#48 - Phil Peters - YF [Director of Supply Chain Services]

0:00Phil Peters:Hello, hello, hello and welcome back to the unfounders. Today I am joined by Phil Peters who is the Director of Supply Chain Services at YF. Now YF do a whole host of different services for brands whether you're looking for operations in supply chain, whether you're looking for sales, marketing, recruitment. They can help you along that journey and it sounds like a brilliant business to be part of. Phil is super passionate about operations and shining a light on all the great work that ops people do up and down the country for so many brands. We've got Opsfest coming up later this year. It's back bigger and better.

0:30Phil Peters:But I really love digging into Phil's career to unlock why he's so passionate about ops. His experience at PwC, Tesco, all sorts of other brands. There's loads within this. I really hope you enjoy it. Without further ado, let's get on with it. Are you a chef, baker or food brand looking to grow? Well, let me introduce you to Mission Kitchen, London's home for food and drink entrepreneurs and sponsor of The Unfounders. Mission Kitchen gives you the equipment, support and community to take your business to the next level. With flexible access to commercial kitchens, expert mentorship on site, and a network of hundreds of like-minded founders, this could be exactly what your business needs to level up.

1:06Phil Peters:If you want to find out more, wind up a tour today at missionkitchen.org forward slash unfounders.

1:21Phil Peters:Hello and welcome back to the Unfounders. Today I am joined by the one for Phil. So for those listening, can you please introduce yourself, where you work and how long you've been there? No problem. I'm Phil. I'm Director of Supply Chain Services at YF. YF is a consultancy that works with lots of fast growing food and drink brands, predominantly to help scale. And I get involved in everything from launching into Tesco, solving all sorts of manufacturing nightmares and kind of building out long term supply chain stuff. and I've been doing that for coming up to three years now. So for those who have never heard of YF, what is it?

1:57Phil Peters:Who are you? How long has the business been going? All of that good stuff. I mean, a lot of people listening will probably go, yeah, absolutely know who that is. But for a few people, that could be never heard of them. So where to start? YF is a consultancy. We took a while to come around to saying that. But yeah, we're a consultancy built to help high growth FMCG brands, particularly in food and drink, as I said, help them scale successfully and sustainably, really. And we work with brands from zero pre-revenue, get them through their first 100K all the way through to national listings, international expansion and major investment rounds.

2:30So I guess what makes us different is our positioning. So I think we sit in a really unique spot in the market. You know, we're trusted by retailers. So we've had an official kind of innovation partnership with Waitrose. We're plugged into investors and we work across hundreds of founder led brands every year. and that gives us a really great kind of 360 view of what it really takes to grow in this industry. So we do that through a number of different service areas, kind of four key areas. So supply chain and product, which is my world as director of supply chain services. So we build and run supply chains for different brands end to end, manage them on behalf of brands.

3:12So we become an extension of a brand's team, whether that's setting up manufacturing, managing stock and logistics or just troubleshooting crisis points and we do a lot of that and we'll probably get on to a fair bit of that but then we've also got our commercial team so helping brands win retail listings building really solid customer plans and fixing and growing key accounts we have a recruitment team so because of the insight that we've got we're able to support brands hiring across all different functions we've got kind of 50 60 000 candidates in our network and therefore we're able to bring the best people to the brands and bring the best brands to those candidates and that's a really fantastic position that we find ourselves in and then we do a bit of training and kind of capability work as well we've launched something called our starter program which is a brilliant program for brand new brands helping them get to their first 10k a month in sales where we provide them with consultancy support network tools and templates basically everything they need to to get them through that first hurdle which is often the the most challenging bit and um yeah but a lot of success in that over the last few months we've got about 20 brands signed up on that program at the moment and it's kind of a fairly exclusive invitation only program but um our plan is to to grow that so always looking for new exciting brands that want to come and join that journey of the early times i heard of yf was

