Thomas Straker & Toby Hoppy: How All Things Butter Are Reinventing Butter

0:00I want to broach this subject of that picture that we all know about. It's a very good lesson learned for reacting the way that he reacted, which he just should have done. I didn't like getting attacked, you know, when you're under attack and you buy back. Any CPG brand, if you think that DTC is going to be the only place that you should sell, in my opinion, it's like, what's the point in alienating such a huge proportion of your market based on the fact that it's just online? Hello there and welcome to Hungry. Hungry is the podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands looking to pull gasoline all over their growth.

0:31Each week we'll interview successful founders, thought leaders, unpack their lessons and provide you with a toolkit to scale super fast. I am Dan Pope, I am your host and without further ado, let's get started. Hello there people and listeners of The Hungry Podcast. Absolutely thrilled to welcome Tom Straker and Toby Hoppe onto the podcast. they are the co-founders of all things butter the butter brand that are literally ripping up ripping up our wonderful industry one of these things at GoPath, Planet Organic who else have we got? Ocado, Milkmore, Modern Milkman Lone Shot, Geteer Gorillas and that's it at the moment a few more to go how long have you been going?

1:17Like a month or two? two weeks

1:22super excited for this appreciate it um i think where i want to start is i was having a little cursory mooch for your linkedin mate and i saw a quote which said if it's on your it's on your like things if you don't change direction you may end up where you are heading lao su i think it is yeah yeah why does that quote mean so much to you i actually stole off my brother right i think it's but i think it's very true is like and if I look at my career I think it's very much on I think I live and kind of breathe by that quote from like different industries that I've been in and I think to be as to be a well rounded individual in life I think it's about ensuring that like you take different opportunities in different places and that's what makes you the kind of person who is who like in the business that we're in now is is because i've been in media agencies and then been in the brand side and then been in the like the startup world and digital marketing then offline marketing uh it's given me now a point of where i feel a lot more confident in what i'm doing because i was changed i changed direction in particular from in the early years of my life and now i feel like maybe that quote might need to be uh taken down relatively soon uh because i want to try and have a bit more of a a chilled life so it's almost like this all things butter and the media stuff you're doing with tom is like the culmination of how the fuck is that yeah yeah multitude of different kind of things melting together into one yeah i think i always wanted to do something i always wanted to do something on my own always like i saw my dad hustle from like very very early age of being like an entrepreneur and having like huge ups and downs in life of like doing really well for himself and then doing really really bad and then thinking about having to sell the house and uh and then doing well again and i uh he was a manufacturer and distributor of bathrooms and kitchens so a bit of a random one but you'd imagine that like when the 2008 crash happened for instance like it couldn't have been a worse scenario for like anyone who's in kind of home improvements because the first thing that kind of goes off the list when people are looking at saving money you're not putting a new kitchen in or a new bathroom in and so his industry was like completely and utterly fucked um and so there was a few times that that's happened over the last he was in that business for 30 odd years and there's a few times that we've had crashes and then they stop it and he was it was a small margin business but it was a lot of risk because he held a lot of stock and so but that entrepreneurial life for me was something that hugely appealed to me working for myself uh but i never felt confident enough from the moves that i'd made in the place that i'd been to really pull the trigger until kind of this moment and always wanted to do something with tom uh and we thought of a few ideas and this is the one which kind of stuck and we went okay let's go for it what were the yeah what were those other ideas so maybe we wanted to do a chip we were obsessing over doing like a chicken poulay well that's what you called it we was never good with names we wanted to do a chicken shop kind of vibe Toby was from Manchester and you know there was just such a big movement at some point I can't remember the exact year it was like 8 years ago maybe you were still living in Manchester it was like a rotisserie chicken place you saw them popping up all over town and I saw like in a weird part of my career I've been working five years or six years as a chef, maybe even longer maybe.

5:08And then I was just looking, I really wanted to do something on my own as well. And it was, you know, it was a low entry level, from a cost perspective, it was a low entry into the restaurant market to open like a rotisserie chicken shop rather than open a full-blown spanking restaurant. And we were looking, there was just like opportunities in those more like regional cities, like Manchester, up Manchester, Birmingham. We're sort of looking at, we never got past the business plan, basically. I don't even think the business plan was really. It was good fun. You know, I was still working a full-time job, so was Toby.

5:43And it's just, we just had that sort of rapport that we were keen to look at other opportunities at some point. I'm glad we didn't do it. Yeah. But even though friends of mine have got rosemary chicken shops in London, London's got 12 spots. Which one was that? Cocop. Cocop. Oh yeah yeah yeah There's one in Fulham They do well I think that's a common theme With loads of people I interview Is that you don't need a lot of lead to find gold You need to fire off a lot of Pardon the blank Shit ideas to find that one idea And also the timing So it's like all things butters popping off On social media It feels like the marriage is lined up Yeah so I mean that's why I think last April April 2022 I did the first butter video and I think then it sort of went quite super viral and we did loads of I've done now about 80 butter something ridiculous I was looking at it and I was looking at all these billions of views across multiple platforms and millions and millions of likes I was like where am I making money obviously it's all well and good endorphins or whatever you get dopamine hits from likes or whatever but i was like i want to see the bank balance yeah honestly i want to start making some money toby and i had spoken about it in august the last year it was just too there's too much going on toby was still sort of like very much in his role um a trip and i was opening the restaurant which opened november so i was just too busy to do anything about it and then january he came in and was like right i'm gonna be happy for me to pursue this open it up and we'll just do it 50 50 and i said yeah let's do this to put the hammer down found the farm and plan that this i've you know he's basically set up the business i created the idea to be set up the set up the business is running it really efficiently so yeah we it's been we have only been launched a week but it's been you know multiple you know from when i when i created the videos in april last year that's that's the sort of that's the length of time it's taken us to get to a point where we're actually selling a physical product and it's it the the alignment couldn't be better from like it's i'm not going out selling towels or something yeah you know it's like it's something that i was i created this segment online i found the product i you and then we then made that product into a physical product to be able to be bought and consumed by people and i think on that as well as like it didn't when me and tom were talking about like what products to do obviously butter seemed like really obvious one because of the association with butter but i think there's also like a a conversation to have is like okay we've got a huge amount of followers on social media like let's how do we leverage those followers into in a product but then also how do we find a product and a category that we think is like there is opportunity not just to do a gimmick product to last three to six months or even 12 months 18 months but actually finding a category that we think is that we can improve or add to what's currently on offer yeah yeah and yeah i think it was like it just the stars are fully aligned there's a huge amount of luck in that because you never thought when i started in like it just happened to be that the butter market had not been really revamped in a long time when Toby showed me the deck for the investment and you're sort of looking at the same packages of butter from 1980 to 2020 so that there was very little innovation in the whole, whereas if you look at crisps for instance or oat milk is a relatively new category.

