This is a chat I have often, mainly with entrepreneurs who over-value their brand, occasionally with people who are (potentially) being screwed in a sale. The 1st answer is that your brand is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, but understanding why someone should pay helps. Understanding margin and brand worth One […]
Since selling Pooch and Mutt I get a lot of investment opportunities. Most want my money to spend on these things, or need it because they have spent too much on them already. These are my big red flags: 1) BRAND: You do NOT need to spend £££ on a big agency to get started. […]
Getting your product into supermarkets is not about luck and it's not about hard work… its about understanding who you are selling to. (Most FMCG brands get this wrong). The brand I started has sold over £50m through UK supermarkets. With no corporate FMCG training I built Pooch & Mutt from scratch. Within a year […]
A few disclaimers to start with; First, I am not an accountant, second, every business is different... although the problems that most businesses, especially FMCG businesses face are pretty similar. What I am is an entrepreneur who set up and successfully exited a business with 95% equity (my mum had the other 5% for a […]
Have a listen to a podcast interview that I recorded with Chloe Thomas on Apple, Spotify, Google or the player above. This was a really enjoyable podcast to record with great questions, (hopefully) unexpected answers and definitely some fun tangents. Enjoy!
The other day I was listening to Mark Zuckerberg on The Tim Ferris podcast talking about values and he made a really good point that really got me thinking. Values have been important to Pooch & Mutt from day 1, they have always been integral to the business, but like many founder-led businesses, they weren’t […]
A few years ago, on a course at The London Stock Exchange, I was introduced to the concept of Employer Brand Strategies. This was something new to me, which I found especially surprising, as I have spent so much of my career developing, implementing, learning about, writing about, and talking about brand strategies. I had […]
"Life-work balance, not work-life balance." Apple: https://apple.co/3yL5aGkSpotify: https://spoti.fi/32e4TiNGoogle: https://bit.ly/33xWEi7
A few years ago I was recruiting a member of the Pooch & Mutt sales team and had a chat with one of our advisors. I told him that we were being asked by some candidates if they could work remotely and asked if he thought it would be a good idea to let people […]
In the pre-pandemic world, I used to meet up with friends maybe once or twice a year and play a game of poker. For me, this was less about the poker and more about the occasion, seeing people, having a chat… as we all know men find it very difficult to just chat without some […]
According to Entrepreneur.com “80% of Purpose-led brands outperform the market” According to Deloitte Insights “Purpose-driven companies… grow three times faster on average than their competitors” According to Forbes “Consumers are 4-6x more likely to purchase, protect and champion purpose-driven companies” And therein may lie the problem… the cat is out of the bag. If everyone […]
This is part 2 of an article on cashflow. Click here to read part 1. I had this explained to me using the example of a supermarket. Let’s say you open a supermarket and stock it with £1m worth of goods (I have no idea of the value of goods there are in a supermarket!). […]
Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feyneman said “if you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don't”. The same is probably true for most of us with cashflow. We think we understand it… ‘make sure more money comes in than goes out’... but most people, and most entrepreneurs, don’t. When someone tells you about profitable businesses that […]
Pet food brand Pooch & Mutt puts sales centre stage to accelerate growth. Founder Guy Blaskey says: “Instead of spending hours debating between two products or marketing approaches, you can stick both on Facebook or Google and with a £50 ad budget find out what customers think.” Mr Blaskey believes it’s the only way to […]
Guy Blaskey is the founder and managing director of Pooch and Mutt, a dog food brand that he set up in 2008 and is now registering an annual turnover of £4.5m. He admits that he made many mistakes before unlocking the keys to growth. "When I started, I thought that all a business needed was […]
There are no people out there desperate for your product or service, despite what you may think. However groundbreaking/ incredible/ amazing your product or service may be, people who don’t know about it are probably getting on OK without it, in blissful ignorance. Before the car people were happy to walk or ride a horse. […]
Borrow ideas from other sectors Pooch and Mutt, a healthy dog food company that wants to challenge the leading pet brands, has used a range of online advertising campaigns to grow brand awareness. "We run ads on Facebook and Google AdWords, with our current campaign returning £25 for every £5 invested," says founder, Guy Blaskey. […]
This article by Guy Blaskey was originally published on smarta.com Stoicism is a school of philosophy that is looked over by many philosophy professors and students. Unlike other schools of philosophy the stoics were less bothered with searching for the meaning of life, and more bothered with how they should live their lives. The three most […]
This article was written by Guy Blaskey for the e-book "Going for Growth" published by Sage. Before we start to look at marketing for growth it makes sense to look at marketing in general, what is, why it exists and where it has come from. In ‘the good old days’ marketing was effectively taking things […]
This article by Guy Blaskey was originally published by the London Evening Standard If we knew what products were going to be huge successes and which were going to be total flops before we spent money on them it would make business life a whole easier. It’s difficult to predict the future, but there are some […]
"I work on the basis that if you ask friends and family they will tell you what you want to hear, and if you ask anyone else they will tell you what their ‘predictable’ and ‘rational’ self would do, but anyone who has read Dan Ariely’s ‘predictable irrational’ knows this is not what they will […]
