Yesterday saw me take a road trip up to Oxford to hear Richard Reed, one of the founders of Innocent Drinks speak at Oxford Entrepreneurs. As a true fan of Innocent I wasn’t disappointed. For those of you reading this who have had a smoothie or two but not ‘joined the family’ Innocent have an amazing way of doing things differently. Whilst other smoothie companies have come and gone in the last 8 years Innocent has gone from strength to strength not sacrificing on quality building an amazing business.

The Story began with 3 men with an idea; to make it easy for people to do themselves some good. In the summer of 1998, they bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London. They put up a sign saying, ‘Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?’ They had two bins, one saying YES and the other NO and asked people top put their empty bottle is the right bin. The next day they had all resigned from their jobs.

What I like about Innocent is that they don’t take themselves too seriously and as a brand they are constantly re-enforcing their message over and over again from quirky jokes on their packaging to their recent invitation for people to apply to join them at their AGM!

They make me smile, and feel good A couple of things I took from the night were Richard’s thoughts on Entrepreneurship with thinking big, but starting small! Having been running studentbeans.com since 2005 we started in Birmingham small and now all across the UK. I think so many people have ideas but never start because they don’t have this in mind and think what they want to do is just impossible.

One final thing was the reference to Richard and other senior team members being Chief Squeezers who are involved in the final stage interview process of applicants to work a fruit towers. I guess that makes me a Chief Bean! Not sure if it’s got the same ring to it?!