8 Timeless Brand Building Lessons: Selling Green & Blacks for £35 Million and New Covent Garden Soup for £40 million

1:05:54Was that Sir John Hegarty? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think he's your post on LinkedIn, so he's still quite active. No, no, I know John Hegarty is, but I just, I think they got taken over or whatever. I mean, it was a long time ago and they had done all the coolest. I mean, I won't even tell you because it would just show my age if I start telling you about the ads that they did. And they decided they wanted to take on a new young brand, so we were very, you know, flattered that they were going to take us on.

1:06:23And they looked at – up until then, we had built up our brand on good old-fashioned story-based PR. You know, Covent Garden Soup was driven by PR. I still think it's a case study, and I don't think anything's changed, by the way because you know building a brand on social media is all about content it's all around stories and we just manufactured stories we were full of stories you know we we all you know embodied the brand and so everything we did was around stories and and people would say oh yeah think about you know big company people would say think about pr it's fine but you know once you've launched a new product everyone's not interested until you launch another product say no no you know we found that the more you talk the more people wanted to talk to you and there was there was always something to talk about what sort of you know we were test driving new cars we were i mean i had this thing we were just down the road so in north london we're just down the road from the bbc and the bbc discovered that we were there and so they would ring up and say um the trade figures are out do you have a view on it and i'm thinking well i don't at the moment but by the time you get her i've got a view on them just come up here and they would bbc in those days had to have sort of fresh footage they wouldn't use sort of archive footage so they had you know they had to film something you know in real time and so i'm finding a manufacturing business within two or three miles of of shepherd's bush was was was pretty difficult so they would come up and i would just have a view on everything trade figures you know i mean all these sort of all these things i mean i got quite good at it you know there was there's business news the whole time we were always on i mean again you're too young and probably no listeners are but there was this sort of terrible fear of the millennium bug they thought the world was going to come to an end all the computers were going to grind to a halt because i was deeply suspicious of that but the blair government was obsessed with you know being on on top of it so we became the sort of poster child of you know a company that was dealing with the millennium bug we got we got of global coverage because you know and i was on with blair and everybody on the day that you know they were launching the campaign so we just became this we became the sort of the best example of an entrepreneurial brand we just happened to be making fresh soup it didn't really matter it was sort of iconic i remember blair when when we did this sort of news story first thing in the morning on the big day and he said oh god you know i opened the fridge this morning all i could see was coffin garden soup and now here we are again and you know we became this sort of phenomenon so that's how we built out the brand and then we thought we need to accelerate that so we need to do advertising and we got bbh in and bbh looked at our files and files of coverage and they said oh my god this is this is just brilliant and so our adverts were just more of the same stories so i mean i got a lot of stick because one of them was i've you know we grew brussels sprouts as family farmers and we made soup of the month which was another of our great innovations you know a soup that changes every month and the supermarkets didn't know what it was going to be just the barcode was the same but we just made something it was in season supermarkets hated the idea of it it was usually our best seller so we did that we made a soup of the month which was brussels sprout and chestnut using brussels sprouts from our farm and there was something really funny the people the you know the press just found it really funny that there was there was you know there was a farmer who was actually making this stuff and turning into soup and selling it in london supermarkets they sort of caught on and so we had huge amounts of coverage so bbh took all they saw all these press cuttings we got of me in a pile of brussels sprouts or so when a field brussels sprouts and so they wrote this advert and and shot it and it was me in a pile of brussels sprouts and just holding one up sort of my top john hegarty you know directing it me as the model i mean you know it's the kind of cheesiest thing as well all my friends in advertising said you know oh god you know they couldn't think of anything else he put the boss in an advert it's kind of when when all else fails put the boss in the advert so that they buy the execution but it was not about that it was just this is a business that really you know is all about provenance it's all about understanding the ingredients that go into it and we can't write a clever advert the clever advert than what we're already seeing which is this is a business that is just telling stories about itself the whole time so let's just tell that story louder and louder by turning it into an advert which we can then pay to put in all the places that previously you might be hoping for unpaid for pr but this this is time to sort of accelerate the messaging oh my god i am so so so excited it feels like hungary is finally swimming in the big leagues i can't believe this is absolutely mental but delighted to announce that big fish yes big fish are part of the podcast perry's been on the podcast three times listeners absolutely love it some of my most downloaded and cherished episodes of all time but big fish are behind literally so many brands in your cupboard in your weekly shop, Charlie Bigham, Year Valley, Tyrells, Clipper T, Goo, Rana, I mean, make the list longer than the River Nile.

1:11:38But they also share risk and invest in brands that they really believe are a force for good, brands that they believe are going to be the next big thing, like Howda, the snack that gives back. But even more exciting news, Big Fish want to speak to the next wave of small challenge of food and drink, Brad, is that a death sim for big things, the raconteurs, the movers shakers buccaneering visionaries so look if you want to speak to big fish and just have a chat get your brand in front of them then drop me a message my mate louis from local beer amazing beer was in their office aka la fish bowl uh last week chatting to perry freddie and the big fish crew so drop me a message if you would like to speak to them what you said about you can get your your marketing to your work can always be too clever and I think whittling it back or whittling it down is it's almost like what I don't know who told me this someone in the podcast told me I think it's from a big ad exec or someone but like it's the best marketing is the marketing you're bored of yeah and it's basically like you know we say you've got that thing that's working really well actually just double down on that double down on that and do more yeah but the typical founder I think um and even I'm like this is you want to do the next creative thing your ego gets involved is actually does that actually move the needle yeah um what what else would you say are some in terms of getting in terms of getting brands out there so we've talked about storytelling talked about pr like how else um we can talk about maybe new covent gardeners as an as super as an example but how else were you kind of driving that distribution because i think one thing again that mark taught me is brands have this two points the zero to one million mark which is yeah i call it the trough of sorrow right it's a morbid way of saying it um and then you get to that kind of five million mark and what i'm trying to get at is how you kick on to that next level and we talked about you know about the different paces like founders think they can go way too quick when you get to that five million mark you've got the distribution what does it take to to go from that that that point to the next level do you see what i mean yeah no i see what you mean and and i mean i mean i think once you got to five million you kind of made it i mean you could go from five million to a billion or you could go from five million to 20 million or you but whatever but i just think five million you know you're probably covering your costs at that point you know kind of it just opens up a vista of opportunity as you say getting to one million is is is really painful and and and the hardest bit of all but at least it you know a million of sales is that's quite a lot that's a lot of stuff and you know and um you know we've we we talked about la brewery i mean la brewery's got a million plus in the in the last year and that's i just just so exciting compared with you know where we were so even in my 60s i'm I get probably more excited about that than I do about seeing businesses sort of get much, much bigger.

1:14:49So, I mean, how do you get beyond 5 million? I mean, it is all about distribution. It is all about, you know, Covent Garden Soup was very dependent on the multiples. And there's only so much fresh soup, I guess, you could sell under one brand. and we were you know it's not like doing soft drinks where you can sell it in you know every corner shop you can sell it in every petrol station you know the the opportunities you know hospitality fresh soup as a ready meal is is i mean it was invented all the ready meals was invented by the by the supermarkets we just happened to get in as a brand because they'd only just thought of it and so they hadn't realized that they didn't really want any brands in this area that they'd invented so we just it was all about you know getting into all of them getting the rate of sale up so that you weren't you know lagging behind and and being in fear of of being kicked out by by you know the asdas or whatever who perhaps you know found the price points quite challenging in some of their stores so it was all about that was also extending extending the range you know how do you how do you do that and keeping that fresh so i talked about you know super of the month i I mean, that was an incredibly valuable and quite brave move by us and hard work because we had to change it every month.

1:16:12But it was a fantastic tool for testing new flavours, which we then quite often would put into the main range and we were able to show the supermarkets that they'd done well in the soup of the month. It wasn't always a direct transfer because people just liked the idea of soup of the month and then when it became a regular feature, they didn't necessarily like it. So it was about extending the range. I mean, I think what we did wrong at Coffin Garden Soup, which limited our growth, is that we stuck with soup for too long. You know, we started doing things like baked beans and sauces and pasta sauces and whatever.

1:16:45But we were a soup company. We were obsessed with soup. We knew everything about soup. We wrote books about soup. And people loved us for our soup. but actually if we had redefined ourselves or defined ourselves at the beginning maybe we shouldn't have called ourselves a covent garden soup company where we should have called ourselves a covent garden food company and and really majored on soup and driven because i think if we tried to do our portfolio things at the beginning we'd have fallen flat on our face but i think our approach was not limited to soup but by the time we started diversifying it kind of was you know they're trying to do other stuff that's a bit lame maybe they've kind of run out of road and um and yet you know we made things that were as good you know our test was would the would you serve this to your friends if they came around for supper tonight that was our only test and so if the emulsifier didn't work on the on the on the um the machinery and we ended up with chunky carrot and coriander soup and it tasted delicious we'd send it out the supermarkets hated that because they liked a tightly written specification.

1:17:52But our specification was, would you serve this to your friends? So all we were concerned about was, as we got bigger, is are there enough people out there who've got the taste buds if they're working on the night shift to be able to taste this? So I didn't have to get a delivery by dispatch rider at three in the morning to taste whether this could go out. So that measure would have worked for pasta sauce. We could have become a giant ready meals manufacturer, a branded manufacturer, but we didn't because I think we limited ourselves. So I'm not sure if I'm answering your question. No, you are.

1:18:25No, it's fine. So links back to what we were saying about the pace at which founders are trying to get things done. And, you know, at the talk I did for you guys, it's the donkey versus the unicorn. Hilarious how you said unicorn tears right at the beginning, but unicorn is the billion dollar brands that everyone reveres and wants to be the Airbnb, the Instagram, and actually in food is like the actual consumption and the supply chain of food. It's not tech. So looking at tech is just, you're completely deluding yourselves. And building on that, I think there is this point of, which is fascinating hearing you say this, because, you know, I've interviewed Giles Brooke on this podcast.

1:19:04He says, you know, just do one thing well and, you know, be the owner of one category. And actually what you're saying, which is super fascinating, is you can get yeah that works to a point but actually you don't want to pigeonhole yourself into just soup and i but i think what most brands get wrong and what we've been susceptible of islands is you try and do way too many things way too quick and it's that point and actually i think that's an art not a science it's at that point of when when and that's when you kind of have to when do we become too soupy which sounds crazy yeah um what would you say are some of the lessons that you've taken from well you said there are a lot of painful failures like what was what's been the what was the biggest most painful failure at new covent garden soup that you didn't allow to happen again at green and blacks um and and or you know when you when you're speaking to louise at la brewery so i think it's probably more relevant to la brewery because we covent garden soup you know we were a bunch of passionate food lovers who had turned that passion into a you know into a manufactured product but we we weren't we weren't manufacturers we weren't we weren't people who loved food factories and yet you know 98 of our balance sheet was in stainless steel was in manufacturing and we had to get really good at it and it took us a long time to get good at making it and it required us to find some people who were as passionate about manufacturing as we were about brands and delicious food to sell you know to give our friends for supper tonight and and that that experience was so difficult and so painful that when we got involved in other things, you know, so when I got involved in what became Green and Blacks, I assumed that we'd have to have a chocolate factory.

