Darren Jamieson:
This week on The Engaging Marketeer, I’m speaking to a fellow Newportian, Joe Granville from Rogue Welsh Cakes.
Joe set up Rogue Welsh Cakes in partnership with his mother back in 2020, when they both worked in healthcare and decided that, for some reason, 2020 wasn’t the best year to be in healthcare and that they wanted to set up a Welsh cake baking business.
What possessed them to do that? How have they managed to make the business a success over the last few years? What kind of clients have they got? And just how good are their Welsh cakes?
Fine with me. Sorry, I’m just having my liquid lunch.
Joe Granville:
Liquid lunch. I would have thought you’d be having Welsh cakes.
Darren Jamieson:
Well, I’m not actually in the shop. Usually Wednesdays are my meeting days, so I do meetings, admin, business development, anything like that on a Wednesday. Hence, I am on the move today and in the van.
It’s got to be difficult being a baker, making Welsh cakes and not eating them constantly. I would struggle with that personally.
Joe Granville:
Yeah, I do struggle with it. I really like savoury foods as well. I like a bit of sweet after something really savoury, something quite heavy and savoury, and then I just want a bit of cake. Welsh cakes are perfect for having just a bit of cake. Two or three warm — lovely.
Darren Jamieson:
They are gorgeous warm, aren’t they?
Joe Granville:
They’re the best.
Darren Jamieson:
Is that the reason you’ve not actually become a savoury cook, because then you really would be eating everything?
Joe Granville:
I would just be eating all day. It would be hectic.
I do love cooking. I love cooking savoury food. I love meal prep and I cook for the kids a lot, trying to make every meal they have nice home-cooked food. But I don’t know if I’d want to do it for a living necessarily.
Darren Jamieson:
How much time do you actually spend baking?
Joe Granville:
It depends week to week. It depends what’s on. If we’ve got lots of orders on in a week, some of the busier weeks I’ll spend Monday all day making. Wednesday, usually, we cook postal orders.
If there are big orders on, I can cook for four, five, six hours straight in a day. Just cooking Welsh cakes, cooling them off, packing them up, cooking them, packing them.
Darren Jamieson:
You’ve got a spot in Newport Market, haven’t you?
Joe Granville:
We do. It’s our market stall, shop front and kitchen at the same time.
Darren Jamieson:
How often is it open? Six days a week?
Joe Granville:
Five days, Wednesday through to Sunday. Then we’re there Monday and Tuesday making and prepping anyway.
Darren Jamieson:
Presumably, because it’s all cooked fresh and it’s not like the stuff you’d buy in a shop that lasts for five weeks, you’ve got a very short shelf life with what you’re cooking. How far in advance can you make it and still sell it?
Joe Granville:
We’ve got a good thing going with Welsh cakes in terms of that. Obviously, the fresher they are, the better, but it’s a really good product raw. You can keep them in the fridge for a good few days raw, and you can keep them in the freezer for a good few months raw.
So what we can do is make a lot more than we need for a day-to-day basis. Then if a big order comes in — 100, 200, 1,000, whatever it is — we can take out freezer stock, go from there, cook them fresh, and they’re still good.
We don’t use any preservatives or additives, but they’re still good for three, four, five days. Even if you just kept them in a biscuit tin, they’re not going to go bad. They just won’t be at their best. If you pack them in really good sealed packaging, they stay pretty fresh. They’re sturdy little cakes.
Darren Jamieson:
You mentioned somebody ordering thousands of Welsh cakes. Who’s ordering thousands?
Joe Granville:
Quite a few people are ordering the highs.
Darren Jamieson:
Really?
Joe Granville:
Yeah. We do lots of corporate events and corporate gifts. It’s a good world to be in.
Say we work with an events company. An events company charges a ticket price — say £30 a ticket — but the people buying the tickets aren’t really buying the tickets. The corporations are buying the tickets for them to go to training, an event or networking.
So the corporations are paying for the ticket, and the little gifts included with it are like the free tea and coffee, or usually a Welsh cake in your room if you stay somewhere in Wales. It’s not free. You’ve paid for it. It’s included in your ticket price.
Darren Jamieson:
It’s complimentary.
Joe Granville:
Yes, but you’ve paid for the compliment.
So we provide Welsh cakes for that. If you go to a corporate event or networking and you get a little goodie bag, they’ve paid us to put the stuff in, but your business, the corporation you’re there representing, has paid for the ticket.
It’s quite a high-spend, big-numbers world, and it works really well for us. We do business with the Welsh Government quite a lot as well. If they’re showcasing Wales or doing anything over in London, they always want to bring a little bit of the best of Wales with them.
I think the biggest order I had to do in a short amount of time was for the Welsh Government. We had to do 1,500 mini savoury Welsh cakes, and they needed to be ready for pickup at Newport Market at 10am. I was there from about 3am or 3:30am, just cooking nonstop for hours, getting them ready for 10am.
Then we followed up to London with loads of produce, loads of Welsh cakes to cook fresh at the market as well. It was insane.
Darren Jamieson:
How do you work out the logistics? Not just the costing, but the timing, the packing, the delivery.
I watch programmes like The Apprentice, and every season they have a task where they have to go into a restaurant or a corporate event and pitch that they’re going to make 300 mini cakes or 300 mini pizzas. They basically overpromise something they’ve got no idea how they’re going to deliver. Then you see them in the kitchen trying to put these things together, having no concept of what they’re doing or how long it’s going to take. They promise 300 and deliver 30, and they’re terrible.
