Business origin stories are often intriguing and inspiring, but that of free-range meat-box supplier field&flower is even better – it’s sublime. Because co-founders James Mansfield and James Flower launched their £13m food business in 2012 not with a glitzy website or fancy app, but with a single cow. The two James’s (we’ll stick to surnames from now on for clarity) met at agricultural college, but this wasn’t your typical farmer-farmer friendship. Mansfield is a South London lad who somehow ended up studying agriculture:

Entrepreneurial journeys don’t come much wilder. In March 2021, Juliet Barratt watched through tear-filled eyes as Cadbury owner Mondelez International bought the business she’d co-launched in her spare bedroom 11 years ago. The deal was reportedly worth £200m. So why the tears? Quite simply because Grenade was her baby…

Chief executive Marie Owen founded LS Productions in 2006. Today, it is a global production partner to brands and production companies, providing location and production services from hubs in the UK and most recently Malta. Clients include: Aston Martin, Adidas, HBO, Netflix, and Ralph Lauren and they have worked on projects featuring A-list talent like Meryl Streep, Harry Styles, Cristiano Ronado, Chris Evans and Ed Sheeran.

Steve Adams co-founded Mattress Online from his spare bedroom in 2003. In 2022, the company bounced into the FEBE Growth 100 with sales of £33m. Read on to find out how Steve’s done it and what he’s learned along the way. Steve Adams felt lower than the price he’d got for selling his e-commerce agency. […]

Watching three young entrepreneurs trying to chase down some of the globe’s biggest brands is a glorious sight. There’s energy, determination, a tenacious, terrier-like underdog spirit, and beneath it all a beautifully ambitious yet perfectly rational question: Why can’t we be bigger than Heinz? The answer, as any entrepreneur will tell you, is no reason at all…

Pizza oven maker Ooni’s year-on-year growth is turbo-charged, but the stat that most exhilarates co- founder and co-ceo Darina Garland is not directly related to revenue at all. The number that makes her happiest is the company’s Employee Net Promoter Score, which is a whopping 74. The global average eNPS – a measure of employee engagement – is 12, with anything above 30 regarded as outstanding. So 74 is an outlier that proves that Ooni’s team absolutely loves working there.