'Failure makes you more humble' – Confessions of a Small Business

The Business podcast Series

In our second Confessions of a Small Business podcast, John Stapleton, founder of New Covent Garden Soup and Little Dish, talks about going out on a limb, coping with a fire that gutted his factory, and failing to crack the US

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John Stapleton, founder of New Covent Garden Soup Co, Little Dish and Glencoe Foods, was the keynote speaker at the Guardian Small Business Network’s Confessions of a Small Business Event on 6 February.

In 1987, Stapleton co-launched New Covent Garden Soup at a time when soup was always bought in a can. He describes it as a “huge adventure” that he was “completely unprepared for”. With big customers and orders flooding in, an overnight fire threatened to stall production for 10 weeks – a disaster for a product line with a short shelf life.

Ten years later, he moved to California and set up Glencoe Foods but struggled to crack the US market. His third business, Little Dish, hit a speed bump in the early days, trying to find a reputable manufacturer and he and his co-founder changed factories six weeks before the planned launch date.

In this podcast, Stapleton shares his thoughts on coping with failure as an entrepreneur, staying true to your values and dealing with adversity. Being an entrepreneur is all about taking risks, he says. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.

John Stapleton
Photograph: Diana Grave
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