The aims of the book

This book sets out to explain the benefits of implementing this significant mid-career change by moving from the status of employee to employer. We will encourage you to seriously consider whether making this change is right for you. We suggest how to do it in such a way as to provide a very satisfying career change financially, physically and emotionally and throughout we illustrate with our own experiences.

The messages we hope to deliver are:

1. Experience is everything. For anyone who has worked in successful organisations, the skills developed over time are strongly aligned to those you can use in a small business. If you look at The Times top 100 fastest growing small businesses, you will see a wealth of experience at the helm of these companies. These entrepreneurs have years of grounding in large organisations behind them.
   You can bring your corporate skills and the professional standards that often accompany them to a small environment where you can add the benefits of being fast, flexible and non-bureaucratic. This mix can allow you to compete alongside large and small organisations alike. However, you do need to be clear on your expertise and experience in order to be able to put them to best use and understand where you may need to find skills that you lack.
2. Running your own business can give you real control of your life. The world of employment has become increasingly uncertain over the last 10 years both through recession and the speed of technological change. Being your own boss will ensure that you are in control of your work life and can therefore plan for your future more realistically.
3. It is easier than you think. Compared to the complexity of a large company, managing a small business is much simpler. If you put in place simple and focused planning and organise yourself well, you will be able to make the key decisions to drive your business profitably.

We brought into our new company sales, marketing and financial experience, which was crucial to our success. The skills and experience developed in a corporate career, put into action in an environment that you control, is a central theme of the book. You can set the tone of the business, set the speed at which you operate and importantly focus its direction on meeting your long-term needs. We also developed new skills along the journey, most importantly the need to keep focused on the core business proposition.

We will highlight the advantages of working in a smaller company including the absence of politics, the simplicity of business aims and the gratification that comes with reacting to things quickly.

Who this book is for

We hope that many of the topics we discuss will apply to anyone starting a business, irrespective of scale and ambition. The focus though is on those individuals with a middle or senior management career within the corporate world, setting up a business. We will touch upon how businesses can be acquired through purchase or franchise licence, but our emphasis will be upon a start-up company.

You will be in good company. There are officially some 4.5 million private SME enterprises in the UK. A small medium enterprise (SME) is defined as any business hiring up to 249 persons. The majority are in fact enterprises run as sole traders without employees. However, there are still nearly 1.2m businesses employing less than 50 people and as a group pay the salaries of 10 million people in the UK. Over the last 10 years the number of SMEs has grown by over 30%, around a million extra businesses. In short, the figures demonstrate clearly that small businesses are a pivotal part of the UK economy and many experts predict rates of growth to increase alongside the technological revolution.

How we have set out the book

We have written the book in four parts, to reflect the various stages in the journey from employee to entrepreneur.

In Part 1 The reasons for going it alone, we examine why, when and what you might do if you are considering leaving corporate life. We also discuss managing this exit, whether you are doing it voluntarily or through redundancy.

We then move on in Part 2 to working through the practicalities of the start-up period, including how to brand your venture, minimise the risks and obtain support. By the end of Part 2, your business will have completed its formal Business Plan and be ready to trade.

Part 3 deals with the “nuts and bolts of running your business”. Firstly, looking at the short term as you organise the operation and create your working environment. As the business begins to mature, we look at how to stay on track and manage your business relationships. Finally, we consider how best to manage growth and deal with change.

Lastly in Part 4 we share some less conventional lessons, situations and opinions that we came across during our tenure as business owners. These are not meant to be all encompassing, rather thought provoking, including some cautionary tales to be wary of.

Throughout the book we recount some of our actual experiences to illustrate the points of the chapter. These more personal recollections are presented in handwritten script.

Our story

Our story in many respects is not very unusual. We started out as work colleagues and ended up as best friends. This goes to prove two things: work can be a very fruitful place to find your business partners and it is possible to be friends and work together.

In 1996, we set up Ubevco Distributors Ltd with our business partner, Dennis Miller. We traded the business for 10 years after which our exit plan allowed us to retire with the accumulated profits.

We first met back in 1986. Dennis and Chris were both working at FCO, an advertising agency. Chris was the Finance Director whilst Dennis had a marketing background in the brewing industry and had joined the agency in an Account Director role. Catherine became a client when she joined Guinness with FCO as her ad agency.

We only worked together for about 18 months at that time before all going on to different jobs. But we stayed in touch. Dennis and Chris became good friends and golfing partners, eventually working together again at Maison Caurette. Dennis and Catherine became partners in life.

In 1993, after taking some time out from work with a young son, Catherine also joined the Maison Caurette Group. Whilst we all worked in different parts if the company, work once again united us and it was here for the first time that we contemplated going into business for ourselves.

Maison Caurette underwent a less than successful merger with another London drinks company, forming the Dolomore Group. The business owners (mainly financial institutions) were running out of patience that the company would generate the financial return they expected and decided the best option would be to break up the group. So we were offered the chance to purchase the beer agency business.

