Business Leaders from Yorkshire and Beyond
Welcome to an occasional podcast show featuring interviews with business leaders from Yorkshire and beyond, presented by Bernard Ginns, director of PR consultancy Branksome Partners, author and former Yorkshire Post business editor and Mail on Sunday staff reporter.
Business Leaders from Yorkshire and Beyond
James Lambert
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From old Victorian dairy to European ice cream giant, James Lambert shares the secrets of his success as an award-winning Yorkshire entrepreneur.
In this latest episode of my podcast series, the Keighley-born businessman talks about taking risks, building teams and accessing capital, both public and private.
Whether you're running a start-up or scaling a business, I'm sure you'll find many words of wisdom here to help you.
This occasional podcast series is brought to you by Bernard Ginns, director of Branksome Partners, a specialist communications consultancy founded in 2016, and formerly business editor of the Yorkshire Post and a staff reporter at The Mail on Sunday.
Welcome to this occasional podcast series featuring interviews with business leaders from Yorkshire and beyond. I'm Bernard Jins, Director of Pranks and Partners PR Consultancy. I'm a journalist by background, business editor of the Yorkshire Post from the financial crisis to Brexit, and previously at The Mail on Sunday. Our guest today is James Lambert. James is an award-winning Yorkshire entrepreneur who transformed an old Victorian dairy into one of Europe's largest ice cream manufacturers and now has invested in a number of major businesses and startups. We're going to be talking about your career and business, the lessons you learned along the way, and sharing some words of wisdom for entrepreneurs starting out today. So to begin with, James, please can you tell me where you were born and your family background?
SPEAKER_01I was born in Keithley. I was very lucky. My father decided to privately educate. I'm one of four, number two. So we went to a prep school in the north of England and a public school in the south of England, and then on to the Royal Agricultural College, as it was then, the College of Knowledge, as we refer to it as now a university. And from there I thought I'd go farming, but when I realized that the cost of farms was so expensive, cost of money in 1980 or 77 to 80 was about 15%. I soon realised I couldn't either afford it nor would it make much sense.
SPEAKER_00And um what was your first job?
SPEAKER_01So my well, my first job was feeding calves and milking cows and lambing sheep. My first proper job was uh to go selling uh bull semen to dairy farmers in East Anglia, um, mainly imported from Canada, where there was a big change in genetics going on in the UK to try and breed much more productive cows from the old British Frisian to something you could give nearly twice as much milk. And so that was I had I was an area uh rep for them.
SPEAKER_00And what did you learn about sales during that pro during those years?
SPEAKER_01I think sales is quite simple. You have to have a great product, you have to um have a way of making sure that your customer needs that product, and and some do and some don't, um, and that it then delivers what you say it's going to do. So the big word is trust, and that takes time to build up, and there is no quick way of getting around that process. Um so it was really building up trust, which builds up long-term sales.
SPEAKER_00And you're in your 20s, what was sort of driving you? What was the ambition at that age?
SPEAKER_01Uh I think I watched, God bless him, um, my father run out of money because he was privately educating us. There was the terrible times in the end of the 70s when inflation just ripped through family savings and family investments, and he was caught in the in it with this. And so I was probably quite driven by wanting to build a secure world for myself. Um, I hadn't got any any responsibilities to anybody else, and so I first of all wrote to the board of the company I was working for, um, thinking about how it could go a lot better than it was going. And within six months they gave me the job of running it. Um, it was relatively small. We had about 45 employees, um, and I focused it right down on a few products that we could really make a difference to our customers and so build that trust quicker.
SPEAKER_00And where did the um the confidence come from in your 20s to take on running a company and knowing what to do?