1:21:05We never had a chocolate factory. We found amazing manufacturers to work with. You know, we found this amazing family business in Northern Italy who made the best chocolate you could imagine. And they just didn't do brands for whatever reason. They sort of lost the ability where they never had it. They just made amazing chocolate for other people. And so that was just our dream. so we could just be you know we could just be green and blacks chocolate fanatics you know we had so virtually the entire green and blacks team were sales marketing and you know perhaps some back office accounts although nowadays we wouldn't even know that you'd outsource a lot of that yeah and course and press is the same so course and press is you know we've got an amazing team of people but they're they're they're sales and marketing people with a bit of you know support around it but you know we do outsource most of our accounting to a great team of people so we've got a finance director but but so that's that's that's my dream model but la so the brands are sales and marketing company really and truly yeah and the manufacturing is done by specialists who work with us but i mean you know you've got to find it so but that's not the case at la brewery because la you know i thought i thought i could find someone to make the louise's delicious kombucha at scale couldn't find anyone i've now realized five six years on that that's the whole point of what louise is doing is she's making this extraordinary kombucha which in my view is better than anyone else's kombucha i'm sure others will disagree but you know that's the fun of it but it is amazing and most people who taste it say this is amazing i don't like kombucha that's you know so when thomasina myers said to me you've got to meet louise she makes the most delicious kombucha i said that is impossible kombucha is good for you and it tastes horrible and then i went to meet louise and i thought this is extraordinary this is what i've been looking for all my life you know something that i can drink which stops me opening a bottle of wine midweek because i don't like sweet things particularly and and so you know i thought because i had had so many difficult we had had so many difficult experiences making soup and having to you know just when we got to that five million stage thinking oh we're running out of capacity in the factory we're gonna have to raise some more money to build another factory you know not having to do that just was was brilliant so for you know 20 years after selling coffin garden soup company i didn't have to worry about i love looking at factories i love it when they belong to other people and i'm on the board of one of the best food manufacturers in britain probably the world and i love it but i you know i'm a non-executive director and that's just great but but but but with louise i realized we had to make our we had to make our own and so you know we've had to put way more money in than we would have done if it had just been a sales and marketing led brand and we've had to go through the pain of you know learning how to make something that's not widely made at the moment how to make it properly and how to make it the way louise wants to make it and it's delicious and it's great and so i get it all and and but you know the lessons for me is is that if you can avoid investing in manufacturing that's just great i mean coven garden soup we you know the way we made money in the end was you can have any flavor you like but would you mind having carrot carrot based one because we know where to get very very good high quality cheap carrots and by the way can you have it in a milk carton because we just spent two million quid on a new packing machine that only puts things in a in a milk carton and and more and more people saying well we love your soup but what about putting it in a different packaging format well that's that's another factory and you know that that demands i mean if you look at the brat you know if you look at the innocence and the and the fever trees and virtually every successful drinks brand they don't make their own hi there guys thank you so much for listening as always means the absolute world to me before we jump into this episode i need a really big big big big favor i have pitched some massive guests humongous guests and unfortunately they've said no because my subscriber count isn't big enough please please please just hit the subscribe button on apple or spotify or follow ultimately it helps all of us bigger guests equals better conversations equals hopefully better insights for you which means you can scale hopefully faster with a little less stress as well so please hit that subscribe button and yeah enjoy this episode to link this back to the you can only sell things you're passionate about but when you were selling not not you but as and i know louise she's like a good mate of mine she's been on this podcast yeah if you you are so passionate about selling your dad's rhubarb as a kid because you knew where that came from like you knew the story and you knew the why it's very easy to transfer it it is the path of most resistance for la brewery but i don't i don't if i don't think louise knowing her you know but her better than me but it's it's so entrenched in her getting that taste that you could only get through making it yourself that makes it kind of easier to sell i don't there's now a lot of you know the cans of kombucha you just know it's fucking shit's right off my language but you know it's awful louise can never get passionate about that so i think sometimes you you have got to take the path of most resistance if it's i completely agree i completely agree i think you know particularly you know i think it's it's it's it depends what you're making In Covent Garden soup, if we had done it, we wouldn't have been successful if we'd done it 10 years later because everyone was making moderately okay fresh soup for the supermarkets by then.

1:26:31They weren't doing it with, you know, they weren't under-seasoning it so that our customers could make it, pretend they'd made it at home. We weren't doing all that stuff. And the reason we had to build our own factory is there wasn't anyone who could make it for us. And that was the thing. But, you know, the family who made our chocolate in northern Italy were, I mean, it would have taken us a thousand years to have got as good as them. And they were part of our story. And also part of our story were the families in Belize who were making, who were growing the cacao forest in this, you know, these wonderful, you know, whatever Caribbean environments, you know, that was part of our story.

1:27:10So, you know, it wasn't that we were cutting corners, but we didn't need to build a chocolate factory. If we built a chocolate factory, it would have to be so enormous because we made lots of different types of chocolate at Greenblacks. You know, we'd had to build an ice cream factory. We'd had to build up. So it wasn't necessary, though. It's certainly not necessary with Causton Press. We can concentrate on sourcing, you know, amazing juice. But there are people getting harder, but there are people around Britain and around Europe who are much better than we are at putting it into cans and cartons and whatever.

1:27:39So you don't need to do that. But for Louise, you're right. You know, it turned out, because I didn't know much about making kombucha, it turns out that you have to make it yourself. I mean, you might be able to eventually find someone to put it in a particular container for you rather than investing it. But that's down the line. And I think that's probably true of most brewing. You know, I mean, when I find that a craft brewing brand is actually made by somebody else, you know, there's one person there who had a vision in their bath one night and, you know, they've gone out and come out and brew.

1:28:15I'm not excited about it. To me, a craft brewery has sort of got to have a brewery. It's got to have a head brewer who kind of is my kind of archetypal head brewer who looks like a head brewer. You know, they can be... Well, that's your story as well. That's your story. That's your marketing. The fact that Louise, the LA Brewery,

1:28:38their biggest headache is their biggest marketing weapon in that we make it in our own brewery in Suffolk, which is super fascinating in terms of we talked about this one million mark most people that will be listening to this are on that journey what's one, if you could like tattoo like a sentence of wisdom there that they have to look at every day as they're going on that journey as every single person is getting to that one million mark is just so hard and that's the point you've got to dig in like yeah what would you say for listeners well you know you've got to believe that you're going to get to a million and you've got to have a plan it's you've got to have a roadmap you know people who set budgets that they don't believe are going to deliver you know won't deliver them but you've got to work out if you if you're saying well we're going to double our sales because i've just sold sold that to my investor going to double our sales in the next couple of years then how are you going to do it what does it take count backwards you If you're doing half a million at the moment, you're going to get to a million, two million in the next couple of years.

1:29:46How does that work? What customers do we need to get into? How's that going to work? You need to do a tight timeline. I mean, so often you see five-year plans and the first year is quite detailed. And then, I mean, I look at investment decks almost every day and there's quite a lot of detail about the next few months. and then it all gets rather vague as the hockey stick kicks off and people are going to get up to 5, 10, 15 million. Well, how's that going to happen? I'm not interested in that. I want to know how you're going to get from half a million to a million. So spell it out in micro detail.

1:30:22I want to know who you are, what experience you've got, who you're missing. Who do you need to take you on that journey? Well, if you haven't got them there, then it's not going to happen or it's not going to happen as easily as you need it to. What do you see in the best plans you see? What are the consistent things, as you say, you see? Great people. Great people. Not a kind of Manchester City A team all lined up. I say you've got to play in position. But if I'm putting on my investor hat, it's got to be a team. So a team to me is more than one person. Yeah. And so it needs to be a credible team.

1:31:02you know you need to have very strong financial resources you you know in a way your financial the person who's sort of keeping the score needs to be way better than than the business can afford so you somehow need to come together you need to put together a as you know a chief financial officer function whether it's a combination of somebody who comes in one day a week and somebody who's kind of ambitious and not quite up to doing it on their own however you do it but you just need i've seen so many businesses struggle including my own in the past where you had you know not good enough um financial resources where the the weekly numbers were coming out late and you didn't trust them and so everything falls apart from that so to me you know that's that's kind of boring stuff but you know i i can't do that for me i need someone i've had a business partner for most of my life since gov and garden suit who just did that who you know whenever i say it's going really well he would go off to prove to me that it was doing really badly and you know having someone who's just keeping a very very accurate record enables you to do all of the stuff that you the the founder or you the sort of brand visionary can do because there's somebody who's kind of keeping tabs on it so to me that's the that's a bit and that person or that function or that attitude will you know will drive the detailed business plan and and as i say years three to five will um years three to five will will sort of fall into place if you get one and two right but you know so often you say well how come there's this great hockey stick in years four and five of the five-year business plan oh it's new product development well where's the new product development well that's happening in years and four and five well have you ever seen new product development deliver great volumes in the first and second year i mean most of the time it fails so start so if you're gonna you're gonna have great results from new product development in years four and five let's see that let's see how that's going to take shape in year one and that's probably all cost in year one so put that in your plan what else do you see that's wrong do you think that's quite a lot isn't it there is but they're just digging a little bit deeper so i said you know i said you need really good people but i mean not that doesn't necessarily mean people who've come from very large companies who've been you know done lots of courses it just means people who listen and learn from listening again i see people who just keep doing the same old thing and you know keep plugging away i i you know people come with business plans and and businesses and and you know they said what do you think of my idea well it's it's you know i don't know it sounds sounds good to me i'm i get very excited about new ideas anyway but is it working and well it's kind of half working well which tell me about the half bit well how are you going to make the half bit a three-quarter bit it's people who you know nothing if you look at the best businesses and and look at where they started if you you know the idea in the bath and how it ended up let's let's track that and you know you and i have just been out into our farmyard and you've met alice who is a young chef and i love having her here not only because she makes delicious food but watching the way a chef changes their business the whole time you know because i mean you've got the luxury of it your business cycles are very very short you know i put something on a menu and and that sold and that didn't sell well i'll drop the thing that didn't sell but just the way she came here you know in 2021 so two years ago with an idea sort of tail end of the pandemic and we're now probably on to version 5.0 of it because she's just she's out there she's looking she's listening she's got a million ideas of her own she's testing them and you know it's easier if you're running that sort of format it's a small business you're you're facing the customers the whole time you're cooking you can change you haven't invested in a lot of stainless steel but i'm just saying that that ability to to pivot again and again and again as you as you see stuff is to me is that's that's vital and i see businesses that do that and i see business founders who are capable of doing that and i see business founders who are hell-bent on getting the bloody customers to accept what they wanted to do in the first place and and and you're you'll fail you'll fail someone else will do it it's like it's like the pursuit of the i know again it's ironic me saying this after we talked about the the unicorn in in the states but so that whole silicon valley product market fit it's like you ask enough questions you iterate iterate iterate then it links up i think one of the quotes i love is by um oasis which may escape me but it's a lyric of theirs which is um the best the best answers of questions or the question lies in the answer.

