YouSaid · the spoken record

Willie Biggart

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28
first
2015-11-06
most recent
2015-11-06
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Wow. Well, I think for sure we're in for an exciting journey. It's been a great journey so far. Obviously, we're keen to drive sales significantly upwards and to achieve an EBITDA around just slightly south of a million would be acceptable, but much further north would be great. But the most important thing for me is to provide a good return to the shareholders, to add value to our customers, because after all, if you don't add value to your customers, you've got no proposition. And we believe that Spoonfen's doing that. So let's now up the ante in terms of marketing with proper funding, we can grow the business to achieve a return for all stakeholders.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, I read his book and enjoyed it, and I thought that was good, but Ray Crock, the way he sort of shaped McDonald's, bought the business from the McDonald brothers, I just think it's a great story. He talks a lot about the importance of the business and how it's run as opposed to the product. And he's created a great system to run that business globally. And I find that very inspirational.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, you know, metrics are great. The one I check a lot is number of cities, number of users in cities across the world. And if that's growing, we're doing something right and it has grown to over 40 cities across the world now have users tuned into spoonfed.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Recently, since I've got involved in the SaaS market, it's quite interesting. Kenny Fraser, who runs Sunstone Communications, writes a lot of blogs for SaaS startups and SaaS businesses. And he started a group. where we meet several of us as many as 20, 25 SaaS companies, and have a couple of hours chewing the fat and sharing stories and problems and opportunities. And Kenny captures all that in a very informative blog for SaaS companies.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And the people that we employed way back then are now actually shareholders and running the business now. And they took on that frightening level of responsibility. And I dare say they got the odd bottle of wine delivered to their home when they were least expecting it.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Best piece of advice. You know, I mentioned earlier about BD and when we hit a bad time four years into the business, we had a serious bad debt. And it was like a big hole opened up in the floor. And we wondered whether we're going to survive. I had the good fortune to be organizing a conference, a motivational conference actually with Sir John Harvey Jones as one of the headline speakers. And Sir John spared me 20 minutes, sat in the car, the bonnet of the car, and I said, Sir John, in my situation, what would you do? He said, it's really straightforward. Will they go back to first principles? Find really good people. And when you found them, provide them with a frightening level of responsibility. And secondly, reward them with unscheduled brumeration when they least expect it. And that's exactly what we did. We kind of grew our own talent.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, well, the Lean startup initially, but I then read the EMIth revisited by Michael Gerber. And it's a great read. It's all about what really inspired me was Ray Kroc from McDonald's and his story about creating great systems to run the McDonald's business and setting that system up at a level that it could be operated by the lowest skilled operator in the business. And it was his focus on systems as opposed to people that really got us thinking. In fact, for example, in our own business, we're using six different apps to run Spoonfit.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Our burn rate is presently about 25K a month. It will rise to about 35,000. And this is where my business partner is exceptionally good. Murray McNichol, as I said, he's come from KPMG background. He is very much a systems man. He has a very, very robust forecast model. And we literally built the forecast from the bottom up. Interestingly, When I was on the other side of the fence seeing presentations, we saw the traditional hockey stick curve and we were quite conservative and have been quite conservative in our forecast because we put forward forecasts. We believe we can achieve. So we looked at the customer, we built it from the point of view of customer acquisition and how many per month and what's achievable and what we need to do in order to achieve these customers.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “It's interesting. Tom from Syndicate Room contacted me and Jock Millikan from Equity Gap at the time of our first round, and we're almost fully subscribed and said, look, give it a go. And we were very impressed with his pitch to us. We were very impressed with the fact that here was a business-to-business crowdfunding platform. And I think the other thing that impressed us was the fact it worked in conjunction with Angels. It was a bit of an unknown context for us. Up till now, most of the funding forays have been through contacts and networks and introductions. So I'm waiting with bated breath and certainly got plenty of irons in the fire.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, it's quite a daunting process. And even having, even although I was gamekeeper turned poacher, I actually, I found it quite daunting when you walk into a room of people. The first piece of advice I would give to anyone trying to raise money is beat yourself and smile and be engaging with your audience. Know your stuff and know your numbers inside out and make sure that your presentation is very short, sharp and to the point.