4:29Phil Peters:actually before joining pact uh right before i actually went on to a category management course it was really well run course like really knowledgeable came away like oh I've learned so much about just how much data and insight there is out there and obviously there's loads of different courses and things you guys run but from a operations and logistics side that leads nicely on to OpsFest that you did for the first time last year and I had the pleasure of being involved so how did that come about and what was it about OpsFest you were like yeah I want to make this happen so as you know OpsFest is the I think it's the world's greatest operations event for challenger brand fmcg professionals possibly the only one but definitely the best one do you know what i could speak for hours on this and i and i often do i guess it's the kind of at least from what we know in the uk anyway it's it's kind of the first and probably only event that's dedicated to to ops and supply chain people particularly in challenger brand space but not really aware of much outside of that anyway and yeah i think it did come from quite a quite a personal place so um you know i spend so much time talking to founders and leaders um across the business but also in operations and solving problems and kind of again and again i see these events that are really focused on founders you know bread and jam for example uh really founder focused and you know trade shows that we've all been to whether that's lunch or whether that's ife or anything like that kind of you know it's usually a sales and sales and marketing people that you'll find they're much more kind of commercial all the shiny stuff all the kind of bright t-shirts and giving away samples and all those things and you know no one was really creating space for the people that were holding all of it together you know the operations role for an event like that is you know make sure we've got enough stock turning up to the back door of the excel on a on a sunday night but then the ops guys are sat in the office basically making sure that happens and don't really have an opportunity to get out and and to be honest for a lot of operations people that that suits us just fine you know it's not it's not our happy place necessarily um a big trade show and talking to people all day and you know i can own that um but i guess for me one of the big things that's missing is that opportunity for ops people to to network to get together to share some of the challenges that they're facing and basically i i kind of wish that i had something like that earlier in my career an opportunity to meet with those right people and share some of those challenges so so i just thought fine let's let's do it let's build it like my my you know my super strength i guess is is making shit happen and making you know solving problems and if i've identified this problem you know the great thing about where i work at yf is is just having that autonomy to go out and do things and um you know for us we we launched it we had about six weeks basically to bring it all together last year and um you know we had around 100 operators from challenger brands come together for a whole day of just really honest conversations um shared mistakes and really practical advice and i think for me it was like yeah it was basically everything i'd hoped for from from that first event we hosted at candy kittens at their what was their new office last year and um you know really welcomed in by by ed and jamie the founders there um but yeah just so many people crammed into a really small space in their office basically and um bursting at the seams and and you know just really a bit of an mvp really just proved that it was something that that could work and and there was demand for and and this year we're just we're just going bigger basically and um just the feedback we received from it you know people telling us that they felt really seen and really celebrated in their roles you know ed from candy kittens opened the event with a session around how you know vital operations has been in building a business like candy kittens and i think founders really they do get it they do recognize how important it is but that doesn't always they don't always share that um and for me that was you know the opportunity to celebrate people in ops and supply chain was was really important so yeah i guess in in summary it's kind of part therapy part knowledge share part big group hug for everybody that's involved in this process and all the people that are solving the problems that nobody else sees we all know that brand is important right but what if i told you it can impact growth and customer acquisition costs by up to 50%.