1:36:06The answer lies in the question. Sorry. What, what do you think are some questions people listening to this podcast should be constantly asking themselves to build household brands? Ed, Ed Perry from cook talks about positive paranoia about, you know, as a founder, having that, that thing that keeps you awake at night, but it's actually really positive. What would you say are those one to two questions? well i mean you know that's that's a that's a pretty good one and that's a great brand isn't it i think you know what's this you know i'm just saying what's this for we started off or we nearly started off by talking about about purpose and i think the word purpose has been slightly hijacked by by you know sort of the esg um professionals and by the way i'm completely committed to all of that as well so it's not a criticism but i just think what what is this for what are we trying to what are we trying to deliver with this because um i think by asking that question again and again and again you you kind of it helps you away from going down those blind alleys so i mean i'm going to use you asked me a general question i'm going to be specific but so la brewery we're we're sort of two years into it and just before i remember it's just before the pandemic we've got a shareholder who's dutch and she's very well connected with with with heineken and so we we were invited to go and meet the head of no and low at heineken who was a really impressive italian was an italian woman she's been told by presumably her boss to meet us because otherwise why on earth is she meeting three people who walking across amsterdam with some samples of kombucha and she um we meet her she's charming she's invited she's brought in some of her team we're we're having a nice but not very substantive meeting louise is pitching and then half an hour into it louise says do you want to try some and they say sure and she says the the the head of no and low says as she tries it she said but but this is delicious and i said why did you say but and um and she said she confessed basically she she She didn't like kombucha.

1:38:26She hadn't tried any kombucha that she'd be impressed with, but she said, this is delicious. And she said, why are you calling it kombucha? And I got all defensive at that point. I said, well, because, you know, it is kombucha, and it's a$2 billion sector in the States, and it's flying over there, and it's going to do the same in the UK. It's just not doing it at the moment. She said, well, so I just spent millions of pounds a year on research and on low and low, and I'm getting, you know, The feedback I get is people want something that's non-alcoholic. They want something that's naturally low in sugar.

1:38:57They want something that's delicious. I've just tried it, and this is delicious. And ideally, that it's good for them. And you've got all four of these things in your drink, and you're calling it kombucha. And nobody cares that it's kombucha. You are answering four big global needs in a world that's awash with food and drink. why are you and i kind of thought hang on a minute i've been in this business for a long time it's really annoying that you've said that you've just absolutely nailed it yeah if you look at what's what we've been trying to do ever since with la brewery is is is kind of recognizing it is kombucha and there are more and more people out there who do like kombucha so we don't want to kind of walk away from it but how do you in a new category how do you anyway that's the sort of you know you get the point but i'm just saying we should have asked that question she you know took an outsider to ask that question but what are we for what needs are we trying to answer you know this idea that britain needs a whole load of kombucha because the west coast and the east coast of america seem to want a whole load of us it's not it's it's woolly thinking it's not it's not good enough we should have been you know out there saying that you know there's 50 of british people now saying they want to drink nothing alcoholic or a lot less.

1:40:17That is our purpose. How do we take this drink, this kombucha drink, which seems to sort of fulfil quite a lot of these things? How do we take that and how do we absolutely nail that need? Because that is a big need. It's a political need. It's a health need. It's a consumer taste need. How do we – it needs that sort of clarity of thinking, I think. Yeah, I think questions – and you said, woolly thinking it's great way of putting it questions kind of boil out the woolly thinking and can can provide like lucid clarity sometimes to founders are there any other questions you think they should be asking themselves a lot that they don't you see you know you see a lot of founders that just don't ask themselves those questions that if they did could really impact the business in a positive way well what did i mean what did the cook guy say you know paranoid I mean, I just think, you know, that kind of gets it all, isn't it?

1:41:12I just think, you know, it's being restless. I've got a friend who chairs a family business in the Midlands that's been going since the 1850s. And I can't remember which year in the 1850s, but his strapline is restless since 18-whatever. I mean, they're not a food business, but they're, you know, it doesn't matter what they are, but they're constantly pivoting. They're a big business. They're one of the biggest manufacturers in the Midlands. They're the biggest, biggest employer in a big Midlands town. And being constantly restless, I mean, it must be a nightmare if you're not a restless type working in that sort of environment.

1:41:56But I mean, I went up there, and it's a town that's not had a great recent history. And yet, you know, he's managed to recruit people back from London to work there because they're just excited by that sort of restlessness. So, I mean, paranoia, restless, whatever, you can come up with all these words. They're not necessarily attributes that you choose to take on holiday with you as a sort of holiday companion. But actually, I think that's what you need to be successful in business is just constantly, you know, pivoting all these sorts of things. So you need, so restless founder, completely agreed.

1:42:40You know, if you, it's a positive paranoia. But then as your team gets bigger, and I know this, I'm quite a restless person. And even with this podcast with my industry, he's like, mate, what? I'm like, can we do this? Can we do this? It's a nightmare. nightmare to go away with when as your business gets bigger if you're two wrestlers and you're too all over the shop it can create friction with your senior leadership team who have have have people to look after how do founders and and or senior leadership teams manage that do that kind of that that paradox of needing to be restless but also needing systems and consistency to actually build a value business do you see what i mean yeah well i mean i think you know as you get bigger you probably you know there's a bit of um division of labor going on so you know i think if the founder stops being restless then that that's a sort of that's a potential existential issue i think having i think having the founder there being restless being quite annoying but actually restless founders tend to be very charismatic so they're unlikely to drive away the doers the the executors, the whatever that you need in the business as well, as long as there is somebody in the middle who is sort of translating it.

1:44:00But, you know, I mean, I don't think I'm necessarily – I'm not actually really a founder of businesses. I'm somebody who is intrigued by – attracted by founders. I find their sort of – the chaos that can probably come from them troubling but not sort of so troubling that I want to run away from them. I want to sort of work with them. Chaos from them troubling by that you mean? Well, I mean, the early stage founders who have got a whole load of other issues that they are probably trying to work through in their personalities when they start a business don't necessarily make great bosses. and so i think but i find the flaws in the character of the of the business founder very appealing i mean people think i'm a founder people think i'm an entrepreneur i don't know what i am but i'm not i'm not a natural founder i'm much happier working with either the results of that activity or the person themselves and i've done that multiple times some people it's impossible to work with them and they don't want to work with you know they just don't want to listen to you so i'm i'm i'm not that um i'm not a founder but i think that if you lose that energy um you know louise at la is she just i mean when i when i first met her and i tasted the delicious drink that she produced she said to me and and it wasn't just for show she said all i care about is i get lots of people to try this drink because i love it so much i remember when i first tried it and I thought this is so amazing and I just want other people to try it I mean you know of course she wants to make some money out of the business of course she wants to do a whole load of other things but to me that's what you need in a business I think that you know I see businesses that have got to a certain stage and they've they've lost that they become you know brilliantly well run brilliantly you know process driven so I think you you kind of need you know you need to retain that but but not not at the expense you know it does need as you get bigger you do need some stability you do need um you know a program where you decide how how you launch new products and you don't you know there's nothing more annoying when you reach a certain size and and you tell the supermarket you're about to come out with something and it arrives three months late because that doesn't fit in with their business model you know they need the stuff to arrive on time and that means you know they've got a program they're they're you know they're quite bureaucratic because they're big so you have to fit in with that and you need to understand that and if if the business founder is still saying now well that's not the way i work you're never going to get anywhere so you do need a bit of both but i think the most successful most interesting businesses are where that founder energy is still you know if they're not there full-time they're still there um you know i've never worked with julian metcalf i've you know see a bit of him but you know you've you've i don't know if you come if you i've been to years yeah yeah but you know someone like julian everyone said you know he is a kind of restless founder but you know i've got friends well mark's another one i've got friends who who worked with him i've never heard anyone sort of saying it's anything other than positive i'm sure on a day-to-day basis it's it's it's it can be a bit it's taking yeah it's taking the um it's taking the there will be little moments of hiccups or annoyances but you'd much rather have those little moments than then there'd be no restlessness at all and i think the analogous way of looking at this is i interviewed a chef um when i was talking to him and he was basically saying as you get bigger as his brands got bigger the chef doesn't need to be in the kitchen all the time he doesn't have to be on the pass every service it's just impossible but there's like there's like a there's a there's a vibe and and the sous chef knows it or and or the sales director on the finance director is it that there's an omnipresence of ex-chef or ex-founder or julian metcalf that's kind of there yeah and julian does a great job of doing it like doing he has one of steve jobs's original um or apple's original computers in the foyer at the itzu office as you walk through and it's in this like box right that is a great example of he may be anyway he could be on a beach but there's whenever every employee walks past that it's a great thing of like you just push the limits um i was trying to think of some of the things he said like lead by example like that that is leading by example even when he's not there and i think that's a great example of someone who's done it well um but then he also talked about you know i've had he said i have instances where someone's come in with brownies and he said what the fuck are you doing have you actually bought these brownies and then they're not good enough and it is that's an example of where you've got the beautiful side of it with the with the uh jobs and uh uh computer but then the chaos of it which is oh you know what the fuck are these brownies i think and i think you need that both and it's it's it's hard thing to do let's talk about green and blacks um let's talk about craig um as we were talking about when you walked around the farm um and and that this kind of links onto this keeping the founders omnipresence because you said to me when we're walking around we'd send our new employees to go and spend a day with craig and they kind of get to know about the the ethos of the brand here it says it was the brand was founded by a hippie called Craig.

1:49:34Talk to me about Craig. Yeah, I mean, I don't know whether he was a true hippie, but I mean, he was of the hippie era, American. I mean, Craig was so full of stories. I mean, I'm talking about the past tense. I mean, he's very much in the present tense. But when I met him, he was full of stories about, you know, the 60s. So his story, I think, was that he went to India like a lot of people, got ill like a lot of people and um he was encouraged to get better by following a macrobiotic diet i think he claimed that yoko told him to follow it but i don't know whoever it was he followed a macrobiotic diet which you know macrobiotics as you probably know um involves you know avoiding i think avoiding meat avoiding sugars or or sort of you know um refined sugars involves eating organic food as much as possible.

