If you have a vegan business, you have found your tribe

Hello and welcome to episode fifty-three of The Vegan Business Tribe Podcast with myself David Pannell, co-founder of Vegan Business Tribe.  And if you have a vegan business, or are thinking of starting one, then Vegan Business Tribe is here to support and inspire you not just to build a vegan business, but to build a SUCCESSFUL vegan business.

 

And because this is episode 53, and because we’re a weekly podcast, then that means you’ve now had one full year of Vegan Business Tribe in your earlobes – so you could consider this episode to be the start of season two if you like!  And over that year, Vegan Business Tribe has just gone from strength to strength and we could not have done it without you.  Our members are really what make Vegan Business Tribe, we really couldn’t do this without all of you and I think that Lisa and I will probably record a special Christmas podcast in a few weeks as our 2021 round-up of Vegan Business Tribe and everything that has happened: from leading our members through the group crowdfunding programme at the start of the year to all the collaborations we’ve done with other amazing vegan business superstar influencers, including Katrina Fox and Kathleen Gage.  All the live talks and events we’ve been at this year this year from Global Vegfest to Vegan Campout to Plant Based World Europe and even Vegan Interior Design Week that I was on a panel for this week.  And also all the amazing collaborations that have happened between our members over the last year that have really moved not just their own businesses forward but also the vegan cause.  And you don’t get to hear enough from Lisa on this podcast so I think recording a more ‘live’ roundup of 2021 with us both will be a great way for us to celebrate the year and also tell you what we’ve got planned for next.

 

And as you know, this podcast and a lot of the work we do is funded by our membership site over at Vegan Busines Tribe.  So if you love what we do and want to be part of our vegan mission and support everything we do to champion vegan business worldwide, then over on veganbusinesstribe.com not only will you find all our content and how we can support you as a vegan business, but you’ll also get access to our amazing community of other vegan businesses owners just like you.  Because we know that just being vegan can be isolating sometimes, but running a vegan business can be even more so which is why a huge part of our mission at Vegan Business Tribe is connecting our members so that they can work together, support each other and just help make a bigger impact on the world with their businesses.  But when you join us at Vegan Business Tribe you also get access to our full Community Hub where you can get to know other members; you can join our online networking meet-ups on Zoom; you can study our courses and collections and also get access to myself and Lisa though our business clinics.  And right now, if you sign up as a member you also get a 30 minute welcome 121 with myself and Lisa so that we can find out more about your business and see how we can help and support you. And the best part is that it’s not expensive to be part of Vegan Business Tribe!  We’re talking about the equivalent of buying a coffee once a week from your local coffee shop, but your support really makes all the difference.  So if you want to find out more about everything you get as being a member of Vegan Busines Tribe, and at the same time know that you’re helping to keep this podcast on the air, then head over to veganbusinesstribe.com and click on the big join button on the homepage to find out more.

 

Now, talking about next year (as I effortlessly and seamlessly segway into this week’s topic), when Lisa and I sit down and plan everything we want to do with Vegan Business Tribe, one of the first questions we ask is how on earth are we going to find time to do it all?!  We ARE fortunate because Lisa and I have really complementary skill sets:  I’m the person shouting and waving my arms about and Lisa is the one that makes everything else happen: Lisa manages our community, she set up all our systems and automation, she manages our inbox and social and keeps us really ‘human’ in all our communications and interactions. If I tend to be the face and voice of Vegan Busines Tribe then Lisa is the heart. But, if it was just one of us running Vegan Business Tribe then we would have to seriously cut down the amount of output we’d be able to manage.  I couldn’t put out all this business advice and content every week if I was also trying to keep on top of all our messages and manage our community and events.  And Lisa wouldn’t be able to manage our community and engage with so many new members if she had the pressure of putting out a podcast each week.  But even with two of us, we still find ourselves saying we don’t have enough time and I don’t think there’s a business-owner in the world that doesn’t have that thought probably pretty regularly.

 

In fact, on the first Monday of every month, Lisa runs her goalsetting and accountability session with our members where everyone sets their goals for the month and breaks that goal down into tasks.  And when Lisa asks people to put in the chat what their barriers are to achieving their goals, the number one reason given every month is ‘lack of time’.  We just don’t have enough time to achieve our goals and we’d all be hugely successful by now if only we could just find that extra hour in the day or that extra day in the week to get stuff done.  But you’re too busy with everything else that you have going on in both your business and your life right now.  Your customers and clients; keeping on top of your inbox; deadlines; supporting your family… you feel that pressure to work more and more hours, and the more you work the more that time seems to get filled up with things that are not moving your business forward.

