James Perry

speaker

571 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

James Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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James Reed: all about business · 89. The business decision you'll thank yourself for in 5 years | James Perry · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

So it's a completely different product than what was on the market at the time.

And both Ed and I are very independently minded, so we had no interest in trying to sell that to retailers who we didn't feel that wasn't really where the market was at.

Um, so we had to sell it ourselves.

So we did it.

We had a vertically integrated business with our own shops and there would be in the kitchen making it.

So the bakery continued.

And actually, so the bakery business, the bakery business was a cake manufacturer selling to food service.

And

The lovely thing about cakes is that they're basically flour, eggs, sugar.

The ingredients are quite cheap, so the gross margins are quite good.

Well, quite.

And so we figured out that actually if we were able to jack the sales of the cake business, then it would start pumping out cash.

We also knew that Cook was very cash-hungry because we needed to invest in shops but also in kitchens, and it was loss-making for...

a long period of time so we thought we'd use we jacked the cake how long was it lost we didn't make a profit in cook until um we started making ebitda in the sort of from 2005 2006 um based on that we did so for five years you were not even achieving ebitda

For five years, we were not achieving EBITDA.

Exactly.

And for quite a lot of that time, we were not just not making EBITDA, we were hemorrhaging cash.

And we didn't want to take external capital because we wanted to stay in control because independence is Ed and my and our families and my sister Rosie's kind of core value.

So how did we do that?

Well, in the early years, we used the cake business to generate cash, which we then shipped over into Cook.

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