This week’s questions for founders
- Is next year’s plan still built on borrowing costs falling, and what happens to cash flow if they don’t?
- Do you know which three input costs move your margin most, and what each of them actually did over the past year?
- Could you hand a retail buyer your margin-at-their-terms maths next week, or would it take a month to build?
The Bank holds and says inflation has further to climb, August’s figures show the climb underway, and the UK’s biggest wellness retailer starts scouting founder-led brands directly, with our read on what each means for yours.
Bank Rate held at 3.75% as three members vote for a rise
The Bank is holding while energy pushes inflation toward 4%, and the live question on the committee is now whether the next move is up.
The Monetary Policy Committee voted 6-3 on Thursday to hold Bank Rate at 3.75%, where it has sat since December. The three dissenters voted to raise it to 4%, the same hawkish split as in July, and the summary that came with the decision was blunt about direction: inflation “is likely to rise further over coming quarters”. On the Bank’s September numbers, driven by wholesale energy, CPI is now expected to reach around 3.75% by the end of the year and slightly above 4% in early 2027. By the close on 14 September, Brent crude had reached $106 a barrel and UK wholesale gas 207 pence a therm (the unit wholesale gas is traded in, roughly a day’s gas for a typical home), up 36% and 78% respectively since the run-up to the Bank’s July forecast round. August’s 3.1% reading was itself enough to trigger the formal exchange of letters between the Governor and the Chancellor.
Two details matter more to a founder than the headline hold. First, the Bank reports “little evidence so far of material second-round effects” in prices and wages, but judges the risks to inflation tilted to the upside, and more so than in July. Second, borrowing costs have not waited for Bank Rate: the Bank notes full and fast pass-through from market rates to the rates households and businesses actually pay, with quoted two-year fixed mortgage rates around 95 basis points higher than before the conflict pushed energy up. In plain terms, money already costs more than it did in the spring, whatever the headline rate says, and the Bank notes that markets now attach a rising probability to a near-term increase.
The planning assumption quietly baked into many budgets, that rates drift down from here and refinancing gets cheaper, is the one to retire this month. Anything that reprices in the next year, a facility renewal, asset finance, a stocking loan for peak season, is better costed at today’s rates or above. The next decision lands on 5 November, a week after the 28 October Budget.
Questions worth revisiting
- Is next year’s plan still built on borrowing costs falling, and what happens to cash flow if they don’t?
If a facility renewal or refinancing falls due in the next twelve months, a Discovery Call is a sensible place to stress-test the numbers before the lender does.
Inflation climbs to 3.1% as motor fuel pushes prices higher
The costs feeding an autumn price review are moving again, and the mix behind the headline matters more than the number itself.
Consumer price inflation rose to 3.1% in the twelve months to August, the Office for National Statistics reported on Wednesday, up from 2.9% in July and the second monthly increase in a row. Prices rose 0.5% in August alone, against 0.3% in the same month last year, with transport, and motor fuels in particular, making the largest upward contribution to the change. When Baseline covered the July figures a month ago the rate had just turned upward; the direction has held.
The mix underneath is the useful part. Goods inflation, the price of physical products, climbed from 2.2% to 2.7% in a single month, while services inflation held at 3.4% and core inflation, which strips out energy, food, alcohol and tobacco to show the underlying trend, was unchanged at 2.6%. In plain terms: the underlying picture has not broken out, but the fresh pressure is arriving through fuel and goods. For a business that makes, moves and sells physical product, those are not abstractions; they are inbound freight, carriage, packaging and the cost lines a supplier quotes from.
The practical read is about the autumn price review. Suppliers who set prices in the spring were quoting into a 2%-and-falling goods environment; renewals negotiated this autumn will arrive with the catch-up built in. The headline rate is an average across the whole basket of goods and services, and an average is not your cost base. A review built line by line, on what your own top inputs actually did this year, will land differently from one built on 3.1%.