How do you know you’re going to be able to do over a thousand Welsh cakes, how long it’s going to take, and that you’ll be able to maintain the quality throughout?
Joe Granville:
That’s a really good question.
I’ve got this thing where I have an internal alarm clock. I know when the Welsh cakes need flipping. I don’t need a timer anymore when I cook.
Darren Jamieson:
It’s more art than science now.
Joe Granville:
Yeah, it really is. You’ve got a bit of a grace period with a Welsh cake, but you certainly don’t want to undercook them and you certainly don’t want to burn them. You’ve probably got 30 seconds either side, and they’ll still be good.
I roughly know because we started small. I used to make every single batch by hand. I know they take about seven minutes to cook, so I can work backwards from that.
If I need to deliver 1,500 by a certain time, and I can fit this many on the cooker, I know roughly, give or take, allowing for running off to drink some water or whatever, that I should be able to do 1,500 in five hours, or whatever the maths is.
And then there’s a lot of hoping as well.
Darren Jamieson:
There’s a bit of hope in there as well, is there?
Joe Granville:
There’s a lot of hope going on.
I’d love to say that anything we’ve ever done or achieved, or that I can put my name to, was down to well-planned strategic marketing and business prowess, but it’s really not. There’s been a lot of luck, a lot of fortune, a lot of much earlier starts than were probably necessary, and much later finishes than were probably necessary.
There have been plenty of misjudgments, but my main thing is that…
I never want to let anyone down
I’ll push through, do the extra hours, skip the meals, be dehydrated — whatever it is. I’ll get it done if I need to.
Darren Jamieson:
What sort of early starts are we talking about? You hear stories about bakers being up at two in the morning. Is that kind of ridiculous timing normal for you?
Joe Granville:
Not so much. I don’t envy proper bakers, because I wouldn’t consider myself a proper baker.
We’re lucky in that the earliest I’m willing to start is 3:30am or 4am, and that’s if I’ve got something like a wedding order. We’ve got one on Friday. I think they want 200 for their wedding order and she’s picking them up at 10am, so I’ll be in fairly early, probably 6am. That’s not too bad.
They’ve got to be really precise for wedding orders. That’s why weddings are a little bit more expensive. Every single one has to be right. I won’t have one that’s smudged or not quite the right shape. They have to be precise, and you give some extras as well for breakages along the way.
Darren Jamieson:
Presumably if you’re doing them for a wedding, they’re probably going to appear in the wedding photographer’s work at some point as well. If you’re going to get credited with that, you need it to be perfect.
Joe Granville:
Exactly. If we’re getting credited, for sure.
I just don’t ever want to let anyone down. I don’t want them to say, “This wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.” A lot of that is the conversation beforehand as well — being clear about what’s going to be delivered and making sure they’ve tested the flavours and know what quality to expect.
Some people have crazy ideas in their heads about what something is going to be. For £300, it’s not going to be like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. It’s going to be something else.
Darren Jamieson:
Do you get a lot of people wanting Welsh cakes for weddings?
Joe Granville:
We get a few. It’s not a part of the business we push necessarily, because they are quite hard work. There’s a lot of back and forth and there’s a lot of pressure on the day.
If I messed up someone’s wedding cake, I’d be devastated with myself. So we don’t push it. We put the price a bit higher because there is a lot more pressure.
People complain about wedding prices being higher, but it’s because there is more pressure on the venues, the producers and the makers. It’s a lot to deal with, potentially ruining someone’s wedding day.
So I’m going to take extra time, make sure everything’s perfect, and I am going to put that pressure on myself. That’s why the price goes up compared to a corporate order.
For a corporate order, someone might say, “Can I have 250 packs of these three flavours?” Perfect. Then they say what stickers they want on there, you pack them up, send them off, and they go into individual goodie bags. It’s not such high pressure.
Darren Jamieson:
What’s the split in your revenue, if you’re able to share that, in terms of weddings, sales from the market to consumers, and corporate events?
Joe Granville:
I should probably know those figures, but as I said, nothing’s come down to amazing business prowess.
Weddings are probably below 10%. The remaining 90% is probably 60% corporate orders and thank-you gifts, and 30% consumer.
It’s not just big corporate orders. We work closely with a holiday company. When someone comes home from a holiday they’ve booked, a few days or a week later, a box of Welsh cakes lands on their door with a little thank-you note from the company.
We do that for private health insurance companies, travel companies, and a lot of IFAs — independent financial advisers. When they take on a new client, they send Welsh cakes as a thank you for signing up with them.
Darren Jamieson:
How about estate agents and letting agents, for when people buy a new house or tenants move in?
Joe Granville:
They are definitely going on my next hit list. They would be great.
We’ve just had an estate-agent-type person join a networking group I go to, and I will be hounding him to take us on.
Darren Jamieson:
That’s BNI, isn’t it?
Joe Granville:
BNI, yeah. Business Networking International. Shameless plug — I absolutely love it.
It’s been amazing for business, not just in terms of revenue, but in terms of making you a better business owner and making you better connected. I can say I have payroll, marketing and a VA, and these are all people in my BNI chapter who look after me.
I’ve got an HR company. I don’t pay for an HR department, but I pay an HR company to represent us as and when needed.
Darren Jamieson:
It’s great having that experience, advice and expertise on hand when you need it. You can just ask them a question, whereas normally if you tried to get in touch with a corporate solicitor, an HR solicitor or a financial adviser, it would be difficult and expensive. You can just throw them a question in the morning and they’ll answer it.
