Three is the magic number, according to Damon Brown, and it wove its spell on Olive Catering in 2004 when he, Sally-Ann Bradley and Andrew Norrie got together to start their own contract catering company.
Brown and Bradley had worked together for Catering Alliance when it was sold to Aramark. They quickly decided to start up on their own, but felt their backgrounds as chefs and working in operations and sales left an ingredient missing.
The final piece of the puzzle was found when they were introduced to accountant Norrie, who had worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and he agreed to join them as co-owners.
“We were a bit different at the start. A lot of other people had tried this set up with an operator and a seller, but we had the three of us, including Andrew, who’s an accountant,” Brown recalls. “His influence meant that, from the start, we lived off our savings. The result was that for the first couple of years, we didn’t earn a penny.
“And even since, we have only paid ourselves from the profit of the company, and we retain a minimum of 25% of profit generated each year to reinvest in the company.
“It was absolutely the right thing to do. Andrew has kept us on the straight and narrow from the start. Sally-Anne and I had learned from our previous experience that this group-of-three approach works.”
In the past six months, Olive has provided proof that this approach works, announcing impressive growth and trading figures. In 2015, its 11th year of operations, it won £3.6 million of new business, taking its annual turnover past the £23-million mark.
Alongside this, it achieved an industry-high client-retention rate of 98%, was named one of the ‘1,000 Companies to Inspire Britain’ earlier this year by the London Stock Exchange and then, in March, won big at the Cost Sector Catering Awards, taking home the Contract Caterer Award. The company’s Food Innovation Team was also a runner-up in the Team of the Year Award category.
“I was very proud that night – it was brilliant. To win was fantastic, and you can tell what it meant to me from the big cheesy grin I’ve got in the photo,” Brown chuckles.
He is quick to point out, however, that there’s also a business benefit to be gained from doing well in industry awards events. “The Cost Sector Catering Award has already helped us win a contract, just a few days after we won it.
“I was talking to a potential client and said we’d won an award, and he said ‘Okay’. When I told him the award said we were the best contract caterer in the country, it really got his interest, and now we’ve got the deal.”
All of these accomplishments are a far cry from the early days, but show just how quickly the company has grown and developed over the 12 years since its founding.
Brown says that, from the start, the aim was to have top-quality food at the heart of the business.
“After eight years with Catering Alliance, we’d learned a lot, so we took the good things from that experience. One thing they were very good at was people – looking after staff and clients.
“We got that and understood it, but we felt it was even more important to be good at food. That was our USP [unique selling point]. We came up with it 12 years ago, and it has stayed with us since then.”
But like many others who have started a contract catering company, they found that getting the first contract was more important than any impressive corporate commitment to good-quality food.
“When Sally-Ann and I parted company with Catering Alliance, there was a nine-month restriction clause to prevent us going into business. We desperately needed a job to sell off the back of, and we finally met a man who took us on at Eaton Corp in October 2004.
“They were our very first client, and we still do their catering. In fact, we did a special ten-year lunch for them a short while back, providing a free meal for every employee as our way of saying thanks.
“We also picked up [mobile phone dealer and now the online division of Carphone Warehouse] e2save, which was a design-and-build company started by a pair of entrepreneurs.
“They recognised in us a similar spirit and said they would go with us. They didn’t look at anybody else, and we still do their catering as well. That was a flagship deal for Olive.”
Brown says that although Olive began a period of rapid growth once it had pocketed a couple of showpiece clients, it remained a very Midlands-focused company for the first three years.
“We decided we would never be more than an hour from the business – we didn’t want guys driving all over the country.”
The decision to change that initial concept and become a national company wasn’t something that was ever planned, but it happened organically when Olive secured the contract to provide staff catering at SSL International’s research site at the Cambridge Science Park.
“The client’s head office was in Manchester and, after we got the Cambridge contract, they asked us to do the Manchester office as well.
“At first, we fretted about setting up an office to service this contract, but then we realised we actually didn’t need one: the accounts function could still be centrally located, so we opted instead to recruit a local operations manager for the job and built the business in the north around them. That has since grown very successfully.”
The move south happened three years ago and marked the point at which Olive became a truly national player in the contract catering market.
“The south has more business,” says Brown, “but there’s also more competition from other very good caterers such as Bartlett Mitchell, Charlton House and others.
“For us, it was like setting the business up again from scratch. Our first success was Japanese Tobacco International’s head office in Weybridge, which, when we finally got it, was a real flagship business gain.
“It was a hard win because the incumbents were doing a good job. It took a year to win it, but we demonstrated that we could deliver what we promised.
“I wanted to show them the best example of what we did and finally persuaded them to visit our Capital One site in Nottingham. I said to them, ‘Come and see this because it’s better than what you’ve got’, and that helped persuade them.”