 

Now, this is important: If this is you and you’re struggling with time on a general basis, so you NEVER seem to have enough time, then there is no point trying to just find more time to do those everyday tasks you are already struggling to do.  Because it will never get better, you will never finish those tasks. The key is to create space so that you can spend time working out how to make those things take up less of your time or how to get rid of them entirely.

 

It’s like: do you treat the symptoms or do you find a cure for the root problem?  So, maybe all your time is taken up putting together proposals.  If so, you need to create space so that you can work out a way to template those proposals so that you can create them in a fraction of the time and build a system that potential customers go through first to pre-qualify them, meaning you are only spending time creating proposals for those that have the right budget and are ready to buy.

 

Are you spending all your time managing staff?  If so, make the time to create the tools and support they need to be able to be more autonomous.  We once did some work with a company that had a sales team but the business owner was still responsible for putting together every quote for work, because the owner thought they were the only person in the business with enough experience to get the quote right.  When in reality, the business owner was creating a bottleneck that was losing sales, because it was taking a week to get back to a customer with a price.  All the owner needed to do was create the time to build a spreadsheet that covered all eventualities and just set some standard pricing for the parts of jobs that they were putting bespoke prices together for.  Once they had done this, the sale team could start doing all the quoting themselves, freeing up the owner’s time to work on moving the business forwards.  And once they had all that information in a spreadsheet, it was then only one more small step to put all that into an online calculator meaning that customers could generate a quote themselves so that the salesperson could then just focus on the people who were ready to buy and already had the budget.  The business owner didn’t need to make more time so they could turn quotes around faster, they needed time to build a system that meant that they didn’t need to do the quotes at all in the first place.

 

Because, believe it or not, we all have the same 24 hours in the day.  Think of anyone who you hold in high regard.  It might be Richard Branson or green industrialist Dale Vince; it might be Oprah Winfrey or Usain Bolt, it might be Mahatma Gandhi or Maya Angelou – we all have our own heroes.  But they ALL had the same 24 hours in a day that you have, what was different is how they used them.  Do you think Venus Williams would have become a world number one tennis player if she’d spent all her time responding to emails?  Do you think that Melanie Perkins, the youngest female CEO of a tech start-up valued at over 1 billion dollars, would have taken her company Canva to those heights if she had agreed to meetings with anyone who sent her an email asking for one?  And this is the main thing I want you to take away from this session, you “not having enough time” is harming your business.  It’s stopping you from moving forwards.  It’s meaning you are not working ON the business to help it grow, you are just working IN the business to maintain the status quo.  And if that’s the reality of where you are right now, then I’d advise you to just go get a job working for someone else.  The benefits will be better and you’ll probably earn more money with less stress.

 

But if you own your own business, then you have the ability to get people to work to YOUR agenda. This seems to be news to some people, but you can dictate HOW you do business.  You are not a potted plant.  If you don’t like the situation you are in, then you have the power to change it.  All you have to do is give yourself the permission.  Let me tell you as someone who used to regularly work over 80 hours a week, in fact in points in my career it wasn’t unusual for me to work 100 hour weeks (and Lisa will tell you what fun it was living with someone who spends that much time at work) but just working more hours does not give you more time, and it took me too long to work that out.  If you just work more hours to try and get everything done then two things happen: 1, your productivity and motivation drop, so something that should have taken you a morning to do ends up taking all-day.  And 2, all the things that are actually taking up your time expand and just take up more of it.  If you’re struggling to keep on top of your inbox, that’s not a problem that can be solved by throwing more time at it. If your messages are never-ending, then all spending more time answering emails does is create more emails.  You block off a morning to answer the twenty emails sat waiting in your inbox and when you log back-in that afternoon not only have ten new messages come in but those twenty people have all replied meaning you’re even less on top of your inbox than you were at the start of the day!  Or it might be your social media messages, or it might be LinkedIn requests – I could literally spend all day every day doing nothing but responding to messages, notifications and connection requests on LinkedIn.  And if it wasn’t for Lisa, I probably would.

