99. How to cash out without selling out | Guy Singh-Watson

James Reed (0:00)

Welcome to all about business with me, James Reed, the podcast that covers everything about business, management and leadership. Every episode, I sit down with different guests of bootstrap companies, masterminded investment models, or built a business empire. They're leaders in their field, and they're here to give you top insights and actionable advice so that you can apply their ideas to your own career or business venture. Can you build a successful business without compromising the people and principles that helped you build it? Today on all about business, I'm joined by Guy Singh-Watson, founder of Riverford Organic Farmers, who turned three acres of organic vegetables in Devon into one of Britain's best known organic food businesses. In this episode, we discuss why cheap food isn't really cheap, what employee ownership can teach us about sharing the rewards of success and the leadership lessons Guy has learned from four decades of building Riverford.

Well, today on all about business, I'm really delighted to welcome Guy Singh-Watson to the studio. Guy, you're a self-declared veg nerd, which is a category I haven't come across before, but I love, and you are the founder of Riverford Organic Farmers, as I understand it.

Guy Singh-Watson (1:21)

That's me.

James Reed (1:22)

That's a fabulous business, I think we'll be familiar to many of our listeners. But tell me a little bit, Guy, to start off about Riverford as it is today.

Guy Singh-Watson (1:31)

Okay. Well, I'm a farmer's son. My father was a tenant farmer and after a brief career as a management consultant in the mid-80s, I came back and started growing organic vegetables on the farm in 1986-7 and 40 years later, that was just me in a wheelbarrow really on a borrowed tractor and selling vegetables out of the back of my car to local shops. Yeah. And 40 years later, Riverford is a 120 million pound business with 1200 co-owners. So it's owned by its workers now, delivering 70,000 organic veg boxes pretty much around England and South Wales.

James Reed (2:17)

Fantastic.

So you've gone from a small three acre vegetable farm to a business with 120 million terms, a 10 million a month, which is very substantial, and 1200 What did you call your colleagues?

Guy Singh-Watson (2:32)

Co-owners. Co-owners. So it's one of 1200

James Reed (2:35)

Yeah, it's one of 1200 employee owned business.

Guy Singh-Watson (2:38)

Fully employee owned. We became employee owned in 2018 after, I think it was almost 20 years from when I first thought about it whilst working my way down a row of lettuces with a hoe to actually doing it in 2018 And I'm just absolutely delighted with the way it's gone.

James Reed (2:57)

So I'm visualizing you and your hoe and the row of lettuces, thinking maybe gardening is a really good way to sort of stimulate creativity and ideas. And I mean, clearly your journey has been a remarkably productive one if you go from where you started to where you are and the number of people you have literally fed.

Guy Singh-Watson (3:15)

We have fed a lot of people.

James Reed (3:16)

How did you go from A to Z or Zed as you had to?

Guy Singh-Watson (3:21)

How did that happen? I pretty much put my head down and go on with it really. I mean, I didn't there have been, I think I've only ever once really written a business plan. And I think I'm quite a sort of intuitive thinker. I can be quite kind of emotionally driven, I think.

And a lot of the decisions, the key decisions in my life were made like that. I'm quite introvert. I think I'm dyslexic and autistic and I am best on my own quite often. And for me, that is often in a field of vegetables, or sometimes at home cooking those vegetables.

And, you know, for the family and friends, yeah, so I need peace and quiet. And that's where the ideas come to me. I still write a weekly newsletter, which goes out with the veg boxes. And I'm normally thinking about that while I'm out in a field or sometimes sitting on a surfboard, almost always on my own, yeah.

James Reed (4:24)

Right. So you started out as a young man, you mentioned as a management consultant, you worked, I think, in London and New York.

Guy Singh-Watson (4:31)

Yeah.

James Reed (4:31)

And then what happened? This is a big change to going to growing vegetables.

Guy Singh-Watson (4:36)

Well, I always wanted to be a farmer, you know, ever since I pulled on my first pair of wellies, aged two probably. Right. And I was always stomping around the farm. And I think that's kind of where I was happiest, but there was a time in my early twenties when I came back from university where I couldn't get on with my family and it was a family business. So I just, I just one day, I just decided I can't do this anymore.