If you’ve shopped at John Lewis, Selfridges, Oliver Bonas or a large number of smaller independent retailers in the UK, you may well have seen The Bottled Baking Co products. They’re available in a wide range of mouth watering flavours and varieties. The company sells ready-measured baking mixes that contain all of the dry ingredients you need to bake delicious cookies, cakes, brownies, tray bakes and more, all conveniently within a lovely glass bottle. The Bottled Baking Co has even collaborated with M&S to create bottles containing Percy Pig and Colin the Caterpillar sweets as part of their brownie ingredients.

In this new Start-Up Story, Leeds-based The Bottled Baking Co founder Greg Fraser looks back to the key challenges he overcame before launching his business in 2016, while explaining where his fantastic business idea came from and how he turned it into a successful business. So, what are the key ingredients when you want to start and run a successful and innovative food business?

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When you start your own business, you must minimise your start-up costs, because then your business starts to make a profit much sooner. If you have to shell out for stock, it increases your start-up costs considerably. And you tie up money you could have used to run your business, while there’s also a risk that you’ll be left with stock you can’t shift.

For many small businesses, print on demand provides the perfect solution. If you sell printed items such as greetings cards, wall art/posters, T-shirts, mugs, water bottles or a wide range of other items, print on demand enables you to get the exact amount of products you need after you’ve made a sale, which is far better for your cash flow. And you can trial new products without having to shell out big sums of money.

In this new Start-up Story, Ruth Sparkes of poster/wall art brand Nordhuset explains how she started her own business and she shares her key start-up tips. She also explains what role the global pandemic played in her Nordhuset start-up story and how your business can get the very best out of print on demand.

This episode is brought to you thanks to the support of Gelato who enable you to create and sell high-quality, custom products and merchandise for your ecommerce business with their print-on-demand services. Sign up to Gelato for free today and get 50% off your first order (within 48 hours of signing up).

Show notes can be found on the Start Your Own Business podcast website. Visit Start Up Donut and sign up to the Donut newsletter for more free start-up news, advice and special offers to help you save time and money.

Confidence is said to be everything. That’s not strictly true, because other things in life and business are also important. But, confidence can help you to overcome challenges, build relationships, take risks, deal with setbacks but ultimately achieve great things. You need to have confidence in yourself and your business. So, why might that not be the case? What impact can a lack of confidence have on you and your bottom line? Crucially, what can you do to build up your confidence in yourself and your business and what’s the best way to communicate that confidence to your customers?

In this fascinating episode, which contains lots of practical advice, these and other key questions are answered by Debbie Green, founder of award-winning Wishfish Coaching & Development and co-host of the Secrets From a Coach podcast.

This episode is brought to you thanks to the support of PPL PRS. TheMusicLicence from PPL PRS provides a streamlined music licensing service, with a single point of contact, to make it easier to legally play and perform music in public. Visit themusiclicence.co.uk to find out more.

Show notes can be found on the Start Your Own Business podcast website. Visit Start Up Donut and sign up to the Donut newsletter for more free start-up news, advice and special offers to help you save time and money.

Building a website and driving traffic to it is all well and good but if your site visitors don't go on to make a purchase, an enquiry or subscribe it will be of little benefit to your business. In part two of this special two-part mini series, Craig Murphy, founder of Birmingham-based Alt Agency, shares top tips and advice on how you can improve your website's conversion rate. With practical tips on issues such as page loading speed and calls to action, you will walk away with actionable insights that can boost conversions and turn your web visitors into subscribers, paying customers or advocates for your business. Craig is an expert in web design, development and maintenance and he has helped many businesses to optimise their website conversion rates.

This episode is brought to you thanks to the support of ALT Agency.

Show notes for the episode can be found on the Start Your Own Business podcast website. Visit Start Up Donut and sign up to the Donut newsletter for more free start-up news, advice and special offers to help you save time and money.