 

Because Lisa knows what is a productive use of our time.  Lisa knows that you can set up a system that means that, 1, the emails and messages don’t land in your inbox in the first place (so what information can you have available, what communication processes can you put in place to mean that someone actually contacting you is the last resort they have to take?); and 2, if someone does contact you, that you already have pre-written, templated or even automated responses ready to send back that funnels people to take an action that doesn’t need another response.  If you can make the time to create these systems then imagine all the future time that is going to free-up.  I’ve seen Lisa clear out an inbox of over 100 messages in under an hour using pre-written conversation flows linked to various different online resources.  Someone needs to set up a meeting with us, paste in the templated message for booking a meeting with a link to our online booking system.  And yes, the email goes on to tell them, the meeting will be for half an hour; yes, you have to write in what you want to cover at the meeting when you are booking it; yes, we only have meetings on Wednesdays; and yes, the slots you can see on the booking calendar are the only slots we have available.  Lisa has effectively killed the whole email tennis match you play when someone is trying to book a meeting with you with one carefully pre-written message linked to some great online systems.  And no, it’s not impersonal, because Lisa opens and closes each one with a lovely personal message relevant to the person she is talking to.  If she had typed the whole message out instead of copying and pasting the bulk of it she would have written pretty much same thing anyway but it would have taken her ten times as long.

 

And if you’re listening and thinking “Well, it’s OK for you – you are running a membership site.  That will never work for me because I get bespoke emails that really need me to spend ages coming up with a response to” then that’s exactly the same with us.  We don’t just have Vegan Business Tribe going on in our lives, we also run a consultancy, we’re always getting messages in from people wanting to collaborate or asking for our advice on a business they are looking to set up or to grow.  We help companies get their products registered with The Vegan Society’s Vegan Trademark – we have a busy old inbox, in fact, we have several busy old inboxes. 

 

But imagine you are a shop.  Messages coming into your inbox or new enquiries are people walking into that shop, and your job is to steer people just to the products you sell in the most efficient way possible.  Let me illustrate this with an example of someone sending us a message asking for help or advice about their business, which is something we get a lot of.

 

First, the old way we used to do it – or rather the old way *I* would do it before Lisa got involved:  I’d receive an email or LinkedIn message from someone wanting help with their business.  I would spend a quarter of an hour trying to find out more information about them online, then another fifteen minutes writing them a response and also asking some questions to try and pre-qualify them.  They would then come back with another longer email with loads of information that would take another twenty minutes for me to digest and before we know it we have both spent a couple of hours with an email conversation going backwards and forwards that neither of us really know where it’s heading and we’re both potentially going to be disappointed when we finally get there. I’m trying to work out if they have got some money and are a potential customer for our consultancy so if it is worth setting up a meeting.  But they might be just trying to get some validation on their idea and some free advice because they know we know this marketplace and support vegan businesses.  But it’s a huge time-sink and you only need a handful of these conversations going on at the same time with different people and that’s your entire bandwidth used up.

 

So, let me instead tell you what happens now:  Lisa intercepts any email before I even see it, because I’m my own worst enemy.  I want to help everyone and anyone and say yes to everything whereas Lisa is our shopkeeper.  So instead of me spending all that time trying to find out more, Lisa simply lays out what is in our shop with a pre-written email, thanking someone for getting in touch, saying their business sounds amazing and these are the options they have:  1. If they are looking for one-on-one consultancy, and have the budget for it, then go take a look at the website for our consultancy which outlines the work we do and how much it costs.  Or 2, if they are vegan themselves and have a vegan business, then take a look at Vegan Business Tribe.  If they sign-up to Vegan Business Tribe then as part of that they get a free welcome 121 with Lisa and myself where we can give feedback on their business or business idea – all they have to do is click on the diary link on the confirmation page after they sign-up.

 

In one simple pre-written email template, which Lisa always personalises so that it doesn’t seem like a template, in a few seconds Lisa has dealt with an enquiry that I would likely let blossom into hours of conversation and work to deal with.  But it’s not just the template, it’s the systems that template leads people to.  The website pages we have set up clearly outlining what you get, the 121 booking system this leads into (and yes, still just Wednesdays and still just for 30 minutes, and no we don’t have any other slots available than those you can see!).  Most people’s response to this is to send a very quick message back, thanking Lisa for replying and saying how great the information was and they will go take a look, and the next thing we know they have signed up to Vegan Business Tribe and their 121 appears in our calendar booked for a couple of week’s time without us doing anything else.  Some people reply saying they have the budget for engaging with us through our consultancy and usually I then give them a call for what is already a really well-qualified sales conversation.  A select few respond saying they don’t want either option, can’t they just set up a call with us instead?  And the answer is, very politely, go re-read the previous email!  Because, as a business, you can’t spend all your time engaging with people about what you don’t have in your shop.  If you’re a hat shop and someone is coming in asking for motor oil, you can’t spend an hour working out if you can sell this person motor oil or not, in that time you could have sold three more hats.

