Week 8 Enterprise Week

Week 8

Enterprise Week

Enterprise week is a couple of weeks where there are various events and speakers attending the university to discuss their experiences, companies or other topics. As my degree is Accounting & Finance I wanted to attend events where the speakers was talking about their experiences is setting up a business and also hear what advice they had for us. In this blog I will discuss two events which I went to “Ella’s Kitchen” and “If it all goes wrong, ill get a proper job”. These two events where visitors talking to us about how they set up their own companies and the problems they had to overcome.

Ella’s Kitchen

Paul Lindley (Ella’s Dad) is the founder of Ella’s Kitchen and he gave the discussion  on the company.

Paul’s Background Brief

Paul is a chartered accountant and after getting his professional accounting qualifications he  worked for KPMG. After many years at KPMG he moved to Nickelodeon children’s channel. He built a career here and worked up to the head of the UK. He left Nickelodeon to set up Ella’s Kitchen.

What Ella’s Kitchen is

Ella’s kitchen makes organic healthy food for children. The idea for the company come from his daughter Ella not wanting to eat fruit and vegetables as they did not taste good and weren’t fun and exciting, this is where Paul got his idea.  The company make and target them to children through using fun packaging and great tasting food. They are a person to person brand and they sell through supermarkets to their consumers. When the company was first set up is was just Paul and he invested £20,000 into getting samples done and doing research into the market, after this he re mortgaged and then began to get the ball rolling to start trading. The company has been set up for 5 years and have 4 years of trading. Below are some facts and figures on Ella’s Kitchen.

• 46 products
• 25 employees (employees mostly are people who have got in contact with Paul to ask about jobs and are often customers, parents or food experts wanting to get involved)
• Last year £30,000,000 Sales
• 6 Countries- UK, Ireland, USA, 3 Scandinavian countries
• In 4 Years trading has 10% of baby food market (£200 mil Market)
• 9^th Fastest growing company
• Food and Drink brand of the year

Brief history of company

This speaker discussed how set up his own studio producing audio and film advertising. His brief background was that he went to college and then wanted a career as a TV Director. After he began working with TV he realised that you struggles to make it your own work. This led him to change his focus to audio. After this He went to work at radio Luxemburg and then moved onto capital radio. He was sacked from capital radio for doing free lance editing work, the speaker claims this to be best thing that ever happened to him as he got a job offer the next day. This job was in a studio mixing audio with visual media but he quickly thought that he could do it better and went on to set up his own studio.

• He got two other partners- Tommy Vance and David Tate and they all invested £10,000 each.
• The speaker put his house up as security for finance
• He built a number of studios as his company grew
• Sold in 2010 to someone who was a ex employee in the past

The two speakers after discussing their company they then began to talk and give advice on setting up companies and making it work. I found the advice they both gave to very similar even though they were breaking into very different markets and very different times. Below I have constructed a table of the advice given and which speaker said the advice.

Advice Given	Ella’s Kitchen	If it all goes wrong, Ill get…
Have to have passion and focus for the business in order to make it work	X	X
Have to be willing to take a risk in order to receive the reward	X	X
Went alone as thought I can do it better than the others	X	X
Taking on staff difficult decisions as tend not to have same passion as you	X	X
Stand Back and look from client point of view	X	X
People do business with people, so people skills are key	X	X
Experts aren’t always best people as they are mostly just working for a salary.	I believe that Paul doesn’t agree or give this advice as he is a expert and professional accountant and he said that his accounts knowledge is “invaluable” to his company	X- I believe the speaker said this as he has never worked in a professional environment such as- Legal, Accounts, etc so he has a very one sided view.
Always be ready for Sale	I don’t believe that Paul is thinking about seeling his business as its very personal to him and revolves around family, but also its only be going 5 years so its still new and he has other ideas he wants to do with Ella’s Kitchen.	I believe the speaker made this point because his personality lead him to enjoy starting new things, and when he sold his business it was 31 years old.

Conclusion - Why I think they were a Success & What impact it has had on me

My views on my career have changed after listening to the two talks. Before I had always been worried about starting a my own business for security reasons as you are not guaranteed your monthly salary. However now I can see that if you have the correct idea and can make it work then you have to take risks in order to get high rewards. I also have learnt that people skills are just as important as qualifications and experience. When talking in one of the events they were discussion what's more important qualifications an experience, and from what was said for the career I want to peruse you will need professional qualifications in order to get the experience needed before going alone. 

Ella’s Kitchen

If it goes wrong, Ill get proper Job

I believe Ella’s Kitchen was a success due to many reasons. Pauls expert knowledge in finance and business is a huge factor as he already has the tools needed to get great advice and knowledge about the business side of Ella’s Kitchen. He also already has huge amounts of experience when working with children through nickelodeon.  He used this experience and contact to get a great deal of TV advertising on the channel. The passion of setting up the company alone and also having the inspiration for Ella’s kitchen coming from his own family made I believe to 3 key factors to this success; Passion, Knowledge and Experience.

This speaker may not of been a professional in his type of business when he started but he had a lot of experience and skills in his work. This was demonstrated early through being giving private work from some people at capital radio. He also has the ability to get things done and look outside the box for example he did not have the money to build his first set of studios, so when a competitor asked him to do work for them he arranged a deal where for every hour of his work they would give him 2 hours of their builders to build his studio, through this he got his competitors to build his first set of studios. Again he had the passion and drive to make his company work as not only because he led what he was doing but also the fact that his house was on the line. Again he had the 3 key factors Passion, Experience, Knowledge.