SPEAKER_01I suppose I've always liked people, and um there was obviously uh no mobile telephones or computers or anything at that time that we could use. Um so you had to build trust. And uh when I before I when I was offered the job, I went and saw the three or four most influential people in the firm who were the big senior managers, and got their their trust that I would deliver what I said I would deliver, which is better bulls for them to sell, um, wider relationships with with some of the suppliers which we didn't have, and um drive to get the best uh salespeople in the areas where we didn't have where we had weak people, and that over 18 months transformed the business. Um, and from that moment on I had their full confidence.
SPEAKER_00So you were thorough and you had a plan. And then how how how did that equip you to take advantage of sort of fortune and opportunities as they arose in the market and what was happening in the wider world?
SPEAKER_01So the wider world milk quotas came in, which meant that the EU uh were not going to carry on paying farmers just to carry producing more and more, and they said that they had to produce 14% less. And of course, if you're in the breeding business of breeding the replacements, that suddenly knocks about half of your business away for a year or two. And um, so instead of sitting down there worrying about it, um, there was a chance that milk that was going to be turned into ice cream was going to be exempt of milk quota. Of course, we knew all the farmers or lots of them. Um, and at the same time, a very small dairy, Victorian dairy up in Thornaby on Teaside, um had gone bust, and for £40,000 my partner Jonathan Rotner and I bought the machinery with one other uh family, and uh we got making ice cream with four people, uh, and it was for um it was called Cardosy's, uh, and it was either for a very small um supermarket chain called Hinton's in the in the Northeast, which had about 30 supermarkets, and that was it. The turnover was somewhere around about £150,000 a year.
SPEAKER_00And what was the vision? I mean, why what gave you why did you want to buy it and what did you think you could do with that?
SPEAKER_01I think the vision was um we weren't sure what would be happening with the cattle breeding business and how long it would take to recover. It actually recovered remarkably quickly and became very profitable. Um Jonathan Rotland, my partner, also had started a business called Dale Pack, which was um making beef burgers, uh, etc. So I had confidence that he would back a long-term business. We then um I I sort of was trying to learn about own label. I went to see the Morrison's supermarket chain, who in those days were just about to open their 40th store and said, could I make their own label tubs? And they said yes. So we started with that. And what I have always felt is is in in business, you a business really has to be good at one thing before it can do anything else. And and because we were busy, I was busy running two businesses for 10 years, I said, let's let's get really good at two-litre tubs, let's be the best in the country, let's be the lowest cost. After all, there were 40 million tubs sold a year, so there was a big enough market for us to go in to. And let's focus on it and let's do the job better than anybody else. And we did. And that led to us winning over the next three years about half of the of the tub market in the UK. Um but investing in low cost uh allows and quality allowed us to continue to be able to hold our prices, and and people come to us and say, you know, Saints Bruce would say, Well, Tesca seemed to be more selling more of what you produce than our supplier. Will you come and quote for us? And so that's how it built up. And we didn't get sidetracked. It's very easy to because the the buyers that like what you're doing uh then say, Well, can't you do this with cones? Or, and of course, you only got so much resource, and resource was very expensive in the 80s. Um, so we didn't, and uh uh very quickly um it became clear there was uh uh a business in Leeds called Treats, uh which were making just lobbies, really, um, and that um they had flated but it hadn't been successful, and on the stock market, and um Trevor Hemings, who was involved at the time with Alistair Sharpson, two entrepreneurial people, particularly Trevor Hemings, um, said let's go out and buy it, and well I said let's go out and buy it. They provided a lot of the funds and we bought it, and then we had a tub business and a lolly business.
SPEAKER_00And a listing?
