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Rule Number 7: Be Generous
What has generosity to do with success or making money or happiness?
Business manuals and success guides of old have tended to focus purely on the attainment of material goals as the measure of our success and satisfaction with life. But times change.
Today, we’re much more aware of alternative ways to measure success and increasing numbers of us regard our time and fulfilment as more precious than a huge salary. In the developed world we’ve never been healthier or wealthier.
Happiness and Success
Gandhi put it well when he said, ‘Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.’ Nowadays that works as a pretty good definition of how we’re coming to see success.
My observation and conversations with happy, successful achievers has shown me that living and working with a generous approach to life pays big dividends.
On a personal level, being generous leaves you feeling better about yourself, giving you that elusive feeling of fulfilment and satisfaction, that we know money can’t buy.
In business, it brings you career advancement and opportunities that meaner ‘jobsworth’ individuals envy and don’t understand.
And if you’re running the business, quite simply, people will want to work for you and stay with you.
On 24 August 2001 People Management reported on research concerning the career aspirations of 14 year-olds. Stephen Gauntlet, one of the report authors said, ‘The most important factor when considering a career was that it be “a job that interests me” followed by “pay” and then “ time for interests outside work.” He also commented: ‘Five to ten years ago, people were looking for power. Now they are looking for fulfilment.’
I usually coach people further down the line when the important factors for them in choosing a company to work for or stay with comes down to one word, ‘culture.’ At a certain senior level, the ‘packages’ all look pretty similar.
What makes the difference are other things like, what the company stands for, its vision, its ethics, its social responsibility, how it treats its staff, and not just at the top.
Generosity in Business
Running a business that displays generosity towards its staff, the environment, the bigger picture, is one that customers find attractive. Big and small businesses are being forced to get ethical and fair as never before. Putting profit before everything else is just not something that any business can really afford to do any more.
Way back in the 60’s and 70s we saw this with the boycott of Barclays bank when customers left in their thousands to protest against what they saw as the bank’s involvement in the apartheid state of South Africa.
Nowadays, the Co-operative Bank, motto Customer led, ethically guided, is enjoying greater success than ever before as it proclaims its ethical investment policy, promising not to use customer’s money to invest in the arms industry or the tobacco industry, or to accept customers from those industries. Boycotts of brands and May Day protests have created headlines.
Barely a week goes by without an undercover documentary highlighting where our high street chains get their clothes made, urging us shoppers to check with our local Gap and Nike town and ensure they’re not employing 12 year-olds in their factories in the Far East. A recent Panorama documentary exposed the horrendous
Consumer pressure is a big deal. A report in March 2005 by Mintel, the consumer analyst, said well-informed customers were ‘taking a more individual and personal approach to the choices they make and are rebelling against mass marketing.’
We want to enjoy our goods without it ruining our health, costing the earth or exploiting people in other parts of the world. Generosity in business today is an absolute must.
Innocent Drinks epitomises the new breed of ethical businesses. They treat their customers like friends, welcoming correspondence and replying by sending back the Innocent rule book, the company’s light-hearted manifesto about living a healthier life, giving lots of money to charity and selling only the best juices.
Innocent treat their staff well too. There is an annual snowboarding holiday, a £2000 cash gift to every baby born to an Innocent staffer. On Friday evenings, the company encourages staff to leave early by putting a couple of hundred quid behind the bar at the local. The company gives a high proportion of its profits to charity and has set up an Innocent foundation, which supports NGOs around the world.
Innocent is also one of Britain’s most successful companies. Their drinks are available in Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Selfridges and Starbucks (among other places) and last year’s turnover was £15 million.
Adam Balon, Richard Reed and Jon Wright all 32, met at college and launched Innocent in 1999. The UK smoothie market is worth £70 million a year and in just over five years, Innocent has taken more than 30 per cent of the market share.
Adam Balon
‘We always talked about running a business together at college and we never really let go of that dream. So we asked ourselves the question “What is it that annoys us about life and what could we do to make it easier or better?” Pretty utopian, pretty simple but actually quite a persuasive way of thinking about it.
The conversation happened during the course of a long car journey together, we had 15 hours to kill so we discussed those things that really get to us and we all agreed that what we really wanted and the things we thought were missing to buy was something that would do us good, something healthy.
We all went out a lot, worked hard, lived a typical urban lifestyle and we realised it was actually pretty difficult to do anything that was really good for you. For example, it was much easier to eat a kebab on the way home after a night out than it was to get some fresh stuff in you.
Then we figured that we couldn’t be alone on this, there had to be other people who felt the same way. We did come up with a few other ideas but the fruit juice was the one that survived the car journey and subsequent holiday, and we thought, actually you know this sounds really good, we could really do this. So we then decided to get a business plan together.
