Interview with Richard Reed
So that meant that all my mates could work for ourselves outdoors in the summer, rather than picking up dog biscuits. I was sixteen then. Well, it really worked for us.
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I met a woman recently who grew up in a tough part of Glasgow and at age fifteen she had to leave school as her parents were ill and unemployed, and go out and work to make money to raise her young kids. So there are no hard and fast rules. What I think the commonality between all entrepreneurs is, is that they make the most of the opportunities that they are given or that they come across, but they also seek out opportunities and then try and maximise and get as much out of them as they can.
So basically I was lucky as I was brought up in a good home, and that good home put me in a good school, and being in a good school, I think my personality tried to make the most of being in that opportunity, which let me go to a decent university. In fact I have always been brought up with my parents saying the surface side of university is the most important bit, and I absolutely maxed out on that as well.
Plus I met these people, and plus I got a lot of experience of doing entrepreneurial things at university such as running nightclubs, DJing, doing promotions — that type of thing. You absolutely do not need to go to university to set up a business. It will just benefit your life going forward. University is just about getting your brain more capable of learning stuff.
If you were going to do anything then I guess you would do Mathematics. If you are numerate and you understand it and can add up — that helps in business. In life there are only two scenarios. When I look for people to come and join us at Innocent I look at their CV and I definitely look to see what their academic qualifications are, because I have to start somewhere in terms of filtering.
I want smart people because smart people make better decisions but I also equally look at all their stuff at the bottom of the CV, which is all the stuff that they do outside of work. Either when they were at school or college, or in their spare time. But I have never met the person. I definitely look for the straight A people but a straight A person who does nothing other than achieve academic excellence versus someone who has got an A and a couple of Bs and has a boat-load of stuff — if they were the captain of this and the whatever of that, I would be more predisposed to them.
Yeah, we have got people here that dropped out of college, so it depends on the person and the requirements of the role. We look for the individual, for the talents and the attributes of the individual rather than which university they went to. People do have crazy ways of sending in CVs. For example, we were advertising recently for a trade marketing manager and their job was all about making Innocent stand out better in the retail environment.
And that stood out. As I said, I had lots of different mini ventures at various stages of my life. We had a couple of ideas: the first one was an electric bath that would fill itself up to a pre-designated level and pre-designated temperature all at the touch of a button, which sounded great apart from when we realised that all the plans involved electricity and water in close proximity to each other, and then we thought that was a pretty bad idea.
We had an idea that we were going to rid the world of door keys. We were going to invent a thing that you kept like a credit card in your pocket, and when you got to your door an infrared scanner would read it and then your door would pop open automatically. I think they do exist and I wish I had one for my front door for every time I get home with my shopping bags.
So we stuck with a bit of advice that somebody had given us, which is: if you want to go into business make sure you know your audience, and the only audience we could say we definitely knew were ourselves and our friends, and what we needed and what we wanted. Depends on what you know I guess! We knew we were good at understanding what we wanted because we were talking about ourselves.
And then we worked out that we had different skills that were actually very complimentary. I had more marketing experience, Adam had more selling experience and John had more operational experience.
Those three things fitted together really nicely. I used to work for an advertising agency, so at least I had some understanding of all the marketing. Starting a business is a full-time commitment and risk. At what point would you advise someone to give up their job and go for it, and how much money should they have saved to fall back on?
People think giving up their job is the sign of commitment. That would be my general rule of thumb. There are a lot of hard lonely hours. Well, you want to make informed decisions. We did quite a bit of research.
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I think the best business decisions are an informed gut reaction. The research will never ever ever give you the answer. So, if you do research up to a certain point where you are educated well about that market, then you can use your gut reaction to make the decision for you. Does the consumer therefore want what is different and better about yours?
And have you got a way of getting that to market? News services Your news when you want it. About HARDtalk. Meet the Presenter. E-mail this to a friend Printable version.
Innocent drinks company
Richard Reed with one of innocent's "cow" vans. Later becoming Innocent Drinks, the company expanded to include juices alongside smoothies. Speaking to HuffPost UK after an " Innocent Inspires " entrepreneur evening at the firm's "Fruit Towers" HQ, Reed spoke about his mission to inspire young entrepreneurs, his post-Innocent plans and the dark comedy he hopes to take to Hollywood.
I think it's partly about awareness. When I was at school, it wasn't even on anyone's radar that starting a business was an option. Jobs were things that you got in other people's businesses; there was no sense that you could set up your own business.
An Interview with Innocent Drinks Co-Founder Richard Reed ...: Karina Grant interviews Richard Reed - a founder of Innocent smoothies. Innocent was set up by 3 university friends, Richard, Adam and Jon.
Whether you've organised a group holiday, a wedding, a party or an away day for your football team, you've got what it takes to organise a business. The second thing is about giving people access to funds. But I'm quite positive about that because I think it's easier now than it has ever been. I'm not saying it's easy though, I think raising funds is a sort of filtering process to stop the shit ideas getting to market.
But all the crowd-funding websites have opened up a new way of fund raising and there's more money sloshing around and people wanting to do it. In the 80s, there was this social revolution in the UK where people became shareholders due to privatisation. Millions of people doing that would make it a lot of money! My theory is we've been through the agrarian revolution, the industrial revolution, the medical revolution and the information technology revolution and we're now going through an emotional intelligence evolution where people are realising that we don't have to feel shame, guilt and feel hopeless that things don't do us any good.
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