There is a phone call that Julie Waddell describes, and we keep coming back to it.
She is in the park with her children. Her mobile rings. It is the Waitrose buyer. The listing is confirmed. Moorish Foods, a smoked hummus brand she invented in her kitchen to get a fussy toddler to eat something healthy, is going national.
At this point, she has no factory capable of volume production, no BRC-accredited smokery, no shelf-life testing, no packaging at retail scale. She has a product, a recipe, and roughly six months to figure out the rest.
She figures out the rest.
The thing about having no plan B
Most professional advice, sensible, well-intentioned advice, is structured around risk mitigation. Have a contingency. Know your exit route. Do not commit more than you can afford to lose.
Julie ran Moorish for 12 years on a different operating principle. There was no plan B. Not as an oversight, but as a choice. The mortgage was on the line. She was the main breadwinner. The business had no contracts with retailers, only last week's sales figures, and everything the family owed was exposed to the risk of those numbers going wrong.
She is not recommending this as a model. She is simply describing what it was.
"It was high risk, high reward. Things went wrong all the time. You have no other choice but to keep going."
What strikes us about that statement is the last part. You have no other choice. It sounds like a trap. But the way Julie describes it, the absence of an alternative was clarifying rather than crushing. There was one direction, and it was forward. That simplicity, however uncomfortable, removes a great deal of the energy drain that comes with constantly re-evaluating whether you should still be doing what you are doing.
How it started
The origin story of Moorish is worth telling because it illustrates something important about how founder businesses actually begin. It was not a market gap identified through analysis. It was a smoked duck recipe from James Martin, a very fussy child, and a wok full of tea leaves, rice and sugar.
Julie smoked some chickpeas, made hummus, and the kid ate it. Then friends ate it. Then she took it to a local deli in Birmingham and ran a blind taste test against Sainsbury's own label, with white bowls and printed questionnaires, and came out four to one.
That ratio, four to one preferred over the category leader, became the statistic she used in buyer meetings for years. It was her one piece of hard evidence in the early days, and she milked it with complete justification.
From there: a factory floor in the Midlands where she stood with a large second-hand blender. A butcher who agreed, once a week, not to smoke bacon and to smoke chickpeas instead. A cool box in the back of the car. Six delis. Then Waitrose.
April to October, 2012. Invented in the kitchen. National launch in Waitrose. No plan B.
What this has to do with the rest of us
Most of the people reading this are not going to launch a food brand from a kitchen. That is not the point.
The point is the quality of commitment that underpins what Julie built, and what it demands from the people around her. When we talk about founder-led businesses at bpe search, we talk a great deal about fit, about the right senior hire for the right founder at the right moment. The conversation served as a reminder that fit begins with understanding the level of commitment you are actually walking into.
A founder who has bet the house, literally, on a business does not experience setbacks the way a salaried executive does. They cannot afford to. That is not a criticism of corporate professionals, it is simply a different relationship with consequence. And the people who thrive alongside founders tend to be the ones who can match, or at least genuinely respect, that quality of resolve.
Julie describes the entrepreneurs she has met who have something that just will not stop. She also describes clearly when she does not see it. "When I am advising other companies,"she says, "if there are certain things you do not see, it is just not going to work."
"You need that burning drive. Otherwise it will fall over. It will just be too difficult."
That is not a soft quality to assess. It is not visible on a CV or straightforwardly testable in an interview. It requires a different kind of conversation, one that gets to how a person has actually responded when things have gone badly wrong, not how they describe their resilience in the abstract.
The serendipity question
Julie uses the word serendipity often. It is one of her favourite words, alongside opportunity. The mentor she found in a magazine article. The Waitrose buyer who took a chance on an unknown brand. The category director at Sainsbury's who was leaving just as she needed him most.
None of those things happened by accident. They happened because Julie was the kind of person who reads an article about a successful businesswoman offering mentorship and thinks, I am going to write to her. Not maybe someone will, or that opportunity is probably already taken. She wrote the letter.
The serendipity is real. But it lands for people who are already moving. The luck finds you because you have put yourself in the position to be found.
That is probably the most transferable lesson from 12 years of building Moorish. Not the logistics of hummus manufacture or the mechanics of a retail listing. The posture. Facing forward, moving towards things, and refusing to treat an absence of precedent as a reason not to try.
This is the first in a series of posts from bpe search drawing on a recent event featuring Julie Waddell, founder of Moorish Foods. Subsequent posts explore the senior hiring decisions that shaped the business, what it is really like to join a founder, and what the final stretch to exit actually looks like.
