经济不景气 商业书籍热卖

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We’ve had a good ten years we've been very lucky.

And now you are writing books, first of all...

Oh I see, yes, well  that too, that too. Well obviously our main business is making smoothies. But we’ve had such an incredible experience over the last ten years of setting up the business, and we have now expense of having done it ourselves before. And I'd love for other people to have that experience too. So we put everything that we've learned in a book to help, encourage people to start their own businesses.

So you think that's why people are reaching for business books from the bookshelves in a time of recession, because they want to learn how to make money themselves, or do you think they’re trying to make sense of where everything’s gone wrong?

Well, I think it's both, isn’t it? But there is something so exciting about entrepreneurship, and the reality is in a down market, there are still great opportunities, and this could be the time, I mean if you’ve always had that thought about wanting to set up your own business, maybe now it's the time to go for it.

But then, books like this are often sold as a 'magic formula', ‘make yourself as rich as me’, kind of thing, but there is no silver bullet, is there? There is no obvious formula that people can follow.

I think the formula is an awful lot of hard work, a great amount of persistence. You’ve gotta make some smart decisions and then you’ve gotta get really lucky. And we kind of put that in our book about the fact that there will be some big decisions you need to get right. You’ve absolutely gotta keep going, banging your head against the brick wall.

Oh, yes, it's interesting coz you talked about how you can't get any funding from the banks or from venture capitalists. There was such an email that you sent out to your friends, saying 'do you know anyone rich?' that pulled in someone to back you.

Exactly, we’ve thrown in the towel basically, I mean, Innocent is a business that literally was not gonna happen for so many different reasons. It’s only coz we kept going and trying and trying and trying, and then got lucky right at the eleventh hour that we managed to get the business up and running.

And you've been resolutely ethical all the way along, but, do you think other businesses will think, well that’s a good marketing ploy, I’ll follow that kind of ploy, to try and get ahead in these more troubled times.  

Well, we've done things the way we've done them, because we believe in them. We give 10% of the profits to charity, coz' it is something that we want to do, and we all care about to just make ethically sourced, uh, fruit smoothies and things like that. I think if you're faking it, consumers these days are absolutely incredibly smart and they’ll get there and they’ll understand that. So if you don't care about it, then I'd say don't do it. There's certainly different strategies.

In that case people can see through things. You see, people were worried that you’ve now got a tie-up with Coca-Cola.

Well, actually the great thing about that investment is, it’s allowing us to do exactly what Innocent said, we had to do, which is to make natural healthy food and drinks, sustainably sourced ingredients, then the money to charity.

You got the money, but it does not compromise your brand at all.

No, that of course is the great thing. It absolutely allows us to do more of what we've always promised to be about. You know all the money that’s been raised goes into the business. We're using it to get more of the healthy drinks as more people are in places.