8:39Phil Peters:Against Ordinary are a brand agency who help founders, marketing departments, scaling teams ensure their brand is the most powerful tool for growth. From brand strategy, tone of voice, and visual identity, to helping you get retail ready with ongoing brand growth attainers. They really are the full circle agency for growing your brand. B and the team are absolutely fantastic. Just imagine what they could do for your brand. So what are you waiting for? See how they can be your grand growth partners at againstordinary.com. no it was brilliant um i mean i was kind of a an add-on still working in sales but actually at the time doing a lot of ops for for marjorie and everything that was around that right in the lead up to christmas so i was like yeah i feel a lot of these pressure points and pinpoints but now in pact i i know we wouldn't be where we are without linus who's in our operations team i'm pretty sure he's coming to this year's ops fest which is bigger and better so it's very exciting but it is so integral and even through the podcast you actually recommended will from tribe and Sophie from Spoon they were great to have on and kind of hear their experiences so I think it's such a vital thing and it's kind of similar to what I'm trying to do with the other founders is just shine a light on people from all aspects of the journey it doesn't just need to be sales and marketing it's not the founder it's like everyone along that supply chain and that journey they deserve to be heard and because they play such a vital role and I think ops as you said you don't have sales without ops you don't have marketing without ops like it's it's just the backbone of business and one thing i will say is the event was probably one of the best goodie bags of free stuff that i've ever had because obviously everyone got the product there that wasn't an issue so for those who do work in ops and hearing this for the first time go oh i'd love to come are there still tickets available like what what's the date like what's the plan for this year's yeah so um after the success of last year we we were like we can't can't really do this as candy kittens again we need some a bigger so uh this year the event's going to be held at soho theater um which is um it's a bigger venue it enables us to have around 200 people in the room which is a step up from the kind of 80 to 100 we had last year um working towards wembley stadium um probably in five six years time but yeah there are i guess there are places left so we've done it slightly differently this year you know it's going to be bigger it's going to be better the key for us is getting the right people in the room so it's not a kind of free-for-all on on tickets it's not a event that we're limiting to say yf community people which is something that we we kind of did a little bit of last year we're really curating it to make sure that we've got brilliant people from brands not just in food and drink but across fmcg brilliant people from um retailers as well and there's gonna be a fair few of them in the room some of the right suppliers as well um because they need to be involved in the conversation so there will be places left we are if you want to register your interest go to opsbest.co.uk and fill in the very brief form there you know we are being picky about who's in the room but for good reason we need the right the right people and the right voices so this isn't an event for every founder or for sales people this is very much for for operations professionals if you're a head of ops and ops director great if you're are starting out on your journey as a supply chain exec or ops exec like there probably is space for for you as well we want we want to bring the right mix together and hopefully make the same magic happen um as happened last year now i'd love to dig into where your passion for operations has come from so you've got quite an interesting career i mean just in turns from from anywhere and everywhere so if you can give us a quick rundown um because your university degree wasn't anything to do with operations but um yeah i'd love to learn your journey and kind of what's brought you to where you are today yeah i mean this is where it starts feeling a bit like an interview isn't it but um i um and i miss interviews actually i i i used to love going to them um but but yeah i i where did my passion for ops come from it's hard to say but maybe we'll figure it out as we as we talk through it but um so i started i guess my career if you like started out um prior to prior to uni actually i i spent a few months working on the pwc gap year scheme which was immense i i remember in sixth form i went to a university open day and there was someone from pwc there talking about the the program they had and you know we were i was always going to take a gap year before uni and was always planning to go and you know work probably work in a supermarket to be honest and then use whatever money i could save to travel and then i heard someone at pwc saying you get to work with all these big companies and you get a laptop and you get an amex card and all this other fun stuff and my my eyes lit up and i was lucky enough to get invited onto the program and it was it was brilliant you know I was 17 18 wandering around London working for massive financial institutions and um somehow being able to actually do real kind of graduate work um and it was brilliant um and I guess what it taught me was a lot of discipline a lot of structure a lot of how to how to work with complex information um and then I was invited back each year of uni to do a month or two of kind of paid work which was brilliant as a poor student kind of need need access to that so I could make some money and go on holiday and do all those fun things um and then was was kind of lucky enough to get offered a job at the end of that um to go back as a as an auditor to PwC and I think that's when I knew that well eventually I knew that audit was not the right path for me um as you say I studied philosophy and politics at uni um I say studied I I have a degree in philosophy and politics I didn't do a huge amount of studying and there's a whole nother debate about kind of how vital having a uni degree is for for this world in particular but I suppose it did teach me quite a lot but certainly I knew that I didn't want to be an accountant that much was for sure and um I have a lot of respect for all my friends in in accounting but it's not it's not me and it doesn't work for me so I had to turn down that job at a time when the markets were all over the place.

14:34I graduated the kind of June before Lehman Brothers happened in 2008. And it became fairly apparent that having a job was better than not having a job at that time. But I knew I didn't want to be an accountant. I actually thought it was much more risky to continue trying to be one. And thankfully, around that time, PwC had just restarted their consulting grad scheme. They'd had to get rid of it early in the noughties when all the Enron stuff happened and they kind of carved out their consulting practice to another business. And they'd launched this consulting grad scheme and it sounded brilliant.

15:06It was like eight, two years, you do eight different competency areas, a bit of finance, a bit of tech, a bit of deals, a bit of operations. And for me on that program, all my kind of peers were really keen on the finance side. Everyone seemed to want to be in finance and capital markets and things like that. And I just, I hated it. I didn't understand it. I couldn't touch it. It didn't make sense. Whereas operations was far more interesting to me because it was a lot more tangible. I got to work on brands like Costa Coffee. I was part of the team that helped integrate Costa Coffee with Coffee Nation when they bought those vending machines.

15:41If you remember, I remember walking into various supermarkets and seeing the Costa Express machines when they went live and feeling that I'd had a real part of that. And I was doing real work and making suggestions that got taken on board. And that was really important. And I think for me, like I'd always been someone that was really pragmatic. I was always a doer. I was always someone that was able to make stuff happen. And gradually it felt like operations was the easiest way to do that. So did that at PwC, worked for some great clients, worked in some great people. Left there, joined a really small consultancy because I thought that going smaller was what I wanted to do.