1:50:34I think you avoid nightshades. Anyway, it was a kind of quite of nightshades being tomatoes. So he developed a brand called Whole Earth Foods, which tried to sort of encompass all of these different principles in a range of foods, which was – and it had quite narrow distribution, and the best-known stew in the brand was his peanut butter, or his range in the brand was peanut butter, which is still out there and doing incredibly well, as you all people know, whole earth. So Whole Earth Foods, and his peanut butter contained probably several elements of his philosophy. And then the story goes that many years later, and many stories later he's in belize and he gets bored on an archaeology dig which his cousin is on um and and drifts into a village and discovers that they are really struggling because they've taken lots of u.s agricultural aid and they've grown cacao um and just as they're ready to harvest the cacao uh at considerable expense even though they've received aid price of cacao has dropped and so you know the the village the farming the farmers are struggling and so they're having to send their young next generation off to the towns which is what's been happening in belize this is in southern belize which is the poorest part um and they and so craig rashly says if you can make organic chocolate if you make organic cacao produce it i will buy it off you and several years later or whatever a period later he's told that they have now got organics as certified cacao his wife Jo says if you produce chocolate without any sugar which is your philosophy through Whole Earth Foods it's going to taste horrible so they need to come up with a new brand so they come up with green and blacks one night so that's the origin of it and And like a lot of founders, I mean, Craig is a campaigner.

1:52:44And so, you know, I'm in awe of his campaigning and his enthusiasm. And I had some great fun times traveling around with him, meeting the people in his world and introducing him to my world and the crossovers. But he was not a business person. And so as Organic sort of took off, actually, the business wasn't very well equipped to cope with that. And so we, ex-Covon Garden Soup company team, bought most of it. And we'd had some issues at Covent Garden Soup when the founder sort of fell out with the backers. And so we were pretty wary of taking on a founder-led business and having the founder still there, potentially, you know, not.

1:53:30Why did the founder fall out with the backer? At Covent Garden Soup? Yeah. Just because it wasn't working. I mean, it's happened. You know, it's a perennial story. It was just the same, you know. Shouting in. It's such a long time ago now, I can't even remember. But basically, you know, it's not delivering. We still believe in the principle, but we just don't believe in you anymore because you haven't delivered. So our new plan is we'll put some more money in rather than let the business go bust. But you're going to have to cede control over the business. So that happens again and again, I'm afraid.

1:54:01and, you know, it's good or bad. I mean, the founder of Covent Gardens who remained a shareholder. So Craig, so we kind of thought, well, this will happen. So Craig's going to remain a shareholder and he's very interesting, but he's very different and we're business people and we need this to work and we're putting quite a lot of our own money in and it's kind of not going very well at all at the moment. So we wrote a very, very sort of tight contract about what happened when we fell out. Anyway, Craig being Craig was determined that we wouldn't fall out. So he actually became rather sharp. He was saying, well, we should can this product.

1:54:38We said, Craig, you've been selling this for 20 years. Yeah, but it's never sold. We should get rid of it. And I think, well, but that's kind of the heart of the business. What about your – actually, I think we did can the canned brown rice. We just thought, actually, we all agreed. It deserves to be canned quite literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think actually Craig put up a fight for that one. He said there are people – he said, I think there's a group of people somewhere in East London who are going to be really upset about it. so we'll just have to live with that. But we just got on very well.

1:55:05And over time, he turned up to board meetings and whenever we wanted to sort of do some PR work, he would be there and he told a great story and he was a great character. Everyone loved him. And as you said, as we got bigger and as we recruited more people who tended to come from larger business and it's really tricky trying to get people who perhaps worked at, I don't know, Nestle or Unilever for most of their probably quite short careers, trying to get them to understand this is a very different business is quite difficult. I know that from other places. Sending them to Craig for half a day or a day in the Port of Marilla Road and listening to his stories, you know, didn't need to do anything else.

1:55:46They just realised they had crossed the Rubicon. They had arrived in a different place where, you know, different priorities existed, where, you know purpose was what it was all about by trying things you know cutting corners doing all the things that entrepreneurial businesses need to do just hearing his story his stories was a great way of um you know initiating people into the world of whole earth and green and blacks well what eventually became just green and blacks so you know that's a happy story where retaining the founder and the founder's sort of ethos um was highly productive and and i think i mean i i i see businesses where the founder is missing and their dna is missing and their vision is missing and it's hard it's hard you can try and you can try and cultivate it and and of course that you know an alternative one can develop but if it's developed by people who weren't there at the beginning who didn't know what it was for it's difficult it's difficult you know i i rely because so much of my time in business i've relied on somebody who cares so passionately about the brand that they just say we're not going to do this even though in every other respect it looks like a great idea we're just not going to do this this is not you know louise is that person louise just knows what we can and can't do i mean she might say we're going to do this and someone else says no we're not because we're not going to make any money out of it i mean that's you need that as well but having somebody who just we had that at covent garden soup wasn't actually the founder it was some amazing it was an amazing person who became a close friend of mine called caroline jeremy who taught me pretty well everything i knew about food and she trained at La Vague N and she was our brand champion and curator and also values curator or whatever.

1:57:40And sadly, she died too young. But she did that for us. So we could sort of plough on knowing that it was all okay. She went away for three weeks. I think maybe it was our honeymoon and we launched past the sauces and they weren't very good. And we weren't really allowed to sit down for about a year afterwards because we'd sort of, you know, we'd got them into Sainsbury's and we needed to launch them and we couldn't get them perfectly right. And so we launched them and they never really, we never really recovered from it. And she just said, you know, you're losers. You launch these, you know what's right.

1:58:13And I went away for three weeks and I kind of, you know, we need someone, you need someone. They don't need to be the boss. She wasn't the boss. I was her boss, but she was terrifying. And well, she was terrifying when things like that happened anyway. reminds me of the conversation i had with george yesterday again talking about um the beatles and he was talking about um having having somewhat so george martin in the beatles he was a producer was almost like the mellower and the one that could like calm down their craziness and we've talked a lot about kind of you need the restless founder and the and the energy and the storyteller and the why you know send people to craig and you get the storytelling and the why and like but then you need someone to to to ooze out and even george was saying that um when jay rayner walked into the restaurant uh see the review george was the chaotic founder going ah and then have you met his head chef tom um i yeah i think i i have i mean i went for the curry with him last night yeah coolest cat on the planet apparently he's like cool yeah and you need then it's like how it's really interesting so so say there is a founder listening to this what what what are you looking for in when you're if you're trying to hire that not necessary mellowers maybe the wrong word but the well i mean the founder may not be the kind of mad you know founder that we've kind of sort of underlies our assumptions here is it i mean the founder might be um somebody just with a good plan i mean i think you just so to to widen your question i think um you know what if I'm right that a management team is more than one person and you're one person at the moment who should the second person be they need to be they need to be complementary and um yeah so if you're the kind of chaotic founder then you definitely need somebody who is a more stable kind of calmer but but not someone who's sort of only at war with you and and you know creates factions in the business you need to be you know you need to be collaborative you know they need to value your chaotic restless you know new ideas every sex every every six seconds approach and you need to respect their calming that slightly slowing down lack of pace whatever it is that you know you you need to see how they complement i mean that's those are the best teams what else do you think makes uh if we had to put this through like a team sheet analogy like the rugby at the beginning what else do you think makes a really good senior leadership team across again you work with so many food businesses yeah well i mean you know so for me um i'm i believe in in flat teams so i i mean we know we skirted around what what role i play so i'm not i'm not kind of i'm not the passionate entrepreneur although you know i'm pretty passionate and i do quite a lot of entrepreneurial things but i don't see myself as that but i do you know i i think i'm i don't really like chairing businesses but i'm quite a sort of cherry type of person but i don't like chairing businesses because it stops you being my business hero my business hero by by the way, is a small boy in the Emperor's New Clothes story who's prepared to say, you know, the Emperor's got no clothes on because nobody else has got the whatever, you know, naivety to say it.

2:01:47So if you're a chair, I think it's quite hard to do that because that's quite rude. So I'm kind of – I like doing all these things, but I'm not sure – I'm not a sort of – I mean, I'll lead from the front if that's what's required, but I'm – I remember journalists coming into green and blacks once and we had a glass bowl of a boardroom and he was coming in to do an interview and i was chairing that's what i was doing the weekly management meeting i came out and he said well you didn't say anything i watched you i was in i was over around for three hours an hour and i apologize you didn't say anything i said yeah but that's that's good isn't it i mean that's that's great i'm only there to stop the sales head of sales falling out with the head of marketing and punching each other but most of the time they don't do that so and um my chair who i told you about way back um when he was doing the full and frank evaluation of me in the early days said there's a fine line between um delegation and abdication and i've never met somebody who treads it quite so tightly as you or whatever the word was at the time i was quite flattered by that I mean, I think about it and I think, come on, you know, is that actually really very, very critical?

2:03:01I mean, abdication is quite strong. But, I mean, if I don't need to do a job, I mean, if someone says, can you come and join our committee and I find it's competent, I'm out of here. I just don't need to be doing stuff. I've got plenty of other things to do. So if it's being done by other people, more competently. So, you know, back to what is the perfect team. My perfect team is go out and recruit people who are, you know, overqualified to do the job they're qualified to do the job that you see your business needing in three five years time that's difficult because you know classically those sorts of people want to be paid more but find ways of recruiting people who need to be you know happy to be motivated by options or shares or put money in themselves or whatever it takes or just find people who are super clever and but quite young and therefore take some risks on their lack of experience for their ability to grow fast but just to recruit a team and and you know it should be a team of equals the covent garden suit leadership team we were all kind of friends i mean we got annoyed with each other but we and and we weren't always friends but we were sort of friends working together and i was you know i was the captain just someone's got to you Walk onto the pitch first and do the toss or whatever with the referee.

2:04:25But that was as far as it went. Green and black is exactly the same thing. We were all equals. To me, that's the perfect model. It was really interesting. When we sold to Cadbury, they immediately put in somebody who they thought looked like me. They said he's a bit of a maverick, which I kind of think, I'm not a maverick at all. I'm absolutely un-maverick. I mean, we just wanted to make a successful business. But this guy, they felt that, you know, he was a bit of a maverick, didn't really fit in perfectly to their model, and therefore great opportunity to move him to somewhere else. But he was also, he was way better paid than everybody else, just completely upended our model.

2:05:06You know, he had big pension contributions to the company, all that sort of stuff. And it was a real shock to the system. And I just realized that's sort of the big company model. If you're running a division or you're running over, The chief executive is way more empowered than everybody else, and everybody else reports in like that. I think that the earlier stage, fast growth, restless, disruptive business needs to be run by a team of equals. It's how it works in the military. If you look at how Ukrainian soldiers run circles around monolithic Russian soldiers, it's because there are these teams, these specialist teams.

2:05:53It's how special forces work. It's just a much more attractive model to me. I think it's just much more democratic and you get the best out of people. You're massively under-resourced compared with the people you're trying to disrupt. So you've got to come up with models where you're going to get way more out of your teams than they're ever going to get. And so you kind of need to find a model that, that, that, um, so what does that look like on say a weekly basis, that model versus that model, like as in, in terms of the reporting, because there'll be people listening to this who are probably going more like that.

