293. Meet the Portfolio Entrepreneur Who Built A Global Rum Brand w/ Aaisha Dadral | crave.

0:00Amardeep Parmar:Happy to have you here today.

0:01Aaisha Dadral:So happy to finally be here. Sorry to interrupt, but I think we should start there by me saying, I'm happy to finally be here.

0:07Amardeep Parmar:Yeah, I was going to say you've only postponed like five times.

0:09Aaisha Dadral:That's so rude. To say that in front of people is brutal. For good reason, in fairness.

0:17Amardeep Parmar:But you've done a lot of different things, right? Which is why I wanted to get you on. So founder of Crave, co-founder of Equiano Rum.

0:24Aaisha Dadral:Yeah.

0:24Amardeep Parmar:You're now hoping to run a family business in foster care. so you've got a few different hats that you wear but you start in the music industry right yeah so you said a word earlier audacity is what links it all together yeah tell us why uh you're

0:41Aaisha Dadral:right i've done a lot of things i think that you cannot be a person that has pivoted from industry to industry unless you have a bit of audacity i exist i have existed in spaces that i've honestly had no business being in and i think it served me i think it's a really good thing and i wish more people did it to be honest I was saying earlier there's a school of thought that says go into businesses that are industries or businesses that you know right taking my parents and we'll come to it but my parents business is in social care my father was a social worker it makes complete sense I've done the complete opposite I started in the music industry I didn't even know that the music industry existed as a place for me to go and have a career to be perfectly honest so I went in in that space.

1:28Aaisha Dadral:I had a lot of people that looked after me, gave me opportunities, opened doors for me. But also it meant that I went in and I was open-minded and I was super malleable and I could be taught. I didn't go in thinking that I had the answers. I knew damn well I didn't know any answers. I think I probably replicated that throughout my career. So when I started Crave 13 years ago, I'd never worked in an agency. That ignorance affords you an audacity. it is and it is audacity it's audacity to kind of go well people tell you you should do it like this my natural disposition is going to go well if everyone does it like that I'm going to do it like this because I don't know any better or if they can go this way I'm going to go that way because why not why would we not try the other way I think that the thread in my career probably is that audacity you know I've never worked in the spirits industry and yet found myself starting a co-founding a rum company people in that journey would come to us all the time oh but you build a sales team like this oh but you open uh international markets like that and we would fortunately four co-founders three of us had really no experience in that space all three of us would be sitting there going yeah but it doesn't mean we should do it like that just because it's always been done like that why don't we try something different i honestly think that it has served both me personally in my career but also each of the businesses that I've been a part of um you mentioned our family business my parents went into an industry that they knew but we're coming in as siblings again with a degree of ignorance now there's a it's a slightly different challenge because you're walking into a business that already has a legacy um and people that have worked there for far longer than any of us have been close to that business right so you've got to go in there and respect it but there's still a degree of audacity to kind of go okay I have to be respectful and learn what I don't know.

3:15Aaisha Dadral:But I also can come in and go, yeah, but why not? Why don't we try this? What's our diversification look like? Well, why don't we try that? Why don't we do it like this instead of that? I think there's a lot to be said for that.

3:25Amardeep Parmar:And with Craven Equinox, right? So two very different businesses they founded. And one is obviously a more service-based business. And then Equinox Run, which is a more product-based business that you got funding for as well. So how is it going from that? I think there's lots of people who maybe start service businesses first. And I always think for other people, starting service business first, getting that experience, getting some money in the bank before starting a product based business can actually really help you. Massively. But how does that switch from like quite different mindsets?

3:54Aaisha Dadral:So it's really interesting because again, I think there's a kind of commonality between the two. Both are really purpose and profit businesses. They both have a kind of a foundation that is about doing things in the world that are good, leaving things better than you found them and having a positive impact, right? If you look at Craven, what we've done, what we've worked on, how we've worked, the team, opportunities that we've opened up, particularly for young people from different backgrounds that don't have access to the creative industries. And then you look at Equiano and you understand the name, the story behind the name and all those things, that philanthropy was part of that journey before we'd even had a name for the business.

