Vegan Business Tribe Podcast

Tackling burnout when you run a vegan business. If you drive a car, do you just keep driving until you completely run out of fuel leaving you stranded at the side of the road, unable to continue your journey? Of course not, so why do we treat ourselves this way? It's easy to get stuck in the trap of working longer and longer hours until you get to the point where you feel that you can't carry on,...

How do you scale up a business? When you talk to the founders of vegan companies who have successfully scaled up their businesses, you start to see a lot in common with how they did it. The testing they did to find the thing that they could scale, how they interacted with their early customers and the mindset of being open to following opportunities and going where the business took them (not to m...

We take you to a live vegan business clinic with four Vegan Business Tribe members. Today, we're going to do something a bit different and pull back the curtain to let you listen in on one of our live business clinics that are usually reserved for Vegan Business Tribe members only. Four members, one problem or question each and (as a room) we try to answer them. In this session we are joined by Ve...

Dealing with negative and anti-vegan comments. If you promote your business on social media, then at some point you will inevitably get someone writing an anti-vegan comment on one of your posts. The first time this happens to you it can be really distressing and your first reaction might be to go full-on vegan Rambo in response! You reply with links to studies, YouTube videos and before you know...

Speciesism in business language? Lots of the words, phrases and metaphors we use in business - without even realising it - have some very non-vegan origins. Have you ever talked about 'killing two birds with one stone' when talking with a customer? Or should we be comfortable talking about our 'brand' when the term originates from plunging a red-hot implement into the side of an animal to mark own...

Why are Oatly upsetting so many of their fans at the moment? Oatly have been one of the leading lights for vegans, almost single-handly exploding a new plant-milk sector into the mainstream and being tipped as the next 'Beyond Meat' for investors. But following taking investment from a global investment fund with a checkered history, and after being criticised for taking heavy-handed legal action...

How do you go from working for someone else to having your own vegan business? A recent survey showed that nearly half of us want to launch our own business, yet the majority of us are employed by someone else. So what's getting in the way of you launching your own business? Is it a lack of time, is it a lack of money, or do you just not know how to do it? In this session, originally recorded live...

How do you answer when someone asks: "So, what do you do?" As a vegan business, we're all really excited about our companies. But how do you get someone else excited about your business when you've only got a really short amount of time to explain what you do? Maybe you've got 60 seconds to introduce your company at a networking event. Or perhaps you've got just the time it takes an elevator to go...

How two of our Vegan Business Tribe members hit their crowdfunding target. We recently teamed up with CrowdfunderUK to take a group of our Vegan Business Tribe members through a crowdfunding programme. In this episode, we follow-up with Victoria from Happy Carrot Skincare and Laura from Primary Veducation about how they hit their targets. What is really interesting though is where the money came f...

How do you find your niche as a vegan business?  If you think you are already a niche company just because you are a vegan company then I'm afraid you're at least five years too late. 'Vegan' is just the sector you are in and if you want to find your niche, then you are going to have to dig deeper. A niche is something that a lot of the population won't care about but a select, smaller p...

How the pandemic has turbo-charged the vegan market place. Before the pandemic, half of all UK adults already said they had adopted some form of vegan buying behaviour - such as having meat-free days or choosing plant milk over dairy. But a recent survey by The Vegan Society also found that 1 in 5 people in the UK cut down on eating meat as a result of the pandemic, supercharging the plant-based s...

What is a marketing funnel, and how do you create one to get more customers? If you understand the journey your customers take before they buy, if you map out the steps that someone has to take to become a customer, then you can develop strategies to move people along those steps instead of just leaving it to chance. This is what we call a marketing funnel - but don't think that people will move t...

Why do so many of us absolutely HATE selling and how do you get over it?  Why do we have such a revulsion to selling ourselves? Being vegan, we're not usually afraid to push a cause - but promoting ourselves or making money from the vegan sector seems to really make us feel uncomfortable.  Your experience of 'sales' is probably someone trying to pressure you to buy something that yo...

How to get the most out of having a stall at a vegan fair or market. If you are trying to get your business 'out there' then sometimes the best way to do that is to literally 'get out there'. For some companies, vegan fairs are one of their main routes of selling their products to the public, others do it to build an audience, but one of the main reasons to do your local fair is to get real one-on...

How do you crowdfund a vegan business? How easy is it and what does it take to hit your target? The truth is less than 25% of crowdfunding campaigns are successful. 10% of campaigns don't receive a single pledge. In March 2021, Vegan Business Tribe teamed up with CrowdfunderUK to help a group of vegan businesses owners go through a collective crowdfunding programme. In this episode, we share...

You can't just sit there waiting for motivation to happen. Because it just doesn't, that's not how it works. If you wait to do something until the motivation to do it manifests itself, then you're still going to be sat there waiting this time next year. To understand how motivation works, you first need to understand how the human brain works. There is no such thing as a naturally motivated person...

We share what worked (and what didn't) from our first year of building Vegan Business Tribe. Few people wake up with an idea for a business and then just go out and build their vision. It doesn't work like that because you don't start out with all the pieces. Lisa and David never meant to launch Vegan Business Tribe, they actually set out with a completely different idea entirely. And to celebrate...

Is there a guideline for how much money a vegan business should allocate to marketing? Maybe you're planning a business and you want to know how much you need to budget each month for marketing costs. Or maybe you want to know what a reasonable percentage of your turnover would be to put back into generating sales? Surely there's a recommended percentage that companies allocate to marketing?...

How do you build up a mailing list? How do you get people to give up their email address? One of the big problems we see with vegan businesses is that they are just not talking to a big enough audience. In this episode, David looks at how you can take a mailing list from a couple of hundred subscribers to several thousand, and what strategies you can put in place to make sure your list keeps...

We talk a lot about success, but what about the taboos in business that EVERYONE goes through but few talk about? Business failure, debt, mental health pressures, hidden disabilities... We bring together three successful vegan entrepreneurs to have an honest discussion about these things that we don’t talk about in business. In this playback from a live panel as part of VegfestUK online, we approa...

If you are a vegan business, how do you compete with the big brands launching products into the vegan marketplace at the moment? The Vegan Galaxy chocolate bar, the Greggs Sausage Roll - they have years of brand recognition, huge marketing budgets and agreements with retailers to get the best shelf-placement? Trying to beat them using their rules isn’t going to work. You can’t just say you make a...

The power of collaboration: How linking up with other vegan businesses will make you both more successful. 'Vegan' is not just an industry sector, it's a movement and we know that we can achieve more together. Maybe you sell vegan handbags and you link-up with someone selling vegan shoes. Or you sell LinkedIn training and you collaborate with a vegan photographer who does professional headsho...

How do you find, approach and work with a vegan influencer to promote your business? And what will they want in return? An influencer is just someone who has brought together an audience of people who are interested in a specific topic, and if you find the right influencer, they may be the conduit to a perfect ready-made audience for your business. Influencers aren't just YouTubers or Instagram st...

How do you make sure that your product, and business, is 100% vegan? Ever wondered why apples are so shiny? Ever wondered what alcohol is filtered through? Ever thought about how they get refined sugar so white? Animal-derived products and ingredients have permeated every corner of our world. They are cheap, they are gruesome and often they are hidden - and it's your duty to make sure they don't g...

Do you feel like a fraud in business? Are you worried someone is going to find you out? Do you have an internal voice like this always questioning if you’re good enough? If so, this is something we really need to talk about. Because it’s not something that is unique to you – it’s called ‘Imposter Syndrome’. Not only do we need to talk about it - but we need to talk about how to overcome it because...