9:36Condiments I think I would say condoms Condoms is another one which is like, that has been like fully disruptive at the moment I mean, who knows who will win that race, but there is a lot of money, which is in the sexual wellness space at the moment. But the Giles Brooks, the guy I'm interviewing this afternoon, he did Vitacoco, he did Bear Snacks, loads of brands, Investor and Pippinup. He based on every category, every single category can have a challenge, a brand that revamps it and makes it fun. We're going to talk about the steps you took, but I want to go back into it first, because I think what's interesting is you've both obviously got this chemistry, you've both went to school together kind of a bit mischievous but the stars are definitely aligned but so so when you posted that first video mate were you what did you have the idea for the the launching a brand or was this at what point did you think right i'm gonna call toby like what happened not at all i think well but creating content became harder and harder as the you know the ideas were getting thinner and thinner not that not that i was running out of ideas it was just always like what do people want to see online and i got into i was trying to get myself into that psyche and i was thinking i went back i was like oh i worked at this restaurant at the doorchester we used to make these three butters in the first course for the bread we had three different types of bread i was like fuck i'm gonna do bread and butter and the one of them we did which was brown butter and we used to do it in a canal so or roshan whatever you call it um so we used to do it in that shape and so i was like fuck i'll do that so i did that on tiktok made the brown butter did some warm sourdough and that was like got a million views on tiktok and i had only had a hundred thousand followers on tiktok at the time i think so i was like oh really it's great fantastic and then about six months later i did a wild garlic butter yeah and then that went that was like a million views overnight and i was like fuck something like clipped i was like shit tiktok loves butter yeah so i was right i need to make the series so i made one more flavor and i did a quick like three canal video oh yeah and i said welcome to all this butter in the series i'm going to show you how to make all things butter from this this this and then boom put that out on tiktok and he meant there was like 10 million views and then i put it out and put then i was like shit i've got to make the next part so i made the chicken skin butter the next day which is still and then that was like 10 million views then i made it honeycomb butter 10 movies and then made a bone marrow butter 20 million views and it was just like fuck it I was feeding this beast like bam bam bam one butter a day and then I got to about 20 and I was like oh man I'm going to do 10 more yeah I was sort of like starting to like feel the like flogging and I'm still going 80 on but it's still like I post them now last week I posted two butters and one's got 7 million views and one's got 4 million views and then I do a really nice fish pie and it gets a million that fish pie looks unreal yeah then I do like a lazani okay firstly it takes me about 10 times longer to make something nice so i like a half the amount like a 10th of new out of users so anyway but anyway so yes i did not have a brand in mind it was just purely to make some content make content and that it really did switch my it changed my business a lot you know i went from 150 000 followers to a million instagram followers basically in overnight two weeks yeah I think then I went to then TikTok went up to two and a half two and a bit million and then I've basically you know it became you know I was opening the restaurant at the time but just couldn't it was just there it was just the right timing for me and you know never went into into it to be like oh I'm yeah I started making cooking videos in lockdown and I was just like I've never gone into it to be like the main part of the business it was like a it was just like a fun thing to do so i was stuck in working in in america what does because it is it's fascinating how much momentum that builds i think with content people only see the the clip of you doing it with the canal if that's how you say yeah yeah i want to go back behind the scenes because i even i know just doing this podcast for this hour and a half conversation or two hour conversation, the amount of ag that goes into just getting the fuck around.

13:55It's so much. What is the stuff that people won't see behind the scenes, like the creative process? Like what is your creative process into creating these butter things? Make a lot of mess. Make a lot of mess. No, I mean, at the moment I'm sort of, it is actually quite rewarding creating in such a tiny space because like I'm creating inner butter space. So I'm always looking for flavours to get into the butter and to not seem like, oh, you just chuck that in for no reason. Right. Like, you know, you've got to like think, how does it actually go in there? Like I made this Sagaloo butter. And I think that's how you say it.

14:39Sagaloo. There's a man saying it. There's a man saying it. I'm saying it. Sagaloo, mate. I'm from Bolton. So I created this, the sagaloo butter. And I was thinking like, cause obviously when you're at home, I was like, if you, all you have to do is boil the potatoes and cook the spinach and then you've got the butter and it turns it into the whole dish. It's basically roasted spices. You put the garlic, all the mustard oil and everything like that into the butter. And then all you're doing, instead of like getting all the spices out and toasting them and doing everything, all you're doing is boiling the potatoes put the spinach in wilt it down then add in the butter and you mix it you've got sag glue yeah that's why I think that's why I think you guys are going to smash it because it's the you're selling butter yes you're actually selling saving people time because if you like if you I know you did the chilli butter with the broccoli the other day like that someone sees that in in on social and they can knit to wait let's get it and bosh that's dinner done if you're an easy like that's how we serve broccoli in the restaurant we make the we make it from scratch in the restaurant but we do chili butter over the broccoli some seeds and nuts and stuff on top and it's like it's you know it's a certified bang like it didn't like i had it last night but didn't um and then but so yeah creating in that space and trying to make sure it's actually useful and some of them questionable which ones were questionable I can think of a few the one which Toby thinks is questionable I don't know which one one of them we won't go into I did a salt and vinegar crisp butter for a chicken sandwich which is fucking dope I always put salt and vinegar crisp in my sandwich and I was like fuck salt and vinegar crisp so I just opened a pack of salt and vinegar chucked in a block of butter buzzed it up which other one did you think I was going to say the cookies is that the Oreo one is that the Oreo one no no no can I say no no no you can't say it you can't say it you can't say it please no basically I was really hung over right I had to do a video and I was like fuck I was like oh it's got to do this cookies and cream butter I was like is that an Oreo is it actually for a brand yeah okay for a brand no no so I was like Toby is it really bad if I go to Asda which was in Bar Royal and buy some cookies from a packet.

17:12And I was like, right, what I'll do is I'll tend to mix the dough in the machine and then I'll just put the tray down and then I'll put it in the oven and put it out. There's four cookies on there. That's a joke. So it's just put them in and crumple them up, blend them in through the bottle. Yeah, it was just that movement of just like, you know, putting the thing in, they just came out. That's hilarious. I've never really... That is too funny. By the way, I don't ever do that. Yeah, that was the only... I think that is genuinely the ultimate time. I had a deadline and I was dying. So talk to me about the discipline of creating content and creativity.

