring people who've spent a lot more time in these areas than you and will be a lot better than you at your job. And so I think your job is to coach. So it's to ask the questions and really tease out things and maybe challenge as well, rather than tell you're trying to understand their way of thinking. And I think for founders, you really have to learn how to let go. if you're still trying to do or manage in a space where you should be coaching you're going to be a bottleneck you're going to you're going to be constricting them rather than letting them run and letting them breathe we've hired an slt and having them all running free without having to worry about constricting them basically it is the big aim now so let's go back to the beginning it was just two or three of you what the first hires you made and why probably two very unconventional hires for FMCG?

22:03I think usually an FMCG probably hire a salesperson and maybe an intern, maybe an ops person or something like that. But our first two hires were a full-time content creator and an NPD manager. So Hannah and Rosa. And we highlighted these two things as content creation and new products or tweaking products, basically making the brand, working on the socials and creating a brand through Instagram primarily and then improving the products and making brand and product as good as it can be early was what we wanted to focus our internal team on and then what we did then was we just outsourced everything else we possibly could we found outsource distribution so we didn't even do like the fulfillment through 3PLs which made my life managing ops a very easy I have to say which is good but Amelia and I focused on sales while they focused on strengthening the brand.

22:54It meant Amin and I could focus on building these like incredibly strong relationships with retailers and put all of our attention into that, which I think if you look into like Bold Bean Code DNA, one of our key things is that we want to have the best relationship with suppliers, retailers, and our consumers. And I think me spending a year on customer service shows that we were really able to build those strong relationships, which was great. Wasn't the most efficient use of my time, but it definitely made for some strong relationships. do you think it's a side note but on that doing the customer servicing again at pop chips we all did that i did it for six months and i find it really difficult because i take it really personally when someone's sending me an email but it was really good for seeing problems really quickly because when you're when someone's telling you about something it's very different from hearing it firsthand so i think in terms of getting to understand the consumer understanding how people receive the brand especially in the early stage it's absolutely invaluable even though it's quite annoying.

23:52I actually couldn't agree more. Someone would email in those early days being like, not really sure about this packaging you're using. Could you try and make it better? And then like straight away, I just found this new packaging supplier with these lovely compostable chips. And so we made that change within a minute. It was such a great example of where being that close to the customer is so key. Amelia actually really encourages the whole team to get on calls with their customers where they'll let us. So we set up calls with our D2C customers and say, what are you enjoying? What are you not enjoying?

24:24What would you change about the product if you could? All that sort of thing, because it has such big impact when you're hearing it from one of your key customers who are so crucial to the business. I have to say those compostable chips are very popular in my house. My kids call them nuggets. And whenever I get a delivery, I'm afraid they won't eat the beans, but they love the nuggets. Yeah, I've heard lots of chefs, like lots of chefs who receive them like love eating the compostable pellets we don't they don't eat them i know i've heard that i've heard that i think they're yeah i'm glad your kids don't but i've heard some people really do i'm not condoning that anyone should by the way i'm not sure if that's food safe but yeah some people we've had reports of some people eating them but yeah people love obviously putting them down the sink it's like the funnest game in the world isn't it you mentioned outsourcing then how do you decide what to hire for versus what to outsource and and what just to figure out yourselves?

25:20I think it's basically this question is down to what you really want to focus on. What do you really want to be famous for? And what are you okay with not being famous for? And that question basically defines what you should bring in-house and what you should try and outsource. And it is way more tempting to try and bring in-house everything like you hear. You'll speak to other founders, You'll listen to podcasts and everyone will say, you need a salesperson right now. And that's the first thing you should hire. And you need an operations manager. You've really got to think about your business because it's unique to what you're building versus what we're building.

26:00They're completely different companies. And what you want to be famous for is completely different to what we want to be famous for. So for us, it's all about the products. That is what we want to have the best products in the market forever. And so there's a huge amount of work that goes into doing that from sourcing to production to MPD to existing product development, all these sort of different arms. Those are the places that we really want to make sure that we're actually investing, retaining knowledge and learning in those sorts of areas. And then the other area is like brand. So we want to make sure that we have the strongest brand.

26:34And that's why we have such a big in-house marketing team. So those two areas are so crucial for us. And then obviously the other area, which is commercial, where we want to have the strongest relationships with our customers and with our retailers and everyone else. So it's really that question of what do you really want to be famous for? What do you want to have the best? And then what do you not mind outsourcing? And usually that comes down to sort of anything like ad bin related that we think that we can outsource. We have and it is one of the early decisions we had, which was to outsource fulfillment and like supplying our retailers.

27:07we found that we could do that and they did sort of new line forms for us they did all the promo uploading they supplied all the retailers so we didn't have to worry about that it gave us so much freedom in actually doing what we think that we would do best we knew that there were companies out who would actually do that job a lot better than we ever would so why not let them and focus on what we think we can be best at basically and you've grown the team to 25 like we said in just couple of years what's been the hardest part of that rapid growth definitely staying focused it's amazing how much focus how hard focus gets once you grow because everyone has these great ideas and there's so much more everyone can do we hire very entrepreneurial people so at the beginning when I mentioned about that like desire for growth and autonomy I think is in the type people that we hire.

27:59But actually, as you'll know from all your work, Ruth, is like one of the best ways to grow a brand is from being consistent and having and showing up and delivering on that mission and staying really focused to that mission and saying no to stuff that dilutes your attention on that mission. I think that is probably the hardest thing because we all want to do so much, but everyone has limited time. And I think staying focused on the two or three things that really matter to us is probably the biggest challenge as we grow. And were there any moments where you thought this is too fast? You know, I think like in the first years, we were growing really quickly, like more than 100 % year on year.

28:41And those three years changed so quickly and so dramatically. We'd have a business model, which was supplying direct to consumer. And then in two weeks, that then had to turn us back and we had to supply retailers and we had to make sure we had enough supply. So like those big changes where you're really structurally changing the whole business in a few weeks were pretty mad. We'd have a product range one day and then three weeks later when we introduced three new products, our product range doubled. So those things do happen really fast. But I think in those early days, if you can manage that and you actually enjoy that and you hire people that enjoy that, then you're set up for anything really in the future.

29:21And as the team grew, what systems or rituals became crucial? think the main system, the one that has been in place since we started, and I actually think will never change. And that's a strong bet, but let's see if that happens. Is our values cool? So we've got four values that run through the business. Every other Friday, we get on a call and someone on the team highlights when someone else in the team has shown an example of going above and beyond in the last two weeks and showing that particular value, for example, be hungry is one of them. So when someone's gone above and beyond their job description to be hungry and chase down an opportunity, for example.

29:59And it's actually like never, you basically have a smile on your face for 30 minutes because it's just someone saying something really nice about someone else who says something nice about someone else. And it's just like a great way to highlight because I think probably the biggest thing that I personally experienced indefinitely in operations is work is only highlighted when things go wrong and very rarely celebrated. And to have this forum where anyone's allowed, encouraged to celebrate people from other teams doing stuff that they've noticed is really cool is it just doesn't happen enough in any business that I've been a part of previously.

30:36And then the other thing that is so crucial to take, I mentioned at the beginning is onboarding. Like you invest so much in team members, like making sure that they've got everything they need to and it's the best investment that you'll make because if you have someone who's happy motivated and wants to be here long term obviously that that's exactly the result you need when investing something when i'm trying to hire investing all that time into making the job ad and going through all those rounds of interviews so i think that making a system like the onboarding system super tight that everyone has what they need and can really hit the ground running as soon as they start working and are really motivated as well is probably the second the most crucial system that we have.