Peter Grainger on his journey from employee to 7 figure business owner

Your Dream Business

Have you ever wondered what it takes to go from an employed person with a business idea to a business owner, with a £1 million turnover and products in mainstream supermarkets like Tesco, Waitrose, and Ocado?

Well, CafePod founder, Peter Grainger shares with me the 3 mindset beliefs that he had when he started his business, and how it helped him to grow it to where he is today.

The great news is that these three things are things that you can work on, to start to believe in yourself to grow your own businesses so tune in now and get inspired!

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

🌟 The key skills that are needed to start a business outside of your skills and expertise

🌟 The learning experiences of launching a new business in a competitive industry

🌟 Where to look for investors for a new business venture and how to get them on board

CafePod is a London-based independent coffee company that makes great-tasting coffee to enjoy at home. Their diverse range of exciting blends are available as Nespresso®️ compatible pods, ground coffee and whole bean. CafePod is available to buy from cafepod.com, Amazon, Tesco, Waitrose and Ocado.

If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to iTunes and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE

Connect with Peter on LinkedInFollow CafePod on Instagram Follow CafePod on FacebookThe Power of Content Marketing with Marcus Sheridan.

Connect with Teresa on Instagram, LinkedIn or FacebookTranscript

Teresa: Have you ever wondered what it takes to go from an employed person with a business idea to a business owner with a 7 million turnover and products in mainstream supermarkets like Tesco's, Waitrose and Ocado. Well, CafePod founder Peter Grainger shares with me the three mindset beliefs that he had when he started his business and it helped him to grow it to where he is today.

And the great news, these three things are things that we can work on to start to believe ourselves to grow our own businesses.

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the your dream business podcast. So this week I have a really cool interview for you. I'm interviewing Peter Grainger, who is the founder of CafePod. And when they first approached me to say, would I have him on the podcast?

I initially thought how well does this resonate with you guys who are listening to this? As I've interviewed a couple of people recently who have really big businesses and, and different style businesses. It's been really good for me to understand how their brain works and what made them go into businesses that appear really difficult.

Like to suddenly decide to do a coffee brand that is not like, and, and you'll hear in this that he had no experience in this. He didn't work in coffee, he didn't work in like anything entrepreneurial. He literally went from working in the city to starting a business, which was crazy. What I've took from these episodes is.

The mindset they have, the, the thoughts they have when they first go into business and how they approach things. And they have been really motivating to me. So I have really enjoyed bringing some different types of people to the podcast. Peter Grainger is the founder of Cafe Pod, which is a London based independent coffee company that makes great tasting coffee.

I can attest to that because I have had some, and in fact, I had bought some prior to them reaching out. I knew who they were, so that was cool that you can enjoy at home their diverse range of exciting blends are available as Nespresso compatible pods, grind coffee and whole beans. And CafePod is available to buy from cafepod. com, Amazon, Waitrose, Tesco's and Ocado.

So I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Like some really, really good takeaways, really. Keep in mind the way that he, his brain worked and some of the things that were absolute essential for him to go forward with this business idea. I took a lot from it. I'm doing some more work for myself around some of the things that he said.

So yeah, I really hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you do, I would love it if you would share it with someone who is a business buddy, my goal, my aim this year is to really focus on growing my podcast. I've been doing it for a long time and I love it and it is full of value. So the more business people I can get in front of the better.

So if you know someone who is in business and might like a podcast, then please go and share this episode with them. Okay, let's get on with the interview. Here's Peter. I am really pleased to say to welcome to the podcast, Peter Grainger. Peter, how are you doing?

Peter: I'm good. I'm good. Thanks for having me.

Teresa: My pleasure.

So we were chatting before we hit record how I was saying that you, your size business is normally a bit bigger than I would normally interview, but your story was fascinating. And with some of the other interviews I've done recently, I think we could have a really interesting conversation. But I want to start as I do most often with tell people what you do and how you got to do the thing you do.

Peter: Sure. So we are a coffee company. We've started, we started a quite. It probably quite a unique way. So we sell a range of coffee products that people use at home. Predominantly pods that works for the Nespresso system, as well as beans and ground coffee and some of the accompanying equipments, but we really cut our teeth and started the business within the Nespresso compatible pods world.

And that really came about in 2011.

I was working in the city in London, took some time out, I was working a hundred hour weeks. I thought probably not a good idea to do on a long term basis, went to sit on the proverbial rock. And eventually after traveling around for a while, saw somebody who was making their own Nespresso. And I knew nothing about the category, the products.