Joe Granville:
It’s amazing. I literally see all of the above every Wednesday morning. They’ll give you their time and help you because you’re part of that group and you turn up every week. I love it. I can’t sing its praises enough.
Darren Jamieson:
It’s interesting with networking groups like that. Typically, you’ll get your financial adviser, accountant, solicitor and estate agent. You don’t often get a baker.
In ours, for example, we’ve got a piano tuner and a chainsaw artist.
Joe Granville:
No, you haven’t.
Darren Jamieson:
We have. We’ve got a chainsaw artist. He’s very well-known. He carved the hand that goes up into the heavens out of a tree in Moel Famau, and he carved a Deadpool that Ryan Reynolds and Channing Tatum were touting around on Instagram a couple of years ago.
You get some random people, but what possessed you as a baker to join BNI? How does it work for you? What do you ask for, apart from hungry people?
Joe Granville:
I think we might need to go on a side quest after this interview, because I need to speak to the chainsaw artist.
Darren Jamieson:
His name’s Simon. I can introduce you to the chainsaw artist.
Joe Granville:
I’d love that, because Ryan Reynolds is someone we’ve been asking for recently. We want to do a masterclass over in Wrexham for Ryan and the Wrexham football team. That’s who we’ve been asking for in BNI recently, so it’s interesting that you mentioned the chainsaw artist and Ryan Reynolds at the same time.
My introduction to BNI was when I was at an event selling Welsh cakes, and there was a guy there selling beers. He did printed stuff onto his beers from Cardiff.
Darren Jamieson:
Bang-On Brewery. Neil, isn’t it?
Joe Granville:
Neil Randall, yeah.
Neil introduced me to a guy who owned a café. Neil was in BNI, but he introduced me to this guy who ran a café and started buying quite big bulk orders from us. We did lots of pop-ups inside his café. He invited me to BNI.
Then Neil said, “Ah, he invited you to BNI? You could have been my visitor.”
I was very interested in what Neil did. His story, in a nutshell, is that he couldn’t get the price he wanted for his beer in pubs and taps. He started getting weird requests for pictures being printed onto bottles of prosecco and beer. He was paying someone to do all the printing for him and realised he was losing loads of money paying someone else, so he started printing himself.
Now he’s become a printing company slash microbrewery that mainly prints labels onto his bottles.
I thought, me and you have the same clients. Sometimes they’re going to want beer, and sometimes they’re going to want Welsh cakes. So we started teaming up. I learned a lot from Neil, and we shared a lot of clients.
My clients don’t necessarily always want Welsh cakes. If I want to say thank you to them, they’ve always got loads of Welsh cakes, so I send them beers. He sends his clients Welsh cakes. We did a lot of client swapping, which was great.
Then I decided to use BNI to build the corporate side of the business. But mainly, what I found and fell in love with was how it built me as a person, a business owner and a general all-round human being.
All the principles of BNI and the core values apply so well to life. They transfer over really well to business and being a business owner. That’s what I fell in love with.
To be honest, it took a year for me to really fall in love with that. I’d made enough money from it that I decided to stay, but since then — and I’m in my third year now — the money’s just become something I don’t really notice. I look at the figure and think, “That’s nice, I’ve made that much from BNI,” but I’m not there for that. I’m there for so much more.
The money is an afterthought and a bonus, really
Darren Jamieson:
That’s really interesting, and it’s really common. People join because they want business. They join to get clients, money and referrals. But often they stay for other reasons. They stay because they enjoy it, for the advice and for the support from other people. You don’t get that anywhere else, especially if you’re a business owner on your own and don’t have people you can turn to within your business. It can be quite lonely.
BNI gives you that support you wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s a common story, but it’s great to hear it.
Joe Granville:
Definitely. Whenever people renew for another year, they tend to make you stand up and say why you renewed. It’s always the same. “The money’s great, but I’m here for all these other reasons.”
It keeps you honest, and I like to be kept honest because I like to be honest.
Darren Jamieson:
One thing you should be asking for, if you’re not already: I mentioned estate agents and letting agents because they have tenants moving into properties and people buying houses. Quite often, they’ll give gifts — usually flowers, champagne, chocolates or something. Welsh cakes would be better because it’s Welsh.
What would be a better revenue stream for you would be Airbnb operators and serviced accommodation operators, because they have guests coming in pretty much every week. They’ll be much higher users of your product.
If someone is coming from England or abroad into a house in Wales, what better thing to give them as a gift than Welsh cakes? Something they can experience, especially if it’s a property around Newport or Cardiff. It’s typical of the region as well as Wales as a whole.
Joe Granville:
I agree. We did have an Airbnb service-type person in the chapter before, but she left for various reasons. That is a great area to go into because the turnover is much higher.
It’s similar for hotels as well. They might have 100 rooms, and that room is being changed over every two days. That’s great. We are in talks — well, we’ve nearly got a meeting set up — with a well-known five-star hotel in Cardiff very soon.
Darren Jamieson:
Not St David’s, is it?
Joe Granville:
Well, yeah.
Darren Jamieson:
I just guessed.
Joe Granville:
I don’t think there’s another five-star in Cardiff, is there?
Darren Jamieson:
I was trying to think of one and I couldn’t. Until you said Cardiff, I was thinking Celtic Manor, but no.
