Читать книгу Wake Up and Sell the Coffee! - Martyn Dawes - Страница 40

It was time to recruit the next member of the team, an operations director. One of our suppliers suggested someone they knew who could be up for a new career challenge. I knew the man they were talking about. He was running a group within Unilever called Branded Concepts Group (BCG), which I had met the year before at the Alldays store in Edinburgh. In fact, I think I had asked him if BCG wanted to invest in Coffee Nation.

I called Scott and we agreed to meet at the Design Museum in Islington. We talked about him joining the company and he pretty much said right away that he’d love to. This meeting had not been arranged through expensive headhunters or recruitment firms and there was no brief or job description written. This was all put in place later but we agreed that he would join the company on a handshake. He shared my vision of what we could achieve with Coffee Nation and was ready to make the jump from big company life. He joined as operations director on 18 October 1999 and soon we were working well together as a team. Scott would go on to make an enormous contribution to the success of the company.

Part of the value that Derek brought right from the start was an appreciation of the steps that had to be taken and in what order to achieve the goal of getting the business established on a sound footing to enable rapid growth. Appointing an operations director early on was one step in this process.

Getting great people onboard once you have enough evidence that you are on to something is essential if you are going to truly seize the opportunity. Judging the timing is critical. Lou had been far too early and he’d paid the price for this with his job. It’s through the combined efforts of a passionate and aligned team that great start-ups become great businesses.

Having access to a sharp mind that had been through all of this before was so valuable. Derek was always positive in his outlook with me and was always a great sounding board. Risks are high at this stage and the lone entrepreneur is vulnerable to tackling the wrong issue at the wrong time or failing to address a potentially fatal risk.