The selling you can’t outsource

Dame Prue Leith is 86 and still filming Bake Off. Two weeks ago she was on the Xerocon mainstage, and I sat in the audience as she talked through the lessons of a long life in business. Two of them struck me as habits a founder should put at the top of the list when building a business.

The first is from her catering years. At a dinner she had cooked, she overheard the client deny to a guest that she was the cook. So she went to the coat room and slipped her business cards into the guests’ pockets. The guest who had asked called the next day and gave her the contract for a City director’s dining room, telling her he was more impressed by her marketing skills than her cooking.

The lesson she drew was that nobody else was going to sell her. The client wasn’t. The same pattern plays out in founder-led businesses. Selling gets treated as a function to hire for later, and in the meantime the founder holds back from doing it themselves because it feels like showing off. The result is a business whose best advocate stays quiet. In the early years the founder is the only person who knows the full story of the product, the customer and the numbers behind both, and the willingness to tell that story is a commercial asset like any other.

The second habit ran through her whole career, and it is the one worth reflecting on. She never spent money she had not already earned. She refused debt, and would not buy a piece of equipment until the cash for it was in the bank, which by her own account drove her managers mad. It is tempting to read that as caution. It worked as risk management. Every risk she took was sized to cash that already existed, so a failure could only ever cost her something she had, never something she owed. The waiting was the price, and she paid it deliberately.

None of it made her timid. She opened Leith’s in Notting Hill in 1969, when the area was considered a place you did not open a restaurant, and a review warning readers it was expensive and awkward to reach only made them keener to come. The bet was bold, and the money behind it was money she already had. That is the combination worth copying: the appetite for risk sitting on top of the discipline, with the discipline deciding how big the bet could be.

She acknowledged the world has changed, and that most businesses now grow on money from somewhere else. Her way is one end of a spectrum. Bootstrapping means growing at the pace of the cash the business generates: slower, with full ownership kept and the downside capped at what you have. Debt buys speed, and the repayments run whether the growth arrives or not, with whatever secured the borrowing at risk if it doesn’t. Equity buys speed without the repayments, and the price is a stake in the business and a voice in how it is run. None of these is the wrong answer. Each is a trade, and the trade deserves to be made deliberately rather than reached by default.

Whichever route funds the growth, her discipline still transfers. In a business that holds stock, the equipment she waited for is the inventory order or the product launch: sized against the cash the business has actually generated rather than the cash the forecast promises. A founder who can say which commitments could be cancelled next month, and which run on regardless, has most of what she practised.

The two habits belong together. The first is about selling: yourself, the work, the story, because nobody else will do it with the same conviction. The second is about being careful what you sell along the way. Fund the growth without weighing the risk, or let commitments build by default, and you are selling the company short to buy the story some speed. She held both sides for over sixty years: told the story at every chance, and never staked more than the business could stand to lose.