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One day a few years ago, I wandered into a local deli and bought a loaf of bread that I had never tasted before.
The crispy, dark poppy seed crust was delicious enough on its own, and the bread itself was so soft and fluffy it was like biting into a pillowy crumpet.
“Where do you get something like this?” I asked the deli owner the next time I visited. “Dusty Knuckles,” he said, explaining that he was a bakery in east London and that I had something called potato sourdough.
From what I’ve learned, The Knuckle now employs 118 people across three locations and is a rising star selling what Nigella Lawson calls great bread. It supplies Ottolenghi’s restaurants, Michelin-starred eateries and hordes of hipsters queuing for £4.50 sausage rolls.
Not bad for a business that ran out of shipping containers in a parking lot seven years ago by three young founders. his childhood friend, chef Rebecca Oliver, and her former restaurant colleague, Daisy Terry.
But this year, I discovered that knuckles are more than just great baked goods. It also helps young offenders get back on track with their lives. Each year, we subject dozens of 18- to 25-year-olds to paid training designed to teach them everything from basic time management to how to behave in a professional environment.
With more than 70% of trainees going on to paid work, further training or further education, and jobs being in such high demand, the company launched a community interest campaign last year to find more potential employers for its trainees. Established a company.
All this enabled the group to achieve commercial and social success, but it was no easy feat. So, what are the dos and don’ts when starting a business like this?
This is what Tobias, 41, the son of two doctors, told me when I went to meet him at Knuckles’ main bakery in the central London borough of Hackney, where he grew up.
First, focus on making your business shine and talk less about its social mission, especially to your front-line customers. Either way, Tobias says that mission should impact everything in the business. He believes it’s wrong to “exploit other people’s vulnerabilities to sell products.”
Second, avoid traditional outside investors. Because, as Tobias says, someone like a nerd with $600,000 to spare is likely to be more profit-oriented than you.
Dusty Knuckle has received significant support from charities, but remains without outside investors. The main reason for this was that the three founders had been working for years in stressful conditions, working terrible hours for less than £800 a month.
This reminds me of a successful green energy businessman I know. He often says that being an entrepreneur is fun when everything is going well, but when it’s not, it’s like waking up every day and having to have a drink when you have a cold.
Tobias and his partners paid nothing when they started the business, working second and third jobs until winning a charity award in 2014 earned them a rent-free but uninsulated shipping container. I took on a full-time job.
In Tobias and Oliver’s case, for three years when they had a new baby at home, they made bread overnight, but the winter temperatures were so cold that they struggled to get the dough to rise.
“It was just a massacre,” Tobias says. “We all have pretty traumatic memories of that time.”
Still, the founders were buoyed by Dusty Knuckle’s early help in finding people who were already accomplishing what they set out to do.
They included James Timpson, who employed hundreds of ex-offenders at his family’s retail chain before becoming prisons minister this year.
Tobias said Timpson gave him valuable advice on financing (there were agencies that could help) and the resources companies needed to find and hire ex-offenders.
But ultimately, successful companies require something that no amount of advice can deliver: courage.
Knuckle’s partners were repeatedly warned not to sign a lease on a second property during the dangerous months of the pandemic, but they still signed the deal and quickly set about expanding further.
Tobias says it was also a very stressful time. “But it has also changed our business.”