SPEAKER_01And a listing on the stock market, which um because they had floated the year before and it had been a disaster, they floated at 170 and the share price was 60p when we got involved and we bought half the shares. Um the first meeting, and I've I was made to run it or asked to run it, and I said I'd love to. Um the first meeting I went to with a shareholder, a publicly listed shareholder, and people I'd never met before, said, You've your business has been an absolute disaster in my fun. Um, come back and see me in a year's time and tell me what you're gonna do. Uh so anyway, that was the sort of so I then thought we've got to get this shop in order. Um, so we then concentrated very much on just two things then ice lollies and tubs. And again, we looked at our cost base, um, we put in proper management systems that makes everybody accountable, because everybody wants to be accountable in a business. They don't want to, it's easier now because of uh, but everybody wants to know how well the business is doing, how well the organization's doing, because you want them to help you make it better, and you can only ever allow that to happen if you share all the information. People used to say to me, What are you going to tell um you know the line manager how much money you're making or how much costs you're saving? And I said, Yes, you've got to trust people. And I think one of the things that I've learned the most in business is you get the right people if you trust them, and they will then trust you. And um I always used to get to work reasonably early in the morning and leave not that late, uh, was because if anybody wanted to come in and tell me how to run the business better at quarter past seven in the morning when nobody else was there, it was a great time to come and knock on my door and bring some ideas and so on. So the business grew. And I think the other thing that we kept doing, which was taking risk. And I think all businesses need to take risks and they shouldn't penalise those that don't work, because if you take lots of risks and you have a culture of risk taking, you again tracked people. Um often, funnily enough, sportsmen, because they're they they naturally take risk in sport to come on and their team players. And we did a lot of that at the time, and we're by now we're in the sort of mid-80s, end of the 80s. Um, but yeah, it was a public company then.
SPEAKER_00How do you justify um a level of risk taking to the to the city which wants guaranteed quarterly returns?
SPEAKER_01Um with difficulty. What we had was a big cash flow, and so we could buy our sales by buying up our competitors, and we got under the radar somehow, and we ended up in five years owning about 75% of the UK's own labour market from Marx and Spencer's all the way through to Quicksave in those days. Um, at the other end, Alvin Little weren't around. Um so we were using our leverage well. Uh so that helped drive the share price. Um slightly because it's a seasonal business, you're allowed the two winter quarters because they don't really mean much to move your chess pieces around. Um but we were lucky, and in the seven years we were on the stock market, the share price went up 12 times and um with dividends 13 times. So we outperformed the rest of the food industry every year, so we actually ended up with some very happy shareholders. However, we were a UK-centric business and I wanted to go to Europe. I saw the same opportunities of buying, of producing a label and renting in brands like Nestle Brothers or in Europe, Mondanese brands, so we could make milk and magnums, etc. So I so I could see exactly the same um reasons for success in Europe, but on a much bigger scale. And so we needed to go even faster to make this happen. And at that stage, I decided that we would have had our share price devalued too quickly if we'd gone on for too many rights issues. And that was when we went and took the business off the stock market. And that was um, I think a very good thing to do because in private equity, as long as you have the right partners and they aren't all the right partners.
SPEAKER_00How do you choose them?
SPEAKER_01Um you want people who again want to trust the people that they want to invest with. Um that's so you want to do a lot of due diligence of the other businesses of which they've owned and how do they behave to those other businesses. And I was lucky, I had A Tree Capital, who were actually investors mainly in distress debt, uh or buying businesses through through buying debt. But they had set up a private equity business in London, and they wanted to buy one through distress debt one of the big the prizes of consolidating the European market. And I just thought, I've got the management, they've got the money. Um, if we go quick enough, fast enough, and smart enough, we'll make a success of it. And indeed, that is exactly what happened. And again, if you were if you were putting multiples to it, um we went from a business making uh 60 million pounds a year to making 300 million uh in six or seven years. Um partly because if we needed more capital, um they were providing, which we didn't, we only needed it once in that whole time. Um but banks were very keen to lend to us because they knew that the if the shareholding went wrong, uh Oak Tree would put more capital in. So that was the unwritten rule because they want to borrow more money from for other businesses at another time from the same institutions. So that's the one thing that you definitely get through private equity. Um you get a better access to both debt of either through the bond market or through bank syndicates than you do of the public markets.
SPEAKER_00What which do you think's best for scaling a company? Public markets or private capital?
