F&D Heroes Issue 1

When did the explosion begin?
Alan’s interest in an entrepreneurial life began when he was just 11 while
his father worked as a mechanic on Mr Kipling lorries. With spare crates
of cakes destined for the rubbish, Alan’s father brought them home for the
family. “After the first month we were sick of eating cakes, so I took them
to school and sold them,” he recalls.
Grenade:
Blowing
away
the
competition
An interview with Alan
Barratt, Founder of
the sports nutrition
powerhouse, Grenade.
Juliet never had any intention of becoming an entrepreneur, however. In
fact, she began a career in education but always endeavoured to do more
than the ‘job role,’ whether that was in terms of writing, or development
and training.
“I tried to make job roles my own. I’ve always worked hard to make the
most of things.” As a teenager, Alan was a “poor eater” and never had
an appetite for food. He remembers looking for a drink that would give
him the calories he needed instead of eating food, but struggled with the
sports nutrition industry almost non-existent compared to today. Inspired
by his interest in strength training, and a desire for meal replacement
products, Alan launched his first business in 1999 at the age of 23.
Alan and Juliet met in 2003, with Juliet joining to help run the sports
nutrition distribution business in 2005. In 2008, they sold the business
and remained in place, running the company for a year after. By that point,
however, the pair had already come up with the idea for Grenade.
“We spent four years working on IP and trademarks,” Alan explains, “because
it’s a very copycat industry. There’s something protectable and brilliant about
Grenade packaging, because it either looks like one, or it doesn’t.”
‘You don’t know what you don’t know’
Alan and Jules talk almost with a sense of melancholy when they look
back at the early days of the company. While they reminisce about the
simplicity of being a tiny business, they provide some very real insights
into what it’s like starting a business.
“To be honest, the early days were really, really good fun!” Jules begins.
“We like learning and we had to learn to do everything. I was doing
invoices on Word documents, we were learning how to get barcodes
because we’d never done it before. We were learning all about trademarks
and how to get products on the shelves in supermarkets. It was really
exciting because we were building something we genuinely believed in,
and started to see people get enthusiastic about it. And that’s what really
drives you as an entrepreneur.”
Alan continues: “There’s something quite nice about not knowing what
you’re doing, because you don’t know what you don’t know. It wasn’t
stressful in the early days because there were a lot fewer things to be
stressed about. When there’s two of you, you know each other’s strengths
and weaknesses and I would know if I didn’t do something Jules would,
and vice versa. I liked the simplicity of having a smaller business.”
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