Robyn Jones, 47, wasn't the only person laid off in 1991. But she probably was one of the few to write her ex-boss a thank-you letter. "Thanks for making me redundant," it said. "If you hadn't, I wouldn't have set up a catering business of my own." Seventeen years later, Jones's catering business Charlton House Catering is one of Britain's largest, and she is very rich indeed.
Jones went to catering college in Derbyshire, before taking a job at a Cambridge catering firm in 1980. She worked her way up from cooking to accounts and by 1991 was making £30,000 a year as head of catering at a Berkshire construction firm. Then came the P45. "At first I thought, 'Why me, what have I done?' But you've got to be upbeat."
Her husband immediately suggested she set up her own business. So that's what she did. Jones "knew and loved" catering and she saw opportunity in it. At the time, it was a "dirty, dishonest" business, where "you didn't talk to the client about what they wanted, you just told them what they could have". Jones felt she could beat the competition by tailoring her service to customers' needs, rather than making them take what was on offer. "So, if they wanted their invoices on pink paper with blue spots then, of course, we could do that."
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With her £2,500 redundancy cheque in hand, Jones began cold-calling companies from her house in Henley-on-Thames. It wasn't easy. Seven months passed before Charlton House Catering got its first client, Guide Dogs for the Blind. More followed, but it wasn't until 1992 that the real breakthrough came. Jones had just won a contract in Weybridge, Surrey, and was turning over a respectable £350,000 a year when across the road she "saw this big office block being built and I said, that looks like a big juicy building, I fancy that".
It turned out to be Sony's new UK head office, the management of whom just happened to be having their project meetings in the museum, and were thus familiar with Jones and her work. She landed a £400,000 contract with them and hit the £1.2m turnover mark later that year. "Sony made people sit up," she says. By 1997 she'd won contracts with BUPA and Network Rail, and by 2002 the company was turning over £20m, when Jones secured the services of Michelin-starred chef David Cavalier to oversee the group's cooking operations. "He's brought a lot of business for us," says Jones. The firm's turnover hit the £75m last year and it's continuing to grow.
It is quite something to have set up a business in a recession and to have thrived to this extent. So what is Jones's advice for other entrepreneurs? "Everybody gets all morose about the whole thing instead of looking at how they can get their costs to fit. That's what we did. We couldn't be lavish with things." People "just have to cut back a bit on their overheads".
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