SPEAKER_01Good question. Most of the businesses that you're currently seeing floated have actually used private capital, and then at a point, because they've got too big, they've gone to the public market, so all these big tech stocks that are being floated at the moment. Um it depends, I think, on how fast you can grow your business. And today, the speed at which people growing businesses is not wasn't heard of 30 years ago. Um, and the ability to control your cash flow through growing your m growing these businesses quickly is also unheard of 20 years ago. I think it's horses for courses. I think private, if you have the right investors, and the right investor to me has two things, money and knowledge. And it's the knowledge bit that you're more likely to get through private equity than you are through a public shareholding. Because clearly, if you're a shareholder of a public company, you're not really asked your opinion on how to run the business better. Whereas if you're in on the same board as the shareholders, you can definitely get much closer to the critical decisions with your shareholders. The downside of private equity can be greed. So some private equity firms leverage their businesses up too much. And what I mean by that is they put too much debt into those businesses and take out too much or put very less equity. That has an effect that if there is a big opportunity, which you hadn't seen when you start it, 18 months, two years down the line, you probably haven't got the equity in the business to go and borrow some more debt, to go and buy the asset. And putting fresh equity in into a three to five year to seven-year investment is quite a difficult thing because you're trying to get the value of what that equity should give in at. And so my expert the best experience I've had, not just for my own the old company, but all the companies I got involved with, is private equity really works if you leave plenty of room for error and not over-leverage the business. Um, you can always take cash out, but it's very difficult to put cash back in into a private equity deal. Um the thing that I find harder on the public market is the discount that existing shareholders often demand to put new equity into a business. When after all, what you're aiming to do is to actually increase the value of that existing equity exponentially because you've got some more money into it. And I used to get terribly frustrated by that thought that I'm going to make you a lot richy, yet you want a discount for my for the money you're going to put in. That doesn't happen with private equity. It's all ranked the same pretty well, I'd say.
SPEAKER_00How has the private equity market evolved over the last decade or so?
SPEAKER_01It well, there's two parts to it. One is scaled, so private equity can get involved in very big businesses now. Um and and some of the funds that Blackstone and others have can um come in not just on the equity side, but they can come in onto the debt side as well. Um so the scale's changed. I think also that what's changed is the specialty. Um there are private equity houses specialise in all sorts of different sectors, uh, and I think that's really helpful because when you're looking for the knowledge with the equity, then you there are some great people around who've got great skills and knowledge in the industry that you're trying to build up, so they can help you not make the same mistakes at some of their other, uh, or they can encourage you to go faster. Um it's all part of there are always horses for courses in business. It's like you know, in the early days, certain banks were more knowledgeable about the certain sectors than other banks, and that's the same with equity funds today. Um, and it's a matter of spending enough time, if you're the CEO or the FD, finding those relationships is as important as anything that you need to be doing, um, as obviously product development and so on. But I was always quite cautious, so I always wanted to have more cover, top cover, um, on for money uh and uh than a lot of other people would, because I wanted to be able to grow faster if we if there was. And the prime example of this was in the financial crisis of 2008, when uh we had raised about 180 million, the syndicated banks, some of them we had 41 lenders, two of them went bust, um 35 of them had no idea who they'd lent their money to and wanted it back. Um, and um the price of assets that we wanted to buy dropped 50%, I would think. Um so we went and and found out how the bond market worked, and the bond market. As you know, is you pay a pound for that piece of paper, and you have to give that pound back for that piece of paper five years or seven years later. And that paper is traded on the secure on how high the yield is on that piece of paper and the certainty that it's gonna get paid back. And so, whereas when you issue shares, you're building a track record amongst shareholders and in public markets about how good the management team is, you do that in the debt market with bonds. And over a period of time, if you if you're always good for your money and you're keeping on doing things and you're perhaps asking for more, uh, then there are more followers of your business. And so you you you build up a brand for your debt. Um we did this, um we had to pay twice as much interest. So I think we were we were at about 6% and we were borrowing money at 4%. Um however, uh we could borrow a lot more because we're paying a higher percentage, but we were buying assets at half the price. So sometimes you can get fixation about what the company's paying for its debt rather than what it can do with that money uh in the buying assets or or doing product development or launching new brands or all the other things that you want to do.
