A great day listening to inspirational business leaders from Innocent, Mind Candy and ASOS and dinner with Sir Richard Branson to follow.
Growing fast has its challenges and the team at Diet Chef have really worked incredibly hard coping with this, but it’s more fun than growing slowly!
I have been very lucky to be introduced to lots of very experienced business people. Although they might be classified as “entrepreneurs” they usually have quite safe, successful businesses and are more risk averse than you would think (they have more to lose!)
There is nothing more exciting for me than to meet someone with little more than an idea and the drive and passion to risk everything (usually meaning not a lot) to try and make that idea a business.
I have historically tried to back people that have this gem of an idea with either advice, money or contacts to allow them to be successful and I think we should make both financial and time commitments to do this without any requirements to get a “slice of the pie”.
I do believe strongly in helping if I can and the easy thing is to write a cheque, the harder thing is to give up some time. My 2012 mission is to try and help more people who want to start businesses, profit, not for profit or social.
My big challenge is I truly understand the plight of a small team or individual with an business idea but less so a social idea, so my personal challenge is to find someone in the third sector that I can relate to and build a meaningful cause/business with.
Tough challenge I think!
It was with great honour that I picked up our award for 3rd place in the Sunday Times Virgin Fast Track at Richard Branson’s Oxfordshire home yesterday.
We are only 4 years old but we have been relentless in our focus in developing our range, offering and customer base just like we were when we first started.
The entire team at Diet Chef should be proud of this achievement as should our customers who have supported us through our development.
We haven’t always got things right and growing pains have sometimes held us back, but we are now in a great position to extend our range and customers both in the UK and Europe.
Well done!
At Diet Chef we used to travel quite a lot by train from Edinburgh to London. That was in the good old days when GNER ran the service.
It was quite relaxing after a full day of meetings to get on the 18:00 from Kings Cross to Edinburgh and enjoy dinner and a glass of wine.
The service was sometimes a little regimented and we were excluded from sitting down on numerous occasions by the restaurant “monitor” (remind me of school dinners) but I still reminisce about these train journeys.
Fast forward a few years and the UK government are using the same staff to run the new service. First Class restaurant car and chefs have disappeared and complimentary menus have been introduced* (*subject to certain restrictions, conditions apply, the likelihood of having food is very likely to go down but not up).
The first issue with this customers who tend to travel first class are not price sensitive and adding a meal to there costs in comparison to the train fare is no major issue. So making everything complimentary seems to be subtext to reduce the quality of the service.
Today I am travelling from York to Edinburgh at lunchtime, here is an example.
Menu R4
Chicken and stuffing
or
egg and roasted tomato sandwiches
All served with hand cooked crisps
-o-
Fish pie with white wine and watercress sauce
Served with fries
Or
Jacket potato and classic ratatouille
Garnished with mixed leaf salad and balsamic dressing
-o-
Dorothy Wordsworth house Madeira & caraway seed cake
-o-
A selection of fruit One apple
So over 50% of the menu was off from York, surely availability is known and demand planning can be done. If not why bother offering it.
www.eastcoast.com what’s your thoughts?
UPDATE: Mark Terry, head of on board catering at East Coast emailed to say that they had lost their logistics provider 4 weeks ago to administration. This should be resolved soon.
I thought it was worth telling the story about my one sponsorship deal we did in 1999. Just for background Orbital was funded initially in 1997 and by 1998 we were beginning to see the height of the dotcom boom.
To raise our profile and get more in with the valley investors we decided to sponsor an event at the Red Herring NDA conference. This was well attended by VCs and at the cost of $50,000 was quite a spend for a little company from Edinburgh. We agreed with the shows producers that we would have a whisky tasting using Scotch Malt Whisky Society cask strength spirits. Having spent our entire budget on the actual sponsorship we flew the whisky over with members of the team all carrying 2 bottles each and clinked our way to the conference.
On arrival we were shown into a room which could only be described as a large magnolia box with nothing in it apart from some undressed tables. At this point we nearly died and decided to take a look at some of our co-sponsors rooms. We then discovered that a number of companies (specifically e-learning companies) were launching at the event and had a budget of over $1m for the event alone. They had stylists, room dressers, walkie talkies – and we were so doomed at this stage!
After whining a lot to the conference organisers they showed us into the time share room where the pushy sales staff sold dreams. This was ideal leather sofas, rugs and the feel of an cigar club!
We had little or no knowledge of whisky but after attending the launch party for the dotcom we persuaded everyone to have an “after party” and free poured the whisky. Everyone loved it, drank and chatted into the night.
Next mornings keynote address by a little known John Chambers, then CEO of Cisco was not that we’ll attended and those who did attend certainly were nursing a proper Scottish hangover!!
There is many of my friends and business associates that go “plural” at some point in their career. Many become non executive directors of a number of companies and also invest in many of these companies.
I personally slightly struggle with this idea and perhaps it is my life stage but also really like the idea of staying singular. Focus is one of the key ways to succeed, and many companies or executives I have seen fail is partly apportioned to lack of focus.
In terms of governance non executives can provide a good level of support to shareholders and executives in businesses and provide help, advice and contacts, but most real business success I have seen is through single minded focus on an area and obsession about improving the product or service in that area.