We were still working in our full time jobs at the time so Innocent Drinks, borne from that car journey in 1998, didn’t actually come about until the spring of 1999. At that point we were basically working on it in our spare time.
The first thing we did was some research. I’d go out and talk to shopkeepers to try to find out a little bit about what they wanted from their products and then we really started contacting fruit suppliers. By the summer of 98 we’d even worked out how to make smoothies and bored our friends rigid with questionnaires so we used that the Parsons Green jazz festival to try the whole thing out.
We bought £500 worth of fruit, made it into smoothies, put them on a stall with a huge sign which read, “Shall we give up our day jobs?” and encouraged people to vote with their empty cups placing them in “yes” bins and “no” bins. And the vote told us “yes”. The “yes” bin was full and the “no” bin was pretty much empty.
We all resigned the next day. It was August and we thought we would be on the market by September. Of course things took a hell of a lot longer than we thought. So that was a fairly bleak time for us - we lived off credit cards.
We didn’t go out and we basically lived on cornflakes and soup! It was fine at first and all very exciting but after 6 months of living like this we were thinking, my God when are we ever going to launch this? We were struggling to raise any money, we went to all the banks but they just weren’t interested.
What they saw was these three enthusiastic guys with no experience in the area. We weren’t a very good investment prospect.
So in the end we just sent an e-mail around to absolutely everybody we knew asking, “Do you know anyone rich?” And amazingly, we got a reply from someone who Jon used to work with saying he had worked with some guy called Maurice Pinto, a 65 year old investor who invested in on-going companies rather than start-ups like us.
We decided it was worth sending him a business plan anyway, and we went for a meeting. In the end, Maurice ended up backing the entire venture and then we didn’t make any profit til the 3rd year but that’s pretty much what we expected. And since then, it’s gone beyond anything we could have imagined.
The thing about the business for us isn’t about profit maximisation in the short term. It’s about growing a decent sustainable business. We need a business that can be profitable but for us it’s more about growing a business we can be proud of.
And that pride comes from everything we do. We want to make the kind of smoothies you would make at home. I put our success down to the fact that that we are still the only company to offer 100 per cent fresh fruit in a bottle; though not all the fruit is organic, it’s as near as; and we are totally pesticide-free.
All the other bottled brands use sugar and water to bulk up their drinks or fruit concentrates. It costs more to do it our way, but our customers are discerning. We spent a year trying to find someone who could make smoothies to the standard we wanted.
The food industry thought we were mad; you don’t use strawberries, you use this great strawberry flavouring. I hate seeing something run as a business, not a passion.
We are ruthlessly nice. We employ people like us – people who would never work for a tobacco company – and that just keeps working in our favour.
We didn’t pay back Maurice as he took a stake in the business so he is in fact still involved. In 2004 the business had a turnover of £15 million, which is a far cry from eating cornflakes, living off credit cards and bashing around ideas about what annoys us in life in the back seat of a car! It’s been absolutely brilliant, and whatever happens we’re still a small business, we’ve all enjoyed the journey.
All three of us have this pathological fear of being average, so for us now it’s all about attention to detail.
We want more than anything to be Europe’s favourite little juice company. We’re always thinking, what can we do to improve things? We drive around in “cow” vans and we’ve got grass on the floor in the office. We don’t want to be the biggest: it’s not about being the most profitable; for us it’s about being the best.
We met some people from Unilever the other day. They were interested in how we do business. We said, ‘Be natural. Be nice.” They went, all earnestly, “That sounds great. Now how do you implement that strategy of being nice?” We were like, “Oh dude, oh man.” We want to connect with the people who drink our products. Our products are totally fresh and natural, and we think they taste gorgeous!’
Innocent drinks really are the best! They stand out a mile from the competition and the personality of the company comes through as well. I love the humour that lists ‘10 pebbles’ as one of the ingredients, explaining at the bottom, ‘only joking!’
I love the taste and quality. I love that they’re nice and fair to their staff. And I really love that they plough a lot of the profit back into supporting the replanting of trees in Brazil. Here’s what they say on the pineapples, bananas & coconuts carton, under the heading, ‘it’s nice to be nice.
‘It’s all very well making tasty drinks, but it’s quite nice to be able to help people out as well. That’s why we’ve formalised our commitment to being truly innocent by setting up the innocent foundation. It’s a separate registered charity that funds non-governmental organisations in the countries where we source our fruit. And the funding of the charity is directly linked to how many drinks we sell, so the more you drink, the more you help.’
Below this is a photo of a Brazilian rainforest, with a plot circled, to show where your money is going.
When you get all this with your smoothie, why would you ever dream of buying an ‘ordinary’ one ever again? That would be no fun at all.
This is an extract from Chapter 7 of Fiona Harrold's new book, "The 7 Rules Of Success" out now and available from us here.