SPEAKER_00So you started by buying a small Victorian dairy in the northeast of England, and you ended with what?
SPEAKER_01Well, when I um probably met my level of incompetence, um, which uh we got from 180,000 to a billion, making 180 million a year. But um, and we were all over Europe, um, so we were the largest ice cream manufacturer in Germany, France, uh, and in Italy making industrial ice cream, and in Poland, funnily enough. And I always wanted to do a deal where um Nestle, who were always the second player to um to Unilever to Wool's uh or Unilever's ice cream division, say Magnum and so on. And I thought if you put their brands uh own label, which is the supermarket brands, together uh and you went out to the supermarkets to help them sell a lot more of both, you'd have a really winning form in it. You could have also, thanks to the team that were there, we could produce it more efficiently because he was scaling up the use of the factory. And and that really worked. But the person who brought um all the Nestle ice cream businesses uh in the 90s was the guy who was the CEO of Nestle at the time. And I stepped down, and within a year, the deal I'd been trying to do, um, he he'd also retired. And uh Froneris, they are now, did the deal, which was to put our private label and rented brands with their rent with their brands in Europe, uh optimised the use of all the production facilities uh over Europe, shut one or two factories, but mainly uh invest in them. And uh that Nestle really liked that. Um they did the deal. Uh they've now done an they then added in America and all of their ice cream businesses. And today um the business is still run by only the third CEO, uh, and we it's been going since '84, so um coming up 40 years, or 40 years this year. Umly the third CEO, uh, and it's now turning over about 8 billion, uh, and it's making over the 1 to 1.5 billion.
SPEAKER_00And how do you feel towards the business? How do I? How do you feel towards the business?
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm so proud of it because it hasn't the culture was set in the early days, the way that the team worked to optimize how you measure the business, um, factory by factory, line by line, sales line by sales line, so that every week we knew exactly the profitability of the business. Um, which drives a very um hands-on culture for those that work in the business because they know that their numbers are are being looked at by everybody and they can see everybody else's numbers. So if the sales guys are a bit light, they can know that they're going to have to shut off a factory. Uh they didn't tell you, they can see they're gonna have to slow up production, or you know, if the buying prices are moved of the raw materials, the sales guys know very quickly that they're going to have to put some price increases in, and we always went first because we have such a great upfeeling of it. And it meant that ordinary people can do an extraordinary job in an organization like that. And today it's the same people doing the same thing on a global scale, and indeed, the the person who's running it now, who's so able, um, he came as a national account manager to help in the Tesco accounting in the UK, and now he's running a global business with 50,000 employees.
SPEAKER_00What do you think propelled you through that journey?
SPEAKER_01Um I think we've we worked out that the business model behind it really worked and would work. Um and um we didn't change it very much. Once we knew it was going to work, um, of course you'd polish it, but the the way of operating, and um uh so say we bought a business in Poland and they didn't know anything about um how we operated, we would just bring their senior managers and put them in a factory and show them that it's not what they're doing is wrong, but this is the way that we think um is the right way to do it. And could they take that back home and implement it? And when they all saw how productive it was and how uh better use of assets and what less waste and uh more engagement, they just all took it back. They didn't need telling, they could see it and and and do it. And then when we gave them and they worked out their own scorecards on how to deliver it and joined in with the group, um it really empowered them. And um, there were some very memorable times when people were passionate about being allowed more capital to invest in the business and deliver because they could see there was the big opportunity there, and in the end, we used to have a there was never a shortage of it, but you had to be prioritizing and keeping people's morale up, even though they couldn't have all the money every year that they wanted, and and indeed, generally they all worked out pretty well. Um, and for me, um it's still the world headquarters is still based at Leaving Bar where we started the business in North Yorkshire, it's still got the same people, um, and it's still basically doing the same thing daily, weekly, annually, um, with what we were doing um 25, 30 years ago. And indeed, it's been so successful, not, I mean, I've left nearly 10 years ago. Um, it's been so successful that it's forced um Unilever to sell off their ice cream business this year. And I have to say I was quite shocked of how unprofitable the Unilever ice cream business was. Um, it was probably 7% less profitable um than the ice cream business that we built up. So 7p in the pound is a big number when you've got that sort of sale. And I I'd be very interested to follow how they get on in the public markets, having been sheltered from directly.