For me I thing “going singular” has more risk, but spreading the risk by splitting your focus over lots of businesses seems more risky to me!
So if you plan to work on an area either personally or through an investment – get a singularly focused team and back them.
As Andrew Carnegie said – “Put all your eggs in one basket and watch the basket!”
Firstly a confession – I love subscription businesses, they remove a great deal of latency or indecision and massively improve the predictability of your business, and I am constantly interested in businesses or new innovations that use subscription based models to grow.
There are some great examples of these in both the US and UK. I thought I might name a few I really liked:
Such a simple service, turning a massively complex product range into a simple and convenient service. Pay a subscription every month and through your door pops a film every few days or weeks which you can watch at your convenience. I personally prefer the actual physical DVD model as some of the complexity of streaming and choosing is taken away and there is MUCH more choice by DVD than streaming.
Part of the success is the proposition, not only is the service convenient but it gives you lots of choice at the same price of buying a single DVD every month. My only issue is that recruitment costs I am sure will be high (and higher now that Netflix have launched in the UK) and average revenue per customer will be relatively low, meaning that the payback on customer recruitment will take a while.
The key things you are looking for in my mind is:
Diet Chef has all the above characteristics, and investors love this.
I have recently noticed that there is a number of subscription sample services popping up – especially in the cosmetics industry. These offer a subscription of samples of new or emerging beauty brands that you gain samples every month. I assume that these samples are given to the subscription company free or at a very low cost, the issue is that you are not really “using” the product your are sampling it, and there is friction between getting the sample and then building loyalty to the product. I would also argue that the value is slightly being transferred to the brand owner rather than you building a brand yourself. The customer is going to build loyalty for the delivery service but I don’t think these will be big businesses and there will be a LOT of competition if they start to take off (think Groupon) so consolidation will happen in the future.
Looking around the BA flight that I am currently on the obvious good examples are:
Newspapers (lots of reading these as services on iPads)
Books (Kindle readers)
Contact lenses – especially daily disposables
A good day at QVC Germany today,we have really grown as a brand there and the sales numbers are astonishingly good for less than 12 months in a new market.
Lots of teething problems wi delivery, warehouse, product range but all simple enough to sort through 2012.
It was quite an experience this morning to wake up and see Diet Chef on both QVC and DMAX (we are testing infomercials in Germany at present).
We are also rolling out short form ads on various channels in Germany with good success.
Here’s a couple of photos of the channels from today:
March is nearly here and there are a couple of major events.
Freyja is 14 on the 4th March which is a landmark birthday and the planning has begun. Issue is the only thing on the birthday list is a dog which is not on my birthday list!
I thought – futile as it is to give some of the reasons for not wanting to extend the furry family:
1. Time
We are all quite busy with travel, school and other projects which means we could have a dog but this is going to impact on some of the general things we take for granted. The commitment isn’t a short one, I joke with advisors that “an investor is for life not just Christmas” and this sentiment follows onto dogs (actually stolen from that key punch line – a dog is for life not just for christmas) but anyway it is probably 10 years plus lifespan unless I can persuade Freyja we should buy a terminally ill dog (think this is unlikely).
2. Social
No it isn’t because dogs don’t use Facebook yet (actually if you viewed my timeline you would realise that a number of my friends are dogs (yes, sad owners that have created profiles – you know who you are!!) breaching all conditions of the Facebook policies and probably increasing the number of users on Facebook by about 1 billion (remember the valuation is based on the number of active users). The only person winning out of this is Mr Zuckerburg and his team of dogs (conspiracy theorists might note that over 20% of Facebook revenue comes from Zynga named after Mark Pincus dog).
3. Because I might like it
My worse fear is that I might like a pet dog, opening the door to more pets (parrots, chickens, ducks and quails have all been mentioned)
So I have laid my case out, I am sure there will be a vigorous defence mounted by the dog lovers of the household!
I haven’t had the best of weekends!
Off to Germany and online check in isn’t working. So make it to Edinburgh airport extra early clear security and notice that I have forgotten my passport (yes, that was a bit of an oversight), mad rush back home and a few panic phone calls and I make it back to the airport in time for the flight.
I am now 250km from London at 34,000 feet
Can BA please change the snack from Mediterranean tomato rehydrated potato tubes (12g and still about 80 kcal) to something more exotic or perhaps just change once in a while. I have taken quite a few flights since January (12 return trips) so the novelty of these are wearing off.
I think BA is particularly good but there is some suggestions of or improvements:
Avios points redemption – I would like to be able to buy lounge access vouchers for my extended family. I know this is a business scheme but once or twice a year I do travel with family on BA long haul or just to Europe and I would like to take friends of the kids into the lounge especially since we frequently travel through London from Edinburgh. These connections would be made a little more bearable if we could do this and it’s a good redemption system for Avios as getting flights to certain popular destinations using points is very tricky.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea, and I certainly wouldn’t expect lounges to become too busy.
Come on BA – remember kids are also future business customers and experiencing this is a good way to let them show the differential with other providers. Otherwise I may move my rewards programme elsewhere as I used to find American very good on these things (upgrades online, lounge access, instant upgrades for platinum customers etc)