Joe Granville:
We’d love to be in Celtic Manor. They do theirs in-house there. For events at the ICC, they flit between myself and another Welsh cake company, so we do stuff for the ICC and Celtic Manor. But it would be great to be the regular at St David’s.
Darren Jamieson:
St David’s would be the big one for you.
You mentioned another Welsh cake supplier there, and Welsh cakes aren’t exactly rare in Wales. There are a lot of people making them. Some of them are really good as well. There’s a great one in Cardiff in one of the arcades. I don’t know the name of it, but they do different flavours and types of Welsh cakes, all fresh on the day. You probably know exactly who I mean, but you don’t need to mention them.
There are lots of people doing it, so what made you want to go into Welsh cakes and think, “There’s a crowded market — I want to get in there”?
Joe Granville:
Fabulous Welsh Cakes is who you’re talking about, and Fabulous Welsh Cakes are definitely the second-best available Welsh cakes in Wales.
Darren Jamieson:
Second best?
Joe Granville:
Second best. Definitely second best.
Although it seems like a saturated market because there are so many people doing them, I consider our product to be quite high above even the second best.
We use organic flour, proper butter, and we have a vast range of flavours. A few flavours have become traditional non-traditional flavours, but we really have fun with it and always do flavour combinations. It’s never just white chocolate or milk chocolate. It’s white chocolate and cranberry. We do bara brith, where we soak the currants in sweet tea and add cinnamon, nutmeg and sweet mixed spice. We do chocolate and salted caramel, but we use dark chocolate to counterbalance the sweetness.
We’re very particular about the flavours we choose. They’re not standard. The organic flour separates us as well. They’re super soft, really light, and they’re a decent size. What we’ve gone for is the perfect balance between quality and quantity. They’re a decent size, they taste great, and texturally they’re very pleasing compared to other Welsh cakes.
It’s almost like they’re not competition. A good example is chocolate. You’ve got Dairy Milk, Cadbury, Galaxy and Lindt, but then you’ve got those small chocolate companies doing organic chocolate with beautiful flavour combinations. It might be £3.50 for a tiny bar, but the difference is insane and you know it when you taste it.
We saw a demand for that, because there were no Welsh cakes out there that existed that we wanted. Before starting a Welsh cake business, I never purchased Welsh cakes because they were crap.
The only time I went and purchased Welsh cakes was for the first six months of starting the business. I went to every single supplier in South and West Wales and tried all of them as proper market research. It confirmed my bias that they were not good enough and shouldn’t be representing Wales.
I’m always gutted when people try Welsh cakes for the first time and say, “I don’t really like Welsh cakes. They’ve got a weird aftertaste, they’re dry, they’re too dense.” Now they think they don’t like Welsh cakes, and I’ve got a battle on my hands trying to convince them that Welsh cakes can be better.
It’s like buying the custard tarts Greggs do, with that thick, nasty pastry and really basic custard, then going to Lisbon and having a proper pastel de nata from a shop that’s making them fresh. The pastry flakes everywhere, the custard is soft and perfectly burnt on top. They’re kind of the same product, but if you didn’t know any better and paid 80p for six in Greggs, you might think you don’t like them. Then you haven’t been to Lisbon and had the real thing from the shop making them.
I’m sure people in Portugal think, “Please don’t think that’s what a custard tart is for us. Please try something else.”
We struggle with two sets of customers. One is the customer we don’t have yet because they think they don’t like Welsh cakes. The other is the customer who thinks Welsh cakes cost 80p for six in Tesco, and that you have to warm them up and slather them with butter. They would never pay £1 for one individual Welsh cake.
We constantly have to say, “That’s fine. If you’re happy with the quality of that, you probably don’t care about the quality of ours.” But we also have to grab those customers and say, “No, you think you don’t like Welsh cakes, but you’ve had the Greggs equivalent of a pastel de nata. We need to change your mind.”
Then they might say, “I don’t like raisins.” That’s fine. I have four options here that don’t have raisins. “The chocolate salted caramel doesn’t have raisins in it?” No, it’s chocolate and salted caramel. I wouldn’t sneak raisins in there. Try this. Then they say, “That’s amazing,” because it’s a really nice quality bit of cake with two ingredients they like.
Darren Jamieson:
That’s passion. That is passion right there.
Joe Granville:
Thanks. I feel like we’re winning the battle. We’re convincing people that if you pay good money for good Welsh cakes, you get good Welsh cakes. We’re convincing people that Welsh cakes aren’t just something from a Tan Y Castell packet that costs absolutely nothing. You can pay good money, have good quality ingredients, and have a delicious cake at the end of it.
Darren Jamieson:
I hope that kind of passion comes across when you’re in your BNI and do your weekly presentation or your 10-minute talk — that you basically just have that big rant about Welsh cakes.
Joe Granville:
That is basically exactly what I do.
Darren Jamieson:
I’d be disappointed if it wasn’t.
Joe Granville:
You can ask anyone in my chapter. I’m in the Cardiff City chapter. That’s pretty much how the meetings go.
I did my 10-minute presentation recently and we did a blindfold taste test. I brought some packet Welsh cakes and some of mine.
Darren Jamieson:
Braces or something?
Joe Granville:
I think I got Braces and Tan Y Castell. They’re so bad.
It wasn’t really fair. I probably should have got some from Fabulous, because Fabulous do good Welsh cakes. They’re okay. They’re good. I know Joe from Fabulous and she’s a lovely lady, but it goes up in levels and people know that. Both things can exist.
Darren Jamieson:
That’s another reason why I’d love you in our group, coming in and bringing Welsh cakes in the morning. What a fantastic start to the day.