SPEAKER_00During your career as a chief executive, what was the closest you think you came to failure?
SPEAKER_01Oh, in the early days with the ice cream business, before we secured uh Morrison supermarket, we were using up money. Um and um money was very expensive, and people were very wary about lending money and it particularly to start-ups. Uh so we got very close to running out of money. Could we erase more? Probably, but it would have been at such a detrimental amount to the management and to the uh existing shareholders that they might not want to do it either. So I think that was the only time. Um I think what what I learned with was we never had quite enough. And when you don't have quite enough, you probably make much better choices on what you're gonna spend it on. So all the things you're gonna do, but definitely the things you're not gonna do. So we never owned any lorries. Um, we recognized early days that um distribution, we could buy it in, we could partner, and it could be done much better and more efficiently with other people, not just ice cream manufacturers, but you needed pizza, vegetable, any other freezing. So we never got involved with that. Um we never got involved in the first instance in owning freezers because we couldn't police them, we couldn't afford them, so we allowed people to put whatever they wanted into freezers, but we had to make sure that we had the best brands at the right prices that they wanted to buy from us. So it does focus you. Um I'm absolutely sure that some of the startups that took place um uh around about the 2000s when money was cheap didn't benefit from uh having uh that same discipline because they could always go out and get some more, and we've you know seen the demise of companies like Brew Dog at the current time and several others that didn't make a profit. We needed to make cash. You're not in charge of your business really until you could make cash.
SPEAKER_00What was Ken Morrison like as a customer?
SPEAKER_01He was fantastic because um as long as you did you provided the product on time to the specification uh and um never let them down, um you could you could write in, they were grew, they grew for the first 10 years that we dealt with them at 20% a year. So when you're writing a budget each year, if you can write 20% beside it and knowing that your customer's going to deliver you that, isn't that a very isn't that the best customer you can have? Yeah. And and for that we gave um, you always gave something for that back to the Morrisons.
SPEAKER_00What do you mean?
SPEAKER_01Gave them better prices. Um gave them the if you were invested in a new line, the first chance for the capacity on that new line, gave them the best innovation you could have. Um, you gave to your best customers first and get them because everybody's looking at them. You know, anybody's got growth, everybody who hasn't got growth is looking at businesses that have got growth, and I'm gonna try and copy them or look at them, you know, why are they doing this differently? Um, and so that also attracts um those customers to you because they can see that you're helping Morrisons as part of that, and others.
SPEAKER_00So, in more recent years, you've been investing in businesses?
SPEAKER_01I've been very fortunate that I've been um chairman of um some very successful businesses, um, which um for some for for families like um the Page family who built this fantastic business called IPN. Um based in North Yorkshire. Based in North Yorkshire, which is in the pet food sector, and it's uh has two great brands. It started with WAG and then it then developed Harringtons, and then they've gone on under different ownerships of private equities. So often when a private equity company comes in, the chairman they want to put their own chairman in, which I think is right. Um, after six or seven years, after all, you've given probably as much knowledge as you can handle, or you as you can you've got. Um, and uh so they then went with another private equity company and they've done fantastically well with them. They've covered carried on buying businesses in Europe and doing a lot of the things that we've done with the ice cream business. Um, and so it's gone from a business. I think when I got involved, um it was somewhere around about £50 million. Uh, today it'll be six to seven hundred million, uh, and it's again it's based in North Yorkshire. Um, so the equity has come in, but the management skills and the way of measuring uh things in a business was the same as we put in, and it's made a big difference to them.
