'When we went into business, we were 'yes people' - and that cost us time and money'

WHEN MANAGING A growing business, time is your most precious commodity. It’s a finite resource, beginning and ending with each working day.

I am personally of the opinion that if your business depends on you and you cannot be adequately productive within normal working hours – give or take occasional exceptions – then your business is not viable.

Of course, keeping to these hours is easier said than done. Everyone wants a piece of you. Each day you will have new opportunities to assess and unforeseen issues to resolve.

When Hannah and I became business owners in 2013, we were ‘yes people’ (we were also 23-year-old graduates). We had a product and we had a brand name, but we didn’t have a brand in a pure sense as we didn’t know who our customers were.

And so we began on a journey of saying yes to everything. Hours spent over circular conversations with business mentors. Days spent travelling the length and breadth of the country at the beck and call of customers who placed very little loyalty in us (and quickly dropped our products for the next new thing).

Evenings spent cultivating winning applications for business awards that no one outside the industry ever paid the slightest attention to. Weekends spent sampling product in empty supermarket aisles. I could go on, but, in a nutshell, the tail wagged the dog.

Did this help us grow our customer base and grow sales? No. Did this cost us a lot of time and money? Yes.

Improper Butter's Elaine Lavery, left, and Hannah O'Reilly

Valuable lessons

But it also taught us many invaluable lessons that only experience can bring. Through our journey, we have learnt about the market, we have learnt about the consumer and we have learnt about ourselves. This has enabled us to step back and to see the bigger picture.

Through this process, we have discovered who we are and, more importantly, who our customers are. Through this process, we have developed a niche strategy with a clearly defined target audience and identifiable, cost-effective routes to them.

We spent the first two years of our business running around for everyone else, reacting, with endless ‘solutions’ and an even longer to-do list. Now, focus, simplicity and routine are what we strive for.

We are planning and becoming more structured and methodical in our approach. We have learnt that, no matter how attractive an offer appears, if a business relationship or opportunity is unclear, immeasurable, time-consuming or costly to pursue, investing precious resources into it can be a dangerous trap.

We operate in a volume-driven industry where economies of scale are the lifeblood. For us, discipline and streamlining are the only ways to achieve sustainable growth in the long run.

This does not mean that we sit in an office all day every day with blinkers on. We are out there. We are meeting customers, talking and asking questions.

Our eyes and ears are always open – meeting producers, going on research trips, scanning supermarket shelves, reading research reports and following trends. We have become sponges and through this process we have got better at fine-tuning our offering.

As I type, it is 5.28pm. Having got our priorities right, that means it’s time to leave the office.

Elaine Lavery is the co-founder of Improper Butter. She and her business partner, Hannah O’Reilly, have been writing about their experiences in a regular startup diary on Fora.

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