4:32Aaisha Dadral:There's definitely a thread, but they are totally different beasts. How do you go from one to the other with a very, very steep learning curve? At Crave, we've had 13 years of working with some of the biggest names in the industry in the world. Google, Nike, Spotify, the BBC, all the way down to founders and really supporting founders. They've got an idea. We bring their idea to life, whether that's through branding, design or marketing or a combination of all of them. You build the brand, you hand it over to the founder and they go and bring it to life. Equiano was a total opposite it was a continuation of my ownership of the thing you build the thing and then you keep building and you have to see the journey all the way through and that comes with a lot of different challenges right on the bits that I'm good at I think marketing branding telling the story and bringing that part to life that was great because it felt like a real privilege I have loved that Equiano journey being able to execute things as we as a team at Crave had envisioned it, incredible.

5:36Aaisha Dadral:But on a purely business front, those business models look totally different. The levers in the businesses look totally different. You mentioned funding. The funding in the two things look totally different. You might be able to bootstrap a service business very easily. But in a product business and a spirits industry, that's an expensive, cash-hungry industry and a cash-hungry business to start, right? You're not going to get far unless you go out and get funding so i think if if crave taught me the hard and fast of business and what it means to build a team equiano really taught me what it is to scale to grow to go out and bring other people into your business to let go of the reins a hell of a lot more to understand that someone in hungary is talking about your product and you've got to trust that you've done enough that they're talking about it in the way that you want them to um baptism of fire steep learning curve, but what a brilliant thing to know how both of those businesses work.

6:29Amardeep Parmar:And with Equiano you said that there's a whole story that you created before you even released the product or everything as well. What was that story and brand and philosophy behind it?

6:37Aaisha Dadral:Really interesting. Unfortunately not the story that we created. The name Equiano. So Equiano is a world's first African and Caribbean rum. It's never been done before. When you think of rum, you think of the Caribbean. But actually sugar cane exists in Africa. rum as a product has existed in africa always we don't have africa on the the global map for rum in the way that really we should and we could and you're seeing a lot more new uh parts of the world come into the the spirit space but rum in particular we haven't seen much from africa so they'd kind of fallen upon this idea that we'd be the world's first african and caribbean rum and when we were thinking of a name a friend of one of the founders mentioned equiano now alauda equiano was born in the 1700s in Africa.

7:23Aaisha Dadral:He was taken through transatlantic slave trade to the Caribbean. He ended up in the UK. He became one of the foremost prominent abolitionists in the UK who had a real influence and impact on essentially the abolition movement, the 1807 Slave Trade Act, and what ended up toppling the slave trade all around the world. You can't make a name like that up. It landed in our laps like a gift. But also it's a really wonderful example of where profit and purpose can exist if you do it in the right way. You can't backpedal that. You can't reverse navigate it, so to speak. We were very lucky. We already had a commitment as founders that Africa was something that we wanted to put onto the map, that African and Caribbean rum deserved a place in the world, and that we wanted to always have a give back.

8:16Aaisha Dadral:We'd agreed as founders that there would be a percentage of profit that would be given back to ground level organizations, full stop. Right. And then the name happened upon us and the things fit like a hand to a glove. It is a stroke of the universe telling you that you're in the right place at the right time, I think. But what an incredible story and what a privilege to bring a story like that to life. If it's, again, you know, if Crave gives me the right with the team to craft narratives and bring stories to life, what Equiano did was one further. It's like taking this story that is so rich and so meaningful and so relevant when we launched as well, but even now, and usher it into a world that needed to hear and needs to hear these stories more now than ever.

9:02Aaisha Dadral:that the sense of belonging, the sense of identity, the sense that, again, you should be brave and you should have audacity because an Alada Aguiano doesn't stand on a podium talking about freedom of all people because someone gave him a right to do it. That's not how it works.

9:19Amardeep Parmar:Awesome. So I know very little about the ramen industry. When you're starting that, right, so you've got the idea, you've got the philosophy, you want to give back. How do you go about from taking that concept, that idea, to actually, like we've got one of the bottles over here, right? What was your part of that journey to then start scaling up and making a reality?