SPEAKER_00And you were involved with Burton Biscuits for the Burns.
SPEAKER_01I was then involved with Burton's Biscuits, um, which I learnt an awful lot about pension funds, because we had a pension fund deficit, and it totally, and I didn't really realize how with the cost of capital going up when in 2008, so this was started in about two years, 2007, 2008 the cost of money went up, which meant that that all companies, even if they had quite well supported pension funds, all of a sudden they had to um provide a lot more in, and so it drove a lot of our cash requirement uh into filling up the pension deficit. And so if you can find a way of the certainty, because a pension fund belonging to a company has got to pair out over the next 40 to 60 years. So what the trustees are looking for is the certainty that that company or the people that might buy that company are going to carry on funding the pension deficits and carrying on putting the money in for the current employees. Um very different consideration, which meant that we needed to consolidate with, and we were very lucky that the Fox's biscuit business was bought by um the Ferrero family, and they also wanted to buy us. And of course, the Ferrero family are one of the richest um companies or families in Europe, and of course they will be around for a long time. So the cost of that pension deficit dropped away, and now it's in surplus, uh, because they can see the certainty of it. So I learnt a lot about pensions, but it but what it also did was it it took the strengths of two businesses and it made them even stronger. One had slightly weaker management, but probably better brands, and the other was was the was the opposite. And by putting them both together, um, they had better brands and better management, uh, and probably better, oh, as good an ownership anyway. Um and they and under the Ferrero family, it's really thrived. Um, and you know that gives me as much pleasure as as the ice cream business because yes, it was a bit of luck that they came along, but it was always the right thing as soon as soon as you know you saw and understood the opportunity for the for those that you were leaving behind.
SPEAKER_00So, what are you up to these days then?
SPEAKER_01Um so I'm uh a small private investor in some startups and some mature businesses, um everything from uh setting up a lithium mine in the north of England, um, which is getting much closer to um investing in um food, several food companies, um distribution businesses. Um as one of my entrepreneurial friends tells me, um, Jamie, uh, when you're investing in private businesses, they're not all weddings. You do have to take a funeral or two. Um, what have I learned? They've cost more and they've taken longer than anybody thought uh at the start. So I've had to slow up to make sure I can support the right um businesses. I still think the same principles of business apply, but I think there's now much more emphasis on cash generation and um making sure that the shareholders are more under financial control of their investment rather than thinking that they can get and tap more money all the time in the market. Um there are certain segments connected, you know, with AI or uh where you know there are a lot of people made money there, they're very keen to invest more in that sector. So that's that is still getting huge cash flows in. But the food sector, probably not so much. Um it's much steadier, it's longer term, it takes more time. Um, but there are still opportunities and there's still great businesses being created today. Um it's just you've got to make sure we try and pick one or two occasionally.
SPEAKER_00So what's the most important if you what's the most important thing for um uh a new entrepreneur to bear in mind, do you think, when they're starting a company?
