Espresso: Green & Blacks Founder The Fail Safe Way to Build Your Brand

0:06Super fascinating is that you've just done an MBA which should teach you all about business you then go into new um new coffin garden soup and you see you didn't really have any idea what you're doing i think there's real interesting um learnings from what you learn in a classroom from actually what you learn doing yeah who was this he or she the chairman uh who came in and what did what were the the three or one to three things yeah he or she taught you about how to run a food business successfully that you you think is still relevant today um so it's a he um it's called jeff and um what was he from he was he'd worked in the food industry all his life he'd worked for cabri he'd worked for i think his last job was doesn't exist anymore was gram met he'd worked for there you know a lot of it had been in the dairy dairy sector and actually you know one of his jobs as a senior manager he'd had about i think he'd had someone like 300 businesses reporting into him which was kind of relevant because he had a sort of template for you know the minimum you needed to do to run a business so you know because if you're doing 300 businesses you kind of you haven't got time to do more than the minimum but this is the kind of fail safe and i mean he taught me loads and loads of other things he's not i say me he taught us um and he and he was gracious enough to say we taught him as much because i don't think he'd ever worked with a team of people who were quite so committed you know i even though looking back on it as i talk about coven garden super company i can feel my heart rate reason because all the things that went wrong there i remember now but at the time i just thought i was the luckiest because i'd had this sort of as far as i was concerned failed career up until then you know doing all these amazing jobs which my parents were proud of a barrister a banker or whatever in the city they just weren't they just didn't you know what did you feel like in him what when i was doing those jobs yeah i i they just i just would come home on a friday or at the end of the day and just think i mean barrister was different i mean i and i that was different that was i just couldn't imagine doing them forever but being a banker or being an investment banker you're basically a stockbroker you're back to you know needing to sell something that people needed i wasn't convinced yeah god that's soul destroying that i was actually what's this for i mean you need them i mean god we need i understand where they fit in so it's great and i was lucky enough to sort of understand how you know we need a financial sector i just don't necessarily want to spend a lot of time in it i mean i do actually have a job in the financial sector at the moment but it's kind of you know it's a non-executive job so i i mean i'm i i see how all these things fit in but it just didn't deliver for me common garden soup in its chaotic early day stage i just i just thought i'm the luckiest person alive i didn't want to go home and so um and often we didn't go i mean we didn't go home we didn't go home until very late we just thought this is great and there were a team of us doing it but i mean you know to counter that i remember the first day that i met jeff the chair he wasn't even the chairman in those days he and i just joined on the same day to sort of as consultants and he he had boys who were kind of in their i don't know sort of eight nine year old boys at the time and he um he described going to watch them at the weekend playing mini rugby and he said you know these these these these young guys were just so committed and so wherever the ball was everybody on the on the pitch was on top of the ball so if ever it got out of the kind of ruck or the mess this kind of pile of young boys the ball had nowhere to go there was no one to pass it to because they were all on top of the ball he said you know no one's that's exactly what's happening here at coven garden soup company everyone's in the factory everyone's trying to make it work everyone's trying to get the soup out on time no one's playing in position you've got to play in position you've got to have people who are standing by you've got to have people on the wing whose job it is to do stuff and so you know everyone had sort of rather vague job descriptions but actually they all kind of merged into one because what we had we probably had 40 30 40 people working in the factory and And then, you know, a management team, we had some engineers, and then we had a management team of, I don't know, let's say seven or eight of us, maybe a bit more, I don't know, you know, kind of senior management, four or five, and maybe the same again.