Joe Granville:
Not every morning. It would get expensive if I did that every morning.
We used to have a butcher in our chapter before I joined.
Darren Jamieson:
He didn’t bring steaks in, did he?
Joe Granville:
He used to make his yearly fee back about 10 times just by taking pre-orders.
Darren Jamieson:
I would be so up for that. I love a steak. To have a butcher bring in a steak on a Thursday morning — “Here you go, here’s your sirloin” — that would be amazing.
Why aren’t there more butchers in BNI groups?
Joe Granville:
I’ve got one and he’s right on the cusp. The thing is, he’s just taken on a care home, and his delivery morning for them is Wednesday morning, and our chapter is Wednesday morning. I’m devastated because he’d do so well. He’s literally a mobile butcher.
Darren Jamieson:
Perfect.
There’s a question I was going to ask you, but based on your big rant, I know the answer. It was: do you have any intentions or ambitions to go into retail? I know the answer is no based on what you’ve just said.
Joe Granville:
Well spotted.
Darren Jamieson:
You’re never going to be going into supermarkets. It’s just not something that’s ever going to mesh with what you do.
Joe Granville:
No, I don’t think so.
I’ve heard absolute horror stories from fellow business owners and friends who have done that, thought that was the dream, thought that was the world they wanted to go into, and then basically ended up in the pocket of those massive corporations.
Darren Jamieson:
It’s the vanity, isn’t it, of seeing your product on the shelf in Asda, Sainsbury’s or Marks & Spencer. But the reality is, the margins are gone.
Joe Granville:
The margins are gone, and you live in their pocket.
They’ll shock you and say, “We’ll order 10,000 units a week.” You think it’s amazing and start churning them out. Then they say, “If you want to carry on doing those numbers, this is the price we’re going to pay.” Because you’ve changed your whole business model and put all your eggs in one basket to fit them, they know they’ve got that hold on you. Your profit margins get smaller and smaller, and theirs get bigger and bigger.
I just don’t think monopolies like supermarkets should exist in the way they do. It’s mental.
I hate when supermarkets say prices have to go up because costs are increasing, but then their profits perfectly align with the percentages they’ve put their products up by. Is that not basic economics? They’re making more money by the amount they’ve put the products up. And they make billions.
Darren Jamieson:
That’s profit, not turnover.
Joe Granville:
Why do billions exist? If you can’t count to it, you shouldn’t be making it. Billions is insane.
Someone isn’t getting what they deserve if someone else is making billions from it. Either staff aren’t being paid enough, producers aren’t being paid enough — somewhere along the line, someone is losing in a really big way for someone to win that much. It’s just maths.
I’m all for people making lots of money and being hungry for life, and all the great things that come with innovative capitalism. But there’s got to be a bit of a cap on that.
CEO pay compared with the person cleaning the toilets, and everyone in between — why is the CEO making huge amounts when others are not? Why are million-pound bonuses being handed to water company owners who can’t successfully do their job? Why are you literally dumping sewage into our rivers and getting a bonus for it?
You’re poisoning our water supply, which is the only job you have — keeping our water supply healthy. We can’t swim in our local rivers because you’re doing your job so badly. And you think you get a bonus for that? It’s mad.
Darren Jamieson:
I’m guessing no, then. You’re not planning to go into Asda.
Joe Granville:
No retail.
Darren Jamieson:
To flip it around another way, I don’t know if you do this already. We had a baker visit our BNI a couple of months ago. He’s a client of ours now because we do a website for him. He’s planning to join our BNI. He doesn’t just bake sourdough bread to sell it; he also does classes showing people how to bake it themselves.
Is that something you do, or have thought of doing? It could be team-building events or experience days, showing people how to make Welsh cakes.
Joe Granville:
We do those. We call them Welsh cake masterclasses.
We sell that as part of the corporate gift offering. There are three corporate orders you can do through us.
We can do the packaging, putting your stickers and labels on them. We can teach your staff and clients how to make Welsh cakes. We come to the office and bring all the equipment with us. Everything is very transportable, so we can go anywhere.
We also have a few venues we work with closely where we do them, in case people want nibbles or drinks afterwards.
And we can come and do live cooking demos. Say someone like Admiral wanted to treat all their staff in the office one day to 300 Welsh cakes. They would pay for the Welsh cakes, I would come and cook them fresh and hot in front of everyone, chat to people, and make it a nice thing.
So those are the three ways we can sell to corporates.
Darren Jamieson:
You’ve got a lot of huge businesses down there in Newport and Cardiff. Admiral, GoCompare was founded in Newport, Lloyds Bank is in Duffryn by the Asda. There’s massive potential for you to do that.
Joe Granville:
For sure. Cardiff and Newport both have big Welsh-based offices. They’re great places to be.
Darren Jamieson:
One question I’ve got to ask, because I was reading a bit about you earlier. You were in healthcare, and your mum, who is also in the business with you, was a mental health nurse. You were doing that in 2020, when healthcare was a big thing in the country for some reason. I can’t quite remember why.
Joe Granville:
Something happened.
Darren Jamieson:
You chose 2020 to be the year you thought, “Do you know what? I’m going to make Welsh cakes.”
What possessed you, in any capacity, to move from healthcare — where there seemed to be too much demand — into what is effectively hospitality, when hospitality across the UK was dead? What made you make that move, and were you insane?
Joe Granville:
Someone said to me the other day, “If you start then, things can only get better.” That’s a valid point.