2:06:29I've seen it happen before when business goes like that, it just, it upends the business, but actually getting that, that balance, right. Again, I, as, as, um, The guy who came in to do the interview said you walk the fine line between abdication and what was the other word? Well, the delegation of the chairman said that way back. The guy who came in to do the interview just observed me not saying anything. So to answer your question, what does it look like? It looks just like that. Interesting. It looks like that. So, you know, the weekly management meeting and all of your listeners will be experiencing that, we hope.

2:07:07Yeah. And so it looks like a journalist coming in and looking through the window at the weekly management meeting and is the founder having to say very much? So if you're not saying anything, how are you getting your, say you have got really, say we're just playing role play here, but say you're in a meeting and something is going wrong and you've got the urge to say, no, no, no, that's going wrong. But how do you kind of observe and let the team do that? Because again, that's more of an art than a science. Yeah, well, it is. I mean, occasionally you do have to do that, but you hope that over the years that your views, you've expressed them and so they're fairly clear.

2:07:51But, I mean, if you spend every weekly management meeting expressing your firmly held views, which you, for some reason, haven't expressed before, then there's a problem. I mean, everyone should know what your firmly held views are as the team leader, as the boss. I mean, of course, new situations arise and then you do have to express them. But most of the time, I don't know, most of the time for me, it's about getting other people to take responsibility and realising their responsibility. because as I say, that is the energy. That's how you get an under-resourced small business to outperform the very competitive market they're trying to compete in.

2:08:34And it's not just the senior leadership team, it's everybody else. I say to people, the most important person in the business is the person who joined last week because they had a choice and they decided to come to us. Why did they come to us? Ask them at the end of their first week whether they're as excited about their choices they were when they first arrived. Hopefully they were excited when they arrived. if not what went wrong i'm sure you get that right very quickly don't ever let anyone say when when the new enthusiastic joiner says i think have you thought about doing this don't ever say yeah we tried it last year didn't work say you might say what brilliant idea um why don't you have a look and why don't you work on that and by the way i think we have tried it in the past but we probably just got it wrong or our timing was wrong you know just try and get everybody to feel like this is their business they have made the best career choice of their life by coming to work for us whatever that involves and you know that is not best achieved by having a shouty founder banging on about what their vision was five ten years ago it's it's the the vision needs to be it needs to have seeped into the atmosphere and in any way the vision needs to evolve but as I say that the most important person is the person who's just joined who knows your products who's probably a consumer of them has taken the bold choice to leave the safe haven of a much bigger business usually to come and work for you because they love what they think they think you are expressing and what they think you are expressing is more important than what you originally thought you were going to express when you started that's so helpful for people listening It's like, as we've said, the vision needs to evolve and become malleable.

2:10:23And that's what Julian does really well. But actually asking the person, I think a lot of businesses would look straight at the senior leadership team. We've got to come up with the ideas. No, just ask the new person who joined because that's a completely fresh pair of eyes, but interested eyes that will then unearth interesting insights. That's insane. and you said I regret in an article I regret selling green and blacks to green and blacks to Cadbury it was a mistake a great shame I can say that now that Cadbury has pretty much disappeared brought out by craft and now Mondelez I wish I'd kept hold of it what did it feel like when the money dropped in the bank account when you'd sold green and blacks what was that feeling like well i'd obviously i i i'd done that once and forth so that kind of that loss of your baby probably happened at cobbin garden soup so i was i was a sort of old hand when we sold green and black so in that sense it wasn't a it wasn't a shock because a lot of a lot of founders just never get over losing control of their their baby yeah because it's mad that just quickly to to talk on that because everyone listens a lot of people listen to this because they dream of the big exit but every person I've sat opposite who's had to pick exit says it's the worst day ever like well I mean because you put so much into it so it's not I mean I'm sure some psychologists or psychiatrists could tell you why that is obviously going to be the case yeah that doesn't mean to say it's the wrong thing to do and and yes I did say that about Grinning Blacks I stand I stand by what I said of Grinning Blacks but it doesn't mean to say I think you should never sell a business because I mean I think sometimes it makes sense to sell a business it just didn't make sense with hindsight to sell green and blacks and there's a reason why we did and why you know by the time we did it we didn't have much choice but i mean i think there are other businesses where you get you reach a sort of natural stage where somebody else can help it grow to the next level and that's fine and i think you know people like me i'm getting a bit old now but people like me can then use our energies that probably are best deployed at an earlier stage in the business again somewhere else if you if you haven't run out of steam and i haven't quite so you know i'm on to version four now um and and plus i do it in a lot of other places as well but you know very part-time so um so i'm not anti-selling because I know that's important to a lot of your listeners.

2:12:53But it's a wrench. It's a wrench, and you're running it. It's all important. Even if you're not noisy and shouty in the management meetings, you kind of feel you're in control, and suddenly somebody else marches in, and they're in control now. And Green and Blacks was – Cadbury bought Green and Blacks for all the right reasons and some not-so-good reasons, but they were not fundamental. They bought it for a lot of reasons. The Canberra were originally a business that supported its labour force. They were the great pioneers of decency amongst Victorian workforces with Bourneville and all of that.

2:13:34But they probably hadn't, back in the day, thought too far about their supply chains. And then we arrive on the scene and people like us doing fair trade. and they really got behind all of that. In fact, we were only fair trade in some of our products because it was so difficult to be organic, fair trade, all these different things. And they took it much further. They were really supportive before and after they bought the whole business in working with our sourcing programme. So they were a great new owner in that respect. So the problem was more about us is we didn't need to sell it. We sold Covent Garden Soup partly because we had a venture capital shareholder who needed an exit, and they'd been in for quite a long time.

2:14:21Actually, they weren't putting us under a great deal of pressure either. But also, I think we had been involved from the start quite a long time. We'd taken a business that was not performing very well, and actually, we were part of the problem initially. we had been allowed to stay around long enough to correct that and turn it into a very successful business and i guess the sort of final bit of the story was we should be involved in a successful exit and so that was why we did it and and you know i think we felt all good we felt good about it i mean it it's not we could have done other things with it as i said but but by the time we sold it it had probably reached a natural um a natural sort of end for us green and blacks was this amazing brand you know it was a force for good it had great aspirations we we you know it was it was pretty profitable um and because we'd had we had real difficulties selling common garden soup we wanted to sell it and we'd we'd actually hired goldman sachs we probably the smallest of a client um and we'd spoken to all the people who expressed an interest in buying us at common garden soup and one by one they fell by the wayside until we had no buyers and yeah that was the worst time of all i remember exactly because it was the day that tony blair won the election i remember walking across london early in the morning and everyone was cheering and you know shouting things can only get better and i'm thinking i was i was walking across london because i'm trying to work out what to say to everybody because the last buyer had fallen out had dropped out and and you know everyone had options everyone had shares in it serious some people had already worked out what they were going to do with the ill-gotten gains from the sale and we're going to say and i went i went in and i made the sort of you know worst leader speech of my life no doubt i mean many of them which which was well we could just roll the dice again we'll just spend another five years getting us even bigger and better and i remember the sales director saying i don't want to do that but i don't i can't leave because i've got so much tied up in this business that you're stuck with me for the next five years and i don't want to do it i want to move on anyway we we fortunately found a buyer who was prepared to pay quite a well a high price i mean sort of as high price as we had hoped before so we did get out within six months of that all falling apart and but it was so it was it was such a sort of traumatic period one of the many traumatic periods i've had in these roller coaster early stage businesses with my heart rate going up again um that we set about when we bought whole earth green and blacks we wanted to kind of know who was going to buy it almost before we'd started and so we sort of you know once we'd stabilized it and got the whole thing going we went around talking to potential buyers got hired a boutique you know investment bank to sort of help us do that and um we found that actually there was one very good buyer for whole earth and cabri had no interest in whole earth i mean they said if they had to they'd take it but they wouldn't put much value on it so we actually sold whole earth to this other interest party to concentrate on green and blacks and cabri said well if you deliver the business plan that you've just given us we will pay you this amount which is a lot of money and of course we didn't leave the business plan but you know there we are we were stuck with it now and i quickly tried to sort of negotiate back and so what if we only hit 80 % of the business plan and they said well you know they'd done all this before they said well that'd be very disappointing we'll you know we'll we will penalize you heavily so actually what so what are the numbers at this point that you had to hit i can't remember can't remember but it was it was it was big growth it was big it was talking like 20 million or it was it was taking it from let's say i'm going to say five to close to 20 million something like that right I mean yeah someone someone yeah someone like Mark will say he can't remember anything it was you know he'll remember exactly but he was he just arrived at the time and he's you know younger than me so he'd remember but it was that it was that it was a big challenge it wasn't sort of taking it from five to seven or whatever it was it was enough to go to the toilet sorry yeah yeah is that all right yeah it's fine absolutely loving this

2:18:35so yeah so it's a mark new kind of ballpark what the numbers were where you had to get to well i mean we all i'm just saying i i it was it was a big it was a big steep challenge and we had to um we had to you know i and we didn't necessarily believe that we would hit them well we didn't necessarily i didn't believe we would hit them at all my my i was negotiating meeting my finance director colleague partner was alongside me you know late in the night all that sort of stuff and i remember trying to sort of row back and saying well if we only get if we get close to it are you going to give us the same amount of money and they said you know they went out for an hour they thought well you know they just kind of come back and they'll probably finesse it slightly but say yes and they came back and so we thought about it and the answer is no it's taken an hour to work that out you know it was three in the morning by then so we're this is Cadbury this is Cadbury yeah you know they've done a lot more negotiating than us especially on buying you know we've only got one business to sell and they've got plenty to buy so you know we I mean what I should have said at that point if I was super cool and experienced I should have just boldly said well what if we beat the plan are you going to you know are we going to get sort of you know an exponential a higher a higher ratchet if we beat the plan because I knew we weren't going to beat the plan.