16:12And then very quickly realized that wasn't for me. Went to one of the only companies bigger than PwC, which was Tesco. And that's where the kind of retail connection really came into play for me. So again, an amazing, amazing education in kind of scale and systems, you know, 300 ,000 plus employees in the UK, which is mega. But because I was part of Tesco.com, it felt like a bit of a startup scale up environment within that much bigger business. So got to do some really cool stuff, got to work on the UK business, but also on the wider European, kind of Central European and Asian business. spent a lot of time living out of hotels in Hungary and Poland and Czech Republic and not particularly glamorous places because you know it's it's where do you have Tesco stores you know in the middle of industrial estates all over the the country again great learning opportunity kind of you know playing in that place where operational detail meets kind of customer expectation and and how to get that right and you know for me one of the the big areas I was responsible for was what we called perfect perfect order and which is is the delivery made on time is it is quality and freshness right is the driver helpful is availability on on on point and loads of really transferable stuff to everything i've i've gone on to do like basically how you know are you delivering the best possible order that keeps customers happy which is the essence of what we do in in ops so um what what was your role at tesco sorry um so i was a an operations what do they call it operations development manager so i looked after um the kind of i was brought in initially to look after the operating model part of what was due to be the biggest fulfillment center biggest dot-com fulfillment center in the country at the time ocado had a fulfillment center that was doing i think 180 000 orders a week um and obviously tesco being tesco it was like we want to go bigger than ocado um we're going to do 220 000 orders a week and when you scale that up it gets you to a billion a year um coincidentally and then i joined and then about two days later uh all the stuff came out about um the 250 million missing from tesco's account this was 2014 that's why i joined the night that my first day was the day the morning after day phil clark's leaving do and it was all it was all very controversial i got offered a very good redundancy package about six weeks into joining but i felt like i wanted to be part of what was coming next so instead of building this big fulfillment center it was like how can we get more with with what we currently have how can we take a fulfillment center that's doing 8 000 orders a week at the moment and turn it into one doing 24 loads of work around capacity and fulfillment and and automation and again all those kind of fun things if you think about ai now and how that's trying to solve various problems um you know we were trying to do elements of that 10 years ago when it when it wasn't kind of well known when it wasn't sexy we were looking at ways to you know automate the picking process in in fulfillment centers one of the i joked about it with a former colleague at the weekend actually because we we got a tesco order and um all the frozen stuff was completely melted you've probably been in this position um when you've been trying things that that you know um competitors to pact or or anything like that like you know tesco drivers think it's acceptable to hand you a basically a bag of melted ice cream and and they've not solved that problem I was looking at that as a solution 10 years ago how can we do that differently how can we deliver you know in a temperature controlled tray rather than a temperature controlled van that clearly can't can't operate properly during the the warm weather but it's still something that they've not fixed 10 years later and yeah we gave them the solution we broke lots of things at the time we showed them what was working what wasn't working but anyway I had an amazing time at Tesco I probably could have stayed there for years I could have been a lifer so many you get so many lifers at Tesco but um one day I got in touch with a friend of mine who'd just raised a load of money through his startup on crowdcube and i think i think it i think the conversation went along the lines of uh you know one day when you've when you've raised even more money then give me a call and i'll come and run your ops for you and his message back was why don't you come and do it today and we met for a coffee and the rest is is kind of history there so i um i left tesco it was a few months before my 30th birthday i just thought if not now when you know i don't think i'm ever going to have an opportunity to do something as crazy as this and leave the structure and the comfort of a company like Tesco for the wild west of the startup environment.