Questions worth revisiting
- Do you know which three input costs move your margin most, and what each of them actually did over the past year?
Holland & Barrett backs an accelerator building retail-ready wellness brands
The UK’s biggest wellness retailer is now scouting early-stage founders directly, and the gaps its programme exists to close are mostly finance and operations.
Holland & Barrett has become the founding retail partner of Breakout Wellness UK, the accelerator created by Growth Studio, in a partnership announced on 8 September. Ten early-stage founders, drawn from applications now under review, will be showcased at the programme’s breakfast launch on Tuesday 22 September before an eight-week programme begins. The cohort spans gut health, functional nutrition, hydration, energy and recovery, longevity, sleep, stress management and women’s health, a fair map of the health-optimisation category, and the supporting bench includes HSBC Innovation Banking, TikTok Shop and Bird & Bird alongside consumer-focused venture investors. It ends with a Grand Finale in November, where each founder pitches to retailers and investors and two winners each take a TikTok Shop support package worth £150,000.
The interesting part is the diagnosis behind it. Growth Studio’s co-founder Paul Finch says wellness founders “innovate incredible products that scale rapidly through social commerce” but often lack “how and what to present to buyers, understanding retail operations and systems, and crucially, how to maintain listing growth and longevity”. A fortnight after Waitrose built wellbeing bays into the weekly shop, the high street is not waiting for premium wellness brands to arrive; it is going out to find them, and it has named what it finds missing.
That list is worth reading as a checklist even if you never apply. What a buyer meeting actually tests is the finance underneath the brand: landed cost and margin at retail terms, the funding behind promotions, what the retailer’s payment terms do to working capital, and whether operations can hold a listing once won. Ten founders will get eight weeks of coaching on it; every other founder can work through the same checklist themselves, starting now.
Questions worth revisiting
- Could you hand a retail buyer your margin-at-their-terms maths next week, or would it take a month to build?
Phoenix can help with the margin and working-capital case that sits behind a first buyer conversation.
Sources: KamCity (NamNews), Holland & Barrett Joins Accelerator Programme To Find New Wellness Brands, 8 September 2026; Growth Studio, Breakout Wellness UK programme page
Run your own race
The Dragon’s Back Race was led for five days by a runner who never reached Cardiff, and the lesson for founders sits in both halves of that sentence.
The Dragon’s Back Race finished in Cardiff on Saturday: six days along the mountainous spine of Wales, from Conwy Castle in the north to Cardiff Castle in the south. For five of those days the women’s race belonged to Bethan Logan. By the end of day four the official results had her nearly six hours clear of every woman who would go on to finish, and she completed day five still holding that margin. Then, with one day left, her race ended; she retired at the end of day five. Isobel Turner, who had run her own schedule throughout, her first four days all within forty minutes of one another, went on to win in 67:46:19, seventeenth overall among the 53 runners who completed the full six-day course. Danny Smith won the men’s race in 46:59:52.
The results do not say why Logan’s race ended, and the reading here does not need them to. Two things are true at once in stage racing, and they are the point. The first: the race is won at the pace you can repeat, not the pace you can produce. Turner’s even days look unremarkable one at a time; strung together they were the strongest thing in the field. The second: nothing is guaranteed over six days. A lead measured in hours is still not a finish, and the mountains do not owe anyone the final day.
Both translate directly. A founder’s equivalent of even splits is a plan paced from their own cash, capacity and margin rather than a competitor’s growth rate; the market posts other people’s day-one times all day long, and chasing them is how strong businesses blow up mid-race. And because nothing is guaranteed, the well-run business keeps its buffers stocked before they are needed: cash headroom, a current forecast, the numbers visible enough that a hard week is information rather than a surprise. That visibility, the dashboard that tells a founder what pace they can actually hold, is exactly the work Phoenix is built to do with founders.
Sources: Dragon’s Back Race 2026 results, Open Tracking; Dragon’s Back Race, course and event information
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