9:37Aaisha Dadral:Blimey, that's a big question. We sat around a table as four co-founders and did some crude blending of some liquids, liked one of them and said, wow, this is it. We love this liquid. Now let's go and get proper professionals to do it. And from there, actually a lot of it fell on my lap and the lap of the team at Crave, where you then land on the name and you start to bring it to life through brand. What are the brand values? What does the brand look like? What does it sound like? What are the parts? What are the building blocks? It was 2019. I'm sitting with the team putting pages of a brand guidelines up and figuring out where there are gaps and if it really says what we want it to say.

10:20Aaisha Dadral:We went from there to we launched in the UK. We launched very swiftly in the US. we did at a time that couldn't be more tricky. We got product into the UK market in February of 2020. And by March, COVID happened and everything closed down. So actually, it's a big question because you're not just asking, how do you build a spirit brand or how do you get product to market? Actually, how do you do it in the face of a global moment and pandemic that has changed everything your immediate route to market in a spirits business for the most part is on trade right bars restaurants etc well overnight our main route to market our main channel was closed so you have to pivot really fast now fortunately we were always ready for d2c but it meant we had to learn a lot about you know what does it mean to be a good d2c brand and also how is the rest of the world reacting and do we need to open in kind of wider global markets sooner than we'd anticipated so you kind of went from the building blocks of how do you make a great liquid okay now let's do the bit that I'm really good at with the team and build the brand and tell the story and bring the story to life how do you get into market and then holy smokes the channel that we would all rely on on trade has closed what now what that looked like in 2020 and in 2021 was growth through a lot of different markets.

11:47Aaisha Dadral:We were very lucky. Lots of markets came to us. I think by the end of year one, we were probably in 12 markets. Now, any spirits founder will tell you that's not just fast growth, that's haphazard. And at some point, it's going to bite you in the tush. And it did. But it also kept us alive through COVID. And again, it came with its own learnings. Would I ever build a product business like that again? Not unless there was a global pandemic. But did it teach us that sometimes you've got to say yes, and then on the backside learning when to say no? Yeah, I mean, invaluable.

12:20Amardeep Parmar:How would you pick which countries to expand into today if you maybe did it not the ideal way in the past?

12:26Aaisha Dadral:So I've been out of running the day-to-day of Equiano for 18 months now. And I think how they pick, how the team picks today, how the co-founders pick today would probably be very different to how we did then. At the time that it was COVID, we started to said yes a lot of things not a smart way to do it I think that now you I think they can afford to be a little bit more data driven where is rum and in our part of the category where is ultra premium rum seeing growth where are audiences either moved by what's in the bottle or by the story and also where can we put boots on the ground where can we have a team that we can get behind that we can support and that we can sharpen the way that the audience in that place wants us to show up in.

13:08Aaisha Dadral:I think, yeah, I think there's probably a lot more intelligence behind it now than there was then. We just had to say yes.

13:16Amardeep Parmar:Hello, hello. I hope you've enjoyed the show so far. I'm Amarit Palmer, co-founder of BayHQ and the host of this show. For those of you who don't know, BayHQ is the community for high growth Asian heritage founders and investors in the UK. Over 7 ,500 500 people have attended our events, 200 people have been through our impact programs, and obviously there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast. If you want to join us and take part in the program and then come to the events, go to vahihq.com forward slash join. We also just released our first ever book called Startups for Outsiders, which you can get on Amazon now, and the link is in the bio.

13:57Amardeep Parmar:Hope to see you soon at our event. Hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. We get a lot of consumer brand founders who ask us about the funding in the early days. And it's obviously a very different market to say a tech business as well in terms of how you get that funded. Yeah. And you're saying the Rums business is very heavy in terms of like, you need the factories set up, you probably have a minimum order size.

14:18Aaisha Dadral:Yeah.

14:19Amardeep Parmar:How do you go about like, who's going to fund this or how you're going to make it reality?

