Be the best you can be because you are the most important thing about your business, Reggae Reggae Sauce entrepreneur Levi Roots told a captivated audience at Business Showcase South West.
Levi drew on his own remarkable journey from youth offender to singer and then Dragons’ Den success story to inspire delegates during his keynote speech at the event.
His appearance on Dragons’ Den – where he performed his trademark song – propelled him into the business big time and within six months his sauce was outselling Heinz tomato ketchup in Sainsbury’s.
Today his highly-successful company sells 50 different products including crisps, peanuts, cakes, soft drinks and desserts.
But it was his childhood in Jamaica and his early efforts to establish his business in Brixton and, later, Bristol that formed the basis for his presentation at the event in Bristol.
Born Keith Graham – “a Scottish name, but when I looked in the mirror I thought I didn’t look Scottish” – and the youngest of six children, his parents came to the UK in the Sixties before sending for him to follow several years later.
Importantly, it was while his grandmother was looking after him in Jamaica that she taught him to cook. However, being a teenager with dreadlocks in Brixton in the 1970s was not easy, he said, and he was often the subject of police harassment and racism.
While his pimento-based sauce became a firm favourite at Notting Hall Carnivals in the 1990s – “until then all the sauces were really hot but had no flavour” – and later through record shops in Brixton, he struggled to sell it outside the Caribbean community.
But he told the audience: “Would I change anything about what has gone before? I don’t think I would. You never know what your path is. I could’ve blamed growing up in Brixton for holding me back – but I didn’t let it.”
He also admitted that it was frequent trips to Bristol that helped him in the early days of marketing his sauce outside of Brixton.
“I used to come down on the train and go to Clifton because I realised if I was going to be successful I had to sell it in places where there weren’t many people who looked like me. I also sold it in St Nicholas Market and Stapleton Road in those days,” he said.
But it was his appearance on Dragons’ Den – a show he hadn’t heard of when approached and which his children urged him not to appear on – that changed his life.
He knew his song would give him his unique selling point – yet he was immediately rejected by dragons Theo Paphitis, Duncan Bannatyne and Deborah Meaden. It was Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh who agreed to invest £50,000 in return for 40% of his company – twice the stake he expected to give away.
But it paid off. “He was my knight in shining armour. He invested in me – which is why I say your business plan must be about you as much as the business,” Levi told the audience.
At the time his children were making 65 bottles of sauce at a time in the family kitchen for him to take out on his bike to sell. But within weeks Peter Jones had got him a contract with Sainsbury’s for 250,000 bottles. That brought another challenge – he had to share his grandmother’s secret recipe for the first time.
On the train to Newport, where the sauce was going to be produced in bulk by a major food company, he was wondering what his grandmother would have thought.
“But I realised I had to upscale to get to where I wanted to be.”
He said not holding on to the recipe was a good lesson – it triggered huge growth – and one that fledgling entrepreneurs could learn from. As was getting a pre-emption clause written into his Dragon’s Den contract, which meant when Richard Farleigh sold his stake it had to be back to Levi.
Business Showcase South West, which took place at Bristol’s Colston Hall, attracted hundreds of delegates and more than 90 exhibitors reflecting the best in region’s innovation, creativity and enterprise.
Other speakers included industry icon Gerald Ratner and Bev James, the ‘Millionaire’s mentor’.
The showcase’s blue-chip sponsors included Enterprise Rent-a-Car, First Great Western and Barclays while Bath Business News and its sister titles Bristol Business News and Swindon Business News were media partners.
