Start-Ups, Pivots and Pop-Ups

How to Succeed by Creating Your Own Business

Richard Hall, Rachel Bell

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780749497460
• eBook ISBN: 9780749497453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

FINALIST: Business Book Awards 2020 - Start-Up Inspiration Category

Start-Ups, Pivots and Pop-Ups is a must read for anyone with a business idea and the desire to be successful. It gives the reader the skills and knowledge to survive in today's innovation and entrepreneurial-focused world. This book is about starting a business. It's about putting your toe in the entrepreneurial water - perhaps through doing a short term business gig or a pop-up business - and then seeing what happens. It shows you how to listen to the customer and work out why failures may happen, and when they do, you'll learn how to deal with them and create a new business that is robust and ready to grow.

Start-Ups, Pivots and Pop-Ups shows you the best ways of starting, testing and growing a business. It shares the stories, experience and insights of those who've done it, and explains how to innovate, trial, refine and succeed. Even if your business idea struggles, you'll find out how to learn so much that you'll pivot your business, try again and then win big time. You'll learn from a range of organizations including Blue Cow Vodka, Sandows Cold Filtered Coffee, Monty's Bakehouse and Lagom Kitchenware.

CHAPTER ONE

The ups and downs of starting a new business

A story about a successful start-up

Much of this book uses real-life examples of start-ups, starting, faltering, pivoting and, more often than not, succeeding. Here’s the first story that contains everything. A long apprenticeship, a pivot, a jump into the void with a ‘pop-up’, success followed by a Black Swan1 of a company destroyer, followed by an example of ingenuity, a start-up and then a long journey to solid success.

Monty’s Bakehouse

Monty’s Bakehouse creates and provides premium snacks and food for the travel industry, primarily airline companies. The business started in 2003 and is based in West Sussex. The story starts a lot earlier.

Dad shows the way

Matt Crane, the founder, talks fondly of his Dad who dabbled in business, invented stuff and had a journey of rags to riches to rags. Matt describes home being, one moment a mansion and then a cottage. It was, he said, great fun. Matt like so many successes in life did not shine at school where his talent wasn’t spotted. The literal translation of the word ‘educate’ is to draw out. Two Es at A level showed no sign of drawing much out, yet he ‘scraped’ into university where he embraced the freedom in contrast to school and educated himself, joyfully getting a good 2.1 in Biology and Biochemistry.

He also showed early signs of entrepreneurial flair when he picked up some rusting tandem bikes from a scrap dealer for a song, refurbished them and fixed aluminium panels on them on which he painted the coat of arms of leading Cambridge University colleges. These customized bikes produced £800, a massive return on investment. His Dad approved of activities like this but gave him great advice:

Don’t do it my way – go and get jobs where you learn a lot and where you make your mistakes at someone else’s expense.

Getting grounded before taking off

Matt spent 16 years learning some important stuff: three years in graphic design (all his structural and graphic design work is done in-house at Monty’s Bakehouse); four years in sales promotion and marketing communication at Triangle; six years working as Stores Format Director at Safeway Supermarkets working on assignment from McKinsey; and three years as Marketing Director at TXU Europe – the Texas Energy Company.

Quite simply he had taken his father’s advice. He was learning to design, innovate and to market. He was equipped and ready to swim with the sharks in a start-up. He considered the opportunities in the snacks and juices markets, researching both. He started to work seriously on these two, inspired and being kept going by people around him who constantly told him he was uniquely driven.

‘It all happened by accident’

That’s what Matt said, but it’s more interesting than mere happenstance. He loved rugby and he also loved sausage rolls and the whole idea of grab-and-go food. So, on the basis of 2+2=4, he set up a pop-up stall at Twickenham Stadium selling his own recipes of sausage rolls during the internationals. It went so well he eventually had six kiosks. Pop-up had become popping-up-all-over. ‘Did it make money?’ we asked. He laughed dryly, ‘Nope. Great customer flow, great cash flow, high costs and measly margin’. Then things got worse. Legislation was introduced in the early 2000s for hygiene reasons that prevented the same person selling unwrapped food and taking the money for it. So, there’d be no more Twickenham sausage rolls unless he doubled his staff. But what happened (not really by accident) was Matt worked on researching how to find a solution to this ‘challenge’. He discovered a newish, polyethylene material in which you could wrap snacks and cook them at temperatures up to 200 degrees Celsius. Problem solved. No hands touching the food.