Maybe subconsciously I thought, if I fail now, there’s an excuse. It was COVID. And if it gets even remotely successful, then I’ve done an amazing thing.
What happened was that, in a weird way, stripping life back down to literally work and home affected people in different ways. I thought, “I can’t travel. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t have fun with my friends.”
I was very young and free. I did a lot of travelling. I worked in healthcare mainly because I could easily come back, pick up shifts, save money and go again.
With COVID, lockdowns and all that, there was a lot of sitting around and thinking: what do we want to do?
At the start, one of the things you could do was go to outdoor markets. They were seen as absolutely fine. I just wanted something to get stuck into and enjoy.
Me and my mum had a bit of a side hustle together previously. We sold refillable deodorant — a little tin of deodorant you could refill. We always used to say, “If you put it on your skin, you should be able to eat it,” because your skin absorbs so much. It was all organic. There were four ingredients in it, and it was all edible. We’d say, “It won’t taste nice, but you could put it on your toast if you wanted.”
We were selling that to zero-waste refill shops, which were becoming big at the time and are massive now.
An annoying side note is that a deodorant very similar to ours won Dragons’ Den quite recently. I think it’s called Fussy. It actually has more ingredients than ours had. So I could have won Dragons’ Den by now, basically.
We were selling the deodorant at an outdoor market and saw food flying out. Doughnuts with loads of icing and sugar on them, things like that. We thought, “Is this the standard? Is this the calibre?”
Instagram went crazy around that time because everyone was stuck in, watching food accounts and foodie accounts. The social media world just went insane. People would get 20,000 followers in two or three weeks. If you had a product that looked good, looked sexy and got people to eat it, it went mad.
It wasn’t actually a bad economy to start a food business, especially one that was a little bit rogue — because we are Rogue Welsh Cakes. It gained traction really quickly.
People’s attention wasn’t being pulled to so many other things because they couldn’t live a normal life or go on holiday. People had spare cash as well. They weren’t driving everywhere, filling up the car every week, or going on holidays. They had no idea how long it was all going to last.
The only thing people could really do was go out and buy food. You could do half an hour of exercise, but you could shop for as long as you wanted. Outdoor markets felt safer to people.
It was a boom — a weird little bubble — for artisan makers and crafters. It made a lot of people question whether they really wanted to go to supermarkets all the time, or whether they wanted to say hello to the person who had spent the last three days preparing their food. Did they want to know their name and live in their community?
There’s that economics idea that spending a pound in your local community reverberates around 10 times before it leaves the local economy. If you spend it at Tesco, you’ve put a penny back into the local economy and some billionaire is laughing.
I think it made people question a lot of things about their life. I know a lot of people who started businesses. I also know a lot of businesses that depended on people going into their tiny shop and sitting inside that failed.
But there was definitely a boom of businesses that didn’t necessarily have to adapt because they started in that world. They were already adapted to the crazy world of COVID lockdowns.
I think it made a lot of people question how they wanted to spend their money, where they wanted to spend it, and it was quite an explosion of small businesses.
Darren Jamieson:
It makes sense. We started Engage Web, our agency, in 2009, which was a recession. Starting in a recession, there are people who need work and need freelance work. We’re still here 17 years later. So it does work.
Joe Granville:
It’s exactly that.
With networking things like BNI, people might say January is a bad time to reach out to people because of finances and Christmas. But no, that’s a good time to reach out and say, “Do you want to grow?” They need the change because they may be struggling.
Necessity can force you to take steps sometimes. Don’t catch people when they’re flying. Catch them when they’re a little bit low and say, “Look, you can change this.” You get the right type of people then, people who say, “Yes, I want to change this.”
What you should do is, when you’re flying and smashing it, continue to plan ahead and continue to do the things that work. Don’t take your foot off the gas. But if things are on a bit of a dip, there’s always opportunity there.
Darren Jamieson:
Speaking of flying, smashing it and continuing to do things that work: you go to BNI, so you obviously get business and referrals through BNI. You have the market in Newport, where you sell to consumers. You’ve got corporate clients. You’re targeting St David’s Hotel — obviously, you didn’t tell me that, I guessed it. You’ve got a website where people can order and do subscriptions.
What types of marketing do you do for your business that you find are effective?
Joe Granville:
I think it’s the person-to-person side. It’s the BNI network, the proper connections, the warmed-up referrals. That makes the most money and is the most secure way of concentrating your energy if you want to grow a business.
Word of mouth is always the best
Someone told me before that the most successful way to run a business is to get customers and keep customers. If you continue to keep your customers, get more customers, and then keep those customers, you will inevitably grow into a very successful business.
I also think it’s consistency over time. It’s the same with life, health, relationships and business. Do you keep showing up? Do you keep getting in people’s faces?
I don’t necessarily think that means posting on social media really regularly, but what you do post should be you as content and other people as content. Empower other businesses. Always try to put out positive recognition of other people and businesses that do things well. Keep showing up daily and showing up to the best of your abilities on those days.
That’s what makes a business grow, and that’s what ultimately makes you financially successful in the long term. It’s not going to be 100% of the time, but we’ve been in business for six years now. After six years, you’d know if you didn’t have repeat customers or couldn’t find ways to get new customers. You’d know something was wrong.
Maybe you haven’t got the product. Maybe you haven’t got the personality. Something’s missing, and you need to go back to the drawing board.