17:47I mean, I've been going through like a slight lack. I have had some ill discipline in the content creation world because of just lack of consistency because obviously I'm running a restaurant, which I'm super passionate about. I love being in the kitchen and it's so much more rewarding cooking for people who are sitting on the bar full restaurant you know you're cooking food that i want to cook all the time and i've got a team around me a great camaraderie really lovely really lovely team great atmosphere energy content literally on your own in the kitchen and then you've got to do all the washing up and then it's like it's kind of like do i want to do that or do i want to go and have a great time in the kitchen with the with the with the chefs and have a like speak to some customers and listen to some music and like oh do i want to be on my own silence in fucking park royal that i'd much rather so actually so i became bad at doing content and then but you really do see the drop if you if you stop it takes two weeks two to three weeks to build back up a good rapport with the algorithm yeah that relationship with the algorithm is pretty key so it's like building up that building up your relationship with the algorithm then staying on the momentum like so let's say it's it's posting rhythm it's all about like you know if you post on monday wednesday friday sunday every week they the they know that you're posting monday wednesday friday they reward consistency yeah they reward consistency i had a meeting with meta about it and they were just talking about posting rhythm and scheduling and doing like so you know to pass out for me i did half a day of film yesterday i did two videos i've got a full day tomorrow.

19:31I'm doing a new series. Can't tell you. But I need to... Well, you also don't know the name yet, so... I do. Working title. I know, he's always going to be. Welcome to... Oh, no. I'm going to not say that, because I'm literally... Sometimes I have to shoot myself in the head when I say it. Back in the way, mate, just for the... Cameroon. I could send a welcome to All Things Butter for an episode. No I missed it To what? To remind Mandy What for? She was posting a video for me But she needed a voiceover Okay You can cut this out We're mid Yeah you can cut this out Okay You can see it in action Welcome to All Things Butter Season 2 The Italian segment Episode 22 Cacio e Pepe Butter With Peachy There we go Happy days Happy days done So I'm going to keep that I like seeing the the way I do my adverts is on my phone as well because I used to self-asset I think it's about cutting corners with content like to make it easier as possible so I used to set this up to the adverts that's all good and I was like this is taking me forever and now with the iPhone bosh I'll be like this is the advert it's done it's quick the problem I find sometimes you wrap yourself up in a duvet so it doesn't sound too tinny or you go and sit in the car cars are great for soundproofing it doesn't bounce around the sound we should record this in my car um so okay so that's mate so and then we're going to get on to how you come into the into the fold mate because i think that's really interesting but just on the um consistency piece because i the consistency is so hard i think people talk about consistency enough like it's so tricky i find it well i've recently stopped drinking and that has helped consistency i think it's because if you're hung over two or three days a week you don't want you know it's a lack of i've got so much energy now like i'm up at half five six and i'm going to bed at midnight i've got like all of the i've got 18 hours in the day every day yeah does it does does it so you've got this shoot tomorrow does it feel like work is what i'm trying to get to uh yeah i've got yes that's definitely work you know i've got to i've got to do some i've got to write the recipes i've got to get all the ingredients bought i've got to make sure all the studio is set up or wherever we've got a another we built this outside sort of production place uh above the restaurant we've got like i've got the flat above the restaurant so we've got on the back roof i've got a sort of i've seen kitchen sets kitchen sets up there so we can film upstairs and that i mean the great thing about that is right next the restaurant i can put take the washing up downstairs we've got a team um so i'm not so it's actually really time efficient and i can make sure that it's set up the only thing is is that you have to climb out a window to get there so it's annoying i'm the team of that so it's like there's a vibe it's like a buzz exactly you go back into the office you can have a i can have a shower or something between freshen up um but it's it's yeah so that's the that makes it so much easier to do like having multiple places to do it i also love doing the longer form content i've done a couple of i've done a couple of series on you i've done a few series on youtube and you know we went up to the most recent one we went to isla with burgh house that was fantastic we we and that's really educational what i find about the shorter stuff is that is it's big it's less educational people like the ideas i don't spend hours and hours writing recipes to put on instagram and stuff like that i'm writing a book at the moment and that is yeah that's where i want people to go go buy the book and get the get the whole vibe of the of what i do that's the thing this is the same with podcasters is as we were talking about today before we hit record is with instagram you can get fucking loads of views but it's quite it's not shallow like obviously people like can become obsessed with recipes with a podcast you can go super deep and like really get to know someone and I thought the views are never going to be as big as a TikTok reel but the depth you get you can't kind of that's where Instagram reel Instagram reel yeah just a TikTok yeah TikTok sorry the mad thing on Tom's content is by far Tom's best content is his stuff on YouTube which he did by the Taste of Business series and that's got by far the least amount of views on all of Tom's content and it's like well I've got 10 times less subscribers yeah or 10 times but But when you look at even the quality production is so much better.

24:08The fact that Tom is in his environment, in his garden, using all of his – I mean, he's got so many toys, you can imagine, in the garden, which he plays around with and cooks on. Well, like all your grills. BMW. Kid's car. And for me, it's like I would love – and I remember me and him have spoken about it so much over the years, like building out that long-form content but it is it cost is i mean i'm not sure it costs money now it's not for a long-form video how much it's not too bad yeah because obviously the editing times like a day yeah if you get a good editor it's 300 quid a day and then if you got a good videographer who's working with you 500 quid a day and you can maybe bash out two or three they're long take two hours to film and then to edit two different cameras it's it was costing me shitload of money to do one a week and i wasn't making money off it and i was like i didn't have a i didn't necessarily have a job at the time because i was the restaurant wasn't open i wasn't earning a salary so all my money was coming through like partnerships on instagram and stuff like that it wasn't too it wasn't like free flowing but i think i think as you say even though half the people have listed like the audience on that is much smaller than say the tiktok the people who have watched it will have a much deeper relationship with you with the restaurant I think there's an unseen value in that we need to get back onto it I was just saying to my PA yesterday I said we need to book two days a month for long form content on YouTube so two full days a month where you get someone in and you've had it planned out for a while and it's just you know next week, Thursday, Friday you're shooting six recipes which is once a month two days, block it out go, I think that's how we want to do it I was speaking to someone the other day who's Laurent Dagenet sort of chef from Canada as he does yeah he came to the restaurant and we had a sick time with him went to Marseille had a wild time hence why I'm now sober yeah I'm nearly sober for that and then nearly so he was nearly sober that's hilarious I'm not a chef so I'm not I'm not as wild as those two so but it did took me out of action for a while 24 hours in Marseille with Laurent Dagenet and Tom Straker was tough.

