Dear Entrepreneur. Danny Bailey
a business is not straightforward and there are many aspects that you just can’t plan. My advice is to be open to changes. Go with the flow as much as you can, but you will come across many obstacles that need a decision that you might not have allowed for in order to move forward. You have to be open to new challenges and opportunities.
Why I started my business
I never felt that I belonged in the educational system and this was a very unhappy time for me. It wasn’t until I was 11 years old that finally, after an Educational Psychologist assessment, I was diagnosed with dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia and short-term memory loss coupled with a high IQ. Although this was a massive relief for me and I did not see it as a disadvantage at all, being taken out of school to be home tutored was a necessity. I was bullied badly and it was a group decision between my family and I.
My love of animals led me to a job at a local falconry centre where I learnt that I had an amazing ability to absorb information, and for the first time was able to read book after book because it was a subject that fascinated me. I also took to speaking publicly with ease and used this new-found skill to talk to the public about the birds at the centre. It was whilst walking through a garden centre at work that I came across a book for sale, Belgian Chocolates and Cakes. I bought it and set about absorbing everything I had read. I began to get requests to make chocolate cakes for family and friends and as word spread I seemed to be spending more and more of my time in the kitchen fulfilling orders. As they say, that’s when I had the Eureka! moment and decided to turn my passion into a business. The rest is history. To cut a very long story short, I became the youngest supplier to Waitrose at 13, Sainsbury’s at 14 and Selfridges at 16.
If you are wondering why my company is called “Chokolit”, it came about simply because being dyslexic that is how I spell chocolate. When I needed to come up with a brand name I realised without thinking I already had.
Why to start a business rather than work for someone else
Running your own business is the most rewarding, exciting and exhilarating career you could ever choose but nothing will test your strength, commitment and perseverance more!
I aspire to be a recognised entrepreneur, to grow a global business and to make an impact in my industry and to the lives of young people across the world.
Good luck
Louis Barnett
Founder, Chokolit
CIVA
Dear Entrepreneur,
Here are six bits of advice from my experience which I hope you will find useful.
1. If you have got a good idea for a business, then do something. A good idea is only a good idea if it leads on to something, and it is up to you to take the first step. The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, who was the father of Taoism some 2,500 years ago, said that, “A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step”. Take that first step, and you’re on your way. The next steps will become apparent, and you will learn from experience as you go along. Fail to take that first step, and nothing will happen.
2. You can learn from failure as much as you can learn from success. So if things go wrong, sit back and think why. What could you have done differently? How will you turn your failure into success? My favourite quote is from the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett: “No Matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
3. If you have a problem, think, think, think... and also ask others for their ideas. Some years back I set up a publishing imprint to produce books for people running charities. I wanted to create something which would generate a lot of income in order to make the publishing operation sustainable. So I took a hot bath, and started thinking. Could I think of something which people really needed and wanted, which could be sold at a relatively high price, and which would go out of date quite quickly? I thought and thought. And then I had a “Eureka” moment, and like Archimedes I jumped out of the bath with my good idea. It was to publish a guide for charities to company giving. I knew that it would be wanted, but at that stage I had no idea as to how I would get the information. I did find a way of doing that, and the book became the first in a growing series of grant directories which have all been updated every two or three years over the past 25 years, and the information has now been put online as well for people to subscribe to. This good idea became the cornerstone of a million-pound publishing operation.
4. Start with the market and work backwards. What do people want that relates to what you want to do? How can you provide it? What networks and distribution systems can you work with? One of the programmes I co-founded is UnLtd, the foundation which makes cash awards to emerging social entrepreneurs for them to turn their ideas into projects. When assessing applications I found that we had so many people with an idea for a product (e.g. reading books for dyslexic children or a campaign to beat bullying). Most were so enthused about their idea and wanted to produce a publication or a website that gave people good information but they had neglected to think about how people might access this information. I ran a series of workshops for them, including getting readers for your publication and getting visitors to your website, in order to get them to think about this. They all were able to come up with some good ideas which would make their idea more successful. And more recently, I met someone who has developed an innovative cooking stove which is carbon negative (that is, it returns more carbon to the environment than it burns). We came up with the idea of starting with outdoor barbecues, because these would be easier to sell than kitchen stoves and would not require changed behaviour or involve large installation costs. This would be a good point to start from, to get the technology understood and into people’s homes.
5. Take risks. This is the essence of entrepreneurism. Have the confidence that yours is a good idea, and then do your utmost to make it work. Don’t wait until you have everything neatly in place. That may never happen. The biggest risk I ever took was to launch an annual charity fair. I met someone and was talking about my idea, and he said that he had tried something like that and it didn’t work. That was like a red rag to me. I wanted to prove that it could work. We hired an exhibition centre for four days, and the cost was greater than my organisation’s reserves. So if it failed, the charity would go out of business. My trustees said that if I thought I could pull it off, I should do it. So I got started. And one of the nicest moments in my professional life was seeing the exhibitors putting up their stands on the day before the opening, then seeing the queues of people at the box office and meeting the hundred or so people who were running the workshops. We did a little better than break even: It was a success!
6. Continue to innovate. Your good idea is fresh and new, and that is what will propel you forward; but it needs refreshing, as otherwise it can become old and stale, and other people will be developing their own good ideas. I have set up a crowdfunding website to help people raise money for good causes. But so have a lot of other people. Ours is called Buzzbank, and is the only crowdfunding website that enables people to raise money through loans as well as donations, and which offers the possibility of backers having a share of the revenue from the projects that they are supporting. There is a lot of interest in what we are doing, but we need to do more than speak out at conferences and fairs. So alongside doing this, I am also trying to create some innovative ideas for how the website could be used, for example, for students to get the money they need to pay for their education, or to create online giving circles where people come together in their communities (it may be a school, a church or a neighbourhood) and together decide to support things that they jointly decide they want to make happen, or to link crowdfunding with start-up support, so that as well as getting the money, people assemble a crowd of people behind them who can cheer them on and provide other forms of support (including their time, their skills, their ideas and their contacts) which will help make the venture a success.
So