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 […]
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 […]
This article originally appeared in The Times on 10/01/22 Pooch & Mutt, Kettering Pooch & Mutt was a sideline for Guy Blaskey when he first started the healthy dog food brand in 2008. He started selling supplements for dogs after successfully treating his family dog’s hip complaint using horse supplements made by his mother’s company, […]
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 […]
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 […]
There’s a new series of Dragon’s Den on TV, but very little has changed. Very little has changed in the 16 years that it’s been on the TV. Dragon’s Den infuriates me. It is probably the most high-profile business show on TV. It should be about encouraging and championing entrepreneurship. It should be about how […]
About 10 to 15 years ago “everyone” was talking about Behavioral Economics. (Obviously by “everyone” I mean a select few people in marketing and business circles, but it was a big thing). Dan Ariely published “Predictably Irrational” in 2008, which was the first book I read on the subject, in the same year as Martin […]
Innovation is often praised and discussed as something that we should be aiming for, something that is always valued, but is that really the case? Are real innovations rewarded? Let's start by looking at some real innovators and what happened to them. Alan Turing Alan Turning basically invented the computer and helped the allies win […]
I’m a huge fan of business books and have probably read more than I ever needed to, some I have loved, some… not so much. Some I liked the main idea, some I didn’t, but me liking the arguments and them being right are very very far from the same thing. Seth Godin is one […]
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 […]
Pooch and Mutt: becoming top dog Guy Blaskey founded supplements business Pooch and Mutt in 2008 after his own dog became ill and discovered there was little on the market to treat his pet. The business was doing well online, but Blaskey was unsatisfied with his “low volume, high margin” businesses. However following the creation of some […]