I mean, I knew as much as coffee as the next person who goes to a cell box or an arrow. And I think more just from my curiosity point of view, I started asking a question, or, you know, like, Oh, the patent that expired, the whole market's opening up. And I was like, Oh, it's that mean how many pods could they possibly sell?

I don't know. Like, is it, is it a beige industry? And it turns out it is a multi billion dollar. And that's just Nespresso. So the actual hog world, it's huge. And that just piqued my interest. And when I got back to London, I got together with friends that we spoke about it. Like any friends would chat about dreams and aspirations of, oh, we should do this and we should do that.

I suppose the difference was that one of the co founders, Brent, is a very action oriented person. And he was just like, right. Enough talk. We're doing this. Simon, we're going to your house tomorrow. We're setting up a company. We're going to open a bank account. This is happening. And that's kind of, so, so the three of us, just to give you some context, you still work together, but none of us knew anything about coffee, manufacturing, branding, supermarkets.

I mean, we literally knew nothing, but when you, there was an opportunity, yeah, it sounded exciting. Everybody likes coffee and that's literally how we started. It's 12, 13 years ago.

Teresa: That is a crazy story. Like so let me just check a couple of things. So you were working, so you'd never owned a business before

Peter: none of us had

Teresa: any experience in owning a business as in like the job you did in the city.

Was it assisting people to set up businesses or something?

Peter: No, no, no, no, no, no. Like, like we all, I mean, I was, I was kind of like a financial analyst, but I used to kind of, I worked in the financial part of it. On the investment firm. And my job was kind of thrown at some challenges and trying to unpick them.

And I kind of, I did bits and pieces of things, but yeah, we were very far. Any of us were very far from real business. We were part of somebody else's business and we never really got to touch the business pieces of that. We, you know, the couple of hundred people who worked for the business. So you would, I mean, we're in our twenties, we're in our twenties, late twenties, so I mean, you know, everything in your twenties, but you realize, you know, nothing

Teresa: on your old stepson. I know, you're so smart.

Peter: Yeah, we literally had, I mean, naivety is probably the biggest thing we had and, and overconfidence, is that .

Teresa: Do you know, I was going to ask, right, because there is something there for you to go. So I'm presuming, I don't know, actually, so let me clarify this. Did you all leave your job to do this? Or did you run it alongside your job?

Peter: So I, I'd gone traveling. I then came back and I had to, we started working on this thing and I then had to find another job when I came back from traveling. So I, so we were all working while we were spending weekends and evenings working on a business plan. All that kind of stuff. So it was, and then I went full time first and then the other two subsequently be kind of came in over a period of six to 12 months.

Maybe when we finally went, right, we need an office, we need. A real business offices. One of the most important things to us though, was that we're like, right, it's our business. We don't want to commute. So we're going to walk to work. That's going to be like the dream. We're living the dream. Yeah. And we all lived in Putney and Southwest London, so we found a space and we're all from Africa as well.

And we'd love to do nothing more than flip flops. So we were like, right, shorts and flip flops walking to work. Yeah. How, how does it, how does it get much better than that?

Teresa: I love it. So I think someone who is much smarter than me and has, you know, qualifications in this could unpick all your brains and go, what was it that kind of made you all go, well, we're just going to do it.

Right. Was there any point where you were like, what if we fail?

Peter: No, I think the best way I can describe it is, is when you kind of connect the dots and you see something, whether it's an opportunity or whatever, or whatever else it is, and you kind of, to you, it's the pathway is clear in your own mind, but now whether that's a make believe pathway or not, in your mind, you believe it should be true.

And you can see it as clear as daylight. You're like, we do this and this will happen and this will happen and this will happen and we will reach here. It can't possibly happen any other way. So in your mind, that is the truth and you then operate according to that principle. So, you know, when we started raising money and people went, you're mad, this is ridiculous.

We were like, how can you even say that? Like it's obvious that this is gonna happen. Yeah.

Teresa: Like, how can you not see it?

Peter: We were like, you loss anyway, and we moved on. We were so clear and committed to that, that it was just, and I think also just the excitement, the opportunity. Like actually why, why can't we do this?

Like, like, it's not. It's not like we didn't know how to code and, and it required us to build a website. We're like, well, we don't know how to code, but this was, I don't know. We just saw it as, yeah, we can do all that stuff.

Teresa: Yeah.

Peter: We're as clever as anybody else.

Teresa: Yeah. I love it.

Peter: Why not?

Teresa: So, so you see this, you know, and, and, and, Obviously, starting with the fact that it was almost like it was put in front of you in one way, you know, you saw it and you're like, okay, this is really interesting.