26:31Yeah. So you can keep up. Yeah. So he was saying that Matty Matheson, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Original YouTube sensation. And he does, he films all his content down in Texas, Tennessee. Yeah. I think Tennessee or something like that. And he goes down from Canada, gets it done in six days. and then that's all this stuff for like a month or that's what i'm trying to do now so this is the first day i'm doing turn a day yeah but just to bosh out because i'm going away yeah i'm not gonna be doing that you're not coming back yeah yeah you better get your lives working now so so right so we so you've got the you've done we've done the videos they're popping off that you guys have began to think of or over the years thought about like let's do either chicken shot called poulet the butter thing comes around it seems to be working what are the first steps you take toby to actually get this off ground because there'll be people listening to this who are in that stage and it's like you've got the idea you've got the momentum like what the first three steps you take so i think the heart i think the hardest thing was because we were both so um like like our jobs were so taxing like tom was obviously two months since the restaurant opening and I was head of growth at Trip Drinks, which was, I'm sure, I think Olivia's been on the podcast.

27:58That's just down the road, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, just down the road, yeah. And so my job was incredibly, it was long hours. It was very, very intensive. But first one was just sitting down together as a two and going, let's go for it and pull the trigger. And that is one of, I think the hardest decision to do is actually pull the trigger and then start going ahead with it. And then you think about what's the list that you need to do. And for real, it's like we, before the brand, before anything, we've got to think about the product. And my view immediately was that Tom being like renowned for TikTok and Instagram videos, like in to the wider audience, it was really important for us to make sure that we had a product that was like superior to others because you're immediately going to have and a microscope under it and think that this product's going to be a gimmick because oh it's tiktok and instagram videos so therefore the product's probably going to be crap and so it was really important for us to find the right farm find a product and see actually like was creating flavors in mass retail possible because no one's done it like lurpak have done um a garlic one which is just basically just a butter with a bit of garlic puree and that's it and uh but no one had done it like in a like chef led from from tom who would have like the product has to be what tom would use at home and so that was like first that was like let's pull the trigger and that is by far the hardest one and then it was just for people listening like what's what's the value you get from putting the trigger i think i think it's accepting the fact that your social life is going to have be hugely impacted and that you are going to have to work evenings and well that impacted you i never had a social life anyway yeah yeah that impacted me but for me it was like i think one of the it was the unknown of thinking okay if i'm going to do this it's going to have a huge impact on my life i've got a wife i've got a kid um and so it was like getting into a mindset to know that that's actually what's that that's how your life is going to change and you've got to accept that's the life's going to change and that's one of the issues i found it's like before even me and Tom thinking about Apula I probably had 40 ideas in my brain of like what's any other ones out of interest had a fixed gear bike company that was quite far down the line of thingy which was a fixed gear bike which had a single speed yeah yeah but also had from the rotation of the of you cycling would charge up the you having built in lights but also having a built in lock so you never I had to worry about the two issues I always found when I was commuting into work was never my lights and were never charged.

30:43And, uh, and I always forgot my lock. And so how do you integrate light with the power from, from cycling and then also the lock? So that was one, which is quite far down the line. Um, I, me and have you, I don't know if you've had Tom Broughton on there before I moved from Qubits. Yeah. Qubits. Qubits, the glasses company. No, no, no. They have about 12 stores and he's a really good friend of mine. And me and him were very far down the line of setting up a framing company, which was going to be using, like it's in picture frame, where you use the depth of field camera of a smartphone, where you take a photo of anything that you want framed, and then you can put it into an AR, augmented reality.

31:29So then once you take the picture of it, it will measure from the depth of field camera the exact measurements of the picture. and then you can put it into an AR environment and then you basically put a frame around it and it was going to be a mobile app. And we got an MVP, created like a very small version of it on that and put a little bit of money into it. But it was about like all of those, both of those ideas got to a point where then I was like, well, that was just a bit of fun. This was like, we'd already had that fun bit of where we talked about it. And this is like those we've talked about.

31:58Now it was like, okay, are we going to actually find a farm to produce it? Are we going to now build the brand? Are we now going to do X, Y, Z? And so there is definitely differentiation of saying, I'm going to start a business to now actually let's go and find a product and let's really go and invest a profit. So we had like, there was already a lot of, we could see there was demand before it even probably like people were like, you should make this, put it in the stores and people would buy it, blah, blah, blah. And like thousands and thousands of comments. And then you're like, fuck, we already had that sort of outreach.

32:32We'd already done the outreach. Be like, would people buy this we knew that yeah it's like market research we almost skipped the step the step which i think majority of businesses would be which is like let's do a big market research piece and like our market research was going up and down supermarket aisles and looking at butter sections and sending i mean if you look back at that time you look at our photo albums there's lots and lots of pictures of supermarket aisles of butter where the butter is and where milkers and we're dairies in general um yeah i mean that was our market research it wasn't going do we think that our market has is going to be like people will buy it sort of drove the um drove the creative brief for the designer initially yeah eliza who absolutely spanked the design straight up we then uh because i think the brief was so good from toby about what we were seeing in the aisles, which was a lot of silver and a lot of gold.

33:31Yeah. If you look predominantly, and yellow from Anchor, you know, you just saw those. And so we just wanted to do something that was just completely out there, colour-wise, fun, exciting. And that's, I mean, that's where Toby's undersells his value. Like he's worked for big brands who've disrupted, you know, luggage brands, razor brands, you know, household names. he understood that kind of like what you needed to do to really break in or even though we had the sort of momentum already just to break through the category I think we did that like as soon as we put the picture out of like a very like it was like an early sketch of the time it was like 40 ,000 likes on the butter account like we only had you know we're now the most followed butter brand in the UK dairy brand in the UK we have and so but we still don't get that traction that we got initially from the actual first block of butter.