2:19:56I didn't say that. And I was sitting with my finance director who, you know, was always poured cold water on my over-optimism. So he knew we weren't going to beat the plan. So I didn't say that. Of course, we massively beat the plan. And so anyway. So you'd already done the deal. So how long did it take you from that Cadbury's meeting or phone call at three in the morning to exit? Yeah. Three, four years. So back to the point. so we pre-sold the business so so this is my long-winded i hope your editors you know not going on holiday but um this is my long-winded answer to why we should never have sold the business we pre-sold the business we hadn't delivered anything like the upside we we thought we could kind of it was beginning to show signs of promise we you know we're just planning to sell whole earth for not a huge sum of money and we could have sold it for a lot more if we'd hung onto it as you now as you know better than i do um we put we're going to put that money in behind the brand and camry we're going to put a money some money in as well so we we suddenly would have a war chest of marketing to do so so there were lots of reasons why we could actually supercharge the brand you know there were we knew what was working but we still you know didn't believe that we could do what we ultimately did do so um yeah we sold it i mean not i don't want suggest we sold it on the cheap and can't really got it for a song absolutely didn't you know they paid a very fair price for it and we did perfectly well out of it but i'm just saying you know if any of your listeners are thinking or getting into a negotiation um you know and and and the final outcome is three four years away anything could happen meaning both ways what were the to look at that three years four years what were the one or two to three things that happened that made you have this exponential growth that far surpassed yours and and Cadbury's expectations like what was in the magic in that period well I just think it was a great brand and it was just coming into its own which we didn't perhaps you know fully realize and so it was one of those brands that everybody wanted to have you know the rate of sale was going up we had nailed how you marketed it we had worked out how you accelerated it we you know there were things i mean mark had just joined and mark was mark is a brilliant marketer and this is probably i don't know what he'd say his best years were but i'd say they were doing working at green and blacks because he just you know he arrived i mean i think he learned a lot as well because i don't think he you know understood the power of the story i don't think he'd worked in a you know a pr-led brand before um but but he he just had the he had the sort of the the skills the professional skills to sort of interrogate he was very very practical so we you know he would go into meetings with a sales team and quite often sales teams don't like taking marketing colleagues with them but he could go in and talk to tesco or sainsbury and and and talk the right language to complement the sales team and and so there were things like just there's a million things that you know julian metcalf at some point walked into our office i can't remember if it was announced or unannounced but he just walked in and said that he wanted a chocolate i can't remember the story now because i've told it so many times but but i think when we walked in and the sort of assumption was we were just going to make chocolate for him he said well we're not going to make chocolate we don't have a factory so why are we going to make our label chocolate um but we'll we'll we'll sell green and blacks and you know green and blacks was this little brand why would we why would he let us anywhere near Pratt anyway one thing led to another and Mark and it was Mark who pulled this off but we we made a separate a size of bar that was we'd never made before which which our wonderful friends in Italy were able to do.

2:24:05And it was a co-branded bra. And it said Pret on the front. But it also said Green and Blatt's. And Julian Metcalfe wrote on the back, I've looked high and low for the best chocolate to make for Pret. But these guys win hands down. That was genius. And he absolutely screwed us down on price. but we, you know, I don't know how many of our, you know, Green and Blacks customers, the crossover between Green and Blacks and Pratt must have been almost perfect, just that Pratt probably had 10 times more customers than us. So we had this bar of chocolate on the counters. We were making a bit of margin, but not much margin.

2:24:46Who cares? You know, we had this perfect bit of marketing collateral endorsed by this, you know, a brand at the top of its game. and Mark, you know, Mark sort of pulled that one off and, you know, it didn't last very long. It didn't need to last very long. I mean, it lasted probably a year or so, but it was things like that just kind of really supercharged. So you said you'd had, you know, we knew how to market it and accelerate it, just double clicking on that because I think there's a lot in that. And so when you said we kind of got that marketing bit right, how i know we talked about mark accelerating with the prep deal that's really interesting i mean we've just done the same thing with islands and gales right gales is probably the new gales have our have its own brand the pays will not spread um when you really know it's islands but it's those who do kind of pick it up it helps us massively um especially when we're trying to pitch to waitress because we're saying to waitress it's like look mate or not mates but like you know know your customer is going to to the girl shop is going to probably be going in to waitrose after a coffee so those little things help but when you said you've got the marketing right like what do you mean by that well i mean i think it was all i think we just we knew we knew what people valued in our brand we'd done this consumer research i'm not sure if we talked about our consumer yeah well that's interesting because some people so the guys that so there's the david ogilvy quote which is really interesting which is um people don't think what they feel don't say what they think something like that about it which basically he's he's anti some kind of um market research or data what what would you say is the what yeah what's your take on using market research because otherwise it can become decision by committee i completely agree i'm so with that sentiment i'm So, you know, so much market research is commissioned to cover arses.

2:26:48So people say, you know, it did well in research. Just not interested in that at all. Of course it did. I mean, you know, you're going to offer a, you know, product that's twice as good as the one that's on the market already. Of course people are going to say they're going to buy it and they're going to pay more for it. I mean, what did you? So I'm only interested in knowing why people did something because, you know, that's fact. Why people did something. Yeah. or why they didn't do something. So what were you asking those research groups? So we asked, and we didn't have any money. So, you know, it's much easier when you've got no money because you can't afford market research.

2:27:22So you're really tight on the questions. So we had, we could afford four consumer groups. We recruited women between 25 and 40 across all of them because they are the predominant chocolate eaters. I love saying that because, you know, if you've got room for people and everyone looks at the 25-year-old women and thinking they're eating all the chocolate. But it's true. They are the great lovers of chocolate. I'm sure there are many other groups as well. So we had four groups. Two of them were people who – what was it? Anyway, the groups that I was most interested in were those that were consuming organic products but um we're not eating organic chocolate that so that let's forget it i can't remember what the other two were but they were sort of you know kind of whatever not another another group sort of test get alongside it but those two groups the ones and i went to one of the the the the group gatherings and sat on the wrong side of the you know the window and watched um the the facilitator talked to this group of women one evening and asked them about their lifestyles.

2:28:37And they basically were chattering away. It was a nice, beautifully facilitated group. They were chatting away about their organic lifestyles, organic in the broadest sense. But they went to the gym. They were really careful about what they ate for breakfast. It was organic there. So we're back in the early 2000s now. So organic is sort of new and kind of misunderstood and whatever, but it's sort of fresh. and so they eat organic food and they need healthy lifestyles you know they're not they're not sort of unimpeachable in what they do but they're kind of broadly and then the facilitator said what about chocolate do you like you know well we know they like chocolate because i've been selected for that um do you like oh why no i wouldn't eat organic chocolate and they all start chatting about why they wouldn't eat organic chocolate and and the facilitator sort of was just started casually handing out some of our chocolate obviously um identified chocolate and they all started eating it and you know the chat sort of died down and someone said oh this is nice what's this and you know and then they all said well it's really good isn't it anyway so it's organic chocolate it's green and blacks and that was that was kind of that was one of those moments i mean whatever it cost us we could have paid 10 times for it that was the moment when we realized that we were completely getting up until then green and blacks was this worthy brand you know it was the it was craig's packaging which we might have modified slightly but it was all around we are here to save the planet we're here to pay decent wages we're here to do this and you know i mean our packs was so chocker with with with information and and and so as a result of that mark newly arrived mark palmer newly arrived basically turned our packs into being super indulgent this is this This chocolate is going to be the best chocolate you ever tasted.

2:30:24This is going to be the experience you've been dreaming of. Everything is indulgent. And then, you know, if you want to know more about us, this was pre-everyone probably calling a website, but on the inside wrapper, which is quite a big area, here's our story. This is the work we're doing with Belize. I was thinking about this. I was writing in one of my newsletters the other week, and I was thinking that, well, I haven't finished it right, but the idea I'm toying with is, like, don't forget the cake is the cake i.e yeah don't forget that people are buying food and like the fun 99.9 percent of the reason reason people buy food is because of the taste like nine like pretty much all the time and even if you are healthy still lead with the taste and um i think you can get so pulled into the icing which is the purpose the fair of trade all these other things a bit like what um happened with union right they're talking about all these other things they've kind of focus so much on the icing they forgot the cake is the cake and maybe that's the worst way of saying it but like that's what i'm thinking is that you can get so bamboozled into thinking i need to talk about all these different things but don't forget you're in the business of food yeah um what have been i try and push myself to ask some like um potentially hard questions but you're as i say you're in the driving seat but what has been like the darkest day in your career because i think people will be listening to this um seeing the success you've had across multiple brands but what have been the days where you just felt like you couldn't go on with this journey because i know how hard it is i have these days all the time yeah i mean i i i mean you know there are there are days and i think yeah i think it gets harder if you i mean i'm not you know living day to day in one business anymore so i've sort of got multiple but i mean i you know i do choose to throw myself back into these early stage businesses which might run out of money at any moment and things tend to go wrong at a faster rate and i do find you know as i said to you i i thought i was the luckiest person alive at covent garden soup and now i look back at the things that went wrong there and my heart rate goes up and i think how on earth did i ever think what are the harrowing memories well i mean the underlying ones were just the constant fear of running out of money except we didn't fear that because we just knew that we were going to get it right in the end but it was hell but there were also there were one-offs which i really hope don't happen to anybody else but you know we've had factory terrible factory accidents which has left me well one of the reasons is i'd rather not have a factory of my own i'd rather leave factories to other people and i go into factories and you know happily i work with businesses that have got very well run ones and i but you know if ever i'm directly i mean you know health and safety for me i think people have a fundamental right to go home safe and factories are dangerous and people doing repetitive work i mean we we work on a farm and actually farms are particularly dangerous but they tend not to be repetitive so people tend to be much more careful in a way whereas in factories you know people get bored and repetitive and so you have a i think you have an even greater responsibility as the in charge of the of the manufacturing side to to to prevent boredom enabling people to do stupid things for themselves and not rely on them to do it even though they are ultimately responsible so you know i have seen that happen um enough to leave me scarred by it um i mean comic garden soup you couldn't have made up the things that happened we had a you know we had a major arson attack just before we opened our second factory at the peak season sort of february when you know we're already bursting at the seams and somebody decided i mean turned out to be an ex-employee um what did they do just set fire to the factory i mean we actually managed to get it going again quite quickly within a way there's a huge amount of damage but we actually managed to get it going again so what do you say to so you look in the mirror that night or that morning what do you say to yourself i don't know i was kind of quite i was quite some sanguine about these things in those days i mean now i mean you know this stuff happens i mean you kind of yeah i mean i would i wouldn't mind a quieter life but things sort of you know if you if you go into this world things go wrong um that went wrong we had an extortionist i mean you know we had an extortionist decided that they wanted to so what is an extortionist an extortionist someone who extorts money out of you so yeah it's a blackmailer yeah yeah yeah and you know I probably don't want to talk too much about that because you know you tend to get copycats but you know people you know it is fairly well known that people think that they can extort money out of food and drink companies by you know threatening to contaminate and we had a very sophisticated one way way back and I had you know whichever business it was was quite advanced and you know we put we i had everything riding on it and then yeah this this this threat came and initially i didn't take it seriously we were one of several businesses and several of them were way bigger in household names which i'm again i won't talk about but you know it was it was it was six years six weeks of of hell and um i uh you know the the metropolitan police were amazing but I kind of went into a sort of dark side of policing that I didn't know existed or dark side of crime I didn't exist it I mean it was but when it all resolved itself in a way it was hilarious I mean I could turn it into a film but um but I wouldn't want to do that again so all these things all these things happen and you think this is all I'm trying to do is make you know nice soup and chocolate for people and but yeah I mean you know there's just so many setbacks I mean there's sort you think you've got a listing with somebody and then they pull it.