20:34And, you know, we've all worked in lots of startups, we've had the privilege of working in and with a load of different startups. But yeah, Zing Zing was wild, we wanted to be the Domino's pizza of Chinese food delivery. Josh had sold a business doing similar kind of a sold a business called Eat Student to just eat. You know, he knew that there was this massive opportunity in Chinese food to do something similar but the problem we came up against there I mean there were loads of problems and again we could do a whole podcast on it but you know we were trying to grow that business at the same time as Deliveroo was trying to grow its business and obviously as much as we were growing Deliveroo were growing more and more and more and you know it wasn't I'm going to order a Domino's anymore it was I'm going to order a Deliveroo and therefore we ended up in a position where we were having to pay a load of commission to Deliveroo before we'd even got started and um we pivoted a lot um the final straw for that business in uh in 2020 when the pandemic hit um you'll remember that they kind of started out calling it the china virus um and people ordering chinese food at the time like people were scared of it and we went through a really tricky period at the start of the pandemic um actually just left the business to to run ketopia at the time the sales just fell thankfully they sped up again after people realized that that was was crazy but yeah i mean food tech and hospitality and delivery and all of those things which you know i had the privilege of working in for kind of seven eight years was it was just wild you know everything that could go wrong did go wrong during that period and i went from zing zing to ketope ketope was a kind of a dubai based business food delivery kind of ghost kitchens a unicorn by the time i left they were doing about one they're worth about one and a half billion dollars but yeah everything that could go wrong did go wrong and in operations that eventually takes its toll we had brexit we had the pandemic we had the cost of living crisis even russia ukraine i'd by that point i'd moved into into pizza where you know it was pretty much the only cuisine type that i was that i'd kind of vowed to go back into because you know there's no trends in pizza pizza is always popular um and then russia ukraine hit and the price of wheat suddenly rose massively and even that hit you know brexit meant we couldn't employ chefs nobody really wanted to learn how to be a pizza chef and yeah ultimately like fast forward to kind of 2022 i just woke up one day and was like i i can't do this anymore looking back now i i you know i can i can say i was burnt out i was definitely going through some some really tough mental health challenges at the time it was it was really difficult and um you know i've i've i've i've talked to my therapist a lot about a lot of it i you know i'm very open to to sharing that with people it's a really really hard environment to be working in um and i still have obviously a lot of friends a lot of former colleagues that are still slogging out in in hospitality but um it's a really really tough place to be and look fmcg has its challenges but um they are different challenges and um you know you're not kind of waking up every day um kind of fighting fires in in quite the same way i don't think um maybe that's unfair maybe some people will disagree but yeah kind of that that kind of autumn of 2022 um I just realized I was I was finished and needed to to get out of that that world and that's where kind of I picked up the phone to Thea who I'd spoken to a little bit before and thankfully there was an opportunity it was kind of one of those rare moments where the the right opportunity shows up at the right time you know I'd I'd sort of learned about what works and what doesn't work in in startups um I was kind of craving something that combined pace and purpose and and the right people to work with and yeah met Thea went for a coffee within about 10 minutes I think we both realized that it was a good fit no fluff just like here's the problem we need someone like you to fix it are you in um I said yes and the rest is history

24:22Phil Peters:no that's that's fascinating thank you so much for sharing I think there's there's so much within that like you said like the the grad scheme and everything with PwC there must have been a lot of kind of skills and learnings and things you took from that that you then advanced on with Tesco say and then going from there into more consultant and then hospitality there's so much like within all of that like do you think there's any like core things that you learn at any stages of those kind of early career bits that you still to this day you're like the way of doing this is something that i always try to continue doing like i'd love to learn some of those lessons because i've never worked for a major company like a pwc or even the tesco so it's always been a bit scrappy challenger for me and i know from speaking to nearly 50 people now on the podcast the people who've done these grad schemes and they've worked in these blue chip companies the structure the the lessons the teaching the progression there's so much within that that just seems to set people up for amazing careers so i'd love to know if you've got any kind of key highlights or things that you could share yeah listen i i definitely agree with that about structure um and process but i um i guess I guess those things are really important but you can have the best systems in the world but if your team isn't aligned with that if you haven't got the right support if you haven't got the right people then none of that matters really you know relationships for me are are key to to all of this and that's probably the thing I learned earliest in my career I mean I I remember like I remember and I've shared this with so many of my team in in the last two or three years but like I remember basically cruising through pwc and like essentially being able to connect with people through being a nice person and and kind of charming people as much as as much as kind of doing a decent job but i remember just working with a couple of people on a particular client where where that kind of charm didn't work they just they just weren't having it they were kind of there were these kind of senior manager types and at pwc it was like it was quite easy to rise through kind of associate to I can't even remember what the levels were called but you'd get to like manager senior manager and then for most people breaking that ceiling of senior manager was really difficult and you just got a lot of these like these these people who just didn't care about didn't really care about people I think that was that that was the thing for me so like you couldn't you couldn't warm them up like and basically I learned like the only way to deal with these people is to just deliver really great quality work that's all they want they all they want they want to look good in order for them to look good i need to deliver them the work that they need to do that they're going to be here till nine ten o 'clock at night because that's that's who they are and how they want to work and essentially that taught me just about how you need to flex your working style and your personality and your character like you need to be agile you need to be flexible in order to you know in order to get the best out of anybody um and we see that a lot you know at YF with different clients we work with you know for every nine clients who are who respond in that that really positive way to you know to us forming that nice relationship with them like there's always somebody that wants things a bit different and that isn't really interested in the kind of small talk and the the informal bit that I think is really important to most people they just care about delivery they just want the job done and you know that ability to be agile is something that I've communicated to the team so I think that's that's a really big thing the other thing the other thing that I learned at Tesco and to this day even half an hour ago I was talking to someone in my team about is is about breaking things and the importance of breaking things when testing I talked about the um the project around kind of frozen frozen delivery at Tesco and I remember like my job at the time was to demonstrate that this frozen tray basically we could use it to keep product in for for a day or two days without it melting so i'd go away and i'd buy the temperature probes i'd put them in i'd go to the distribution center i'd load it up with the frozen foods i'd fill it i'd leave it in the in the right place i'd possibly get it delivered to my flat um and i remember i i received it and i opened it up and the temperature logs the food everything was in perfect condition and i like very proudly went to see my manager and told him what a successful trial I'd arranged.