14:23Aaisha Dadral:It's really interesting. So I personally had never gone out for funding for a business until at Griano. know um and also i think south asians probably can relate to this we tend to come from households where even if you do start your own thing we tend to bootstrap and we tend to hold on to our equity as well we're not big on giving people shares and we're not big on taking other people's money so i'd really come from that school of thought and crabe was was built as such but the reality of a product business and particularly a spirits business and when you're talking with the world's first african and caribbean rum that literally means we're taking rum from africa to the caribbean blending it and bottling it and then sending it out to the world before you've even sold a single bottle you have accumulated so many costs in that process that without going out for funding unless you are in a position where you're personally backing it you're going to die a death very quickly um i think there's lots of different ways to do it we went down a route that i think was the right route and i'm glad that we did and i think i'd do it the same way again i put the first uh seed money in significant amount to get the business to market the brand to market we then did a friends and family round of I want to say it was about 950 and it was pretty close people there were a handful of people that were through introductions or through platforms but for the most part was people that we knew and then we went out and we really looked at angels more than anything I think we were really clear as founders from the outset that we didn't want to go out for VC money if we could avoid it because I think the pressures that come with that very different uh and you it changes your strategy a little bit we were in a very fortunate position that what we ended up with was a strategic strategic investor and who understood our industry and it again that came with some turbulence of its own but certainly in that beginning bit having angels and then having someone who you know really understood the journey that we were on and what it means to be in the spirits industry and sometimes what cash looks like that was super helpful and to avoid the VC thing was was was also a spot of luck I think

16:22Amardeep Parmar:and you said that you've stepped away about 18 months ago right yeah and can you share like what's been happening since so I know it's obviously quite a difficult period at that time

16:31Aaisha Dadral:as well like share what you're willing to share yeah I mean so let's do equiano first it was a difficult period because exactly to the point of the funding um funding's a tricky thing and if you end up in a position where your funding doesn't come through as we did or funding comes through in a way that you hadn't anticipated it has a massive impact on your business the day-to-day running of the business you've committed to things and if the cash hasn't come through from your investor you're in a very tricky predicament we ended up in a scenario where ultimately the goalposts changed with our lead funder and as quickly as you try to remedy that going out for funding takes time particularly when you know you're having to do it from the bottom up you've got to rebuild the finance model you've got to put an investor memorandum together because thinking about the strategy that's still attractive to people that are now coming in it's a very different proposition so we ended up in a scenario where the goalposts changed with the the thunder and we were scrapping around it puts you in a really distressed position you run the business very differently you have to take tricky decisions about where you spend money and when you spend money so for example if you're in a position where you're just about to pull the trigger on marketing marketing becomes a very uh immediate luxury when you're more worried about keeping people's jobs safe right so that happened it was tricky the businesses come through it uh two of the co-founders are still in that business and running the business happy days on a personal level you know in the whole time that equiano started from when it started to the whole time that i was a part of the day-to-day running at that business i just had a lot going on with life i think most founders can relate to this life and work in my experience don't exist separately sadly as much as I'd love to lobotomize myself sometimes um I think the two things are one in the same and I had a lot going on with life I got really unwell with long COVID in a way that I've never experienced I had fatigue and brain fog and then more serious things you know heart lungs all sorts of things um and at the same time I think when you're in that position it was the first time in my life that I'd been in a position where I was just completely helpless.

18:34Aaisha Dadral:I didn't have control over what my day-to-day looked like. And it's inevitable that things surface in periods like that. So, you know, there's a childhood trauma, you never dealt with it, you finally face it. All of these things happened exactly as Equiano was kind of building, growing, finding its momentum. You find yourself in a position where you're running two businesses, never clever, even on your best day. No one can run two businesses. It's not real life. um but you're running two businesses you're unwell and then you're also you're kind of dealing with everything that's going on in your brain that is hard work so 18 months ago you kind of hit the wall you know burnout is a very real thing and I think it's burnout beyond just your intellectual mind of burnout because of work when it's burnout because you're emotionally utterly depleted and exhausted um it was to a point where you know I had co-founders saying to me oh can you just be in this meeting I was going I am so scared to be in a meeting because I've got nothing clever to say in this meeting because I'm just totally wiped out it's a scary place to be in and I think the massive learning for me is never get to that place again but also it's a little bit of concoction of timing and bad luck right on the flip side when you're dealing with big life things uh work kept me alive thank goodness for having two businesses neither of which necessarily was giving everything to all the time you can't you're splitting lots of directions but you know work kept me alive and thank god it did and obviously today you've I'm hoping you're feeling a lot better much better as you well know I'm just off the back of a horrible superflu but

20:10Amardeep Parmar:much better and like what have you done in the past 18 months the people who maybe are going through something similar right now and trying to not necessarily look for solutions but just I guess the realness of like going through that and how do you come out the other side and be able to smile

