🏆 Family Business Entrepreneurs of the Year 2024
🏆 Family Business Entrepreneurs of the Year 2024
Luke and I both grew up in family businesses. Luke’s parents had a dairy farm in Hertfordshire. My parents had pubs in the Oxford area. Growing up in a family business is an unmatched experience. There’s always something to do and it’s very much a team effort. It’s definitely where we learned our work ethic.
I’d even go as far as to say it’s probably where we learned about what sort of relationship we’d like to be in. Having a family business can either make or break a relationship, but we firmly believe if you can work together around the clock 7 days a week, you can get through anything!
Our business screamed “family” from day one. The idea to sell coffee and brownies came from Luke’s mother’s secret brownie recipe. When I first met Luke, I attended a family party, Luke’s mother presented me with a tray of Triple Chocolate Brownies. I had a nibble of one and was hooked. I considered myself a brownie fiend but I’d never tasted anything like this before. “You should sell these, I’d pay good money for them” I said to Luke’s Mum. She looked astonished and said “really?”. There planted an idea which would develop in time and soon become our family business!
With such high hopes for the future. Little did we know that a pandemic was about to sweep the globe. The entire need for the family business was so that we could raise our children together, at our own pace. We both didn’t want to have to miss out on a minute of our children growing up. Starting a business that we could fit around the kids seemed like the perfect idea.
We managed really well between the two of us until covid hit. It was a scary prospect pivoting a business with two young children with no childcare, but we did it!
During covid, Luke’s parents and his sister (and her family) all moved to Suffolk to join us. This was music to our ears. We are both very much family orientated people, so to have our children grow up with some of their family was a dream come true.
Luke’s sister began helping us with admin and seasonal packing. Then her children joined us out of school hours. Luke’s mother began baking with us. Luke’s father began driving for us and before we knew it, we were surrounded by family at our bakery in Suffolk.
Over the years, every single one of our family members have helped a hand. Luke’s brother gets roped in for the big festivals and my mother comes to stay every December to help with the packing.
He said he thinks “It’s the best way to live. You have to be willing to get stuck in to anything (at any time), but it really works for us. Obviously it benefits us to have a completely different skill set from one another, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Obviously it can be difficult to switch off if you’ve had a bad day, but these are few and far between (thankfully).
Thank you all so much for supporting our small family business. It means the world to us that we get to see our children grow up, together AND do a job we love.