SPEAKER_01Uh for me, keep it simple. Think about how every business has to start with a winner. So you're putting all your resources into being a winner on one product or one service, you know, after all Amazon started trying to redefine the book market. It didn't set out to be what it is today. And when you look at what you learn from winning and generating early cash flow or early investor support because they can see you're going to be a win, is the most important thing you can do in business, I think. Um so don't get carried away. Most entrepreneurs are too inventive. You you've got also remember that you have to manage your uh your inventions, um, whatever they are, and give time to the managers of of uh of the people that you're employing or doing it yourself to actually make it happen. And so I used to think in yearly yearly chunks, um, because most businesses are seasonal in one way or another, not necessarily, but pretty well they are, even if you're selling books or or um obviously for me with in the food sector, it's all pretty seasonal for one food group or another, um, is to make sure you get that winner out early. Um, people will really follow you then. Um, and your self-confidence to your team goes up, and like life, business is about confidence. And obviously, entrepreneurs are confident people by nature, however, they they they they have a thickness of skin sometimes that can take too much of a battery. So don't give yourself too hard a challenge at the start. Just try and do one or two things well. I mean, that's probably why you've thought about your business idea. It's probably why you've researched that business idea. Um, yes, you can pivot, but make sure you give it the really the best effort. Seek as much advice as you can from the right people, and they want to be other entrepreneurs, they want to generally be optimistic entrepreneurial people. Um and if you need money and you haven't got enough yourself, make sure that money comes with knowledge that you're going to need either in the short run or the medium term, because that is the bit that's free. Um, money always comes with a cost, but knowledge is basically free at that moment in time. So don't be afraid to knock on whoever's door you think you can can help you. Um you're gonna get rebuffed, as all entrepreneurs know, a lot of the time, and you're gonna have to take some big belly hits. However, if you're if you can see how your product or service can win, stick at it. Others will take more time, probably. Um, and once we've worked out, or I've worked out with lots of businesses, how they can really win, it then becomes obvious. But it isn't obvious always at the start. But there will be a moment when you suddenly think, I can make this business win. I'm gonna con I'm gonna not do X, Y, and Z, I'm gonna stick to this one thing and get good at it. And that to me is is how really successful businesses get going, and you give yourself the best chance. Lots fail. You know, I've invested in failures. Um I liked the people I Involved with it was I normally fail because the markets turned against the idea, or you were second or third, and there was only room for one or two in that market. And that you've learnt a lot on the way. So it if you know it's the old saying you have to eat lunch or be lunch. If you have worked out you can't win, but you can still get a decent return, go and find out who you think will be the best buyer for your business. Don't spend a lifetime being marginally profitable and not really getting to where you want to do. Find the person who's probably eating a bit of your lunch and go and make it very easy for him to pay over the odds for your business because he's got overheads inside it that he won't need or he can get a better return on if he's putting your business together. And then either join him or her uh or go and start again uh with all of the knowledge and some of the money you've made, which is what lots of entrepreneurs do.
SPEAKER_00Okay. We have some quick fire closing questions now. Um what is your favourite book?
SPEAKER_01My my favourite book and and um was the the history of of uh um what's it called? Um Nike.
SPEAKER_00Oh, shoe dog.
SPEAKER_01Shoe dog, yeah. Um because if anybody wants to know what perseverance looks like, um they need to read that book. Um I think. Um another one was Good to Great, which lots of people have have read. Uh and but I think any any I'm talking because this of the of this isn't uh about entrepreneurship. Um I think anything that gives you self-confidence or knowledge in the area that you're interested in, I think makes for good reading. And um, you know, the old saying of what you don't know, you don't know. Um that could be met by um what you don't know somebody else probably did know, and if you can find a way into that, you can speed up your the you know the chances of your success.
SPEAKER_00You needn't reinvent the wheel either. No. No, um your favourite film?
SPEAKER_01Um I suppose Shushak Redemption, because it's again it's about human spirit and it's about you know persevering and it's about um right wins in the end. Um it says a lot about America and Americans, um, but it says a lot about ourselves.
SPEAKER_00Favourite song?
SPEAKER_01Um it depends on what sort of mood and what sort of alcoholic content is in my blood, but I suspect comfortably numb by Pink Floyd um well into an evening with anything like a tennis racket as the electric guitar probably sums up, you know, my music. Good choice.
SPEAKER_00Um, best advice you've ever been given.
SPEAKER_01Surround yourselves by people with a better skill set than you have, particularly when it comes to management. And without doubt, I have been lucky enough to do that.