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “We know it works, and here's our business plan. So we went for seed funding, first round funding actually, of 250,000. And then we developed the business further. And as you know, we're on another round at the moment to really crank it up and hopefully achieve enough funding to drive it to profitability.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, very interesting, a bit of history. I, as I mentioned earlier on, spent some of my time as a business angel with Equity Gap, which is predominantly focused on the startup community. And I'd seen lots of guys coming in to present business plans and invested in a few myself, actually. I realized that there was nothing wrong with going to the market to fund a business. We had bootstrapped spoonfed ourselves probably to the Tune Murray and I and a couple of sweat equity partners, good creative on the creative side in X402 on the development side to the tune of about 400,000 pounds. And when we had a product that was fit for purpose and ready to rock and roll, we went to the market and said, here's something, we've got some sales traction, we've got some customers.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Through five stores, four stores in Central Belt of Scotland. It's a social enterprise business aimed at creating jobs for homeless people. So that helps. But they've grown the business with our software platform from 7,000 to 70,000 pounds a month in terms of turnover. and have said openly they couldn't have done that without the help of a system that is put in place to run their business and they're going places and they've got ambitions to be the same size as Pret and it's great to be working with people who literally took to our system like a duck to water and it was great and they're good guys to work with”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think it's a real bonus. There's no doubt about it. It helps. Two examples. My own experience when speaking to some of the, certainly some of the big chains and even a small business, I can identify with that. I can say, look, we ran a small business like yours. I bet you don't have this problem, that problem, this problem, that problem. And they say, yeah, we do actually. You've obviously been in the industry. That helps. The other thing that's quite interesting, we've just employed one of our UK sales executive has come from a firm called Social Bite, which is a customer, and doing very well in Scotland. And they came to us when they were, and this is in the public domain, so I'm not giving away any confidences. It's been reported in the papers, they came to us when they were doing about £7,000 of corporate catering revenue.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, you know, that's a good, a very interesting question. What has become very clear to us very quickly, even when we're cold calling prospects, is our knowledge of the industry. We've developed software based on customer needs from needs that we identified when we ran our own catering business. And that's in stark contrast to others out there who have been developer-led and very focused on, well, this is a good piece of kit, someone's going to like it as opposed to our approach was here are the problems that are affecting your industry. And here we're delivering the solutions in a SaaS offering. And that has really stood us in great stead. Not quite sure if I've answered the question, but...”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “interesting is Le Pan Quittidion actually found us through the internet and inbound marketing and I guess looking to the future that's where we want to be we want to get found rather than I mean the wholesales process of running a SaaS business is very different to running a marketing services business or selling pots and bans you you've got to get found”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I mean, in the very early stages, really delicious was our old catering company that we sold. So it was natural that they wanted to take our system to continue to run the business. But actually they were very cooperative, as were a number of others at the sort of beta test stage, who we gave it to them to play with. We had a bug list that, you know, I mean, for me, coming from a marketing background, it was at times quite hardgoing. But we worked our way through and we ironed it all out with their help. And then when we had the system absolutely fit for purpose, we started talking. I suppose the analogy I often used, and it was the same in my BD days, is we have a rifle strategy. We're in a niche market, so it's very much a targeted approach, understanding who your customers are, what you're wanting from them, and then go get them as opposed to the shotgun approach where you throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks. It was very targeted. Having said that, what is...”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Few companies working in the niche space we are in which is providing not only that online ordering platform that you get with the B2C side, but from a business-to-business point of view, we've got a complete system which you can plug into your business and it'll run it for you and make it more efficient. So that's quite exciting in that in some ways is our opportunity is to exploit the back office functionality that we have compared to some of the bigger B2C offerings that are out there.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “But I think it's a broader acceptance of technology. I found myself talking to someone. I was out at a function last night where we were talking about the advent of technology and how we went away on interrail trips several years ago. And our parents never heard from us for four weeks or so. And everyone assumed you were fine. But now with mobile technology, it's completely revolutionized how we do things. What's interesting with our market is there is a huge explosion of B2C food technology offerings. I'm thinking of seamless, I'm thinking of Grubhub, Deliveroo, Just Eat in the UK, big, big technology platforms making it easier for consumers to order their pizza and have it delivered to the home. But there's very...”