3 Finding Support

I convinced my gran to teach me her jam-making secrets and give me all of the advice that I needed to start making it myself. We spent an afternoon making jam together, which I found fascinating, and I got super excited about the prospect of starting my own little jam business.

When we got home, I ran round to the supermarket and invested about £2 in a few oranges and a bag of sugar. I made the first few jars of marmalade that afternoon and took them round the street in a plastic bucket. I couldn't even wait for the jars to cool down properly before visiting the neighbours, I was too excited.

I returned home having sold those first few jars with about £4 in my pocket. I felt like I had accomplished something huge: I had created a profit completely on my own, with nothing more than a few oranges and some sugar. I waited anxiously for a week, before returning to those first few customers to hear their verdicts on my jam.

All of them had loved the jam and immediately bought more; some even bought extra jars for their friends. Their support encouraged me to start visiting more houses and to come up with some new recipes.

I was all fired up about my little business and couldn't wait to start knocking on doors to build up a list of regular customers to deliver to.

I designed some labels on the computer and started calling the business ‘Doherty's Preserves’. I printed off some leaf-lets that I could give to people, explaining the story behind the business and also how high quality the products were. My homemade preserves were all natural and made with top-quality local fruit. I wanted to make sure that my customers and potential customers knew why the products were so great.

Slowly Building Up

Within a couple of months I was visiting about 50 houses every month and had a range of three products, two jams and one marmalade. I was making about £20 a week at this point, for tens of hours of work. That didn't matter, though; I knew that I would soon be able to invest in bigger pans and would be able to make much more jam in the evenings after school.

I soon had a few of my friends helping with the deliveries and was making hundreds of jars of jam every month. The business wasn't really making much profit, but I had a good feeling about the future and it was a huge amount of fun.

I began getting invited to local events, like church fêtes and gala days, where I set up a stall to sell my increasingly popular products. My school even let me set up a stall at the Christmas concert and at parents' evenings. All of this helped to build a brand locally and people started talking about ‘the jam boy’. Word was spreading about my business and local people were supporting me in whatever ways they could.

There is no doubt that the first place you should look for support is your friends, family and your local community. They are more likely to be open and honest with you about what they think are the pitfalls of your idea and I'm sure they'll be happy to support you in whatever way they can.

My family and friends were usually my guinea pigs for deciding whether or not a new recipe was good enough to be added to the range. Some recipes didn't make it past this stage, like banana jam, which just didn't look very nice!

Having been going for about a year, the business was growing nicely and I had started generating strong sales every week. I was also managing to keep up with the production, since I had invested in two large pans and was getting help with labelling and deliveries from my friends and my younger brother, Connor.

I had to work very hard to keep all of this under control in the weekends and after school. Once we were making deliveries all over the local area, it became hard to figure out how to grow the business. I was also struggling to make a profit from all of this hard work, especially by the time I had paid my friends something for their time. Pretty soon, I needed to come up with an idea for taking the business on to the next level, an idea that was shortly to arrive.

Taking the Leap

Encouraged by all of the support that people were giving me for my fledgling business, I decided to leave school to focus all of my energies on trying to turn what was really just a jam-making hobby into my career. I was little more than 16 years old at this point and, as you can imagine, making the decision to go into the ‘real world’ seemed quite daunting.

Starting a business can be a lonely experience. It is usually something that you work on alone, or maybe with a business partner. It's your project in the garden shed, your obsession that nobody else around you quite gets.

A big question is always who you can turn to for help. If, like me, your family doesn't run its own business and none of your friends do, it can sometimes feel like you're the only entrepreneur around.

For me, being so young when I started out, I wasn't very sure where to turn to for advice. Although my family and friends were all very excited to see me setting up a business and supported me in whatever way they could, getting an idea off the ground wasn't something any of them had experience of.

Finding a Mentor

I've been amazed by the number of people willing to give advice to young people starting out in business. I benefited from the help of a successful local entrepreneur called Kevin Dorren, who had already built a dot-com company and floated it on the stock market. Having set up a successful business himself, supplying low-carbohydrate snack bars to big supermarkets, Kevin got in touch after reading about my story in the local newspaper.

He said that he loved to see young people with ideas for their own companies and that my story reminded himself of when he was young, trying to set up a small business. He explained that a lot of people had given him advice over the years that helped him get his ideas off the ground, and so he was more than happy to share the lessons that he had learned along the way with someone else starting out on the same path.

Kevin agreed to meet with me every few months and he taught me all about his business, explained how supermarkets worked and shared stories about where things hadn't gone so well for him.

