business and by the time I qualify the economy may have recovered.” With qualifications under his belt he managed to get a position working in Los Angeles before being attracted to a job working for children’s television channel Nickolodeon in the UK. Starting out as the Financial Controller he spent the next 9 years broadening his depth of knowledge in the roles of Finance Director, Commercial Director, Marketing Director, Communications Director and then General Manager. For Paul this was an ideal opportunity to build and develop his skills sets whilst at the same time gaining an in-depth knowledge of his future consumer base, “Nickelodeon in the UK is a joint venture owned by two huge media companies but the management team were all in their late twenties or early thirties and we were kind of empowered to be entrepreneurial. Multi-channel digital television was a new industry and it was creative and innovative. Over the years I came up with a few different ideas of how we can help children but what most impacted me was that I became aware of the statistics about children and poor health. For instance, 33% are overweight and 20% are obese and at the time television was being seen as one of the reasons for poor health as kids were either watching bad adverts or weren’t doing any exercise because they were watching too much television.”
“the whole point of the idea was improving children’s health and I thought I needed to go in big from the beginning”
After nine years at Nickelodeon in what Paul describes as a ‘pseudo entrepreneurial environment ’ and with broad experience in terms of finance and marketing sectors he felt he was ready with a number of ideas. “I was at the right time of life to follow through the idea I thought had the best chance of succeeding and I thought to myself that I would regret it more not following that through than doing it and failing”
“I handed my notice in and gave myself two years to come up with the brand,
24 entrepreneurcountry
the concept and a product but I was always thinking big from the beginning. I knew from the outset that my first sales were going to be in a multi-store retailer. I had no desire to go down the route of the local deli or farm shop because the whole point of the idea was improving children’s health and I thought I needed to go in big from the beginning.”
One of Paul’s earliest strategic decisions was to form a partnership with his former employers at Nickelodeon whereby Ella’s Kitchen received advertising time
on their
television channels in return for a stake in the business. Whilst he feels it was important, Paul places emphasis on other fundamentals, “it was a really important building block for us but it wasn’t exclusively the one thing that built the business. Most importantly we got our branding right from the very beginning. I didn’t go out to big agencies but through some networking found a friend of a friend of a friend who was a cartoonist and after I gave him a few ideas and executions he came up
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