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Right food gets the right people at the right time at enhanced margin to be a bit cliche. And we're in advanced diligence stage with two major retailers, one in the UK, part of a big food services group, and another in America, which they're testing it in New York, but they have a number of branches throughout the world. The potential for spoon-fed right now is significant. There's no getting away from the fact it doesn't come easy. You've got to work hard at it. Bigger companies take longer time to make decisions. But there's been a move more towards the bigger, major chains, which is great news for us because they like it.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, yeah. No, the market opportunity is huge. I mean, the drop-off catering food market globally is 33 billion pounds. In terms of revenue potential for spoon-fed, that's 200 million annual revenue potential if you work it out on the average value of orders and the number of orders placed. America is a huge market and it's eight times the size of the UK. When we set out in our journey initially, we thought, well, we'll go for the smaller independent UK caterer. But what's really surprising, well, not surprising actually, but what's really interesting is the fact that since we started on the journey very quickly, some of the bigger chains have latched onto the value of being sure that”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Who deliver food to offices don't have. It's paper based. I've often said our biggest competitor is actually paper. But there are more technology companies on the market than there ever have been. But interestingly in our space, which is business to business, there is surprisingly few competitors doing what we are doing.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, the main benefit is there's a system and process in place to enhance efficiencies. When we first got involved in a catering drop-off business, and I should specify that Spoonfed is specifically for caterers delivering food to offices. And as you can imagine, people ordering the secretary or PA or receptionist ordering food for a business meeting in the office is absolutely dependent on you getting it right and doesn't want to be embarrassed with the food arriving wrong. So one of the great benefits of Spoonfed in this regard is it allows caterers, customers to know with confidence that what they order is what they will get and it'll be on time. It cuts out mistakes because of all its integrated processes and back office functionality and provides an efficiency level that a lot of these businesses who use these technologies”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “What was really interesting about spoon fed compared to my previous life in business, here we were running a business that was a system dependent business now as opposed to a people dependent business. And that was making a huge, that's our opportunity. Here we had something that we could create that we'd add serious value to customers and help them run their businesses better.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “we realized there was an opportunity to create something on a much wider stage. And that's when the spoon-fed journey began. And with my previous business experience, felt confident and comfortable about driving this one forward.”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Decided to invest in, I believe it or not, a catering business very different from doing the marketing for Coca-Cola and brands like Orange and Lurpak Butter. But it was fun. And I walked into this business as an investor director and realized very quickly it was completely disorganized chaos and it needed systems and processes to make it work. So that's where I found Murray McNichol, who was a good colleague for XKPMG. And together we started to shape that business. Very quickly we realized that the value in the business was in creating a good system. There was nothing available off the shelf. So we created our own. We then sold the catering business, kept the software. And with the software now proven and handling over 40, 50,000 orders,”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Stage I realised that keeping the average age up at 27 being the oldest statesman in the business, it was time to step aside and let the management achieve the true potential for the business. So I was fortunate I had a management buyout. We were approached by an American ad agency, but it was right and proper that the staff took control of the business and took it and I've taken it on to bigger and greater things. This is BD is one of the top agencies now in the European structure and they've also got an office in Sydney, Australia in Melbourne. Could I also say when I left BDE I moved into the sort of non-exec space, invested in a couple of companies. I joined Equity Gap, a business angel group and I saw lots of startup businesses coming towards us and at the same time”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, well, it's been a very exciting journey. It's had its ups and downs, Harry. It all really started 10 years into my career. I'd done the sort of usual working for various PLCs, Bells, Baxter's Bass in various marketing roles and took the plunge after a couple of beers with a friend, one of my brand team in Phileas Fogg across the road, the pub, and we decided our journey was about to begin. So we up sticks and started a sales promotion agency. My children weren't so happy when I came home and they were moved out. The kids' playroom. But we started from a very simple basic platform and built the business over a number of years with some ups and downs, as I say, to 12 million turnover and a million PBT, which”

    2015-11-06 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC FF 20: Shaking Up The Food Industry With Willie Biggart @ Spoonfed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source