Pip Murray, 36, is the founder and chief executive of Pip & Nut, a nut butter brand that she set up in 2013, and is forecasting sales of £24 million this year. Its UK-made spreads and snacks are stocked by all the major retailers, including Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose, and it has 35 employees based at the head office in Shoreditch, east London. Murray remains its largest shareholder, followed by Giles Brook, a serial entrepreneur and investor.
My first business plan took six months to write
It was 75 pages long and I wrote it on my days off from a part-time job at the Science Museum, where I was working as a theatre producer.
I specifically remember googling what a business plan is, because I had no idea, and ended up getting all of these really old school templates.
I didn’t have any experience in the food industry, so I think I was trying to build some kind of credibility. There’s definitely a sense that you want to organise thoughts and articulate something that isn’t real yet. And by writing something like that, you feel like you’ve done your homework and that you’ve validated the idea for yourself and others around you.
I had written it for investors
I now realise this is hilarious because no investor would actually read 75 pages. Although the administrator for the Start-Up Loan I applied for did read it and I was given a £10,000 loan.
The reason it took me six months was also because I was doing all of the financial forecasts, which is quite laughable when you’ve not yet sold a single jar.
You are trying to make up some numbers about what you think the business could do in the next three years. Some of the forecasts of sales weren’t actually so far out — but the same couldn’t be said for the profit margins.
Pip Murray wants to expand Pip & Nut’s snacking portfolio
I was very young — 24 — when I began working on the idea for Pip & Nut
Before starting work as a theatre producer, I had studied anthropology and geography at university, so I had no background in food or business.
I didn’t know what P&L [profit and loss] stood for or FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods]. There wasn’t a huge amount of support for start-ups back then either, and any help was general rather than targeted to the food industry.
Once I got the Start-Up Loan, no one ever saw my 75-page business plan ever again. I got straight into setting up the business, doing the product development properly and looking for factories.
The next ‘business plan’ was created for a Crowdcube campaign
The tone was completely different. You have to include a little bit about the category size and the opportunity, talk about your product and your route to market, but it’s less formal and there’s a video pitch as part of it too.
After that, we pitched to [professional] investors for the first time. By this point we had a proven track record and so the story shifts from being hypothetical to what you’ve delivered.
Critically, it has to be punchy. We’ve all got such short attention spans these days, no one has time to read through a 50,000-word document. And it needs to focus on the real problems you’re trying to solve for customers.
Today, we have a one-pager
We have our purpose, our vision for the next three years, the goal we have in mind and then four or five objectives that we’re trying to unlock.
For instance, right now we want to expand our snacking portfolio and reach a certain number of consumers. That’s one key goal for the next three years, and then we’ll have tactics that fall underneath that.
It’s very simple and is very similar information that we share across the business, whether it’s with investors or our employees. If you were to ask anyone in our team what are the three or four things that we’re working on this year, they should be able to list them out. Less is more.
It doesn’t have to be perfect
I’m a big believer that you want to spend some time building a strategy and a plan, but you want to spend more time actually executing it.
What Murray has learnt from building her business is you don’t learn by “staring at your laptop for weeks”
If I could go back to my 24-year-old self, I’d probably say if you can’t write it on a single page, you probably don’t understand the business yet. Then once you’ve got it on a page, just get on with doing it. You learn by building your knowledge over time: you really don’t learn by sitting at your laptop for weeks or going to the British Library to look at market reports, which are very vague.
For any business, speaking to your consumer you will learn far more about whether or not you’ve got a good idea and if the product and brand resonate, than you do by writing a hypothetical profile of a customer.
My last piece of advice would be to go and speak to other entrepreneurs and see if you can beg, borrow and steal how they present their plans and then use that as a template. There’s no shame in learning through what other people have done. It’ll certainly be a faster way of doing it than googling it or doing an MBA.
Pip Murray was talking to Hannah Prevett, deputy editor of The Times Enterprise Network https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/entrepreneurs