So you weren't just lying on a beach and going, I know coffee pods, right? Which, you know, where the hell does that come from? So you'd seen this opportunity. Did you know and did you start to raise money from the very beginning or was it a case of, okay, we really want to do this. We've put some money in.

Actually, this isn't going to work without some help.

Peter: So the nature of what we wanted to do, so if we step back, so before the patent expired on, on Nespresso, being able to make your own Nespresso pods. Nobody in the world besides himself was making, so if you want it now, the market opened up a little bit.

So there were one or two people who had started doing it. And, but there was no, there's essentially no factories around. So if you wanted to do it, you physically had to make it yourself. So to do that, you needed manufacturing equipment. So we knew from the get go that We would have to manufacture, we did float the idea of, well, actually we could buy, you know, pods from this person and then resell them and then the classic kind of, you know, textbook, like, oh, we'll just cut out the middleman and we'll do it ourselves.

How hard can it be? And that's why, how, why we decided to do to make it ourselves versus buy from somebody else. And, but the equipment was hundreds of thousands. It was half a million. So we knew that in order to get going, we needed, I mean, we needed to physically have some big something and there was no factory in existence, so we needed that money to even start.

Teresa: Okay. So where did you like, so you decided I need some money. Do you have like super wealthy friends that you then say can you hook me up or did you know straight away that you'd have to go to people you didn't know? And if that was the case, where the hell did you look and how did you find them?

Peter: We used to, you know, in the environment that we used to work in, we knew we worked with some people who, who had some, who made some good money.

The irony is a lot of them were like, Oh, that's definitely, I mean, this is pocket change for them. And they were like, no, no, no, no, no, no. But you wouldn't even notice if the money's gone, actually like, oh, okay, there goes that assumption. So you kind of start off with what you assume to be the easiest path.

And then you realize that that's not quite how things are working. So we put together lists of people and then inevitably you get referrals from them like this is not for me but you could talk to Bob over here and and then We started researching angel networks, and then they would have these nights where you would bring your pitch down and they would invest some of the invite some of their, their members down and you would pitch to them and pass, but maybe you get some people from that and maybe you wouldn't, I mean, we ended up trying every, I mean, literally everything, and it was a brutal process, but it was The people who we call were obvious shoo ins were not.

And that left us short by quite a lot. And then we literally had the cold calling and the searching. And I think that never,a truer word, the phrase. If you want money ask for advice, and if you want advice, ask for money. We had a lot of advice. Let's put it that way.

Teresa: That is a great phrase. Like I love,

Peter: and it's true.

It is true. And it's one of the things that I keep anybody ever asked me about raising money. So if you think somebody is, you want to talk to somebody, don't ask them for the money, ask them for advice, ask them, I'm raising some money. What advice would you give me? And it's just, it works better than people think it does.

Teresa: Yeah, that's really interesting. Also, the fact that you got lots of no's and you said it was a really tough process, like how did you keep going with that? It sounds like there was no point that you went, this is a terrible idea. What the hell are we doing? Or what, or did that happen?

Peter: Oh no, no, no. I mean, it's, it's, we, we just were so bought into the idea and what we could do that it was just, I mean, it was hard.

It was brutal. And, and the machinery that we ended up having to buy was something like it took six to eight months lead time to build it. So as we were raising money, we raised a couple of hundred thousand pounds. And then we went to the people who we commissioned the machine to buy. And we were like, right, we'll put this down as a deposit.

And then we, we, we arranged with them to kind of pay them off through the process. And so it's, we'll be paid off at the end, but we didn't have that. So we basically put pressure on ourselves going, well, we'd put a deposit down now. Now we really need to find the rest of the money.

Teresa: Yeah.

Peter: And in that time we then had to go and talk to, I mean, we have no customer yet.

And this is the other, if I reflect back, it's just ridiculous.

Teresa: Yeah. I love it. When you do this, talk a story to you like, what the hell were we thinking?

Peter: But I mean, it's just, and we also assume that you would just buy a piece of machinery and like a toaster, you just plug it in, put some bread in it, push the button and out pops toast.

And that's how we assumed. You made coffee capsule, which is for the record, not how it works and is super, super, super complicated. And yeah, so, so we kind of learned a lot of the lessons on the fly, but at that time we already bought them. The clock was ticking effectively. So we're like, well, we don't have a choice now.

Teresa: I love that. Like, I think there's that great saying of like, you know, if you want it to work, you burn the boats. Like you put yourself in a position where you have no...