I just try to put my honest self out there as much as possible on social media. I try my absolute best not to only put highlights out there. If anything, I put the worst of it out there. I’ll say, “Look, I forgot this thing,” or, “This didn’t work out the way I wanted it to,” or, “I took 700 Welsh cakes to an event and sold 100 because there were only 50 people in the room.”
These things happen, and it’s great. They get way more positive responses, partly because people like to see you fail a little bit.
Joe Granville:
But two, people respond to honesty. There’s so much truth and honesty missing in social media and in the marketing world.
Even now, people have learned that the algorithm likes honesty, so they’ll tell you things like, “Put a blooper at the start of your video before your video.” And you go, “Ah, you’re just gaming the system a little bit.”
Darren Jamieson:
Faking honesty.
Joe Granville:
Yeah, faking honesty. If anything gets you sent to hell, it’s got to be faking honesty, hasn’t it? Surely that’s not legal.
So I just try to put my honest self out there.
We do use some social media marketing people. On Deck Consultancy are great. They’ve just joined BNI, but I used them before BNI. They reached out, and with some people you just have that connection straight away.
Lucy and her dad, Ian — instantly I knew, “Okay, we’re going to make the kind of content I want to make, but you’re just going to do it professionally. It’s going to be nice. It’s going to be me on camera, doing one shot, and then going, ‘Yep, that’s the shot.’”
If there are mess-ups in there, there are mess-ups in there. If I’ve nailed it first time, that’s what goes up.
So we do work with them, and I’m about to sign a bit of a package with them this week, hopefully.
The in-person stuff is how we push it. Turn up. Go to those events, go to those networking things, go to the exhibitions. Make those connections. It builds and has that ripple effect.
You have the ripple effect by being out there, but business also has that natural snowballing effect, where you’re constantly picking up a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. Then, next thing you know, you go, “We’ve actually got 30 corporate gift clients now.”
Sometimes, if they all order in a month, we could be looking really nice. Some months, maybe only four or five of them order, but there are 30 of them there, and whenever they need something like what we provide, they’ll use us.
Darren Jamieson:
It’s interesting what you said about being in business for a while and, if you’re not picking up new clients, there’s something wrong.
It’s a big problem with salespeople that they’re going to struggle to sell if they don’t believe in the product. You have to believe in your own product, your own business or your own service if you’re going to be able to sell it. If you don’t believe it, you can’t convince somebody else that it’s good.
I see that with people who come along to BNI as visitors. They might think about joining, but in the end they don’t. It’s not because they haven’t got the budget. It’s not because BNI wouldn’t work for them. It’s because they don’t actually believe in the business they’ve got, or in their own ability to sell it, enough to think it’s going to work for them.
You obviously have absolute unwavering belief in your product. That comes across in spades, which is going to make you very, very good at selling that product. It’s also going to make you very referable, because people are going to say, “Yes, speak to Joe. He’s got fantastic Welsh cakes. You’ve only got to look at his face to know how good his Welsh cakes are, because he’s lit up by the thought of them.”
That comes across and makes you very good at representing your brand and your product.
Joe Granville:
It’s funny you say that, because I’ve not always been that way.
I mean, I could sell dog poo to a lamppost, but when it’s your own, it’s different. I’ve got so much better at it, and I’ve had some forms of business coaching and talks with people, because I think if you don’t have imposter syndrome, you’re weird.
It’s definitely a hurdle and a barrier I had to overcome, and it took years to overcome it.
Then you enter things like the Great Taste Awards. We entered the Great Taste Awards two years ago with one of our products, the bara brith Welsh cake, and it won a Great Taste one-star award.
Things like that can help you overcome it because you go, “Okay, professional food tasters think this tastes good, and that it tastes like the things I said it should taste like. That’s good.”
That’s validation. Although you should never rely on validation for happiness or anything like that, sometimes you’ve got to double-check. If you convince yourself you’re the world’s fastest 100-metre sprinter, but then you race someone and they’re much faster than you, you’ve got to go, “Okay, hang on a minute. Maybe I’m not the world’s fastest.”
Darren Jamieson:
You need a reality check.
Joe Granville:
Exactly. You need a reality check.
For us, it was really important to enter the Great Taste Awards and go, “Are these what we think they are, and what a good handful of customers think they are? We need to double-check with some chefs and people who are actual food judges.”
It also helps you know how to describe your product. Part of the process of the Great Taste Awards is that, when you enter a product, you can’t just say, “It’s a bara brith Welsh cake. Try it. Do you like it? Score it.”
You have to describe the flavours they’re going to experience. Describe the textures. You’ve got a limited amount of words, so you’ve got to really think about it, drill down and get to the point as quickly as you can.
What are people going to experience when they taste and try this product?
That’s such a big part of it. Do I know exactly what this product is? Do I know what people need to expect from it? And does it deliver those things?
That was really good validation for us. It read like a two-star review but ended up being a one-star award. We’ve re-entered this year, so I’m hoping to get two stars this year with a slight tweak.
Stuff like that really helps me overcome that barrier of being able to sell my own product. Honestly, if you gave me a little rundown of your web design business and your USPs, and asked me to go out and knock on doors, I would be superb at it. I can sell.
But because there’s no pressure about the product, because it’s not mine — it’s someone else’s — I could just be a salesman for it.
I found it hardest to become a salesman for my own product and my own company
It’s not such a barrier anymore, although sometimes I still have to check in with myself.