34:26So that it sort of everyone related to it quite nicely. And then, you know, I think that whole creative journey, like finding the right imaging and the fun playfulness, I think that's what people get on board with. Just as, you know, if we just did a silver package and it was just said all things butter on it. There's a few things on that. So have you listened to one of Rory Sutherland? Have you heard Rory Sutherland? You just listened to him. He's a marketing genius. twice but he he says the opposite of is one of his principles is the opposite of a good idea is a good idea right and it's it's just a great way of looking at things it's like if you look at butter it's all gold silver um quite it was just do the opposite inject it make it fun sort of um energetic vibrant yeah you kind of just disrupt the category the other thing is he's right he's so against market research and he's there's a quote by david ogrevy i'm going to butcher it now but is the issue with market research is people don't tell you what they think they don't do what they say and they don't act the way they feel something like that which is basically like bollocks right and those of these there are a few other flavored butter brands that have tried it before um i think when i was at money life in the farmer's markets yeah so if you look at that but then if the way you guys have done it is completely fresh way of going in making the videos on social it's a bit like bold bean that category like who who thought bold bean was going to come in and disrupt the category.

35:52I mean, when I first saw it, I thought, I don't, I think this is probably a niche, this is too niche to be mainstream. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I first saw it. Oh my God, I thought, I think it was then a man bragged amazing. When I first saw it, I met Amelia and I think she used to work with Mold, didn't she? She's good friends with Mold. Well, she's good friends with Ben. I don't know if she's ever worked at them, but okay, so she gave me a sample of Bold Bean and I was like, fuck, that's amazing. The only beans I tasted or legumes was from that Spanish brand Navarre or something like that. It's still in the tall jars see-through and they do the sort of chickpeas and they're on a par to bold bean.

36:39But no one's done it in the way that she's done it in terms of like trying to make it like British or like give it like a cool, fun brand. and it's now like the product fantastic she cares about it um she's great yeah i think they've done soap isn't that good on social yeah i think i just i just think if you've got a good product and you've got passion behind it then i think you can really get somewhere like our butter stir through some bold beans is delicious yeah and then there we go you can also be you can also be super targeted as well yeah because i think i know you've i know you've bit the listings we can't talk about but when you've got other listings up and down down the road yeah you could basically do an all things butter on your socials tom with a manchester um a manchester brand then that'll get the local because the hardest thing is how do you drive rate of sale out so london it's always the biggest that's the enigma yeah but you could like literally be so targeted collaborate with other brands like a cheshire farmer who does leaks from putting things on my house here right but that would that would drive shoppers to those stores that are so hard to get get hold of or get into yeah um you both seem super creative you both got loads of creative ideas like what would you say is your definition of creativity in a sentence that's a difficult one i mean for me it's like i i think for myself personally tom is definitely more creative than i am and in particular like when you see in the kitchen for me um i don't think i can do in a sentence i think i am very rational when it comes to creativity and actually when i look at the likes of can lions it drives me insane because i think all these people win these can lion awards and my view is that 99 of them their roi must have been absolutely rubbish because they're too they're almost too far gone but i don't think that from a creative approach when it comes to like marketing for instance it's um i just for me i have to see tangible results from creativity for it to really like like work with me as a person if i don't like creativity that i can't see um like results from is there an example of that like because rational creativity is delicious i can well i think for me for instance like when i looked at the creativity of of all things but if I take it as a um if I take that as I've probably butchered the the answer to this but let me take like when you ask it from from a singular sentence when I looked at um all things butter I had a very I had a very clear vision of exactly how I wanted it to be from a uh from like standing away standing out from the shelf and I gave lots of examples of brands that I particularly love but my objective for that creativity was all about the fact of how can I drive like what is this going to be doing for driving sales wise how is this going to have a great rate of sale how is this going to really stand out from the crowd to get people like excited about it when i think about the cow for instance like because we have on all of our flavors we have this all things but a cow in different positions and almost like very tongue-in-cheek very fun and for me it's like that hot the whole concept of the cow is to get people to want to almost like collect the the different cows and like look at it and think it's fun and and but it was all about the the mindset people wanted to pick it up on the shelf where if I I wouldn't look at it I don't look at it from a way which is let's just create something that looks beautiful it's more let's create something that I think will generate sales or generate some sort of tangible output that I can actually measure I think you can over one can overthink creativity something I always say to my chefs don't be afraid to be simple do something simply creativity can be very small because small changes make big differences that's delicious you've opened a door for me mate I've just butchered the hell out of that with about 10 sentences of just kind of chatting like a bollocks and then you just absolutely smashed down the dark you gave him time to write down the book I also did say that he is the creative one I am the one who is just very results focused yeah but that's i mean that's i was thinking when i wrote that just thinking about often thinking about food or like how it's mainly based around food or something physical that you can change um i think yeah you can like if i'm thinking well how am i creative in the kitchen yes i take inspiration from classics but i also don't want to then go and make it sort of super fancy and frilly i still want to see a pumpkin serve a pumpkin but i want to do it my own way so yeah keep simple one of the guys interviewed guys at from honest burger the other day and they said simple is not easy so people think simple's oh simple be easy mate well just do this it's so simple it's easy you know and that's what everyone says simple is hard focus is work like doing less is work and i think you're so right is there can be there's this obsession up and i'm the worst this it's just like let's just make this real thing and make it really complicated yeah other examples um what i kind of want to explore because i think it's fascinating is the kitchen in the the culture in the kit in your restaurant and how that's going to spill into into the brand and like what the lessons are but first like are there examples of um of this where you know with with your with your chefs or at the restaurant where you've done something that's super small that's had like a big impact things what your exact words i'm more of it yeah in that respect i let's say if someone the head chef is presenting a dish to me and he's done like he's got all lots of different elements which are going on and it just becomes the the creative process becomes muddled because you're not singing off you're not really giving an impact to one thing to shine yeah and it's like pull away i suppose you do this in lots of things and like pull away start taking away the stuff that is not that impactful and then you're left with the big impact on the plate whether it's three different elements which just really sing harmoniously together um for instance i did a dish which was which i thought this is super it's so simple it's I did I grilled the pork chop I made a beautiful mashed potatoes and I did some I had a little bit of I made a lovely sauce but I put some mustard some chopped tarragon bit of lemon zest through the and I grilled some plums and put that on a plate and it's just like harmony like all of it singing away and then when we tried to then when I said right let's put this dish on the menu in the restaurant you know they were taught they were like oh well maybe we should do like all little salsa of this and a little thing of that and I was just like it just became muddled it just didn't sing like it that was a really hearty play of food it was established and just like that's what it was and once you start to try and refine that you lose the soul of the dish so it's just pull away the pull away the crap but often creativity can be taking away not adding oh mate yeah yeah do you know rick rubin is you know the music producer rick rubin he did um big bearded guy he did the black album he did everyone mate yeah yeah but his his whole thing is yeah creativity is taking away yeah that is that is i love that to be honest tom tom for me is is a good sounding board where although 90 of like the gen like business the day-to-day business like i keep tom like up to date for the majority of like the administrative point of view that tom wouldn't even know about but when i when we come up with a problem sometimes and we've had one recently which to be honest we actually can't talk about because it's to talk about listings and things like that but like tom's point of view when it comes from like breaking things down in a very simple way is is a really good sounding board for me where when i have a million things going on from whether it's chilled supply chain to linkedin strategy to some issues with the supply with like the farm or whatever it is there's like so many things going on and then having like tom's mind come in and just be like okay let's just like take this away do not worry too much about that is it really the end of the world and actually it is it it's a small thing and it's you can just take it away and you can just you can break it down a lot more simply and so uh it's very it's nice to have a sounding board where you have two people and this breaks in something you were speaking about before but we have very very different brains and i think that's why it works really really well of how we break things down differently and we've we do not like in 20 years we've had very very few arguments our entire friendship normally we're pissed yeah you know we're pissed and i think that that is every time my husband's three absolutely smashed yeah i mean how we run the business is like we have 100 trust of each other and we know where each other excels and that's how that's how it works that's why it works so well and we really value each other's um that we value each other what each other's bringing to the table so much that we kind of let each other stay in our lanes yeah i think that was the that was a major thing for me like expanding to just running one restaurant to having multiple businesses and just it was just stay in your fucking lane so what are your lanes so i'm a bit more creative and i have you know i've got a lot of marketing to do around the restaurant or like keep creating content keep staying relevant and trying to get cancelled we'll come on to that now yeah yeah that wasn't like that like that was my lane was like stay like focus on food i'm good at food food is my lane yeah that's my lane socials is my lane um what's your lane for me everything else yeah all the boring shit all the new line forms i mean i'm a therapist for him i'm uh no i'd like it's the operational really running of the business and numbers yeah numbers looking at it from a like seeing the businesses that were done before and like trying to take as many lessons from those as possible which is like because i've made so many mistakes over the last whatever i've been working 13 14 years and so and i've seen loads of mistakes being made as well uh across all businesses that i've worked out so and that's something that if i like if i look at tom as like a businessman tom is worked in kitchens and then gone from kitchens to obviously the social media stuff gives you an element of like you have to think commercially because obviously you want to try trying to monetize like the following you've done yeah and then going into owning a restaurant well of tom's 12 year career or 13 year career there's only really been two of them which has gone to like running a business and so it's for me that's where tom just goes toby i don't like i trust you 100 i know that he knows that the decisions that i need to bring him in or not bring him in on a 90 of the decisions that he doesn't need to be in he wouldn't really even know the decisions will be made but he trusts me to know to know that i can understand his brain and i know that if i have to bring him in um and he knows my brain and knows that toby will bring me in if he really needs to bring me in and so the day-to-day running of the businesses and obviously in the in the i i look after um like the numbers in the restaurant me and tom do the numbers in the restaurant together um but then when it comes to like the day-to-day numbers of of butter i just kind of we speak six seven times a day on the phone anyway yeah just like in general life and so he knows that he's always up to date but yeah i want him the best asset for tom in the business is to keep churning out content keep creative like like ensure the restaurant is the restaurant's amazing asset to have as a business as you can imagine like i know that when you were at um money life like having that as being able to take potential suppliers there and taking to the restaurant like tom cook for them and actually i do a tasting in the restaurant we did a press and retail event there last week which was like it was an it's just an incredible asset to have and the team is so fantastic and so providing tom stays in like and like he stays in his lane i stay in my lane we seem to work pretty we work pretty well together but there were definitely gaps within the team that we filled by bringing advisors and bringing in additional shareholders we've got we've got a good team now like you know i don't deal with anything i don't have to deal with yeah um we're obviously we're hiring yeah we're doing some good if you're a challenger brand that's absolutely killing it in d2c but you're struggling to crack retail then you've got to listen to this maybe you've got a card listing maybe you've got a whole foods listing maybe you're absolutely killing it in selfridges maybe you're absolutely killing it in your farm shop and your indies but my friends making the leap crossing el chasm crossing el rubicon to grocery retail is not easy it's the champions league of fmcg it's super hard it means playing at a higher level and that's where some of you amazing brands sadly stumble look retailers want stories backed by data not dreams and a pretty pitch deck and let's be real supermarkets are not just going to magically make a space for you and your little brand they need data something's got to go for you to get in for you to get on shelf and that is why i've got to tell you about north star they are the team that's helping purpose-led fmcg brands go from gut instinct dreams to unstoppable pitch decks that actually unlock retailers north star i'm not like another data company that force feed you data like foie gras that act like a nasa space mission it's super super simple to use their team are amazing and they actually get the challenger mindset north star are your shortcut to smarter decisions stronger pitches and investor confidence all built specifically for challenger brands like yours you don't need a massive sales team you need north star link in the show notes click that link and you'll be able to book a free demo with north star highly highly recommend that and thank me later making good hires um i'm working on some new flavors yeah yeah a couple of new flavors It's got to get spread at all.