4:25So not big, but it's a manufacturing business, so not tiny. It was, you know, we had a couple of million turnover. We were in, I think we were already listed in Tesco, which was then not the biggest supermarket, desperate to get into Sainsbury's, which was our target. We just couldn't get in. we were in just getting into or in waitrose can't remember exactly but you know it was that sort of and by the way it was much easier to get into the supermarkets in those days so any one of your listeners thinking oh they were well on the way actually if we hadn't been in supermarkets we'd have been dead that you know ready selling short life ready meals the only place you could sell them was in the supermarkets because they had the you know the logistics infrastructure to cope so i mean we were in a few london you know multiple independents that that took it but otherwise we the supermarkets were our they were our customer base so yeah we we that was that was what it was like jeff taught us you know so you need everyone to play in position you need accurate weekly management numbers they don't need to be so accurate that they're late because you need them on time you have a weekly management meeting the weekly management meeting doesn't last very long it you know it's but it's it's the the the main agenda is driven by a budget an annual budget which we've agreed and how we are doing against that budget you know this week and what's causing the variances let's talk about those and then just going through the various areas of the business but around that very sort of narrow framework very easy to get drift into wider issues just close those conversations down that you know so if if you're sharing it which i would was doing quite early on so that sounds like a great conversation for you two guys to have but but you know let's not delay the meeting because we've got you know we've got a business to run so it was a maximum hour-long meeting you know action points captured first thing we did the next week was go through the action points if you didn't turn up to the meeting you got a lot of action points because that was the way we made sure people turned up at the meeting and it was kind of there weren't really very many excuses i mean you're allowed to go on holiday a bit but weren't very many excuses for not turning up to the meeting only the senior management team because when we first there were meetings going on but they were all over the place and everybody would be in the meeting because no one there were no one was playing in position so nobody was there representing the other people in that part of the team so you know you're in charge of production you don't need the engineers to come to the meeting because they should be fixing the filling line so i mean this sounds blindingly obvious but when you are in a fast-moving business it's not delivering what everyone wanted you know panic stations can easily take over so it was just putting some some order some sense and that's kind of where it all starts i mean i've i've been involved in so many early stage businesses now where just in introducing that level of discipline everyone when you go to them everyone says yeah well we do that then you look and they say well they kind of think they're doing it but they're not really doing it you know the meetings get cancelled the meetings sort of take place at different times so somebody misses it you know all that sort of stuff so it's just really it's being really quite disciplined and by then the weekly stuff feeds into a monthly board meeting and so there is a formal board meeting we had non-executive directors by then they turn up for it you know this is back in the late 80s early 90s you wore a tie if you're a bloke at least and and um you know i always say i mean i remember when i was just beginning to run it not being able to feeling not not having much of an appetite that the day before the board meeting and having you know when it worked out when it was okay having a sort of huge relief on the friday lunchtime when it was over that it worked and that sort of sense of oh my god i've got a quite a serious meeting and i've got my investors coming and my non-executive directors and that you know i'm not saying it should be intimidating but it kind of has a bit of formality to it that that you know you don't necessarily want to deflate even in these informal times so that is another thing that he taught me quick one guys espresso's got a brand new sponsor unleashed unleashes inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software we use unleashed daily islands i bloody love it we've got our admin time in half saving approximately 30k a year why use it save money save headaches save stress get granular clarity on your margins know where your stock is don't miss availability look your favorite brands literally use unleashed as their backbone candy kittens tiny rebel trip always religiously look there's a link in the show notes please feel free to book a call with josh his wonderful sales team at Unleashed.

9:17They're amazing. Even nothing comes of it. And even better news, you'll get your first month free if you reference Hungry. Thank you. Zooming out, right? Not all discipline. There's a multitude of ways to enforce discipline, but actually having a sense of intimidation can enforce discipline, right? And by intimidation, I don't mean like, oh my God, you've got to do this. But I mean like that soft kind of, as you said, I couldn't really eat the day before. And I think what you've said there is really fascinating is you know you work with loads of businesses if we were to thread the needle between all these businesses would you say you'd say that one error is just kind of doing mark says it's the brilliant basics which is like you know having the report on the friday getting the actions done on the on the monday don't miss the meeting what are the kind of um consistent things you see food businesses and brands get wrong well i mean you know we've talked about the sort of basic disciplines so i i mean i i mean maybe this is a bit of a random one a bit but i think people need you need to be realistic about the scale the potential scale of your business and you know how fast you're going to get there i've seen so many businesses where they've gone out and raised money on a promise and raised quite a lot of money or raised it on quite a high valuation.

10:40And, you know, you look at it and you think this is going to take way longer. And you've kind of sold 50 % of the business, 60 % of the business already to people who probably, in my view, should have known better. And it's just going to end in tears because you're going to end up having to raise more money and you're probably going to have to raise it to lower value. And you're going to end up either not working there because so often the founders fall out with the backers or working for nothing because you've been so diluted and so moving at an appropriate pace i mean if you're so convinced that you're onto something that's going to be an absolute winner then you know raising enough money to blow the lights out maybe it makes sense and i'm you know i'm a cautious farmer so what do i know and uh you know you and i were talking earlier about i mean i've seen so many early brands and and and predicted that they were going to be successes or not successes and fail to realize quite how successful they were going to be but actually i haven't seen that many of them i've seen many more where people have been optimistic about things sold raised lots of money and then they've you know they've survived they haven't failed like now others do but the owner the founder has ended up with not much to show for it and and you kind of think well wouldn't it have been better to have moved at a slower pace would it not better have put the money, the expensive equity you've raised from outsiders behind things that are already working rather than punting it all on something that you hope might work.

