I really enjoyed reading Innocent Smoothies’ latest book, the account of their development and some of the lessons they have learned along the way. I met some of the Innocent team at last year’s Do Lectures and was very impressed with their ethos.

It taught me lots about ethical business, and gave me stacks of good ideas about how to improve running my own “business”. (I put business in speech marks as I can’t quite think of what I do as being a proper business!)

I was going to write a blog post with some of the interesting nuggets from the book, but the guys at Esc the City beat me to it and were happy for me to lazily plagiarise them…

– Never give in, find the way that works (Innocent was rejected by 100’s of potential investors before finding someone via a lucky email titled ‘Do you know anyone rich?’)

– An unmet need is an opportunity (What service/product would you like to see to improve your life which doesn’t yet exist? Fancy creating it?)

– Successful people are great at telling stories (Innocent are really, really good at this – they tell stories about starting their business, they tell stories about their products, they tell stories about their offices at Fruit Towers.)

– It’s all about having fun. Innocent ran a competition for messages on the bottom of their plastic bottles – the winner came up with: ‘Trapped in bottle factory, send help’. Their standard one is: ‘Please stop looking at my bottom’.

– ‘Doing good’ doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive from ‘making money’.