Even if you don’t sell online, having a great website is a must. Before many customers will buy from you, they’ll want to find out more about what you sell and how much you charge. Many will also want to know more about your story, who you are, your values as a business and what makes you special. If you want as many visitors as possible to your website, you need to optimise it so that it ranks high up in search engines such as Google. But what does that involve, where do small businesses go wrong when it comes to “SEO” (search engine optimisation) and as a small-business owner can you do it yourself?

In the first of a two-part special on small business websites, answering these key questions and others is Craig Murphy, founder of Birmingham-based ALT Agency. Craig is an expert in website design, development, SEO and website maintenance. He’s helped many businesses to optimise their websites for search engines, which has enabled them to attract more visitors and make more sales.

This episode is brought to you thanks to the support of ALT Agency.

Show notes for the episode can be found on the Start Your Own Business podcast website. Visit Start Up Donut and sign up to the Donut newsletter for more free start-up news, advice and special offers to help you save time and money.

Success, and indeed survival in business, relies upon making enough sales. If you don’t, you’ll soon run out of cash and that’s likely to spell the end for your business. If you are to make enough sales, you must generate sufficient sales leads, which is a never-ending challenge, because all businesses lose customers over time. So, how does your business generate leads and how many leads is enough? Not all will convert to actual sales, of course. What’s the difference between 'qualified' and 'unqualified' sales leads? What are your options if you want to generate sales leads online and how about offline?

Answering these and other key questions is sales expert Charlie Day, founder of her own sales consultancy, Charlie Day Sales, author of the book Sales Is Easy If You Know How and creator of the Facebook group of the same name, which has more than 10,000 members. Charlie is on a mission to “help small business owners to sell with ease and confidence”.

This episode is brought to you thanks to the support of AI-powered quiz platform Interact. Activate ideal customers with quizzes and convert them from passive viewers into engaged buyers. From lead generation to audience segmentation, the Interact tools are designed to help small businesses achieve their goals and grow their business. Try Interact's AI tool for free now.

Show notes for the episode can be found on the Start Your Own Business podcast website. Visit Start Up Donut and sign up to the Donut newsletter for more free start-up news, advice and special offers to help you save time and money.

Who among us doesn’t enjoy a toastie or Mexican-style wrap? Both can be a delicious snack or meal. CRIMPiT is a successful new British business. Its clever, innovative products offer a quick, easy and mess-free way to create delicious toasties using your kitchen toaster or burritos, calzones, enchiladas, kebabs and pasties that can be heated in your air fryer, oven or pan.

CRIMPiT co-founders, Mike Harper and Ian Critchlow were inspired to create CRIMPit by the need to create a speedy, high-protein, low-carb snack for Ian's elite swimmer son.

In this new Start-Up Story, Mike explains what challenges he and Ian had to overcome to start their business, win more than half a million customers and get their products onto the shelves of high-street stockists in the UK. CRIMPiT is about to launch in the US, so what has been the recipe for its success?

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There are more than 310,000 retail businesses in the UK, which is 5.7% of all businesses, with SMEs accounting for more than 99% of them. Many UK retail businesses, especially those in the high street, have had a very tough time in recent years, having battled Covid and a record inflation-fuelled cost-of-living crisis that’s left consumers much more careful when it comes to spending their cash. So, is it still worth starting a small retail business and if so where do the best opportunities lie? Should you take on premises or stay strictly online? How do you set yourself apart and create a winning brand?

Answering these and many other key questions is Catherine Erdly, a small-business independent retail expert with more than 21 years’ experience, 17 of them spent working for high street names. She now works exclusively with start-ups, independent brands and retailers, helping them to grow their profits.

This episode is brought to you thanks to the support of Square. Whether you're a small business or a multi-location retailer, Square's retail POS system includes all the tools your retail business needs including payments, inventory management and ecommerce. Find out more about Square's retail POS systems at square.com.

Show notes for the episode can be found on the Start Your Own Business podcast website. Visit Start Up Donut and sign up to the Donut newsletter for more free start-up news, advice and special offers to help you save time and money.