 

Now, I’m making a bit of a joke analogy there, but this is really serious.  Because if you have a vegan business, then it’s likely that part of your mission is to move the vegan cause forwards.  You might make a product that knocks an animal-based product off the shelf.  You might service and support other companies that are doing great work in the vegan business scene.  You might even help people directly and have a positive impact on their lives through the work you do.  And you can’t help us move the vegan cause forwards if you’re spending all your time answering emails instead of doing all the important things you need to do to grow your vegan business.

 

So, how do you actually make that time to work ON your business and not IN your business?  If you’re already struggling to find the time to keep the day to day running of your business going, then how do you create even more time to lift yourself out of that hole?  Well, this is probably not the answer you are wanting to hear, but a lack of time isn’t usually, actually, a lack of time.  It’s a lack of joy. 

 

Do you remember when you first set up your business?  Do you remember how much enthusiasm you had and how much time you created?  Do you remember jumping out of bed in the morning or looking forward to the weekend when you got to work on your new baby?!  Do you remember the joy you had when you got your first sale or when you first got your website online or when someone first shared one of your social media posts? If you want to be able to create more time, then you need to reconnect with that joy.

 

Because when you do, you will find that creating time all of a sudden doesn’t seem to be such an issue.  You will find that instead of looking forward to finishing off that Netflix series this evening, instead you’re looking forward to spending a couple of hours creating that extra page of resources on your website that you can direct people to instead of having to write the same email response ten times a day.  You decide you’re going to spend your Saturday morning learning how to automate your meeting booking system so that you don’t have to spend ages playing calendar tennis.  You get excited about freeing up your time by automating (or even getting rid of completely) all those admin tasks you find yourself doing every day.  You get excited because you know that doing this means you have more time to actually make a difference in the world by moving your business forward.  You rediscover your joy.

 

And finding that joy might mean reconnecting with why you are doing what you are doing in the first place.  If part of you having your own vegan business is to move the vegan cause forwards, then go connect with that cause.  Go find your local vegan activism group and join them for some leafleting in the town centre.  Go find your next local animal rights march and take part in it.  Contact your local animal sanctuary and ask if they are looking for volunteers.  Visit your local vegan event and see if they have any speakers you can go listen to.  Vegan Business Tribe came about because Lisa and I sat in on a session that activist John Awen did at Scarborough Vegan Festival about how just being vegan isn’t enough.  Reconnect with the reason you wanted to have a vegan business in the first place and ask yourself: are you actually now making the change you wanted to see in the world?

 

Keep a record of all the change you ARE making.  Every time we have helped a Vegan Business Tribe member, or every time two of our members’ companies have come together to launch a collaboration, or just when we’ve made a big impact such as getting an organisation to start engaging with veganism because of some of the activity we’ve done, Lisa writes it down in our wins document.  Then any time we need some confirmation that we’re making a difference we pull up that document and read back through it to remind ourselves what a difference we’ve made so far.  And trust me, it’s become a very long document, a real validation to us of the change we’re making.

 

For me, if there is a task that will have a big impact on our business, if there is something that will really move us forwards, then I create that extra time by cashing-in my unproductive time.  What do I mean by that?  Well take the example of our online marketing course on Vegan Business Tribe.  We have a full 24-module course on how to promote your vegan business, and even though I say so myself it’s a damn good course.  It has helped so many of our members completely re-approach how they market their businesses. But we didn’t have the time to write this course.  I wrote it at a time when we were starting a new business whilst also trying to keep on top of other paid customer work, give time to our families, and deal with all sorts of other pressures on our time.  I was already working long hours, there was no time to also fit in writing a 90,000-word course on marketing a vegan business.  But having the course was a cornerstone of our Vegan Business Tribe strategy, something that we knew would really move us forward.  So, I swapped where I was spending my time.  I set my alarm for 4.30am every week-day for a month, and the vast majority of that course was written in the twilight hours between 5.00am and 8.30am before the rest of the world got going. I created a (beautiful) 3 and a half uninterrupted hours at the start of every workday to work on something really valuable.  As soon as 8.30am comes around, the emails start dropping in, the messages start coming, heads start popping around my office door, the family starts WhatsApping and I’m back into my standard distracted day.