51:17Yeah, I think... I asked William Kendall last week when I was up in Suffolk, what does every brand get wrong as they're trying to build a brand? And he basically saw it when he was watching his little kid play mini rugby. And when you watch little kids play mini rugby, they all run to the fucking ball. Yeah. And he goes, that's where everything goes wrong in business. But if you just stay in your lane and you do what you're good at and you do the thing that you're amazing at, the rest will kind of... It's got to be trust. what so you said i've seen and you know you've worked at trip you've worked at harry's away away the luggage company the yes you've got a really eclectic mix but what are some of those plants didn't you say you're working for some a big company and they hadn't done a forecast or financial like a revenue i mean there's quite a lot of them right yeah what are the biggest mess ups you've seen that you weren't allowed to happen all things butter i think the first one that i saw which is pretty consistent across not all of them but at large portions i was also a consultant for loads of DTC on each other brands as well is ensuring that you stay on top of the numbers from day one.

52:22When me and Tom were like, say, from January to March was like finding the perform, finding the product, making sure there's actually viable business, etc. Then in April I called up a friend of mine who had worked in a consulting client before who was a CFO. right no no i still was talking through uh yeah he was a cfo and he's one of the best people i've worked with um and he's actually a big cfo he's a big cfo of a massive fintech company but for him it's like he needs to have balance of also working and he enjoys doing some like fractional work in cpg companies and so i brought him in from literally april the first so like nine months or seven months before we launched.