12:14When we have spent money, whether it's at Covent Garden or Green and Blacks or whatever, on expensive marketing initiatives, it's always on, well, it's usually been, and I would say it should always have been on things that are already working. We're not always going to spend it on expensive of TV advertising or, you know, poster advertising in London unless we've got evidence that it's already working. You know, even if it's a – it may not be perfect evidence, but we're backing something. Is there an example to add some – bring that to life a bit? Well, you know, I mean, we're green and blacks, and you've spoken to Mark.

12:53I mean, Mark's big first campaign, you know, we we put we put some expensive posters outside um the main tube stations in london and it was it was it was going to cost us a lot more than we had ever spent before and we could just about afford it but we combined it with massive distribution gains in in in in the multiples in the stores that were near those tubes so we used the we used the the the promise of the adverts to persuade the the Tesco's and the Sainsbury's and whoever else with those stores to give us, you know, extra listings, front of store exposure, so that it couldn't really fail.

13:35The advertising couldn't really fail. And you've got this sort of multiplier effect. So, you know, we knew that when Green and Blacks was, you know, given a prominent position, it sold much, much higher. So we knew that if we could use the extra burst of marketing to encourage the stores to give us more of that then it was it was it was kind of it was a surefire winner so that's probably that's probably the best example i could what was the advert if you can remember well i can i can remember the first campaign because because we had we we the main campaign were were cross-track big cross-track adverts i can't remember what you call them but those big sheet adverts and they were all based around this discovery that that that it was mainly women of a certain age who ate chocolate and it was their sort of guilty secret.

14:25And so we had this campaign of a, let's call her a young mum from South London and it's dark, she's in the street, in a tourist street in Wandsworth or wherever. Her Volvo boot is open and she's unpacking, can't remember the name of the supermarket, and she's unpacking the bags, but she can't wait to get them inside the house. and so she's scoffing green and black's chocolate kind of rather obsessively on the street, in the dark, with a streetlight. And it just so perfectly depicted what our research said, which is that's how people felt about their chocolate. They said, oh, well, when we go out of green and black's, we hide it in the back of the fridge so the rest of the family can't see it.

15:12We sort of picked all that, and the agency sort of turned that into a really lovely advert. People hated it. you know this is a this is a subversive activity we might have told you about it we don't have to go and turn it into a bloody great advert so but we had a little bit of money left and a little bit of money left and we we did these two um you know sheets at the top of the you know whatever whatever you call those but above the seats they were all just talking about the the provenance they just said you know our the vanilla that goes into our chocolate is you know because it's organic is produced in this way and it's really difficult and it was just sort of food facts people absolutely love those so that that shaped our our advertising there on and we we axed the clever big you know well if we did any cross-track stuff again it was all around food facts as far as i remember because you know you can be too clever in your marketing that's that's delicious you can be too clever in your marketing um like unpack that a little bit more because then there's a lot a lot in that well i mean i think you can be too clever in your marketing when when a covent garden soup company when we first felt we had enough money to advertise we we advertised in the color supplements and you know magazines which were then the kind of most obvious place to do sort of you know high quality beautiful advertising so the weekend press and you know lifestyle our magazines and um we we took on a big shot you know cool coolest in london advertising agency um for bogel bartle hegarty who i don't know if they still exist now but anyway they were was that sir john hegarty yeah yeah yeah i think he's your post on linkedin so he's still quite active yeah no no i know that i know john hegarty is but um i just i think they got taken over or whatever i mean it was a long time ago and they they had done all the coolest ad i mean i won't tell because it would just show my age if i start telling you about the ads they did but we and we they decided they wanted to take on a a new young brand so we were very you know flattered that they were going to take us on and um they looked at what we we up until then we had built up our brand on good old-fashioned story-based pr you know covent garden suit was driven by pr I still think it's a case study.

17:40And 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 all, you know, embodied the brand. So everything we did was around stories. 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. he'd 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 were 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've got quite good at it you know thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day let's be having ya if you want the fun episode it will be in the show notes a link will be in the show notes the full episode thank you so much please leave friends as well it means the world to me