 

And you can do the same. If you are at your desk for 5.00am, then by the time the usual start time of 9.00am rolls around you have already done half a day’s work.  Do that for just a week and you have created an extra two and a half days within that week.  That’s two and a half days that your competitors don’t have.  That’s 20 hours to finally do the thing that is stopping your business from moving forward.  Do it for a single month and that’s an extra 80 hours you have created.  You still think that you don’t have the time to move your business forward?  I am a big advocate for having a good work-life balance, especially with how my life used to be, but what you are actually doing is swapping the time from something unproductive to something that will make a real difference.  Getting up earlier means going to bed earlier – and don’t try to get up that early but still go to sleep at midnight, it just won’t work!  But what do you actually do of real value after 9.00pm anyway? It might mean you need to give up Netflix for a week.  It might mean you find yourself going to sleep the same time as your kids, and that’s fine – if in return you are creating time to gain something of real value, not just clear out your inbox.  And if you think that you can’t possibly get up that early, well if you were going away on holiday tomorrow and had to set an alarm for 4.30am to catch your plane, then I am sure you’d have no trouble convincing yourself to go to bed early!

 

Creating time to work on making your business successful really is your duty.  Give yourself permission to block a day out in your diary to improve something in your business that will free up your time day-to-day.  Even book a holiday to do it – yes, book a week off work.  Tell all your customers that you are going away, put on the email autoresponder and then spend that week working on something that will set you up for years to come.  And if you are listening to this thinking that this is all too much effort for you or it’s not what you signed up for with a business, well, remember no-one is forcing you to do any of this.  You always have two options: either make the time to do the things you need to do to make your business successful and move it forward, or don’t – and stay exactly where you are now.

 

It is going to be hard work, but no-one said you couldn’t have fun doing it and it’s always better when you surround yourself with other people on the same mission.  That’s why as well as Lisa’s goalsetting and accountability workshops we recently launched our virtual co-working sessions too.  We bring together a virtual room full of Vegan Tribe Members on Zoom, quickly go around the room and tell each other what we’re going to be working on, then hit mute and get to work with your fellow vegans in the background. At the end of the first hour we have a quick catch-up to see how everyone is getting on with their task, then repeat again for a second hour.  And the feedback we get from members after these co-working sessions is brilliant. Two hours where you have closed down your email, put your phone on silent and blocked out time in your diary to work on a specific task.  And even though Lisa is running the session, she actually uses that focused time to do her own work too. She’ll use that time to schedule all our social media posts for the week meaning she’s being doubly efficient – not only running an event for members but she’s also getting our social media done at the same time!

 

Don’t underestimate the power of focus.  Read any memoir from a successful business person and you will be amazed at how much they section off their time to work and focus on specific tasks or projects to move the business forward. Richard Branson will clear his diary for a month where the only people who can get hold of him are his close family and the other people who are also working on the same project he’s working on.  His assistants are charged to handle everything else that comes in.

 

And that might be an option for you as well.  As a business owner, you develop skills.  Some of those skills you can use to move your business forwards, others are skills you will develop just because there is no-one else but you to do it: social media, business admin work, your accounts, SEO, prospecting on LinkedIn, sending out your products, maybe even making your products.  These are all things that may well be better done by someone else other than the person in charge of the business.  You reckon Richard Branson does his own social media? Now, I am a big advocate of learning new skills so that you know how everything in your business works, but only so that once you have mastered them you have more confidence to brief someone else to do it.  Even making your products – I have met some amazing vegan business owners that, as soon as they proved that there was a market for a product, the first thing they did was sub-out the actual production of that product so that they could concentrate on building up the business. You can’t be both in the kitchen or workshop and at the networking events and pitching events at all at the same time.  Ask yourself: are you building a business or are you just building a job for yourself? If the latter, then just go get a job working for someone else because like I said, the benefits will be better, it will be far less hassle, you’ll likely earn more money and you’ll be able to clock-off at 5.00pm.

 

But if you ARE committed to building a business, then: BUILD A BUSINESS.  Look at where your time is being spent.  Does it need to be you, with all your skills doing all the things you are doing at the moment, or is doing all those tasks what is actually stopping you from building a business? COULD you give that work to someone else who will be able to do it faster and maybe even (when you work out what your time is worth an hour) cheaper?  When Lisa and I stopped doing our own accounts and moved over to Vegan Accountants headed up by Vegan Business Tribe member Keith Lesser for example, it freed up a massive amount of room on our plate to focus on other things – so doing so probably saved us money.