He also put me in touch with some of his contacts, such as suppliers and even potential customers along the way, and proved to be a great sounding board for my sometimes mad ideas.

I was also lucky enough to be put in touch with an ex-Tesco buyer called Tony, who had left the world of large corporates to set up his own company. He had registered with a government scheme that connected businesspeople with young entrepreneurs who needed a mentor.

Everyone starting out in business should try to find someone like Kevin or Tony. There are government programmes to link entrepreneurs with a mentor and also charities like The Prince's Trust that can help you find one. But I would say that the best thing to do is to find a success story that really inspires you, or an entrepreneur whom you very much admire. Find your hero. Get in touch with them, tell them your story and explain your dream; ask if you can meet them at their office for 20 minutes to ask a bit of advice.

When you meet them, you absolutely must respect their time; they are helping you out of the goodness of their heart. They are giving up their time to give you advice because they enjoy helping other entrepreneurs to get their ideas off the ground. Make sure that you have useful, to-the-point questions that can really make the most of your meeting with them. Ask how they did it, what they would do in your situation, who you should be speaking to, what you should be reading and so on.

You're looking for someone who has been there and done it before and who can point out the pitfalls, share stories of their mistakes and make connections to people who might be able to turn your ideas into reality.

Experienced businesspeople are willing to spend their time giving advice in this way because it offers them the opportunity to learn about a whole new business than their own. You have to bear in mind that it is down to you to respect the relationship and not ask too much of your mentors. You should only really ask them major questions about the direction of your business, not day-to-day things that you could easily work out yourself. If you get on well with your mentor and they learn something from the experience, they will no doubt be willing to give you a lot of their time and really help to make your ideas happen.

Creating a Board

If you want to find someone who can devote more time to helping to come up with ideas for your business and solve problems that you are facing, you might want to consider putting together a board. This is where you employ a few experienced people to give you advice on the direction you should take the business in. They won't work in the company day to day, but will be able to give you advice on what direction you should take the business in, based on their experiences. They will have a totally different perspective of your business than you do, which means they will come up with different opinions and ideas for what you should do next.

Your board might only consist of one or two other people whom you can meet with as often as you feel is appropriate; something between four and eight times a year would be fairly standard for a start-up business.

Finding people to invite onto your board is a lot like finding a mentor. You are looking for someone who has different experiences than your own, who has perhaps had success in a similar kind of business and ideally who has contacts you can take advantage of to grow your company.

How you attract these people to sit on your board is down to you, but you can consider offering them a small stake in your company in exchange for their expertise; they will be motivated most to help you succeed if you do.

Alternatively, you can simply pay them a fee for their time, making them a non-executive director, a role that I hold in a number of fast-growing food and drink companies. Their name being connected to the company alone, if they are well known, can be worth its weight in gold. In essence, a non-executive director is someone whom you employ to provide advice on the direction of the business, by meeting up with you for board meetings throughout the year.

Raising Finance

Going from the eureka moment of SuperJam to actually seeing the finished product on the shelves was a process that required hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment. Since I wasn't in a position to raise any finance from a bank or investor, being so young, I had to figure out how to get my ideas off the ground without much financial backing at all.

My family certainly wasn't in a position to lend me any money and I had little more than a few thousand pounds in savings, mostly money that I had made from selling home-made jam on a relatively small scale for the previous year or two.

Money was needed for product development, design, jars, lids, fruit and promoting the story to the press. All of those things cost money that I simply didn't have, so I had to consider all of the different options available to me for raising finance. I spoke to charities, such as The Prince's Trust, and even met with potential investors and banks, sharing my business plan with them.

Grants and Soft Loans

I needed some money to pay for the first supermarket promotions, printing leaflets, travelling to meetings with supermarket buyers and other bits and pieces.

I applied to the Prince's Trust (the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust in Scotland) for a £5,000 loan and also for a £1,000 grant.

It's a wonderful charity, backed by Prince Charles, supporting hundreds if not thousands of young people to get set up in business. It provides loans, grants and advice to anyone with a bright idea who is struggling to raise money in the mainstream way.

I was one such person and the charity loved my idea. It agreed to issue the loan and grant and, as it does with every loan, agreed not to break my legs if things didn't work out and I ended up not being able to pay it back.

There are all kinds of places to look for grants, which is money that you don't have to pay back, and I have listed some of them at the back of this book. The government often offers grants to people who are starting up, especially if you are investing in research and development or are likely to create lots of jobs.