28:29And he basically took my head off and was like, there's nothing successful about this. Like what you've shown is that you need to break it basically. Like what he wanted to see was a tray of moldy defrosted food. Because at that point you could say, okay, I can't do two days so I can work backwards from there. All I'd done was show that you could do it in one day, but I had no idea whether it could withstand two days or three days or four days. And that approach now I apply to everything. We're working on a really interesting project here at the moment. working on a particular bit of product development for a major retailer and again in order to get that right I'm being you know there was one point where I was being sent some pictures from one of my team of you know this is the product it looks great doesn't it this has got you know this amount of grams of a particular ingredient or that or the other and it looks great doesn't it and I said to them like it does look great but I want to know you know I want to see one that doesn't look great so we can build up from there.

29:24Otherwise, we're giving away margin, we're leaving stuff on the table. So that's a really big one for me, like just break things and get excited about breaking things. It's not a failure. It's actually the first kind of step to success. And I think more generally, and probably the biggest lesson I've learned from everything I've done ever is the importance of cash. Like moving away from kind of pure operations, cash is king, as everybody says, but like working with a lot of more old school operators during my time at Zing Zing specifically but even now working with all the founders we have like you know the biggest mistake I think we ever made at Zing Zing was not bringing in a finance person once we've raised a load of money like not looking after the pennies it is so fundamental to the brands that we work with that you speak to every day like for startups you know great brands die all the time because they don't track their finances properly and that is a real problem um and i think just being able to track cash being able to look after it you know there are brilliant people out there that can do that there are some exceptional founders that are really good at it but then there are lots of other founders who just they you know they want to spend money on all the fun stuff they're not looking after those pennies and and you know that is so vital and again the best brand the best founders that i work with are the ones that are that are paying attention to that that are really taking every penny into account are tracking everything properly and you know they're the ones that will have the best chance of successfully scaling their businesses yeah

30:53Phil Peters:no that's so important i think especially after a big raise within a brand like first thing you know you go is oh i've got this pot of money what can we spend on and you're like oh should we do out of home should we do new products we get a big team like what do we need to do without that forethought tactical thinking it's like well actually you could spend through that money way too quickly and not actually achieve anything and i think that's one thing that i love with the team are packed like if we get a new opportunity it's like we've got this customer asking could we do a white label thing rather than just kind of going yes let's do it it's like okay let's cost it out actually what's it going to cost us like do we have the cash do we need to do this do we do that like it's this whole kind of formula and things everything going together to then go is it viable yes or no like before you even kind of go okay let's explore it it's like let's just actually model it let's cost it out because without doing that as you said you're kind of flying blind and it's it could cause a lot of problems so i'd love to know now around the the yf team like how big is the team now what's the kind of format do you guys have an office if you can share anything around the team and what's what's the dynamic like it's it's great i mean i think we're in a stronger position than we've been in in the time i've been there um i think the it's just a brilliant business to work for it's kind of fast-paced it's collaborative it's also really human which for a consultancy is is quite rare i think um we've actually just got back from our kind of annual off site last week where you know we had a chance to kind of be together zoom out a little bit we went go-karting we went swimming we went had a couple of nice meals together like just just really yeah just really human and full of connections there which is great um really high trust really low ego people are here because they they care we've got a really powerful mission as a business yes you know we're still a business we're still a profit making business but we we we do deeply care about what we're doing and the opportunity to work with founders and you know for those founders their business you know their life depends on on what they're doing you know it's so precious to them and you know it's so privileged for us to be able to play a small part in that and therefore it's it's vital that anyone that joins our team cares about the work about the clients about each other so we've got kind of 15 to 20 of us at the moment lots of other people that we work with within our network as well we have a fairly hybrid I think you call it working environment so Monday, Tuesday, Thursday are generally office days for us although you know within ops we can be a bit all over the place a lot of the time and then kind of Wednesdays we try and keep as no meeting days and use it as an opportunity to get a bit stuck into those kind of deeper projects that everyone needs to do from time to time and then Fridays again from home but trying to wrap up the week and kind of bit of admin day for most people but yeah we have we have we have a lot of fun we use the time in the office to be really collaborative like again don't see the point of coming into the office just to sit on zoom calls all day so yeah we try to do as much as we can in those days you know use them for for having fun as well um and kind of what's the point again what's the point of being together if you're not really together and yeah what do i like about it i mean i love the autonomy that i get like i came in i came into if because i did want a bit more of a a bit more structure um you know i'd gone from kind of leading businesses and kind of as the MD of a number of different restaurant and hospitality businesses to coming into a particular smaller role, kind of running a business unit here.

