89. The business decision you'll thank yourself for in 5 years | James Perry
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Welcome to All About Business with me, James Reid, the podcast that covers everything about business, management, and leadership. Every episode, I sit down with different guests who have bootstrapped 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. What is the purpose of business? Simply to generate profit or to create value for society as a whole? Today on All About Business, I'm joined by James Perry, co-founder of Cook and one of the founders of the B Corp movement in the UK. In this episode, we discuss building businesses around purpose.
why James rejected venture capital, and how entrepreneurial thinking could help tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Well, today on All About Business, I couldn't be more delighted than to welcome James Perry to the studio. James is the co-founder and a director of Cook, a company that will be familiar to many of our listeners and viewers. It's a frozen food company that makes and sells frozen ready meals and puddings. Cook sells through over 100 of its own shops across the UK, as well as online and through supermarket partners such as Waitrose. I am a happy customer of Cook. I can say that now, James. James has also, very interestingly, co-founded the B Corp movement in the UK. That was just over a decade ago and has been an instigator of promoting and spreading the message of B Corp across the country since then.
And he has also run a program called RAW, which is Ready and Working is what it stands for, RAW Talent. and this is a program that focuses on helping marginalize people into the workplace so i'll be very interested to talk to you about that as well james so thank you for coming got masses to cover i'd like to go back to the beginning in a way you started your working life at a company called cadbury uh fabulous chocolates what did you learn there and how did that come about
Well, I studied economics at university and I was taught that the social purpose of business was to maximize its profits for shareholders because profits are a proxy for social progress and that's how we generate prosperity in society. And I was a little troubled by some of the things I was taught, which we maybe talk about. But I was just really... So which university was it?
I was at Manchester University. And that was the... In the early 90s. That was the mantra at Manchester at the time, was it? It was indeed. Maximise profits.
It was indeed. It was kind of the height of neoliberal economics being taught in universities. And I was a bit troubled by some of what I was thinking about and some of the consequences that that might... that might arise. But I was just really keen to understand business. So I went on the milk ground, applied to lots of different companies and got offered a job at Cadbury's. So ended up moving to Bourneville in what it was in 1994.
But Cadbury's even then had a reputation for being slightly different in its approach to capitalism, if you like. And Bourneville is also a town that was built to accommodate the workers.
Yeah, indeed. So the back story of Cadbury was that John Cadbury, who founded it in the early 1800s, was a Quaker. And he was part of the temperance movement. And they were concerned by what was going on in the gin shops of the time. And they wanted to create some competition for the gin shops. So they invented this, initially it was a drink called chocolate, in order to have a sort of temperate response to the excesses of the gin shops. So it was a business that was a product that was started for a social reason and with a social heart. And those Quaker values shaped the most extraordinary business over 150 years and it's a great British business.
I never knew that. So it was hot chocolate was the first.
It was coffee shops, literally chocolate shops, like coffee shops initially.
Right. And that was an alternative to the gin shop.
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