There's also a huge amount of support for businesses that plan on exporting to other countries. In the case of SuperJam, we were invited to exhibit our products at a trade fair in Dubai. This helped us to get our products stocked by some distributors and retailers over there. The government contributed towards the cost of flights and paid for our stand at the event, which was fantastic support and made it possible for SuperJam to promote its products in a market that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to reach.

Borrowing from the Bank

If you aren't eligible for a grant or a soft loan from the government or someone like The Prince's Trust, you might have to consider borrowing money from the bank.

I don't want to recommend that anyone risk their house and pension on their idea; there is always another way that doesn't involve taking crazy risks that could wind up ruining your life. I have seen many entrepreneurs learn these risks the hard way. In most cases, you should do whatever you can to avoid signing a personal guarantee for the debt of your business.

If you have to borrow money, check out the Enterprise Finance Guarantee, which allows you to borrow the money to start your business from a high-street bank without risking your house. Instead, for a modest fee, the government will become the guarantor on your loan; which means that if your idea doesn't work out, the government will pay back your loan. That way, the bank can't hound you personally to get its money back.

There could be all sorts of other options available to you, other than just taking out a loan from the bank. Depending on what you need the money for, the bank may be able to help you out in a way that doesn't place any risk on your shoulders.

For instance, you might need to borrow money for working capital, things like stock and providing credit to your customers. In this case, it might make sense for you to ‘factor’ your debtors, which is where the bank pays you up front for money that you know is coming in further down the line; taking a fee along the way, of course. That way, you won't have to worry about collecting money from your customers and by getting their money in the door quicker, you might not need to borrow as much from the bank.

Finding an Investor

You will no doubt already have given some thought to the option of finding an investor for your idea; perhaps inspired by BBC's Dragon's Den. Although I didn't choose this route, it makes a lot of sense for many entrepreneurs.

Finding someone to invest in your idea could mean taking on a partner who has the cash to back you and also wants to work in the business with you. Or it might mean finding an ‘angel investor’, who specializes in putting up the money to get ideas off the ground, to buy a stake in the business.

Who you choose to bring into your business, whether day to day or merely as an outside investor, will be one of the biggest decisions you make. You need to be cautious not to share too much control of your business with someone else, unless you're totally sure it's the best thing to do.

I would personally be fearful that if I took on outside investment and they didn't understand why I do things the way I do, they might not support things like our charity work or let me try out crazy ideas every once and again.

However, as long as your investor understands your vision for where you're trying to go and can make a worthwhile contribution to help you get there, by supplying you with contacts, advice or ideas, it can be a beautiful relationship.

Getting Your Customers to Back You

Something I'm really fascinated by is the phenomenon of entrepreneurs asking consumers to back their idea from the offset. This involves getting the individuals who love their idea to buy a share in it, or even pre-order the product before it has been made. This can raise all of the money needed to get prototypes created, or set up premises or produce the first batch.

This idea has really taken off in the music industry with sites like slicethepie.com, where music fans can buy a ‘share’ in an up-and-coming musician. The artist can use the money to record their album and, once it's launched, shares the profits with their fans. A site called kickstarter.com expands the concept to include filmmakers, performers, designers and all sorts of other creative types. What's wonderful about the internet is that no matter how crazy your idea for a film or how niche your comic book concept, there are thousands of people out there somewhere who would love to see it happen. There are all kinds of ideas that banks or conventional investors wouldn't touch but that fans are more than happy to back.

Although this is a really unconventional way to raise money, I really love it and think it's a model I would consider if SuperJam ever needs to raise money in the future. I can't think of anyone better to have as a shareholder than someone who really loves the brand and wants to see it succeed in the long term. I'd go as far as to say that the kind of people who would invest in a band they love or a brand they love are the kind of people who would tell all their friends about it, send in their ideas and do everything they could to help make it a success.

The real value in getting your customer to back your idea is that you can get instant feedback from the very people who are going to be buying your product. By involving as many people as possible in the process of developing your business, you will gain access to a far wider range of ideas and opinions than you would have on your own.

If potential customers feel that they have been involved in developing your product and business, there's no doubt that they will be very loyal to it. If you've taken on board their contribution and made what they think is a great product, they're certainly going to buy it from you when it launches. They might even proudly tell their friends about your product or service, and how they helped you get started, once it gets off the ground.

Your potential customers' feedback on your concept is gold dust. If all of your customers tell that you should bring it out in red or with chocolate chips or that you should offer free delivery, that's exactly what you should do. If you can involve them in the process of developing your product, you're on to a winner.