'The business was going really well, but I wasn't making money. I had to rethink'

BEFORE THE ECONOMIC crash, I was working as a portfolio manager in KBC looking after about €2 billion in funds.

I was very happy doing asset management, but after I had my first child in 2008, I started thinking about what sort of business I could set up.

The world of asset management was going through a rough patch around 2008 and the company was making cutbacks, so I decided to take the redundancy package they were offering because it was as good a time as any to try and set up my own business.

I wasn’t necessarily looking to set up a company in the baby space, but my own experience as a mother led me to the business I eventually settled on.

After I had my child, I was trying to research weaning stages for babies to inform myself about how to wean my child off breast milk and onto food, but I found it really difficult to get the right information. There is an awful lot of information and help out there on the internet and in books, but a lot of it is conflicting.

My own research showed me that there was definitely something I could do, because there was nobody really on the market showing parents how to cook healthy food for their babies. So I set up the Mummy Cooks cookery school.

Making money

Our target market is first-time mothers who are going through the weaning stages with their child, with the hope that they are going to stay with us through the child’s feeding life right up to school-going age – using our products and recipes at every stage to help with healthy cooking.

It didn’t take long to get some momentum behind the business and all of a sudden I was getting roles as the weaning expert with the likes of MummyPages and at the Pregnancy and Baby Fair.

The business was going really well and it was in demand, but I wasn’t really making money. So I had to rethink how this business was going to start generating profits.

When I was doing the classes, I partnered up with Lesley Barber who was running BabyPotz, a company that produces chemical-free baby bottles and food pots. She was in a situation where someone else had to manage the business for her because she had a full-time job and couldn’t bring it any further.

Once the opportunity to buy the business behind BabyPotz came up, I didn’t hesitate in trying to snap it up.

There were seven bidders for her company and I won it – not because I bid more money than anyone else but because she believed in my story of promoting healthy eating in children, and it matched what she wanted to see.

She was selling BabyPotz in Ireland, but I brought it to France, Germany, Italy and the UK through Amazon, and now it’s a sizable chunk of my business and has helped get more revenue flowing into the company.

Product vs service

The whole operations side of marketing a product as opposed to advertising a service was a big leap for the company and myself to make. When you have a product, you have to stop a lot of the time, manually take account of things like stock and constantly be sure that you’re ordering enough products to keep up with demand.

Bringing a product into the business also meant I had to start negotiating with retailers, which was a whole new world to me as well. I found it focuses you, because when you’re in front of the likes of Dunnes Stores, it is crucial to make sure you have your numbers right so you can confidently say you’ll be able to supply enough stock.

It’s tough work, but it’s all worth it. When you see the money coming in from product sales, it is so rewarding and all that revenue means the business is now in a position to start growing into the UK.

We could build the company up in a similar way in the UK, but that’s the long game and it doesn’t bring the sales straight away, even though it helps develops the brand.

To date, I haven’t spent a penny on marketing. It has all been about creating content and giving it to media partners like RTÉ Food, Xposé Parenting and MummyPages and building the brand that way.

To be honest, we can’t grow into the UK fast enough. We may have built up a brand in Ireland, but we haven’t in the UK and it’s such a bigger and harder market to grow into.

So for the stage we are at, it is vital that we get investment to allow me to develop all the products I want straight away, while also helping with the marketing and growing the team.

We have the groundwork done in Ireland and it would take us two years to get to where we want to be in the UK without investment – and that’s just too slow. We would possibly leave ourselves open to being copied in the meantime.

Mummy Cooks could be a nice little earner and it would be easy sit back and watch the money come in and slowly expand the business, but at this point it is better to go for the investment and grow faster before someone beats us to it.

Siobhan Berry is the ‎founder of Mummy Cooks. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on unlikely entrepreneurs.

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