Welcome to Re-Sauce’s first-ever blog. Over the next few weeks and months, Lee, Ian, Stuart, and I plan to add blogs on all sorts of subjects on an ongoing basis to give our readers some ideas, based on our own personal experiences. It is our hope that these blogs might help people to consider their options as they grow their own businesses. So if you ever want to ask any questions or interact with us, don’t hesitate to ping us an e-mail: [email protected].
So where better to start than at the beginning… well, sort of…
Having stepped down as MD & Exec VP of Peerless-AV EMEA towards the end of 2017, I quickly realised two things;
1. I didn’t like Golf and still don’t fully understand the appeal
2. I needed to keep my brain active
To that end, as I was and currently still am a Non-Exec on the Peerless-AV board, I asked Peerless if they would have any objections to me resurrecting the BBG monicker to use for a new consultancy business. For those that didn’t know, BBG Distribution Ltd was the original name of my business that Peerless acquired back in 2009. Peerless thankfully agreed and so I launched a new business consultancy called BBG Business Development LLP.
Fast forward to Feb 2020 and I attended the ISE show and this virus called COVID had just started to make the news…
To be honest, none of us thought too much about it being an issue until early March. At that point, I had been signed up to be the keynote speaker for a large buying group and their CEO had also asked me to accompany him on a mini-tour of the UK, talking about business development and sales and marketing, when all of a sudden it hit… Within 1 week, all of the work BBG had signed up for until the end of the year literally disappeared.
This enforced break gave me time to consider what I wanted to do, as whilst I had enjoyed the BBG Business Consultancy, a lot of the time I was asked to provide marketing ideas which I was then putting into 3rd parties. I, therefore, came up with the idea of combining a Business Consultancy with a Marketing Agency. In my eyes, the two worked hand in hand, as not only could I help companies on the strategic and business side, but I could also then provide them with the tools and services they needed to develop.
It was at this point I decided to reach out to Lee Baker (formerly of Midwich) to see if he was interested in coming on board. As my forte was mainly sales and marketing, and Lee’s background was mainly commercial, we then decided to bring someone else in with a strong background in finance and so approached Ian Sempers (formerly of Medium UK), who we both got on well with and hence the idea of Re-Sauce was born…
The next blog will be from Lee around his thoughts on building a business and then the week after will be from Ian, about finance, then we have more blogs focussed on building a global brand and all sorts of marketing pieces as well. I hope you will enjoy them.
We plan to release these on Friday afternoons and so anyone who is interested can maybe use this as their step towards the weekend. There are many lessons that the 3 of us have learned over the past 15-20 years in this business and these experiences will be covered within these weekly blogs, so before I sign off with the 1st blog, what can we draw from this?
Well of course you have to start with an idea, but then you need to have the right people and the right proposition for your market. It has been an awful lot of work to start a whole new business again from scratch, but I for one have really enjoyed working with people I like and being back in the industry I love.
I believe we are all very lucky to be working in such a fast-paced and interesting business and I can’t wait to get involved in the industry again, working with some amazing products and people.