2:36:26You think you've found a new investor in a business and then at the last minute they walk away and it's bad enough for yourself but you've got to go out there and be positive about it and be with other people. It's sort of, you know, that's... I mean, every job, every activity involves massive setbacks but I think you expose yourself to them more if you get involved in this early stage world because you're just buffeted around by events, by people. You have very little control of your destiny, even though it's all about controlling your destiny. It's why you do it. But you're trying to disrupt this big, well, part of this very, very big system.

2:37:12And this very, very big system, most of the time, is dominant. Yeah, for sure. when was the last time you cried?

2:37:24I mean, I'm not a great... I'm not a great... I mean, you know, I sort of cry when, you know, in films and things like that. But I mean, when was... I don't... I mean, I can't remember when I last cried, you know, other than tears running. But I mean, when do I feel like crying? These days probably. No, I'm... I can't remember. I can't remember. I do remember actually feeling utterly, utterly miserable. I told you about working in the city. When I worked in the city, and I had great friends in the city, and my employers were tolerant, and I had an amazing time looking back on it. But I do remember being here one Sunday thinking, oh, my God, tomorrow is Monday.

2:38:06I've got another five days of doing this thing that I can't imagine where it fits into the rest of my life. and I loved it here because this here being you know in the country with growing vegetables in the garden and cooking and I'm in my 20s and you know I'm a farmer why would I not love being here in the country and this part of the country is beautiful so I love being here but it was more about going back into the fray of this life I just makes no sense to me whatsoever and I do remember kind of if I didn't cry I felt like bursting into tears when that moment struck me one thing i read was that your brother passed away when he was like 10 years old yeah how did that impact you or how does that impact you not not i mean you know he was ill for a long time and um so i knew he was going to die and my parents were amazing i think you know how they coped with it looking you know as a father of grown up children now but father of children i mean i took it all in my stride which takes must be entirely down to my extraordinary parents who managed the whole situation it just it was very very normal how did they manage it well they just you know they had a child i mean he had he was very ill he had a you know genetic disorder which um we never actually worked out what it was but i think we know what it was because when we had children we we checked um and the geneticist sort of based on the symptoms i described what we thought it was.

2:39:35They described, they thought, they diagnosed what they thought it was. And they just, you know, I think because of the way he was nursed at home, I mean, a lot of people, he was so ill towards the end that a lot of people probably would have, you know, put him in a hospital or put him somewhere else where he got, you know, specialist care. But my mother particularly chose to sort of look after him at home and with a little bit of help from others, but not much. And I just saw that. But I was a sort of selfish nine, ten-year-old in the last days of his life. And I suppose it was a privilege. And actually, he was very, very ill.

2:40:19He was deaf, dumb, blind. He was fed with liquid food. he cried I could stop him crying I felt quite proud about that that you know he could recognize my voice even though he was supposedly deaf he could recognize feel and what was really interesting I thought and and and nice is you know I I had I was a little boy who had friends around to play and you know it's funny how children are very tolerant so this you know he wasn't he wasn't he wasn't in great shape and so he would lie on the sofa and you know contorted and they just sort of say oh William's got a handicapped brother and you know should we go play football now and oh and he can stop him crying that's quite cool I don't know how to do it you know it was sort of it was just very normal and um so when he died it was just I mean I was probably I remember I was going out to play with some friends and I was worried that that might not be possible because he just died and I just went out and I stayed with him so but you know I mean it annoys me when people say i can tell you an only child and i say no you can't because i'm not you know why why do people say that do you think oh i think they sort of you know because i'm quite confident and you know i think you know people occasionally say you know you can always spot up an only child and i say well you've got that one wrong because i'm not you know i i ended up an only child but what are some of the because your parents showed great stoic leadership clearly um and protection of you what are some of the lessons do you think from that period that you i know you're only 10 years old so but like that you that you think you maybe even applied in some of the businesses you'd run i don't know i mean i think i think it would i i i mean i am who i am and and and that that is very much part of me but i can't i can't sort of distill

2:42:19what particularly it was. I mean, I can, you know, my mother particularly, my mother was a child, she sort of studied child psychology, so it was what would now be called a social work, and she ran an orphanage in her sort of mid to late 20s. They were called orphanages in those days, and, you know, they were under-resourced as far as I can tell. I've read her sort of diaries after she died. She only died a few years ago. And in the end, she sort of, she had a breakdown. And, you know, we think this is all sort of part of modern life. But she basically, you know, if you're running an orphanage, you've got dozens of children who want infinite love.

2:43:01And, you know, you're there trying to provide it because that's what you've been trained to do and that's what you instinctively want to do and it's impossible. And so unless there are safeguards, unless there are, you know, management there's management who take you out of take you off the front line from time to time you can only crash and burn so my mum clearly you know experienced that but she was just the most amazing she you know she understood why people did things and so you know if I was being someone's being mean to me at school she would always unpack it okay you know it became a sort of I got I hated it because I just wanted someone to say oh they're horrible you know go and dump them on the nose and And they should always say, oh, yes, but, you know, problems, you know, the parents, I think I've heard, you know, there would always be a sort of a reason why so-and-so was behaving badly or had stolen my pencil case or whatever.

2:43:53And actually, you know, it annoyed me so much that I've, you know, I now do it myself. I'm always trying to work out why people do things. What are the motivators? I mean, it's fascinating, isn't it? I mean, what motivates you? Work out why people do things. You know that when we were talking about the market research. Yeah, yeah. You're like, I didn't want to know what. I wanted to know why someone makes a decision. And that's so nice. And that's kind of one of the reasons why I carry on being in business because I just like why people do stuff. Why is this management team not working? Why is someone behaving like that?

2:44:25And at business school, there was one – I'm not – I gave up doing numbers. I'm not bad at maths, but I gave up the rubbish English education system. I had to make a choice. so I became an arts A-level person. But then you go to business school and it's all about numbers again. And so I was up against French and Dutch engineers who were brilliant at numbers. The one thing I could do was organisational behaviour. And we had this unbelievably cool professor called Manfred Ketzevries, who I saw being interviewed in the FT a few, probably a couple of years ago now. But he's a Dutch-American shrink who became a business shrink.

2:45:06and he taught organisational behaviour and we had to do things like watch Bergman films. What films? Ingmar Bergman, Swedish director, kind of deeply, deeply, there's so many hidden meanings in these films. I used to watch that. Well, you know, so, I mean, his genre, but you could watch the film and it could just be a sort of adventure story or you can watch it and you can spot that, you know, the dog, the shadow of the dog is cast there. You know, I love all of that. And so, you know, those are the courses I love, basically, and all the ones I was good at. And then the Dutch engineers said, you know, what are you talking about?

2:45:52What's all that about? I mean, you know, everything's very straight down the line. If you've been taught, they're straight down the line. Nothing is straight with me. People behave strangely. I'm fascinated by people's flaws. I like working with my best friends including me deep flaws what would you say your flaws are and how do you work on them

2:46:14what are my flaws when we talk too much that's what my wife would say all my school reports said you should say more so all I've done is responded to the school reports and now I get punished by my beloved wife. No, I mean, look, I've got lots of flaws. I mean, I'm probably, yeah, I need to, from a business point of view, I

2:46:49do need someone to sort of hold me to account. It's like having a business partner who's very numbers driven, who's not as enthusiastic about you know the vision or whatever but just kill as you can i i i miss you know there's nothing worse than a sort of a flaw that turns out that is a hidden positive but i mean i think i i get carried away by enthusiasm about things i mean i've got a lot better than that because you know because of all these setbacks you know people are kind enough to say you've been very successful i mean you know i've had so many failures either within the businesses that look like they're successful or some that are just pure failure we haven't even talked about those but um but you know that to me and i actually i'm you know i'm much more interested in failure i mean nice what's your favorite failure or the failure that taught you the most i actually think i think you know coffin garden suit company is probably the biggest failure because because there were so many failures within it and i got to see the end of it so that's probably where i could write most about failure partly because you know we really didn't know what we were doing at the beginning and so we just got so many things wrong small things wrong but some of them bigger things and um yeah the big the big failure which i think we were going to talk about earlier and it didn't ever we went down a rabbit hole probably but was was not believing the business plan you know the business plan said you need to get into sainsbury's and when you get into sainsbury's things will take off because they're your perfect customer but but they wouldn't take us on, and then they did.

2:48:23And it was in the middle of the summer, and that's the worst time of year to sell soup. And we got into 10 Sainsbury's, and we thought, oh, God, we're finally in Sainsbury's, and it's the summer. We rang out all our mates, said, go into Sainsbury's and buy soup. And they all rang back and said, well, there's no soup there, because actually, guess what? Sainsbury's was the best place to be selling Covent Garden soup, and it was selling out. So Sainsbury's said, we're going to put it into 20 now, and then we're going to put it into 80. And then we got into the winter, and winter sales took off, and we were more and more soups.

2:48:50the failure was not believing Sainsbury's was the goal we were never going to take it everything was built around as we went out to raise money we said this is all about a business that was going to get into Sainsbury's Sainsbury's was way bigger than Tesco in those days so it was the that's mad yeah it was the biggest supermarket and it was kind of it was sort of it was probably like Waitrose was now but much bigger so it was kind of where middle England shopped and Covent Garden Soup was what Middle England needed to buy. I mean, Waitrose was a great place to be, but there weren't many of them.

2:49:28I think there were 70 Waitroses back when we got into them. It's 400 now. Sainsbury's, I don't know how many of the Sainsbury's were, but let's say 800 then. I don't know, maybe fewer. So we didn't believe we were getting it. We knew we needed to get into Sainsbury's. We kind of believed we were going to get into Sainsbury's one day, but we didn't believe that one day was any time within our planning cycle. And so we got into Sainsbury's. We got some warning of it. And so when we finally got into the middle of the winter and we were in Sainsbury's and the sails were flying, we couldn't produce it.

2:50:01We hadn't geared up for it. We were making on one shift in the summer and then suddenly we need to start making on two shifts and possibly three shifts. We had no contingency plan for that. We didn't have trained engineers. We didn't know. So basically, everything started going wrong. We just weren't producing enough soup in the day, and so we'd move on to another shift. And I'd come in in the morning, and the night shift had failed to produce anything because the ingredients hadn't been delivered on time or something had gone wrong and there'd be no engineer to fix it. And so our costs just went through the roof.

2:50:40And I'll say we were shorting the supermarkets, And we should have been doing incredibly well. And in fact, we were just doing worse and worse and worse. Our sales were going up and our costs were going up twice the rate. You know, that was the biggest mistake. And, you know, I've made that mistake again. I've seen people make that mistake. And it's, you kind of... So the mistake is, it's just... Well, it's back, you know, we were talking about what do you need to do to deliver, to get to that million pounds or get to that five million pounds, get to that million pounds, you know, you write a detailed plan, which, you know, the detail is the most important thing.

