FOR MANY YEARS I lived in London and built a career as a police officer in the Metropolitan Police. However, things started to change when I started suffering from ulcerative colitis.
After I was diagnosed in 2008, I spent a couple of years on medication, but my condition was getting worse and really impacting on my quality of life. I wanted to take control of it.
I did a bit of a research and in 2011 I completely overhauled my diet and lifestyle. It was a game changer for me and after that I saw a significant improvement in my condition – definitely more than I was getting from the medication.
Around that time I met my wife and business partner Michelle. She was living in Ireland but working in London from time to time and, in 2012, I bit the bullet, married her and moved over.
By that stage I was really passionate about food and I wanted to study nutrition because I had seen the health benefits of food first-hand.
So I suppose you could say, due to my condition, I was on the cusp of a career change. I started studying nutritional therapy in Dublin and that inspired me to forge a career in the healthy food sector.
I wanted to do something to make being healthy easier, I just didn’t know what.
Beginning
I started working in the health food area as a manager of a health food and grocery store and did that for two years.
However, between myself and my wife, we knew we wanted to set up a business of our own. We work well in a marriage, so we thought we might work well in a business as well.
Between both of us working full-time, laying the foundations for the company and my studies, we were very busy. Then in 2014, we had our first baby together and another in 2015 – we have my 10-year-old stepson too.
It took us a little while to find the business formula we were looking for, and we still hadn’t completely committed to the idea of launching our own company when, in November 2015, I had a flare-up of my condition.
I know this might sound like a setback, but it actually encouraged me to jump feet first into setting up the business and trying to get it off the ground.
The idea for the business came from our own experience as a family. We found eating healthy a challenge because we didn’t always have time to shop for fresh ingredients and find new recipes that the whole family would love.
At that point we came across the ‘recipe box’ concept that had been gaining traction in other countries like Sweden and gotten very popular in the US and UK.
So with my wife’s 15 years of experience in marketing, my new-found knowledge of nutrition and my love for creating healthy recipes, we decided to set up the Wholefood Revolution.
Subscribers to the service get everything they need to make two or three main meals, so they don’t have to measure any ingredients, go to the shops or research different recipes. It’s all in the box delivered to their doorstep.
I think cooking from scratch is something people find increasingly difficult these days. There is convenience food everywhere and people are time poor, so our service is a way to make home cooking as easy as possible.
We have three kids and, like any parents, we’re trying to feed them properly. But it’s not easy to come up new recipes all the time that people will always want.
People tend to have a stale repertoire of four or five meals that they cook all the time – and they’re probably sick of those.
We went through lots of iterations of what we might do to try and solve this issue before we came across the concept of the ‘recipe box’ outside of Ireland. It was the perfect match for us because it addressed the problem we know people have.
Leaving jobs
Michelle has always wanted to work for herself – even more so than me. She knows enough to go into marketing consultancy, but she wanted to work with something new.
But for me, it was a big decision to leave my stable job in London. My dad was a teacher and my mother was a nurse – both public-sector jobs – so the idea of becoming an entrepreneur was quite daunting.
I think I took courage from what I had done to take control of my health issues and that helped wash away a lot of the fear. All the changes I had made to my diet, I did all that off my own bat. In a way, setting up a company was just another big change to my life.
Of course it has been a challenge, but it’s something that is positive. I think you have to try these things at some stage in your life and if they don’t work out, that’s OK.
There’s still fear on my part because we’ve got big bills to pay, but I felt less fearful having made so many changes in my life already and knowing I’ve got my wife involved with me.
Juggling kids and work
It’s probably the worst time ever to set up a business when you have young kids – but for us it has also helped us understand the service we run.
Like most parents, we are also incredibly busy and don’t have time to cook, so it actually makes us the top customers for our own product because without our own service we wouldn’t be cooking healthy meals every day.
The business has also made us experts at time management – both when we’re working on the business and making time for our social life. We still have a lot of work to do to get the balance right.
When you set up a company, you have to come to grips with how you manage your time quickly or you’ll lose the run of yourself. You also need to be prepared to live with a lot of uncertainty – especially from a financial perspective.
If you go into work and do your nine-to-five job, you can be relatively assured of what will be in your bank account at the end of the month. But as a startup, it doesn’t work like that.
Having said that, we are going from strength to strength right now. We launched in June last year and, although we’re not taking a lot of money from it, in January alone we have done over 1,000 meals for our customers.
Seasonality
The expansion to Dublin is key for us in the next six to eight months. It’s a massive market that we want to capitalise on and increasing our customer numbers will help us deal with seasonality.
That’s an issue we had to ride out last August. We had an idea the numbers of orders would drop off then but when we started seeing the numbers decreasing it was hard to keep heart. But we saw a big spike again in September when kids went back to school.
Ultimately we want the business to go to nationwide delivery and even beyond that. If we can build a strong enough brand, we could look abroad and see if there is the potential to licence it.
However, from a health perspective, it’s about encouraging people to learn new skills that might have been lost in the last generation. The greatest joy for us comes when we get great feedback from customers.
I suppose they are our bosses. Our customers are the ones who give us constant performance appraisals and decide whether or not they’ll come back for another week. Thankfully most of them do.
David Wallace is the co-founder of The Wholefood Revolution and blogs at The New Years Revolution. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on unlikely entrepreneurs.
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Written by David Wallace and posted on Fora.ie
Written by David Wallace and posted on TheJournal.ie
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