Ashreen Seethal
COVID-19 has been a catalyst for change within the small business community. Alongside the numerous struggles that businesses have faced, the resilience and innovation that SMEs have adopted in order to survive has been amazing to see.
Ashreen was working for the D2N2 Growth Hub when the pandemic hit and was the first port of call for many small businesses in Nottingham worried about the future: “I spoke to hundreds of distressed business owners during this period, offering the best support I could at the time. It was so important to be present and available, to offer business owners a chance to openly communicate their worries and their fears. I often didn’t have all the answers, but I wanted to show good leadership by offering openness and honesty in my communication and visibility”.
Her interest in supporting business growth and strategic development then led to Ashreen taking on the role of Innovation & Growth Specialist for Innovate UK EDGE. Through this role she works with innovative businesses across all sectors in the East Midlands, helping them to realise their potential through growth, scaling, and internationalisation.
We asked Ashreen to describe what an average day looks like: “I spend most of my time engaging with clients through (currently online) meetings. A typical day would involve two or three meetings, where I could be going through an intensive diagnostic with a new client to determine what their needs are and how I could add value. For existing clients, our meetings typically involve working through an action plan which I design to facilitate their growth strategy. This includes anything from developing their investment readiness, refining their innovation strategy, or acting as their critical friend who challenges them to think in a different way and to establish an ambitious vision for their business. This is followed up with research, connecting clients with everything on offer through Innovate UK and other business support programmes, and ensuring I draw on my own professional knowledge and experience to help them navigate the path towards innovation and scaling.”
As her job title suggests, innovation is what Ashreen is interested in nurturing but getting people to understand the concept more widely is a challenge: “The definition of innovation is so subjective, with the traditional view being around market disruption, ground-breaking inventions and scientific discovery. I want to challenge that belief and help businesses to widen their perspectives of innovation, particularly women entrepreneurs. True innovation lies in the ability to think in a unique and diverse way, to adopt new processes, and to embed new approaches to how you do business. It could just be innovative for your business; it doesn’t have to be innovative for the whole world. For example, I work with a number of tech clients who are using other companies’ software and code but in a way that is unique to their business – this is highly innovative as it offers their clients a bespoke service or software product that isn’t offered elsewhere on the market. It shows a deep understanding of client needs and how adapting existing resources to best meet those needs, creates unique value. This happens all the time in other sectors, yet it is not often thought of as ‘innovation’”.
Ashreen is keen to stress than innovation can take place across any sector: “One of my clients is Faux Butcher, based in Sherwood, and the amount of innovation they have achieved with food is incredible!”.
Lauren Nally is the co-founder of Faux Butcher in Sherwood, as well as No.Twelve, a vegan restaurant on Wheelergate. She was referred to Ashreen via Nottingham City Council and Invest in Nottingham, but at first, she was sceptical about how useful the support would be.
Lauren Nally and Ritchie Stainsby of No.Twelve Restaurant and Faux Butcher
“I wasn’t sure about this whole business support thing, and then I had my first meeting with Ashreen, and she was just phenomenal. She understood my needs, she sat me down and said: ‘Talk me through your business, where do you need help?’. She acts as an advisor for me, which is brilliant because when you are in business, it’s really difficult to see what’s going on outside. And there’s never enough time - things get swept under the carpet. This is where Ashreen comes in, she picks up the carpet and she says: ‘Right, we need to work on this!’.
The idea for the new deli had come about over Christmas 2020, during lockdown: “We’d taken out a Bounce Back Loan and, how all business ideas start, we’d had a couple of glasses of wine around the table, and we started to write a business plan, and at this point the restaurant wasn’t open so we had all the time in the world to make a plan”.
The recipes were developed in the kitchen of the restaurant, but as Lauren points out: “If you serve a plate of food, it’s very different to selling something in a packet that someone takes home and cooks”. To help with this Ashreen connected Lauren with sector specialists from the Food Innovation Centre at the University of Nottingham, and the Food and Drink Forum: “They helped me with what needed to be displayed on our packaging – nutritional information and things like that.”
They also helped Lauren to access a few funding opportunities: “In business you get a SIC (standard industrial classification) code depending on the nature of your business, and I didn’t know anything about this or what it meant; nobody tells you this when you’re starting out. Because we were manufacturing our own products that meant we could have a manufacturing SIC code, which opened us up to another field of funding opportunities”.
Faux Butcher - Photos by George Alexander
Now the Faux Butcher team, with Ashreen’s help, are looking at how they grow beyond the walls of the deli: “Given Faux Butcher’s highly successful launch and fantastic publicity, they’ve established a good customer base. The next phase of my engagement with Lauren will focus on establishing and growing their manufacturing capability and their B2B offering. We’ve already seen an appetite from other businesses to stock and sell their products and we need to capitalise on this demand”.
Lauren says: “We’re looking at a short, medium, and long-term plan for where we go next. At the moment we make all the products in the restaurant, and now we’re looking at whether we outsource the manufacturing, or if we find our own unit and equipment? Then how do we send the products - how do we get them across England? So, logistics – stuff I don’t have the time or the knowledge to handle. Ashreen is helping us work out the cost benefits of each option”.
Ashreen is proud of how far Lauren and the team have come: “It is so incredibly rewarding to see the success that Faux Butcher has had, and to think that I was able to make a positive impact on their journey. It is such a pleasure working with business owners, like Lauren, who are open to support, passionate about innovation, and highly ambitious for their business”.