34:13And at the time, that's absolutely what I wanted. But over the kind of two or three years, I've got much more involved in the wider business. I've got the space to be a lot more entrepreneurial, things like Opsfest, for example, you know, Thea, I'm not sure it was her number one priority. And I'm not sure it was necessarily something she thought was going to be a big success, but she, you know, she gave me the rope to go and try and do it. And, you know, it was brilliant and we're doing it again. But, you know, I get to build, you know, I've got to build a team. I've taken the team from kind of four of us to nine, ten of us now in supply chain services, you know, and have got real backing from the business to do that.

34:54So the culture is great. I think we're in a much better place to where we were. People are sticking around for a decent amount of time. Two of my colleagues have just got back from their kind of month off sabbatical that they get after five years. And there's a few more of us that are due that in the, well, we'll be due that in a couple of years. Hopefully we'll stick around and take advantage of that. But it's just great. Like, you know, we really genuinely feel like we're shaping the future of the industry. And we get to work with brilliant founders, brilliant brands, brilliant retailers, brilliant investors in order to do that.

35:24So, yeah, I mean, a big thumbs up. And there are challenges, of course, but overall, I think it's a great place to be. And we're hiring if anyone's interested. Very happy to hear from anybody that's interested in joining our business and helping to bring more of that energy and more of that great culture to the YF. I was going to say YF family. I hate that term. So I say YF family. But, yeah, anyone that's kind of got that passion and shares the mission that we're going after that wants to come and join a brilliant team. Absolutely be in touch.

35:58Phil Peters:That's great. I think it's a very multifaceted business, like packed to working with YF, with the brand's new side for Waitrose. So again, it's all, you kind of see how that works. It's nice to kind of see how behind the scenes works a little bit. And as you said, like the operations side, I know one of my friends has got a brand who just said he's going to work with you guys or he has just started working with you to help with his operations side. So for any brands kind of listening, going like oh i really need support with ops like how how does it work and what's the kind of setup in terms of say i had a food brand of some sort go back to mitch's kitchen days if i had mitch's kitchen go i need help with this operationally like what's your kind of process just kind of like top line like we don't need to get into the nitty-gritty but just kind of like a here's the support that's on offer and how we would help be your operations yeah i mean it depends i think what's um what people don't often understand and what we need to be better at communicating is you know we say why f's a consultancy and consultancy to a lot of people sounds a bit like you know we tell you what to do or we advise you as opposed to we actually do stuff for you um and i think within our our supply chain services team we are we are a group of doers as well as advisors so um for some brands we will become their operations team so we're an extension of their team we'll pick up the phone you know if it's we're working for pact we'll pick up the phone and it will be phil calling from pact calling your one of your suppliers or one of your customers to sort out a delivery issue for example um source as an outsource function sometimes we work alongside an ops manager for a bigger business but typically we work in as an alternative to an ops team so uh or an ops professional so rather than having a you know a graduate ops exec essentially running your logistics and dealing with all your suppliers you you get the benefit of working with with our team so you know what does that give you it gives you kind of a bit more comfort a bit more experience a bit more expertise.

37:47It means that if someone leaves the business, you're not struggling because you've got cover for holidays. You've got cover for that exit. You've got cover for somebody just deciding that they, I don't know, getting sick, whatever it is. So yeah, we do the kind of end-to-end supply chain piece, which is great. So we'll run order to cash for you. We'll process orders. We'll invoice orders. We'll make sure that they're being delivered properly um we'll do your your demand planning which is obviously really important we'll check in your stock and inventory we'll we'll liaise with all your all your suppliers as i said i mean basically whatever whatever needs to happen in an ops role and again one of the challenges for early stage founders is ops is can often be a you know you only need a few hours a day but ops can't really be a part-time role you can't really have someone on a day and a thursday to do operations because stuff happens all the time.

38:40So I guess with us, it's always on service, which is really helpful. And we just take the headache away from founders, really. And it's not for everyone. It's not, you know, some people prioritize it from day one. Other people, you know, once things get too much for them as a founder, they just need some more headspace. They come to us. Often it coincides with a retail launch. So just taking on a new client who's launching into Tesco in October, they've come to us and they've said, right, we're not ready for this. we need to spend the next three or four months working with you to get us ready for the retailer and then we want you to run ops for us once we're in there.