2:51:20You write it and then you need to put it into practice. So, you know, if you believe that you're going to grow from half a million to a million in the next year and you've told everyone that and it says on day 35 of this plan, this needs to be in place, it needs to be in place. but but you write the plan and you think that all makes sense and then you just carry on as before and so you get to day 35 and the thing that triggered whatever else needs to be in place happens because it's in the plan but you haven't done the thing that actually needs to get you to day 36 and and that's a you know and you've you've because what the reason why you do that is that is that you've written so many plans before you've you've set out with so many ambitions to get this business off the ground and you've and you fail to deliver them because that's what happens with early sales but most of the time they just don't deliver because but you know if you if you wrote the sort of the totally realistic plan on day one of your business you know you'd never start it because it would be so it would be so pessimistic it would be so gloomy you just think well i'm not going to do this it's just so no one's going to back you to do it anyway so you write this bold plan you raise some money because everyone gets excited by including you you don't deliver it and you don't deliver the next one but you deliver some of it and and you deliver enough evidence that it could work that you raise some more money and so you get into the habit of believing that you're never going to deliver the plan so you finally write the plan the perfect plan and you don't believe you're going to deliver it and you deliver it because you've you've become a bit more disciplined and you've got more people working with you now and and they help you deliver the bits of the plan that they're meant to deliver but the whole plan isn't isn't isn't put in place and so you know there's a bit missing and so you fail to deliver the plan in the end because you know whereas big companies established companies this is what they do you know they they i mean cadbury called it a contract they they write they write a one-year budget and everyone assumes that budget is going to be delivered because the growth yeah we're probably going to grow our sales four percent well big deal but that's kind of what most companies are doing so if we're going to grow four percent that means we you know we need to be able to do the following things you know we need it's much easier to do it when you say oh in the next year we're going to double our sales that's quite a bold plan and it involves a lot of stuff that you've never done before you don't you don't know what it looks like and it's it's found it goes back to this donkey versus unicorn thing yeah is that the minute you almost need that naivety and to think like a unicorn to get to get the fucker going right you know how hard it was you wouldn't get going but then you need to as you go down this sequentially you need to balance that out with or as we've said temper it down with a bit of pragmatism and actually be okay with kind of growing four percent you know yeah um i want to wrap up and kind of start sorry finish where we started was kind of back with food yeah and louise i asked louise what i should ask you and she was saying that you're a very good cook and i'd love to know she said that so she's going to say he's a complete also what what are some of the lessons you've taken from cooking or a love of cooking that you think can apply to to brand building you asked tricky questions i mean they're good questions i'm just um you know so when she's very nice to say i'm a very good cook i mean i'm i'm i'm an enthusiastic cook what the reason why my cooking seems better than it is is that i love ingredients and i'm really into ingredients so the cooking bit for me is sort of secondary it's just what you do with amazing ingredients so actually with amazing ingredients you need to do very little so i'm not you know i've got friends who do all that kind of you know master chef let's i mean i'm so not interesting what do you like cooking i mean you know i can eat raw stuff i mean i just like you know fresh fish off the beach that's just being caught or unless it's soul we live on soul bay you shouldn't eat fresh soul by the way because just it's one of those things that you know like game it gets better after two or three days yeah but you know um but i like eating fresh fresh fish fresh you know i eat less and less meat but you know amazing meat i mean we've got a amazing butcher if you're going back to albera i've been talking to gerard who runs the alber bookshop that's a great bookshop as well um the albera butchers and he's called gerard king and he sells a lot of old beef so cows that have done their time doing other things which is what cows are meant to do and it's just completely amazing it's sort of you know it's very very strong you just you don't you need hardly any of it to make a sort of powerful regular something like that so i i'm if i'm not i mean i you know if i'm cooking for friends and i don't do enough of it now i it's it's it's all about the ingredients it's all about it's slightly showy offy as well you've got friends coming out from london i mean they all can go to nice restaurants and eat food with loads of stuff all over the menu about what at what the provenance but they can't get the stuff I can get.

2:56:37So it's sort of, it's all about, you know, if I haven't got three or four things with a very unique story on the table, then I'm disappointed and they're disappointed. But that's not answering your question. I think in terms of what you're saying is like, don't forget the cake's the cake, right? It's like, don't forget like, you know, with brand building, I suppose you could get so convoluted into thinking you're making the most pristine um i don't know what's it when you put it put it in the water bath i wasn't what's the point in putting an aldi steak in a water bath do you know what i mean in a nice way it's like yeah you can get yeah see that's that's where but i think if you've got the base ingredients the product tastes good you've got you know there's something in that i say yeah yeah well i mean i i do occasionally sous vide and i mean i we we've got a a wonderful guy who works with us has worked with actually every brand I've been involved with and he's called Michael Carr Hill I see the MPD guy yeah yeah another person probably used to talk to because he's he is just I mean he's another of my sort of food influencers and I mean I remember I remember um you know way back when he was working Coffin Garden City he was a kind of mature student and he would go off to restaurants around around the world that he'd read about and then get stuck there because he haven't got enough money for return fare and he's still i mean he's a dad of teenage children now but he sort of still does that so if ever i'm needing a restaurant you know he'll sort of say well i tried these two last night and and whatever but i've been back in coffin garden soup company so what are you going to do this weekend i said well we've got a lot of muntjac around here which are these wild introduced deer i had that last night the curry yeah there we are yeah so muntjac i mean they're monk munt muntjac they're they're indigenous to sort of the himalayas to india and in nepal and places like that and they were released here in my home county of bedfordshire by the duke of bedford about 100 years ago and they they are houdini's they've escaped and they're now everywhere they're really annoying in that they eat lots of um plants natural plants which sort of make it harder for you know threatened species to survive so they're not they're kind of pests they also bark a lot which means our dogs bark back at them in the middle of the night and and but they're very successful breeders anyway they get hunted around here so i said um to michael i've got i've got munchak i'm not quite sure what i'm going to do with it and he he came came out about 15 minutes later he said here are here are 10 recipes for my favorite laotian cookbook a laotian laos laos yeah yeah is that how you pronounce laotian i don't know i don't know i don't know what laotianese mean from from the come the i think that from a lao cookbook i think you would call it from you know the country next to cambodia the the the oh that's sorry yeah yeah yeah so i mean the fact that he has a favorite cookbook from laos if that's how you pronounce it i should know um told me something this was 20 odd years ago but in fact they had 20 you know he had favorite cookbook and here are some recipes that he had tried so yeah he's he's one of my great food influences and influences and and you know having conversations with people like that about ingredients and what you do with them and how you and he got me into sous vide but i mean if i was going to sous vide it i would have to be you know you're cooking something for 24 hours and what it would have to be something rather amazing i mean we've got amazing cattle farmers next door to us who just love their their animals and so and they sell their meat at the farm they got and richard who i just i'll go and buy some of his meat which will you know really benefits from that sort of cooking or gerard with his 17 year old or 11 year old cows i mean that's what where else are you going to get that from i mean that's what we should be eating you don't need much of it because it's so rich in flavor and also to though you asked me before we started about what I thought about veganism.

3:00:39I'm completely supportive of it as long as it doesn't sort of stop us, some of us, probably most of us, eating animals that are a byproduct of a healthy ecosystem. You know, we need herbivores in our system and they need to be culled either by wolves or by humans. There are no wolves in this country, so we need to cull them. And then let's enjoy their 17-year-old meat a bit but that's very different from industrial meat production um i've absolutely absolutely loved loved this william i think final question i was i love reading right i just was surrounded by books there's been books um everywhere what's some of your favorite books god well you know i'm i i'm a terrible reader at the moment i mean i read non-fiction i read i'm i love history so um but But I've sort of got caught up in this, you know, because I'm a farmer and a, you know, I'm going to say a food campaigner, but more of a sort of food and farming campaigner.

3:01:44There are just so many books being written at the moment around how we farm better. And I get asked to comment on them and I do quite a lot of stuff on, you know, platforms about it. And so I feel the need, even though quite a lot of them are a bit repetitive. Some of them are amazing. So I tend to sort of spend my life reading about, you know, about better farming. And so, you know, Gabe Brown's Dirt to Soil, which is about this, you know, amazing farmer. bismarck it's north dakota or south dakota been there anyway and and and and and and how he discovered her book the living soil is just a wonderful wonderful book and explains the organic movement and explains you know why why so many of us are unhealthy now you know she well so what's wrong with what's what is what sorry for saying really dumb here because i am quite dumb when it comes to this but what's so wrong with the soil stuff the soils are knackered with the soils soil you know as she said in her the title of the book soils are living their ecosystem so it's the it's the one ashenborough series that hasn't been done i don't know what it would be possible to do it but you know 99 of life is in the soils or should be in the soils we grow so her her line was you know if you have a healthy soil where this ecosystem is alive where everything is this interdependence is functioning and the plants that all the things that that feed off that soil the plants the animals whatever are also healthy and then those things those people we who eat those plants and those animals will also be healthy that was her that was her solution to a national health service but nobody listened to her not many people listened to her back in 1930 1940 and now in 2023 we have a nation and we have many nations where the biggest cause of ill health is is poor diet it's not genetics it's not it's not old age it's not whatever it's just people are eating themselves sick and her argument was if you look after the soil and you eat things off the soil and you don't process them you don't need to process them they they you will eat yourself healthy and one of her one of her you know great sayings was we spend too much time looking for the causes of ill health we should spend more time spending looking for the causes of health and you know there was never a more you know timely but she said that 70 80 90 years ago um so that's that i'm really interested that's what i'm trying to do that's what well that's a whole yeah i was thinking we almost had that podcast before we even hit recorded this podcast this morning yeah but we'll have to do a part two exact that because a great whole conversation there um well it's a massive it's a massive movement and now you know i mean it's not as massive it needs to be but there are so many people out there writing people who've come in from outside writing books about it you know it sometimes feels like it's all happening um you know there are there are conferences like groundswell which i thoroughly recommend you go to which is in june um on just the north london near where i grew up 7 000 people this year all talking about regenerative agriculture and about the soil about how you you know and about health about human health and animal health.

3:05:22And so whole rafts of people, some of them you'd know, who are coming together to talk about all this stuff. There's a kind of revolution going on to counter the revolution that took place in the last century, which was all around, let's create more and more food, doesn't matter what the quality of it is. It's all about feeding people with calories. and then it's been completely subverted by, probably a lot of it in a well-intentioned way, but it's been subverted to, and I'm not going to blame anybody, but it's been subverted to mean that so many of us are very ill because of our poor diets. Yeah, as I say, I'm going to have to come back up to interview Alice and your cheese man as well, so that's our podcast.

3:06:13final question which i ask all guests is what is one truth you wholeheartedly heartedly believe in that most people would disagree with you on well you know i i mean just carrying on on a theme like that because it's probably the one i've i say most often at the moment is we grow too much wheat in the world that's probably a bit narrow but i mean that's true you know the world believes we need to grow more food to feed nine ten billion people and wheat's one of the biggest crops we grow and i think we greatly well that that can be the opening of our next one thank you so much thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you like that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and i really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on linkedin search dan pope and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands thank you so much

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