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“HOW TO HANDLE FAST GROWTH? ASK FOR HELP”
Connie Nam felt her confidence draining away. The founder of London-based lifestyle jewellery brand Astrid & Miyu had built a fast-growing, multi-million-pound company, but that didn’t matter. As unbelievable as it sounds, imposter syndrome was creeping in. The Seoul-born, US-raised Londoner explains why: “I’d hired someone who’d started to challenge how I ran the business. They were an expert in that field; I wasn’t. I saw myself as a founder, not a CEO, so the criticism hit home.”
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HOW I BUILT A BUSINESS WITH BABY SPICE
As business meetings go, it was unusual. It’s not every day that an entrepreneur with a background in manufacturing pitches to a Spice Girl. But somehow, this rendezvous was going ahead. And Christopher Money was pumped. The year was 2016 and Christopher had moved heaven and earth to get an audience with Emma Bunton. But the outcome of his proposal was in the balance. The idea that Baby Spice would say no to his business partnership invitation wasn’t worth thinking about, as the idea she’d say yes was so incredible. *Enter huge amounts of adrenaline.
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OONI Pizza Ovens: ‘We didn’t disrupt this market; we created it’
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.
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‘WE’RE FOUR YEARS IN AND WE’VE JUST TURNED DOWN AN £85M BID’
Until last year, Wayne Starkey still filed his own VAT returns. Many co-founders of four-year-old companies do – old habits die hard and it saves a few quid in accountancy fees. What VAT-DIYers don’t do, however, is turn down £85m buy-out bids. Ever. Yet that’s the jaw-dropping offer Wayne and co-founder James Whiting rejected just a few months ago. Those facts indicate how far and how fast The Skinny Food Co has come since its 2018 launch. They also reveal how down-to-earth yet ambitious these two entrepreneurs are.
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ON TRACK TO £45M TURNOVER AND “I STILL DON’T SEE MYSELF AS SUCCESSFUL”
When Wayne Spriggs’ company, Lusso, was chosen to kit out the bathroom of The Equinox Hotel’s penthouse suite on Manhattan’s West Side in 2019, he couldn’t help but smile. Flashing through his mind were vivid memories of the two-bedroom houses he used to fix up in his hometown of Middlesbrough. The Equinox was a world away. Yet without starting out on those humble houses in England’s Northeast, the glamorous New York hotel project would never have come about. Moreover, if Wayne hadn’t taken that first step, Lusso – on track to turn over £45m this year – would not exist.
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“We started out with one cow”
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: