CHAMBER NEWS
The Enterprising Women Awards is one of the highlights of the Chamber’s events calendar and despite the pandemic, it will return in force once more with entries now open for next year’s showpiece. To kick off the 2021 awards, this year’s Business Woman of the Year Neeyantee Karia opened up about the challenges of her journey to the top on a virtual launch event.
in early March, just weeks before lockdown, she had her two daughters by her side. “It was really important to me
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because I wanted them to see what the last 20 years of sacrificing looked like,” recalls the co-founder of the parent company behind Jake & Nayns’, a Leicester-based ‘street food on-the-go’ brand. “It hasn’t been an easy 20 years. We’ve certainly had our ups and the downs have been horrendous, but we’ve got through it and we’re still standing strong. “So that evening, when I took my
daughters there and I won, wow, I can’t express how it felt that someone had actually recognised me for what I’ve done within this company and the sacrifices I’ve made.” Neeyantee is the co-owner of
Food Attraction, which manufactures ready-to-eat food for high street restaurants, supermarkets including Sainsbury’s and Co-op, airlines, train companies and educational establishments. One of its most popular snacks is
the Naanster curry-filled naan breads under the Jake & Nayns’ brand, which is named after her fellow co- founders Naynesh and Jake Karia. The company reported 57% year-
on-year growth in 2019 and employs more than 100 people
34 business network November 2020
hen Neeyantee Karia attended the Enterprising Women Awards 2020 ceremony
across three units it owns in the Hamilton suburb of Leicester – but the journey to this point has been far from plain-sailing.
IT WAS IN 1999 when Neeyantee, who worked in banking, and her estate agent husband Jake decided to go into the food business due to his desire to take his mum’s “wonderful” food to mass market. They quit their jobs the following
year as the company that would eventually evolve into Food Attraction began to take off, building its first factory – which was leased at the time – and securing a contract with the former supermarket giant Safeway. “We thought it was an amazing
contract at the time,” she says. “It was going to pay for all the building work we’d done, all the backlog of payments we had and everything was ticking over nicely – we couldn’t really ask for much more.
Neeyantee Karia was the 2020 Leicestershire Business Woman of the Year
“But on 24 December 2000, our
consolidators that would take our stock for Safeway six weeks in advance rang us and asked what we’d like to do with the remainder of the stock. “We said ‘what stock? Everything
should have been sold by now’. It turned out that two-thirds of the stock hadn’t been pulled off for the Christmas line. “I was devastated and burst into
tears, thinking about how I was going to pay the staff.” Neeyantee says her employees
understood the difficult situation and pledged to stay by her side. Several of them still work at the company now, having progressed into more senior positions including office manager and planner. By Easter, the company had
turned it around and prospered for much of the next decade, until the 2008-09 financial crash came along, creating “bad debt after bad debt”.
Neeyantee Karia’s THREE KEY TAKEAWAYS from 20 years in business:
1. Look after your staff because they’re the ones who help you to get through this
2. Learn from your mistakes – you’ve made that mistake and you might make it again, but you’re not going to make it a third time
3. Don’t be afraid to make those mistakes because without making them, you’re not going to learn
“After our fifth bad debt, we just
couldn’t sustain it and the factory had to fold,” she says. “But we believed in what we
wanted to do and so did our staff, who said we had to do something. “So with the little funding we
had – and don’t forget we’re still a first-generation family business, so it was just the money generated from within – we started up again in 2009 and it progressed.” Lessons were learned from the
mistakes the owners had made, admits Neeyantee, and they decided to spread their risk into different sectors of customers. But there were more stormy
waters as some venture capital investment created unnecessary pressures that affected the family’s health, but the business once again came out the other side stronger in 2013 – with the Jake & Nayns’ brand growing and the company expanding. “We haven’t looked back and it’s
been a phenomenal journey,” adds Neeyantee. “Yes, we’ve lost some of the sectors during Covid-19, but that’s okay because the other parts have grown and we had made contingency plans before lockdown by building up stocks and resources.”
DESPITE INITIALLY FEELING hesitant to apply for the Enterprising Women Awards because she didn’t feel worthy of the title, she eventually decided to put herself forward around this
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