53:09And he has been the greatest asset that we've ever bought into the company because our accounts are absolutely on the money. All of our registrations are on the money. He does everything from the bookkeeping to everything. He just really, and me and Tom have such a great relationship with him. And so that was immediately like, I knew that if we're going to get this to work, me and Tom agreed that from a equity perspective, we're happy to give equity to the right people and so he came on as an equity partner uh from from april and to honest like is is being worth his weight in absolute gold um and so that was one thing immediately was like don't get yourself into a point of where like from a and he looks after all the stock management ensures that like we are not like overexposed from a stock perspective and things like that um that was like the main thing that i've taken from those uh from from those businesses as a whole and then when it broke down to like margin perspective as you can think of like away and harry's and i'll even say patch but i've also worked for quite a few of the like new york based startups which have raised a shitload of money particularly like the heyday of raising all the money where there was such a huge focus on growth and not a huge focus on uh bottom line yeah and it was like the bottom line will come the bottom line will come like but when the fuck is the bottom line going to come?

54:31Because you see WeWork is basically just about to go under, and you see there's loads of other businesses that have gone under or funding is now running out. And so an absolute fixation on bottom line and having a very, very realistic path to profitability was something that was so key to me from the start. And in the end of the day, Butter, as you can imagine, is a low-margin, high-volume product. and so we had to have a really really clear plan of how we were going to be a profitable business and how we were going to run it lean and so fixation on bottom line was again another one which like i've taken from majority of the businesses that i've been at and having a realistic path of profitability rather than like i've seen some paths of profitability in my time i've seen and i'm sure you've seen some as well i think most people have seen them where they are literally just so plucked out of thin air and I know you have to do a little bit of like plucking out thin air the whole coffee stick yeah yeah but realistically as Gav said in with like the pitch to it you see the classic coffee stick yeah the classic hockey stick yeah from thingy and it's like D2C for me was like my bread and butter is D2C and your bread and butter yeah it's actually do you know what it's really annoying is that I use bread and butter I use acronyms bread and butter is an acronym is an acronym of saying like Yeah, bread and butter.

55:55Yeah, yeah, or churn. Bread and other things, but I use it. Especially from being a DC background, like churn rate, for instance, is one of my best friends when I used to talk about that. So I very often use words, which people then take the piss out of me because they say that it's related to butter. I'm like, I used the fucking words before I had a butter business. But DC, like I say, is what I've been doing for the last 10 years. And although most of the business that I've been at, I've been omnichannel, have gone omnichannel. So I've got to understand more about omnichannel but what does Omnichannel mean?

56:26Omnichannel so it's like yeah so it's like retail and D2C see you loads I mean you every day baby and D2C and for me like the play always but we Omnichannel yeah yeah well we will be Omnichannel but one of the plays immediately for us was that we were going to be an Omnichannel and retail retail first business but we were going to be an Omnichannel business and a lot of people I think who would think very very D2C would be like well you've got Tom and Tom's got a massive following and da da da da and it's all online. But my view is like, people do that shopping. Yeah, try and look at the unit economics of sending some butter out from a fulfillment center to a customer and having chilled storage and then having the chilled fulfillment cost and then having an ice pack in there and a thingy.

57:09Well, you can't, I mean, it's like we will, we have a DTC element of the business which we're launching at the end of November. However, the business happening, regardless of whether Tom's going online following, the margins are so, they're already raised within in retail And on the DTC, they're even more, like, they're utterly appalling. And so there was a very, like, straightaway, I think... I do think it is the market in general is changing from like online brands or new challenger brands where retail has definitely got significantly more focus than it used to have. yeah and i'm sure like you can name loads of examples of that yeah but do you know so i think there's a do you know who gives a crap yeah yeah exactly yeah so i interviewed him simon absolute legend he was from australia actually it was like 5 a.m our time i was thinking i couldn't get going i was so tired um but he was saying that they had to go d2c and they got lucky with d2c because of covid obviously everyone toilet paper um but i was one of the questions i asked him i'll ask you guys like what's one belief you have which has changed drastically in the last five years and his was we can't we the only way to sell our brand is direct to consumer because you've got to go where the shoppers are actually going to be buying it and i think it's um yeah as much as tom's got the big following the restaurant's got got the big following where do people actually buy butter well the best the best example of it is i've got i've got pricey yeah yeah yeah crack on mate yeah They don't film them all the time.

58:46The best example for me of alienating a retail customer is the Harry's and Dollar Shave Club, by example. What do they do? I don't know much about them. So Harry's, obviously Harry's razors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Dollar Shave Club. So Dollar Shave Club did that insane viral video that was, it was one take and he kind of like, he walked through the factory and he talked about the fact of, why are you spending too much on your razors? and when you can get your Razor for a dollar and through the post and basically fuck retail and it's all around DTC. And their whole premise around like was bringing Razor, they were the first people to basically do Razors online.

59:26And then Harry's came about six to 12 months after them. But their big marketing play was around the retail shit and you should get Razors sent to you. And that was like their big marketing push. where Harry's example was razors are really convenient if you want them sent to you through online. However, if you don't want to buy them online, you can buy them in retail and that's also really convenient for you as well. Well, Dollar Shaper did get sold for a billion to Unilever when in the absolute heyday of DTC marketing like five years ago, whatever it was. Well, Dollar Shaper now has basically gone bust or they're closing it down in Unilever because they have this huge push on the fact that it's not about omnichannel, it's about D2C, D2C only, we want to revolutionize it.

1:00:18Well, if you think about the razor market, it'll never be more than 50 % of the razor market going to be online. So you're immediately alienating 50 % of your entire customer base of people who are shaving. And so for me, it's like, if I think about butter, if I think about toilet roll, if I cpg brand if you think that d2c is going to be the only place that you should sell in my opinion is like you're just what's the point in alienating such a huge proportion of your market based on the fact that it's just online do online and it is great to have customer data and blah blah blah and you really own that relationship with the consumer but i do feel like there is like you're never going to be able to fulfill the ceiling of where you like you'll hit a ceiling at d2c and every business that I've been at, we hit a ceiling on DTC.

1:01:09You get to a point of where you need to then start selling elsewhere. And when it comes to marketing costs, and again, I'm sure that all the guests that you've had, Facebook marketing costs have gone up, Google marketing costs have gone up. It's so expensive to advertise these days. There's more people in the market of every single product with like category that you're in. And so you have to find a way of being able to attribute your spend across multiple channels. so if you have facebook as your sole um marketing channel but you're on race you're in retail and you're in on d2c it allows you to actually attribute attribute proportion of your marketing spend from facebook actually to retail sales because you know that retail have some people are purchasing your products in retail because of your facebook marketing i would assume that i mean i would say that 90 majority of brands that do that if you are doing a lot of spending a lot of money on Facebook marketing and you have a product in store, people will be buying you in store.