Back to Twickenham in 2002 where Matt was giving a great show of producing delicious hot hygienic snacks, providing high class customer service but hardly making enough money to make it worthwhile. One day, in a lull in activity, Matt noticed a man staring at what he was doing. He walked across and asked Matt a few searching questions about the business and the packaging. Then he walked away and shook his head a few times like someone having an ‘aha!’ moment, before coming back and handing Matt his card. It said, ‘Inflight Director Air Canada’. He asked Matt to call him when he had a moment.

How much?!

So, a few days later, Matt called. He was asked to come into an office near Heathrow and talk about his business to a few people. Matt had learnt a lot about pitching at the marketing company he’d worked for, so he prepared properly although he was still pretty uncertain what this was about. Those few people turned out to be a roomful of executives. Matt says that even he was impressed by his performance that day. He described how everyone seemed fascinated by the quality of the snacks and the polyethylene wrapping that seemed to solve the tricky problem of serving hot snacks at 35,000 feet, quickly and cleanly.

A few days later he got a call. After the niceties he was told Air Canada would like to place an order. He stopped breathing and heard a croaking voice (his own) ask how much for. At the other end of the line a calm voice said Air Canada would like to place an order for 13 pallets to be delivered fortnightly for the first 12 months.

That was a mountain of snacks, an edible Everest. And he hadn’t got the gear in place to climb a hill yet, let alone a mountain.

We have lift off…

He and his wife sat down and worked out how much money they could raise quickly by remortgaging their house, delving into Matt’s pension pot and borrowing from family and friends. He then worked out the logistics of production, packaging, delivery, of creating a new firm to manage this huge piece of business. He didn’t sleep much for a few days. He and his wife constantly looked at each other in a mixture of terror and delight. This was it: the opportunity to have a real business created with a real, substantial flow of regular income from a blue chip client.

Like all well-trained business people, Matt could create great plans. He said that whilst you knew it wouldn’t turn out quite the way you planned, at least you knew where the stress points were, what was missing and how you should monitor progress.

How a pop-up becomes a real start-up

Today Monty’s Bakehouse has 50 direct employees; produces between 35 and 40 million meals a year – that’s over 100,000 daily; and has clients like Air Canada (of course), BA, Cathay Pacific, SAS, Scandinavian, Qatar. Monty’s Bakehouse products are also served in big event stadiums and in high-end bakery retailers. Matt decided to separate creative development and production. The capital investment in setting up industrial-scale kitchens was a reach too far, and besides there are some great producers out there. What he concentrated on was the way to reinvent sausage rolls and grab-and-go food with great looking, brilliantly packed snacks. The business depends on finding new recipes and winning respect for what they do. In 2016 they won the Mercury Award for best inflight snack with their Chinese BBQ Chicken Savoury Pastry. It sounds simple. Looking back on where they were 16 years ago, however, when it was exciting but full-on and absolutely terrifying, the journey has become an exhilarating rollercoaster ride.

Matt has these key observations, ‘We have to keep our business, our food and the way we work relevant the whole time’.

We love that word ‘relevant’. In a world where artificial intelligence and robotics are constant topics of conversation and where it’s difficult as a customer to get to talk to a human being (especially in large institutions), it’s unsurprising that so many people are worried about the relevance of their jobs. Between 1760 and 1820 in the Industrial Revolution the workers in Britain were going through similar moments of self-doubt. Matt is very clear about one thing, ‘This is not an asset or a brand business, it’s a people business’.

