He called his children’s food brand Ella’s Kitchen, after his daughter, and
outsourced the manufacturing to a factory in Scotland.
Partway through his research, Lindley hit on a ground-breaking way of
marketing his products that would not involve him spending any money. He
approached all the children’s television channels, proposing that they
advertise his products in return for a share of his company’s revenue.
Viacom, which handles the sales for Nickelodeon, agreed.
Lindley said: “It was risk-free advertising because if we sold a load of
products we would give them a load of money. If we sold nothing, we would
give them nothing. Initially we did a one-year deal. That gave me a piece of
paper that I could go to the supermarkets with.”
He did just that and eventually Sainsbury called Lindley, saying it wanted to
stock his products in 400 stores across the country. The first range hit the
shelves at the beginning of 2006.
His products were soon taken on by Tesco and Waitrose, and this year Lindley
introduced a range of pasta sauces for children. As a result, Ella’s Kitchen
will have sales of £3m this year.
Lindley, now 41, admits to making one mistake — not creating a management team
earlier.
“Our growth potential is well over 100% for a number of years, but organising
our resources and systems and infrastructure to meet that is harder than I
anticipated. I built a core team of three senior managers that I perhaps
should have done 6 months or 12 months earlier.”
One mistake he did manage to avoid was parting with equity in the business.
“There were times when I was less sure of my skills and my vision, and there
were people who I don’t think would have added much value but who were
offering services and contacts for equity. But I had an absolute belief in
what I was doing and that
it would come through,” said Lindley.
He thinks the secret of his success has been thinking big.
“I have discovered that I am quite a big-picture person rather than one who
focuses on the detail, which has the benefit of giving me vision. I am
constantly thinking of new things we can do and looking for different ways
to do things.”
He has this advice for budding entrepreneurs. “Live your dreams. Look at
things in a different way. You live one life and, if you have an idea, it
will be far more disappointing to read in a newspaper in five years’ time
that someone else had the same idea and did it while you merely plodded on.”