1:02:09There will be, I mean, we've done lots of questionnaires about this in the past of where we've gone into retail and got people to see why have you purchased XYZ product. And 50 % of them from one brand that worked out said it's because they saw us on social media. And so it allows you then to expand your ceiling on DTC because you can lower your targets because you can attribute a proportion of your marketing spend to some with your retail sales. If you don't have those retail sales, you've got every single pound, marketing dollar that you have is just attributed to DTC sales, no omni-channel sales.

1:02:42And so therefore your cost then, you're going to hit a ceiling of whatever your cost per acquisition is. So it's 30 quid. But if you've got a retail presence, maybe you can say your cost per acquisition target could go to 40 quid because you're actually attributing a proportion of your spend to retail and therefore you can afford to spend more money on marketing. 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 to 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 i just know a guy um matt kelly space goods yeah yes i interviewed him a couple of weeks ago they've he he was basically saying how the landscape for d2c because of all the costs of advertising on meta have gone through the roof that the only way it's kind of it's weird the way these things move like when i started at money life everyone was like right you've got to get on D2C be the Harry's um Grey's was the most successful launch ever I think into retail they were huge uh huge D2C business goes into Tesco's absolutely flies Huel to be honest I know the sales director of Huel lovely guy they're smashing it considering they're a huge D2C business but then it's like does it actually work because the margins are so easy on that whereas with you guys we've got a cool box yeah but like it's an absolutely nightmare yeah the business realistically like if you look at our model of businesses the first year is like 70 30 70 retail 30 percent dc wouldn't it and then it'll go there you go then it'll probably go like 80 20 then it'll be like 85 15 and then we'll maybe land at like 90 10 and we'll always have that element of dc because of tom's online following we're always going to have an element but realistically it'll be for like gifting it'll be like merch it'll be like butter knives butter dishes cool t-shirts etc plus if you want to buy four pack of butter you can buy it but it will be cheaper for you to buy it in in retail yeah because we can't make it's just physically impossible for us to be able to sell butter at the same price at retail online when you take into consideration all the additional costs that we have associated even even with the margin doesn't matter it's all the additional costs that we have on top of it eats away that margin that you'd be giving to the retailer like and more yeah and it's actually probably easier getting into a wholesale retailer even though the ranging windows are a nightmare and the buyers change.

1:05:22You don't actually have to touch, it just goes from the farms straight to the retail. Yeah. They literally just go, they all... And like a wholesaler, a wholesaler has like the chilled lorries in our area every day of the week. Or Sainsbury's will have chilled lorries in our area every day of the week and they literally just pick up the pallets and it goes into the distribution sensors. And where for us, for DTC, it's like we need to find a chilled 3PL then and the 3PL, they have to have a freezer solution where they have the ice packs and they have to build the boxes and they have to we've got all branded insulated bags which then insulated bag ice pack four packs of butter into box close the box then it's a five pound fulfillment cut charge because you've got to go 24 hours because if you think that it's not like majority of the majority when i was a trip i think we did majority was like 48 hours um delivery and so 48 hour delivery therefore you can go down to like unless people pay for next day delivery but our standard was a four year delivery that's like nearly half the price of 24 hour delivery four blocks of butter this costs you 15 12 quid it is three pounds each and then you've got to pay five pounds of delivery yeah yeah so adding over a pound a block yeah it's uh but obviously we will be available online yeah and if you are buyers online you can do i'm not saying that and i have to pay our dc packaging is awesome like it i've tried to like take everything that I've learned from DTC packaging and make an awesome experience when you open it.

1:06:49How have you done that? Well, for instance, like the box is just like, when the box comes, it's covered in cow print. And then you open it up and then you've just got this, then you have a cow which is parachuting down with like a block of butter. I took this vision of like worms, the game, where you'd like, I don't even think it's on the internet. No, no, no. Do you know worms where it'd be like, you'd have like those parachutes? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got like the cow's parachuting in and then like blocks of butter are parachuting in. And then you have like the box, the insulated packaging, which is all like cow print all over it with like the cows.

1:07:22Black and white. Or just get, it's got cow. Yeah, no, so it's cow, like cow black and white print, but then with the cows on it. And then when you open the ice pack, even the ice pack's all branded with the cows and then the butter's in it. So it's a wicked experience of opening it. And like, I want people to buy online. When's that ready? End of the month. So that's almost like the DTC is more like the storytelling depth vehicle. That's going to get into consumer's salt. It's like the retail is where you can get the volumes. Exactly. It's allowed us to have loads of fun with the brand even more and get people to find it tongue-in-cheek and get into the tongue-in-cheek, like me and Tom.

1:08:03Yeah, gifting. Gifting out to people who want to. yeah you know you want to send if I you know if you give someone someone gave us a restaurant they wanted some butter and I just gave them in a brown paper bag yeah we've got to do something about it it keeps getting dented that butter yeah those pictures are all fucking dented yeah let's put it in a I want to I want to talk about the the restaurant and the the leadership learnings that you're going to apply to building a brand because I think that's a I interview loads of chefs and loads of CPG founders I never had it when there's two right in front right so i suppose tom like what are your leadership's um kind of principles your one to two we talked about kind of this simplicity thing and creativity is taking away which i love i thought well okay so in restaurants slightly that you're dealing with a lot of people you know there's a lot of pressure it's a pressure environment in a restaurant because you're being judged every day or twice a day yeah yeah twice a day you're you're on show base it's like you're putting on like a dance and you know all the steps have got to be right everything and so you know they start from fresh every day we don't have loads of storage out people prepping in the back you know you're on the section you you are you're responsible uh and so i suppose with that i lead with a firm but fair approach so i will tell you if it's wrong but also i'll say it in a nice way and i'll be firm and that's what i said if i'm having to be direct so I'm having to do stuff really quickly like in the kitchen behind I'll be like da da da da da and that'll be it and that's the end of the story like I don't want to I just want people to say yes we'll do it like that sorry or not even sorry we'll do it like that where somebody will go like oh I was doing that because it was wrong and done I was like it doesn't work that's how it's meant to be that's what we've got the recipe so it's like it's being as direct and direct and clear as possible and not really altering from that.