- Eight years ago he was running a struggling cheese making business
- He bought a defunct 75 year old factory that US food giant Kraft had closed
- He had no real plan
- Having bought the factory he still had no firm idea what he wanted to do with it
- The morale in the local town had collapsed.
8 years later…
- He has just been voted World Entrepreneur of the year – yes World!!!
- His company is America’s biggest yogurt brand
- He employs more than 3,000 people
- Annual sales stand at around $1billion
- He controls almost one fifth of the US yogurt market, more than any single competitor.
Would you like to know how he did it?
“I never thought of throwing in the towel. I was curious, I had no real plan but I wanted to get out of the painful time I was having. My first decision was to turn off the lights – I had just seen the electricity bill and couldn’t believe it! My second decision was to hire five ex-Kraft staff to paint the walls.”
“It wasn’t much of a business plan but then doing something is always better than sitting on your hands. When we find we have problems, we all do something, if you are in the motion of action, the ideas come. No-one has any big business knowledge including myself.”
“It’s not been an easy ride, it was a hugely difficult time at the beginning `it almost killed me’. We would work nights, days, Christmas, but in the end we delivered, who cares as long as it gets there. Entrepreneurship is like a quest, like crossing the ocean or climbing Mount Everest: When you put yourself through this journey, you find out who you really are.”
“The food companies became so big they forgot who they were making the products for and why. Entrepreneurship can turn communities around. I admit fearing that the business will lose its character as it grows and I told key staff that if they detected ‘unwelcome changes’ in my leadership they had my `serious` permission to punch me in the face!!”
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