Before we had the chance to do the deal, the Dolomore Group went into receivership, putting an end to our deal and leaving us all redundant, with a statutory redundancy cheque amounting to a few hundred pounds each. We set up Ubevco on 1 April, 1996. Our earlier planning on the buy-out project had put us in good stead from the point of view of readiness. We were confident that there was a market opportunity for the business and that we could put the necessary finance in place. We had to draw on a lot of contacts for help to allow us to quickly put in place the logistics requirements.

Dennis took on the mantle of Managing Director and oversaw the sales function, Catherine became Marketing Director and Chris managed all the commercial functions including finance and logistics. As well as the three of us, we had two non-executive shareholders; both with financial investment backgrounds and we only had to invest £10,000 each to start the business. Finally, we invited 10 of our old colleagues to join us. As they too had been made redundant, they had nothing to lose and so we were operationally ready. With 10 employees and £50,000 in the bank, we started trading. The Mexican suppliers of Sol Lager had agreed to move their brand into the new business but we had more difficulty persuading the other agency brands given their experience with the Dolomore Group. However, Asia Pacific Breweries (APB) with Tiger Beer, South African Breweries (SAB) with Castle and Moosehead Breweries all eventually decided to give us some time to prove we were up to the task.

At the time, the decision for Dennis and Catherine to both be involved in the business did not seem especially risky. They had worked in the same business, albeit in different parts, for a couple of years and after all, were both out of work. Clearly, there was financial risk; both had to invest in the new company and derive an income from it. However, equally, both were confident that even if the venture did not succeed it would not have harmed their chances of furthering their respective careers elsewhere. So the risk versus the benefit offered by this opportunity seemed acceptable.

The first few weeks were very difficult – the receiver was unhelpful and maintaining enough supply to meet the demands of customers was a key priority. But as the weeks went by and we imported fresh stock the problems receded.

After a couple of months, we were offered the chance to take the Red Bull brand into the portfolio. Red Bull had set up its own company three years earlier and the infrastructure and advertising costs conspired to produce heavy losses, which the company was not keen to carry. It closed down the business and moved the brand into our business – strong proof that there was a place for our concept. We took on some of the Red Bull employees and they set up a small office in London from which they would oversee the brand marketing.

The next five years passed very quickly. All the beer brands showed healthy growth. We built an amazing team of people who were the source of great enjoyment and sometimes amusement for all of us.

Red Bull started to grow almost immediately and showed steady progress over the next two years. By the end of 1998, we had quadrupled the volume to around a million cases and then in 1999 we saw the volume shoot up to 5 million cases, over twice the budgeted volume. We had built up the team to around 50 people by this stage.

In many respects, this should have been the highlight. We were more successful and profitable than even our most optimistic plans. The big issue that we faced was the imbalance in the portfolio. Red Bull had gone from being the third largest brand to being the biggest and accounted for 85% of our volume.

The Red Bull brand was now more than big enough to sustain its own infrastructure. And whilst when it joined the portfolio it proved that our business model worked, it now highlighted the key flaw. The more successful we were in building the brands the point would come when they would be big enough to have their own UK operation.

But we were lucky and Red Bull waited another year before it decided to do so. By the time Red Bull announced its intention to go it alone in July 2001, we had increased the workforce to 130 and had turnover in excess of £105 million. But to be honest, we had had enough of working with Red Bull. It is hard to imagine being glad when you lose £90 million from your projected turnover but, in truth, running the business at that stage had lost much of its charm.

We had a very challenging five months as we restructured the business and transferred Red Bull and 60 of our people to the new Red Bull organisation. But our beer business was strong. We had just launched the Pilsner Urquell brand into the portfolio and after reducing our cost base we were confident that we were financially viable – just – to carry on.

And that is what we did for another five years. The joy returned as we had a better balanced business and a more manageable number of employees. We continued to see strong growth on all our beer brands and we still made a few mistakes along the way with a couple of new brands that didn’t work. But the business model proved strong and we stayed profitable.

However, we began to discuss the longer term. We could not see ourselves doing the same thing for another 10 years. There were signs in the marketplace with worrying implications for our model as global consolidation of the major brewers moved ownership of brands into fewer hands. We felt that if we were to survive in the longer term we would need to strategically change direction and we questioned whether we had the energy and drive to do that. Our success so far had made us individually financially secure.

We agreed that the best course of action was to find an exit plan. After exploring all the options we decided to sell the business to APB who owned the Tiger beer brand. We worked with them on a plan whereby they effectively took over the business and the team. We were able to have an elegant exit from the business.

Final word

We believe there are many good lessons to take from our story.

• We had a strong business idea. There was a gap in the market that we filled.
• We had a very flexible financial model which served us well both through the periods of growth and when we needed to downsize quickly.
• We had a great culture that made it very enjoyable to go to work.

Overall, we could never have predicted the way the business would develop but we had enough experience to be able to manage the challenges as they came along. We had a fantastic time as owner managers and whilst we accept that we had a good dose of luck along the way we truly believe we worked for it and ultimately made the right decisions to capitalise on it.

It was the lessons we learned in our corporate life that underpinned everything we did and were the key to running a successful small business. In many ways, it represents the best grounding you can have to prepare you to be an entrepreneur. We hope that this read will be thought provoking and provide some help and inspiration should be you considering ditching the day job.