48-Hour Start-up: From idea to launch in 1 weekend. Fraser MBE Doherty
was where you would have to walk back to a house of one of your regular customers at the end of your round – if they had been out the first time you called. Of course, this was a total pain in the ass, especially if they were still out the second time around.
But the lesson he taught me was that if you didn’t get hold of your customer, you had let them down. Some, for example, were old ladies who counted on your delivery each week. They would often have the correct change all ready for you. If they had popped out to the post-box and ended up missing their bacon that week, there was a risk they’d buy a multipack at the supermarket instead and you would lose them forever.
KEEP ON KNOCKING
The bacon-selling job was a truly formative experience, and the attitude it pressed into me has had an impact on me to this day.
There is no more physically exhausting and mentally gruelling way to sell a product than by going door to door with it piled high in a plastic bucket. At least if you do telesales you have a seat.
Add to that the fact that there can’t be many more unpleasant climates in which to go door-to-door selling than the one we have here in Scotland. For the most part, it was so cold outside that the bacon we were selling needed no further refrigeration!
Our customers were Scottish housewives – a thrifty bunch who knew the prices of equivalent products in the supermarket only too well. It’s safe to say that a Bacon Boy faces more than his fair share of rejection on his rounds.
We would knock on nine doors before the tenth might say ‘yes’, taking a packet from our shivering hands and replacing it with a few coins. At first, being rejected over and over again was hard to take. But in the end I came to accept that as a Bacon Boy, just as in life, you have to knock on thousands of doors, each time with the same enthusiasm as the last. For the most part, anyone’s career as an entrepreneur is a sea of rejection, peppered with the occasional hard-won sale. A process of trying something, failing, changing tack a little and trying again. This is natural.
My youthful sales experience provided me with a great education. I was totally captivated by the whole world of starting a business – amazed that through nothing more than walking the streets, pressing doorbells and talking to people, I could build a business out of thin air, despite my being a teenager who knew nothing about anything. I could secure hundreds of regular customers and even grow my little enterprise week on week, simply by doing a good job.
Remember, at the start of your 48-hour journey, the importance of starting small. There is no shame in launching a product on a tiny scale – at a farmers’ market, or by picking up the phone, or, heaven forbid, knocking on doors.
In the end, despite my fondness for the Bacon Man and the lessons he was teaching me, I had a burning desire to ‘stick it to the Man’. Why was I spending my life working for someone else when I now knew how to do it on my own?
The urge towards self-employment overtook me and I soon resigned from the Bacon Service, telling the boss I would be striking out on my own. Entrepreneurship had come knocking.
BE WILLING TO TRY
All of these early experiences as a kid really shaped my attitude in business to this day. I was very lucky to have parents who stressed to my brother Connor and me that the most important thing in life was to find something that we loved – that to get up in the morning and do something you enjoy is success. They never tried to push us into a particular direction and always supported us, no matter how bizarre our dreams at the time might have been.
Looking back, I’m amazed that my parents showed such patience throughout my eccentric childhood attempts at making money. I’ve come to learn as an adult that most parents wouldn’t have put up with such things. They tend not to let their kids raise farmyard animals in the family home. Fair enough, I suppose. More seriously, they typically tell kids that their ideas won’t work. They short-circuit the process – rather than letting their kids learn from trying and failing, they’d rather they didn’t try at all.
Through the Bacon Man I gained a basic understanding of what it meant to be an entrepreneur. He was someone who approached life on his own terms, and actually enjoyed what he did, almost obsessively so.
Thanks to his bacon empire, he was able to go on three or four holidays a year and, at least by my calculations as a naïve teenager, he barely had to do any work – the grunt work (excuse the pun) was done by his loyal teenaged followers.
Thanks to my slightly unconventional childhood, my life has been one of hundreds of small business failures and a few successes. I’ve attempted all kinds of ideas over the years, and most of them didn’t work.
Throughout my teens, I tried more than I care to remember. Most I have tried to banish from my mind, having wasted months on them barking up the wrong tree. Some memorable experiences include an attempt to redesign nappies so that they could be flushed down the toilet rather than sent to landfill, a business selling bars of chocolate with teachers’ faces printed on them, and a company distributing biodegradable plastic cups to outdoor events. I made websites for people, printed funny T-shirts and even brewed my own beer. In my twenties I tried various other ventures – delivering healthy meals for the elderly; creating a last-minute high-end restaurant booking app; launching a healthy food subscription business – and invested my savings in all kinds of other people’s start-up ideas, most of which didn’t make a return.
When I ask people what they think of all of this, they usually reflect on how I have been able to bounce from one failure to the next, without losing enthusiasm for the overall project of being an entrepreneur. My parents always seemed delighted, if not a little puzzled, that, even when I was a child, within days of giving up one unsuccessful concept I would already be working on some other idea that I was convinced would change the world. This, I believe, is because I am not afraid of giving ideas a shot, even if there is a high possibility of failure. I absolutely have my parents to thank for that – for never discouraging me from trying.
MY FIRST WEEKEND AS AN ENTREPRENEUR
You may already know a little about my SuperJam story from my earlier book, SuperBusiness, in which I shared the adventure that I went on ‘from my gran’s kitchen to the supermarket shelves and beyond’.
After my short career with The Bacon Service, I found myself looking everywhere for a new business idea and then, one afternoon, my grandmother was making jam in her kitchen in Glasgow, just as she had for as long as I can remember. Eureka! Jam would be my product.
We made a few jars together, Gran sharing her jam-making secrets with me, and then, bursting with enthusiasm, I raced to the supermarket to buy some fruit to make a few jars of my own. While the fruit was boiling I printed some labels on the computer at home, under the imaginative-enough brand name ‘Doherty’s Preserves’. I adorned the jars with a little strip of tartan ribbon, stolen from my mum’s sewing box.
Before the bubbling jam with which I had filled the odd-shaped jars had even cooled down, I headed out to the streets with a dozen or so loaded into a plastic bucket. I strained under the weight of them as I walked from house to house. Almost everyone said no, but eventually a kind old lady who knew me from my days of selling bacon bought a jar. I was in business!
I could barely contain my excitement as she counted out her £1.80 in small coins into my hand. I no doubt beamed with enthusiasm as I knocked on door after door after door that cold Scottish evening. An hour or two later I returned to my parents, proudly holding the plastic bucket upside down over my head – I was triumphant! Before long, my success was such that the Edinburgh Evening News ran a story about me at 15 years old.
From that point on, jam completely took over my life, to the point that I decided to leave school and go full time into making it. I’m not sure whether my parents thought it would truly become my career, but they could see I was doing something I loved, and that was what mattered.
I was soon making jam every day, selling it at farmers’ markets all over Scotland. I constantly tweaked my recipes, learning from customers