 

And if you find a good virtual assistant, or a VA as they are known, then part of you handing over responsibility for some of your tasks will include HAVING to write those email sequences and responses when someone asks you a question, so that your assistant can send them on your behalf.  It will make you put that spreadsheet together for generating quote requests instead of doing each one bespoke so that someone else other than you can do them.  We have a number of Vegan VAs as members in Vegan Business Tribe who believe in your mission to help bring about a vegan world and would love to help you out.

 

So, what’s it going to be?  I know you wouldn’t be listening to a podcast on creating more time if this wasn’t a problem you’re facing at the moment, you especially wouldn’t have listened pretty much to the end!  But I will re-iterate that a lot of being able to find more time comes down to two things:  1, reconnecting with your joy and your reason for having a vegan business in the first place, because with joy comes motivation and with motivation comes focus; and 2, giving yourself permission to change.  I’ll repeat it again, you are not a potted plant.  You have the agency to make changes to the structure of your day, how you work, even where you work.  If every Friday afternoon you want to go work from your local vegan cafe and leave your phone at home to concentrate on a specific task, you know you can do that right?  If meetings are disrupting your days too much then you know you can set a meeting day which is the only day of the week you do meetings on?  And if that means someone has to wait two or three weeks before they can get a meeting with you, then that’s OK too. Hardly anyone makes a comment to us when they click on Lisa and mine’s Vegan Business Tribe diary and see it’s booked up for the next few weeks, in fact it’s an indication that we’re people who are in demand and people want to speak to.  And if someone just can’t wait, then… just let it go.  The amount of times in the past I’ve caved-in and offered someone an off-schedule meeting slot just because I thought it was going to be a dream client or an amazing opportunity, only then to find it simply wasn’t – it was someone wanting something for free but using their company name and some bluster to jump the queue. I’ve learned, if someone who has just contacted you has space in their diary to organise a meeting at short notice then they’re probably someone who can let wait for your time!

 

Because you do have to manage your time.  You cannot do two things at once.  You cannot say yes to getting a client’s work finished for a deadline and then spend all those days when you should be doing that work responding to other people’s emails.  You cannot set yourself goals in your business, then not put the time aside to actually do the work that’s going to move your business forward. As I often say to Lisa, you cannot try to make two demands on the same period of time, you cannot park a car in a garage that already has a car in it, no matter how much you try and cram it in.

 

So, we are coming to the end now, and this has been a really interesting session, because as I said at the start: when we’re running our goalsetting workshops or on our business clinics this question about time being a barrier comes up again and again.  And yes, some people genuinely have less time to spend on their business.  They may have a young family, or they may be a carer for a family member or friend.  They might have a full-time job and are building a businesses on evenings and weekends.  But a lack of time is rarely the real barrier.  It’s a case of becoming disciplined with where that time is spent, it’s about getting people working to your agenda so you can build a business that serves them better, rather than being pressured to work to other people’s agendas and not being able to move forwards.

 

So let’s just find another couple of minutes to recap what we’ve spoken about today on how to make more time in your business.

 

 

So that’s pretty much it, and I really hope that this session makes a difference to you – and if it does, reach out and send us an email to tell us then Lisa can include you in our ‘wins document’!  And if it has made a difference, even just to your motivation to change how you use your time, then can I ask a couple of last favours of you before I let you go?  I know I know, I’m so demanding!

 

First, could I ask you to make sure you’re subscribed to this podcast.  It does make a real difference and makes sure you’ll get a notification for each new episode, but if your platform allows it can I also ask you to leave us a five-star rating or a thumbs-up – and if you are on iTunes you can even write us a quick review.  And thank you to Dana Banana, Langtree Laura, Keithy Helsinki, Laura Chepner, tsf16, Hannah P 93, Home Shared and Cheeky Kitties who have all recently left us some amazing reviews.  And I am assuming that those are not your real names, but thank you all the same for some REALLY kind words about this podcast.  And second, if you did find this episode useful, I would be really grateful if you can help us share it also.  Maybe you’re in a vegan business group or you’ve got your own vegan WhatsApp or LinkedIn group.  Because the more vegan businesses we can get this information to, the more people we can inspire to really make an impact with their vegan business, and the quicker we all move towards that vegan world.

 

So thank you so much for listening, Lisa and I always really appreciate your time.  And I will see you on the next one.