39:13So that's the kind of engagement we tend to do. But it's not all outsourced supply chain. We do ramp up where we just help brands get ready for the next phase of whatever their life looks like. We do manufacturing searches if you need a factory, if you need a warehouse. We'll help you implement a stock on an inventory system if that's what you need. Pretty much anything operational that you need, we've seen it we've done it we can help with it um and if we can't then we know the right people that can so you know no day is is the same in operations i'm i'm privileged that i'm at a kind of stage in my career where i get to do the more fun kind of advisory chunky stuff and and a lot of the therapy that is required with founders and ops people but we've just got brilliant team of people that have worked across every different category that have worked across every different channel that worked across every different temperature range like we've just seen it and done it and and i suppose that's the experience that that brands are paying for when they when they come to us but um yeah we we just love working with innovative exciting brands thankfully we we can pick and choose a little bit who we work with and um we we just love working with these brands that want to make a big impact and want to move quickly that's brilliant i'm sure there'll be a

40:23Phil Peters:few people wanting to get in touch so uh for anyone that's been listening and guys oh that sounds like exactly what i need like what's the best avenue to get hold of you or find out more information in yeah and look i'd say you know one of the great things about yf as well is that because we have you know because we have our sales team because we have our recruitment team like we are the way i put it is that we are kind of solutions agnostic so this isn't a kind of a hard sell for me to say come and come and join us for outsource supply chain like what we tend to do is is talk to people and figure out what the right solution is for them as a brand you know some people join us as a community member right at the start or join the starter program the hope is that we give them the right advice we have that level of integrity so that as they grow as a business at some point they want to come and work with YF in in some capacity across some different service areas so if supply chain isn't right then it might be that recruitment is or it might be they just need a little bit of advice and that's that's one of the great things about the business but um to contact me either through the YF website or um or my email which is quite easy to work out from our kind of emails.

41:25Frutcher, phil.peters at we are what I have.com or LinkedIn as well. You know, we all try our best on LinkedIn. I know it's, there aren't that many Opsie influencer types on LinkedIn. I think we're all too busy, you know, doing our work rather than talking about our work. Yeah, LinkedIn's a great place to meet people. It's a great way to build relationships. So yeah, very happy for anyone to reach out on there to talk about Ops, supply chain, challenger brands or anything really. And yeah, I think you're you're you're right like I want people to get in touch um if you want to work with us great but also if you just want to meet and have a coffee and and chat about the challenges and things that are on your mind I'm I'm always happy to do that as well you know I think you know everyone just needs that little bit of incentive to to to keep going and you know I love talking to people particularly people that are at the much more kind of junior stage of their career actually actually I like both like the people that are really just starting out like it's great to to have that chat and to be able to tell them that you know things get easier and you know it's not always firefighting but then kind of when you sit down with your kind of peers at the kind of director level you can be a bit more honest about the fact that uh you know yeah things are not always easy we've had a we've had a roller coaster of a few years of supply chain i i i think we've lent on that whole idea of you know the pandemic and and the credit crunch and everything else being across the living crisis sorry being making it harder for for supply chain or not but the reality is it's never going to be smooth it's never going to be plain sailing so all you can do really is invest in good people good processes good systems do your best but i think if you do all of those things and you've got a great chance of success you need to find the people that like

43:02Phil Peters:putting out fires because there's going to be a lot along the way final question uh this is the music one uh so what is your song of choice that represents your working career i mean there are a lot of things sprung to mind um I think I think when you're in operations and supply chain I think if you are not sitting at your desk listening to a founder crying down the phone or a warehouse telling you that you've got no stock on hand and you're not kind of humming along to under pressure by Queen and David Bowie then you're not doing your job properly so I would say that that is the song that represents my certainly my experience in this world but yeah I mean under pressure we are under pressure a lot like I've always I've always claimed that I'm not somebody that gets stressed easily and I think that probably is one of the reasons why I get on so well with founders because I can be a bit of a ying to their stressful yang but yeah we definitely still feel the pressure you know when we take on a brand we are really invested and we we care so much that um we feel it we feel we feel everything with them so yes that's my song of choice i do i mean i love it as a song i'm a huge bowie and queen fan but yeah that's the one that very clearly sprung to mind yeah no very fitting love it um and what a song so thank you so much um there's so much more i would have loved to get into detail with you but i know timing wise uh we're out of time so thank you so much for coming on and for sharing so openly with everyone no problem absolute pleasure and see you and hopefully everyone that's watching this that wants to be there at OpsFest in October.

44:38Brilliant.

44:39Phil Peters:And for everyone listening, thank you so much. We will see you on the next episode. Goodbye. Goodbye.