The Lessons From Yummy Lollies

I was at the Brighton and Hove Chamber of Commerce breakfast a few weeks ago. The speakers were Zoë and Sarah from Brighton company Yummy Lollies.

They talked about their five-year journey of building up Yummy Lollies from the original idea, through to their current stage of 1,000 outlets, major distribution and beginning to export. You can hear the full podcast of their talk here (I recommend it) but I was struck by a couple of real learning points for other businesses which want to grow like Yummy Lollies which I wanted to share with you.

Outsourcing to concentrate on what you’re good at

Zoë and Sarah talked about their decision to outsource the production of their lollies to a bigger company. They did this so that they could fulfil bigger orders as they had been turning down orders for 10,000 lollies at a time.

Using someone else to produce the lollies, they can make much bigger batches to their recipe, access specialist machinery they couldn’t hope to buy and centralise their distribution. But it struck me that outsourcing the production wasn’t just about being able to make more lollies faster and cheaper. Zoë and Sarah seemed to have realised something very important:

The lollies themselves are not the most important thing. The most important thing is the idea of lollies.

Selling, not producing

Yummy Lollies has a remarkable product. It’s different because the lollies are made from 100% fruit. They’re selling the idea of tasty, healthy lollies for children. So, instead of spending all their hours hand making the lollies, Zoë and Sarah have concentrated on their core skills of creating more ideas (extending the range) and getting shops and schools to sell them.

Even more important if you’re a mum

Zoë and Sarah also talked about how they keep their working hours down to 9:30 am to 2:30 pm, so they get to run a business and have time to spend with their children. So if you’ve got limited time and other priorities in life (which is all of us, not just mums), it’s even more important to be able to concentrate your efforts into the most important areas of your business.

Help with the important bits

If you’d like some help with recognising the most important parts of your business, your core skills and what you should be concentrating on, maybe we should have a chat. And if you’re thinking that you’d like to be able to concentrate your energies on marketing and sales, but aren’t sure of the priorities here, or how to really get going, let’s talk about how I might be able to help.

Photo credit – thanks to Natalie Maynor