I used to hate taking money off people in the market. I’d rather someone else was working and selling the product. I’d always want to give a discount, or there’d be some sweet old lady and I’d think, “Oh, just have them.” I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take money off people. It was crazy.
I’ve always been much better at taking criticism than compliments. I love criticism. I love finding out different people’s opinions and what I can learn from that. Fantastic. I love that.
Give me a compliment, though, and I’m just like, “Ah, just write it down and put it on Google or something. I can’t.”
It takes me two weeks to reply to people’s Google reviews saying how lovely we are as a company. I need a week to read it, then a week to process it, and then a couple of days to reply.
Darren Jamieson:
That is strange. But no, I get it.
When I first started Engage Web, I was the one building the websites. I was the one doing the digital marketing. I was the one who had to fulfil everything.
When you’re selling something, there’s a part of you thinking, “I’ve got to do this.” If you’re selling 2,000 Welsh cakes, you’re thinking, “I’ve got to make all these Welsh cakes.”
But now I’ve got a team behind me, I’m not so bothered about that. I can say, “Yes, we can do that. You want a custom ordering system and custom delivery based on the weights of the products, calculated directly by the website? Yes, that’s not a problem.”
Because Gab or Nick has got to deal with that. I haven’t. I can make it as complicated as I like because it’s not my problem anymore.
But you’re the one still fulfilling it, so you’ve got to think, “I’ve got to do that.”
Joe Granville:
Yeah. I do love biting off more than I can chew, and really testing—
Darren Jamieson:
Pardon the pun there with Welsh cakes.
Joe Granville:
True. I didn’t even notice that one.
I do enjoy that. I very much say yes. If someone says, “Can you do a thing?” I go, “Yeah, of course. Absolutely.”
Darren Jamieson:
That’s Richard Branson’s advice. Say yes and then figure out how to do it later.
Joe Granville:
I didn’t know that, but yeah. I’m kind of “shoot first, ask questions later.” Or, say yes first, then ask questions later and figure it out.
I don’t think anyone is creative enough to think of something that would be impossible to get done.
Darren Jamieson:
Them’s dangerous words, Joe.
Joe Granville:
Yeah. What I meant was—
Darren Jamieson:
He’s putting it out there. If you can think of anything really ridiculous, Joe says it’s possible. Whatever it is, it’s possible.
Joe Granville:
No, I mean within the boundaries of possibility. People would be bound by the impossible. Even if they took it right to the edge, it’s still at the edge, so it’s still possible, I guess.
We have had ridiculous requests.
Darren Jamieson:
Have you?
Joe Granville:
Some of the most impossible requests are getting Welsh cakes to places.
Somebody ordered £50 worth of Welsh cakes through the website the other day, and I was trying to put the address into Royal Mail, but it wasn’t coming up. I double-checked and double-checked, and it still wasn’t coming up.
Then I saw he’d emailed again saying, “Sorry, I put the address in wrong.” It was Toronto, Canada.
I said, “Kenneth, I’m really sorry, mate, but we don’t send Welsh cakes to Canada. They could take a month. I have no idea what state they’re going to arrive in. They have to go through customs. I’m sure you have laws where you can’t have food crossing borders.”
Darren Jamieson:
No raisins or currants, I’d have thought.
Joe Granville:
Exactly. It was just an insane thing.
I emailed and said, “Unless you want them sent to an address in the UK, I’ll refund you.” He just never replied. He spent £50 on nothing on the website.
Darren Jamieson:
So weird. Random Canadians.
Joe Granville:
Random Canadians, right?
Darren Jamieson:
We are out of time now, Joe. I know you noticed.
Joe Granville:
Oh my God, yeah. It’s three o’clock.
Darren Jamieson:
It is.
As a final note, Joe, for anyone listening to this thinking, like myself, they’re getting quite hungry listening to you, and anyone who wants to get in touch with you, whether it’s for corporate orders or to come down and see you in person, what’s the best way for them to reach out or visit you?
Joe Granville:
On the website, all the contact info is on there. The email address is [info@roguewelshcakes.com](mailto:info@roguewelshcakes.com).
If you go on roguewelshcakes.com, you’ll be able to find my number on there. I just put my number on there. A lot of people order through WhatsApp these days. It saves all the back and forth over emails.
Darren, I hope you managed to actually get through the questions.
Darren Jamieson:
I haven’t got any questions, Joe. I told you I haven’t got any questions. It’s just a conversation. There are no questions written. That was it.
Joe Granville:
Fantastic. Okay, that’s good. I hope I didn’t ramble on too much.
Darren Jamieson:
Absolutely not. It was perfect, mate. It was perfect.
Joe Granville:
That’s good.
Darren Jamieson:
I really appreciate it. Thank you for being a guest on the podcast.
Joe Granville:
No, mate. Thank you so much for the invite. I’m absolutely buzzing we got to do it, man.
About your guest:
Joe Granville is the co-founder and owner of Rogue Welsh Cakes, a family-run Welsh cake business he created with his mum, Maria, in 2020. After working in healthcare, Joe turned his love of food, flavour and Welsh culture into a business built around handmade Welsh cakes with a twist, selling from Newport Market, online, at events and through corporate gifting. Rogue Welsh Cakes is known for creative flavour combinations, Welsh cake masterclasses and a strong focus on quality ingredients and personality-led customer experience. You can find out more about Joe and Rogue Welsh Cakes here:
Website: https://roguewelshcakes.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-granville-8994662a1/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/roguewelshcakes/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roguewelshcakes/
X: https://x.com/roguewelshcakes/
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