20:24Aaisha Dadral:do you know what it's a really great question but it's such a it's such a boring answer you have to sit still I actually left my own devices I'm a very still person for someone who's had to have dynamism and do a lot of things and moved fast I've had to sit still and I didn't realize how hard I would find it I actually think that I spent the first several weeks being angry at the world than myself that I'd been completely unproductive it's hard when you're someone who is switched on all the time and is accountable for a lot of things in people it's hard to sit still for five minutes and sit with your thoughts I did a lot of sitting still I didn't travel I you know the obvious thing is get on a plane get out of the country and usually I would but I think for the first time I realized that I actually need to sit my feelings for a second I need to allow all of my feelings to catch up with everything that I've been dealing with and everything that I've done and not done and all the things I've been and not been um I sat very still I was there's therapy you know four years ago so continued with therapy through that 18 months but took a lot of time to honestly just replenish and refresh and rejuvenate my soul a little bit I spent time with my siblings and my parents my grandparents who I'm still lucky to have and my partner uh I got a dog which meant I was forced to be outside these are silly things but you realize that when the proverbial hits the fan it's really those basic things that make the world of difference I cooking is my favorite thing in the world being in the kitchen is my favorite thing I've probably cooked more in the last year and a half than I have for the longest time um but sitting with myself and having to catch up with my feelings and focus on my wellness and ask myself some difficult questions and have some difficult conversations with the people in my life um yeah so it was a restful 18 months but not really no um what's interesting is you then also when you put that into the context of work you come back to work eventually and i've certainly found i just have a very different viewpoint i've always been someone who cares deeply about giving back and uh leaving things better than you found them and i think you see that in all of all of the work that I've done in Crave is a great example we we've nurtured a lot of great talent and everyone that's worked at Crave is if and when they've gone they've gone on to brilliant careers and I'm naturally a nurturing person I think you know there's lots of ways that you can do good in the world uh Equiano I think we achieved that in different ways but having this time off has given me the space to stop and just go but what do I really care about I've proven to myself that I can build that I can start something from nothing that I really excel at the zero to one um and I can I can lean into scale and I can support founders through Crave in in both zero to one and in scale and do it for myself but what do I really care about I don't know if I have the answer yet I think you know as I said before profit and purpose is a thread through both my career and probably the career of my siblings and my parents um I think profit and purpose will continue to to gather pace into the future but having the opportunity to stop and reflect a little bit and to figure out what you really want and what matters in life yeah is a real privilege

23:42Amardeep Parmar:what was the trigger to be like okay I've had enough time now you feel like you're ready to come back was there a trigger was it just a slow transition it's a really good question I think it

23:53Aaisha Dadral:was a slow transition actually. I wish there was a trigger because I think I'd have felt more like full of beans with it. I think it was a slow progress to be honest. I kind of had a couple of occasions where I felt like I was ready to get back into things and get back in the thick of things and the people in my life were going, Laisha, absolutely not. We're sick and tired of you. Sit still for longer. Give it a rest. Have a break. Read a book. Watch a movie. Thank goodness that I took heed of their advice. I think I've slowly, slowly got back into it and it's only now that I'm starting to feel the pace back actually you know I'm busy with Craig the family business is something that we're talking about a lot more uh but I felt like I gave myself the the slow sensible pace back in I think there's a lesson in that you know sometimes the bull in a china shop zero to a hundred isn't the way to go sometimes just let things be let things breathe a

24:42Amardeep Parmar:little bit I think we've mentioned the family business a few times we're not really going into it too much. What does the VAMI business do and what's your role there?

24:49Aaisha Dadral:So Swiss is the UK's leader in outcomes for young people in foster care. They are the best at what they do in that regard. So I think I said earlier, my father was a social worker. He understood that industry incredibly well. He had a career that moved very fast. He became very senior very quickly. But he saw from the inside what it looks like to care for the elderly, the young and everything in between. my parents took a leap of faith together and started a business that essentially is in the social care sector today there's two major parts of it workforce solutions in the social care sector so providing nurses providing social workers to the public and the private sector and then foster care so if the main business is 36 odd years old now foster care is probably 26 six years old.