'Turning down £50,000 a year in the recession is not a decision I took lightly'

But living with financial sacrifices is worth it when you’re building a business you love.

By Elaine Lavery Co-founder, Improper Butter

WHEN I STARTED Improper Butter with my business partner Hannah over two years ago, we had to bring something novel to the market with our flavoured butters – otherwise we couldn’t compete.

We had no money, no contacts and no experience. What a way to start a business. However what we lacked in all of these, we made up for in a love of our product, a willingness to work hard and an unwavering sense of self-belief. The toughest part about our journey so far has been a lack of finance, both for the business and personally.

Before starting Improper Butter, I turned my back on a graduate entry role in a London-based investment bank. It meant giving up a salary double that of most graduate entry roles and moving back home to my parents’ house in Dublin.

I didn’t enjoy banking, but turning down £50,000 a year in the height of a recession is not a decision one takes lightly! I’ve seen my peers move into lavish apartments in the Made In Chelsea-esque parts of London and enjoy luxurious holidays up to four times a year (thanks Facebook).

But making personal financial sacrifices is OK when you’re young. You are less likely to have commitments like a mortgage or dependents. If my siblings and are I anything to go by, children are a pretty expensive hobby.

Pensions are a boring concept that you can fob off until your 30s. Private health insurance is mad money – you might reason you’ll take your chances and waive a policy away for a few more years. And if you’ve a youthful facade, you might get away with availing of your student discount a while longer too.

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Forced discipline

Our goal was never to make a quick buck. We can live with the personal financial sacrifices. Making financial sacrifices in the business has been a lot harder. We’ve bootstrapped our way through an incredibly challenging journey. For two years, our business has survived from month to month. Ironically, this experience has been an education that you couldn’t pay for.

Being lean has instilled incredible discipline in us. We’ve had to learn quickly – how to think on our feet, how to negotiate, how to deal with stress. By necessity, we’ve become fine-tuned to details like gross margin percentages and allocated overhead spend.

We’ve quite successfully figured out how to cobble together inexpensive finance through enterprise awards, our Local Enterprise Office, Bord Bia and bank lending. We have made mistakes, but to borrow a quote from successful Irish businessman Mark Roden, ‘trial and error is not failure’.

We have learnt and we have invested into the future of our company. Our experience has enabled us to develop a vision and a strategy. Our vision is to become the modern Irish butter brand. We have made concrete plans, based on our experiences, of how we are going to achieve this.

Improper_Butter_ContactSheet-002 copy 21 Improper Butter's Elaine Lavery and Hannah O'Reilly

We are now raising essential scaling funds in order to execute upon this. In return, we are ready to bring outside interests into our company. Thankfully, we have a great advisory team around us to help in the execution – all contacts we have made in the past two years, heavy hitters in their respective industries. With their support, we are confident of making our investors very happy.

I can hand-on-heart say that I have not for one moment had any regrets about the path I have taken. I could have worked 15 hours a day for someone else. I chose to work 15 hours a day for myself.

The only question I had to ask myself in making this decision was ‘do I want to make a short term gain, or do I want to be work towards a long term goal?’. I chose the latter. In that scenario, I get to work with my best friend, doing what I love everyday. Those benefits outweigh any financial sacrifices I have made along the way.

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

If you want to share your opinion, advice or story, contact opinion@fora.ie.

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