It started with a human being pitching his product and winning a big piece of business. Sixteen years later he still has the Air Canada business. Without great human interfaces, client management and a creative workplace, this might not be the case.

The entrepreneurial landscape

Many entrepreneurs are reckless, impetuous and selfish and they crash through life leaving chaos in their wake.

This is what Guy Singh-Watson, the founder of Riverford Organic food service and farms, said to Kirsty Young on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, on 6 July 2018. We tend to agree with Guy. To many, an entrepreneur is characterized by a swaggering rebelliousness, a very low boredom threshold, a gambling streak and an obsession with money. We know entrepreneurs who have towering rages and the attention span of minutes. They’re rich but unhappy. At the very centre of this book is an ongoing conversation about work–life balance and happiness. Some are convinced that anyone who works for themselves is bound to be a workaholic. Then there are others, which include us and Simon Sinek, who see it slightly differently, claiming it’s only working hard at something that you don’t really care about that creates imbalance and stress, whilst working hard at something you do really care about still creates imbalance, but imbalance and passion. Sinek thinks the passion compensates for the imbalance. Meanwhile, Kirstin Furber, former Head of People at ClearScore and BBC Worldwide, says everyone in HR is currently talking about something called ‘One Life’ where work and life blur into one happy cocktail.

We want to distinguish between the cowboys whose interest is in a quick ‘exit’ and the people who are trying to build their own sustainable business. We detest the casual use of that word ‘exit’ by the way. If we hear someone using it as their primary objective for being an entrepreneur, we steer well clear of them. They’re not creating a business; they’re playing a game of business poker.

The real start-up engineers, in whom we’re most interested, are full of enterprise, ambition and hope. They are opportunity creators. They are like us. They want to leave a legacy. They are not ‘risk averse’ like their counterparts in big companies. The old-fashioned flash entrepreneur is dying out and being usurped by hard-working, smart, collaborative, creative and independently minded pioneers who want to change the world (a little, not a lot – they aren’t that unrealistic). They want to be proud of what they do because they prize being liked. In a way they are returning themselves to their very roots. Here’s how Mohammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi entrepreneur, founder of the Grameen Bank and Nobel Peace Laureate, put it in a Guardian interview (Cosic, 2019), celebrating Yunus receiving the Concordia Leadership Award during their 2016 Summit:

All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves we were all self-employed…finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where the human history began…as civilization came we suppressed it. We became labour because [they] stamped us, ‘you are labour’. We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.

Yes. We are all innately entrepreneurs; let’s understand what that could mean for those of us who dare to try to be innovators. But first of all, beware. In an article in The Times ‘Dream of Being an Entrepreneur? Trust Me, They Dream of Being You’, Sathnam Sanghera warns entrepreneur wannabes against expecting freedom (Sanghera, 2019). He recalls that it was the tyranny of accounting, managing people and navigating health and safety regulations that drove restaurateur Raymond Blanc to a minor stroke in his forties. Do not become an entrepreneur, Sanghera says, unless you are willing to work incredibly, crazily hard.

For our part, we think we are that hard. So, let’s move on.

Who? Where? How? What?

Who are we talking about? The enterprise line-up

There are many types of start-up person and entrepreneur, and we list eight below. Most of these are well known, but we want to focus on three as we have most to learn from them.

I) YOUNG AND HUNGRY

These are bright, young people leaving school to fulfil a dream, or going to university to do ‘Business Studies’. Some say going out to work in a start-up is much more interesting than the course work, which is, perhaps, unsurprising. Having said that, a lot of these types say the basic groundwork and debates around business topics have shaped the way they approach real work-li...

Table of contents

• About the authors
• Prologue
• 1 The ups and downs of starting a new business
• 2 The start-up revolution
• 3 Pivots, refinements and surprises
• 4 Pop-ups, questions and experiments
• 5 Start-ups: How to do them. How to succeed
• 6 Conclusions and summary
• Bibliography
• Index