The Business of Good Bread

Duncan Findlater is Managing Director of Wholesale and one of the four founders behind Company Bakery, the Edinburgh bakery built on a simple idea: make really good bread and see where it takes you. Since launching in 2017, the team has grown from supplying their own wine bar to producing award-winning sourdough and pastries using Scottish flour and traditional methods. Here, Findlater reflects on building the business, weathering the setbacks and why, when things get tough, the answer is usually to just crack on.

What inspired you to start your business?
Until 2014, Amy, my wife and business partner, and I were living in London. We had become used to having access to, and eating, great bread. E5 Bakehouse had just opened, we were a 30-minute walk from Borough Market, and places like Ozone Coffee were bringing a Melbourne-style approach to brunch to the city, which we had experienced while living there for two years. We moved to Edinburgh in 2014 to open our wine bar, Smith & Gertrude. The focus was simple: great wine and great cheese, and, by extension, great bread to go with the cheese.

Not long after we opened, our bread supplier stopped providing wholesale, and suddenly we couldn’t get the sourdough that had become such an important part of our offering. As it happened, a couple of serendipitous conversations were happening at exactly the right time. One was with Ben Reade, who had opened Edinburgh Food Studio around the same time as we had launched Smith & Gertrude. We met and got chatting at an awards ceremony. The other was with Hollie Love Reid, who owned Lovecrumbs, one of our favourite cafés in Edinburgh.

Ben was producing his own exceptional sourdough for his restaurant, while Hollie had experience running wholesale bakeries. We needed bread at a decent scale for S&G, or, at least, what we thought was a decent scale at the time. In short, with three ready-made customers and four like-minded individuals all in the same space, physically and figuratively, it just felt like too good an opportunity to pass up. And that was really it. The inspiration came from a need for great bread, combined with an enthusiasm for simply having a go. We were lucky enough to meet like-minded people who were also prepared to take the plunge, and from those conversations, the bakery was born.

What was your biggest challenge and how did you overcome it?
The short answer is, I’m not sure I know. We’ve faced all kinds of challenges over the years. Some sound bigger than others, but my feeling is that if we hadn’t responded to each of them with the same level of determination to get it sorted, we might not have the business we have today.

Our first bakery was on the top floor of a communal workspace in Edinburgh called The Biscuit Factory. It was a cool spot, but operationally it was a nightmare. Door access codes would change without us being told, the lift could be out of action for weeks at a time, and we might turn up to work while a rave was still going on.

It was common to arrive at 5 a.m. to start deliveries only to find we couldn’t get into the building, or that the lift was broken, forcing us to hand-ball half a tonne of bread down three flights of stairs. When this happened, we’d call family members, mates and colleagues from our other businesses. I remember one time Rannoch, our current Head of Sales, had his wife, sister and two sons all helping get deliveries out of the door. We’d drive across town to collect keys, wake landlords up to get access codes, basically, we’d do whatever it took to get the product out of the door and to our customers on time. So I suppose that’s always been the biggest challenge: we bake to order, fresh, every day, 363 days a year. Making the product to the standard we demand and getting it to the right place, correctly and on time, is the business, and it is the challenge. It’s also, I think, ultimately what our success to date has been built on. We approach the bakery and our commitment to our customers with the same focus that our hospitality businesses approach their commitment to their customers.

Since those early days, we’ve produced and delivered through the Beast from the East storm, through floods, through power cuts, through Covid and through fires. To date, I believe we have had only one unscheduled closure in 10 years.

More concisely, the circumstances change, but the challenge remains the same: delivering on our commitment to our customers. We know their businesses rely on us doing so. We’ve overcome these challenges simply by understanding how important that commitment is, and by surrounding ourselves with people, both within the business and within our family and wider circle, who understand it too. When something goes wrong, we don’t tend to spend too long asking whose fault it is. You just figure out what needs to happen and get on with it.

How did it secure initial funding?
We didn’t, is the short answer. Each director started the business by putting in £5k. Since then, we have had a couple of small loans from family members, but that has been it.

How do you handle failure or setbacks?
Is it too flippant to say that we just crack on? We’ve had plenty of what could be considered failures or setbacks, but at no point did we feel any of them were fatal. As such, it really was just a case of acknowledging them, figuring out what happened and whether there was anything useful to learn, and then just going again. I don’t think you can start or run a business if you are not an inherently hopeful person. We spend most of our lives at the bakery living in various shades of hope.

What advice would you give to someone starting their own business?
Advice is tough, especially trying to summarise it in a short form like this. Mainly because the path you take to starting your own business tends to be very particular to you: your circumstances, your past, your future aspirations. Talking, and more importantly listening, is always good. I’m not sure that counts as advice though? Persevere. Maybe that is better? I knew that I wanted to be my own boss, to have the freedom to live the life I wanted, and still I reckon I spent most of the first two or three years of the bakery with the phrase ‘the struggle is real’ circling round my head. Almost like a mantra, if you want to put a positive spin on it, but really just to galvanise me when I was delivering two loaves of bread in torrential rain, in the middle of January in Edinburgh, and questioning my life decisions.

How do you stay motivated during tough times?
Perspective. The tough times we have had with the businesses all pale into relative insignificance when considered against what folk are dealing with on a daily basis. That’s not meant to sound trite. I think having a sense of perspective is immensely important, not just when running your own business but when running teams, managing people, whatever it may be. It allows you to deal with any situation with the seriousness it requires without over-dramatising. We’ve had a load of tough times in our 10 years running businesses, internal, external, personal, professional. I think if what you are doing is genuinely what you want to be doing with your life, then whilst motivation will peak and trough, it will always be there no matter how tough it gets. Also… music. This quite possibly isn’t legitimate business ‘advice’, but music, more so probably than even friends and family, is what has helped me through the tough times.

Share your tips for achieving success…
I don’t know. For me, it comes down to what you want from life. I studied Theology and Philosophy at uni, so suffice to say I probably think about things too deeply. We get one go around. Figure out what you want from life and then build your business to support that. For me, success has always been about balance: I want to create businesses that people love, not just like; I want to be financially secure and enjoy the rewards of hard work; I don’t want to miss any moment with my family or friends, or in particular my kids. Success for me has been keeping those things in perspective and finding the balance to achieve all of them. So figure out what you want from life and then build your business and life to deliver that… not sure that counts as a tip for achieving success!