JOE Reade set up The Island Bakery on Mull as a bread-making business 25 years ago with his wife Dawn. It has now turned into a premium biscuit company that sells in countries including Germany, Switzerland and Norway and has plans for further international expansion.

Name: Joe Reade

Age: 47

Position: Founder with wife Dawn

WHAT’S THE BUSINESS CALLED?

The Island Bakery

WHERE IS IT BASED?

Isle of Mull

WHY DID YOU SET UP THE BUSINESS?

WE set up in 1994. I was looking for a way to earn a living on the Isle of Mull where I grew up. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We started baking bread. We were very naive and had no great masterplan.

Looking back it was a bit bonkers really, but then it evolved from one thing to the next. We started off as bread bakers and were baking through the night. We delivered the bed with a milk business. Now we just make biscuits and sell them around the UK and abroad. We were fed up with the seasonality of bread.

Mull only has 3000 people so in the winter there’s only 1000 people within reach to buy bread. We would spend the winter watching our overdraft grow and praying tourists would come in summer to save the overdraft. It was a very hand-to-mouth existence since 70% of sales occurred in the first three months of the year. We had a lot of seasonal workers and it’s a skilled job so was very difficult to run a business on that basis. After 11 years we had enough. Biscuits reach a larger market, are high value, have a longer life and are easier to sell to people in London than bread.

I think I always wanted to run my own business. I don’t know why. I grew up on a dairy farm to quite entrepreneurial parent. I didn’t know what I wanted. I went to Edinburgh University to study geography which was a good all-round education but has no bearing on what I do now.

I have always been in a family where borrowing money is the norm. I’m from a family farming background but we have no wealth behind us. We’re always convincing banks to lend us money. I got a small inheritance from my gran’s allotments she sold – enough to buy a small oven – and that’s how we started very modestly in my brother’s garage.

WHAT IS YOUR TARGET MARKET?

WE make high-quality expensive biscuits, to be frank. It’s aimed at people who appreciate a good quality product. We’re not competing with McVities, it’s different and made in a more caring way. We sell in delis, organic stores and Waitrose in the UK. On the whole we’ve had good feedback but we don’t always get it right. Our business is about several things – using wood-fired ovens, organic and made on Mull. People won’t buy your product because it’s eco-friendly, they want tasty products or they won’t come back. We’ve got a loyal band of Island Bakery devotees which is great. Lemon Melts are the star product and a third of what we make.

The National:

HOW IS IT DIFFERENT TO COMPETING BUSINESSES?

YOU’VE got to have an enjoyable product but it’s also about integrity, honesty and character. There are plenty of large companies trying to compete with small producers by fabricating home-spun credentials. We are what we say on the tin – we are an island bakery. We are portraying something real, not contrived. It isn’t easy to persuade people to spend more than they could on biscuits – £2.50 or £3 is not always an easy sell. It needs to be something different and special. We have to convince enough people they should be happy to pay that. There’s value in buying something people have an emotional attachment to – they have fond memories of holidays on Mull. That’s really important.

IS SCOTLAND A GOOD PLACE FOR THIS TYPE OF BUSINESS?

OF course. We are selling Scotland so we couldn’t do this anywhere else. Part of the provenance of the product is where is comes from. We can take advantage of that in branding. Scotland has a fantastic name for its food and the environment we make it in. It’s great for our product. On a practical front it’s difficult in Mull as you’re making things on an island with a small pool of staff and you need to bring everything on and off the island. Brexit is totally bonkers, a collective national madness. At the moment we don’t have a huge amount of foreign staff but we do sometimes recruit from the continent like Polish people, Romanians and Lithuanians.

It is becoming more difficult to recruit as people don’t know whether to stay here. We have a Romanian couple working for us and are worried. There’s also the cost of ingredients – a big percentage comes from abroad and we sell

back to the continent – we pay customs in Germany and Norway and it is easy at the moment. In Switzerland it is a hassle, there’s

lots of product sitting at the border so I imagine Brexit will cause more of that.

WHAT DO YOU ENJOY MOST ABOUT RUNNING THE BUSINESS?

IT is very varied. It doesn’t matter what you run, any small business has a variety of things to deal with. You’ve got to be marketeers and engineers and operation managers. You have to be involved in every aspect of the business especially if you’re on a remote location like ours. You have to be resourceful and multi-skilled which is a challenge. It is difficult to know what parts to retreat from when you hire other people. We have 30 staff at the moment.

WHERE DO YOU HOPE THE BUSINESS WILL BE IN 10 YEARS’ TIME?

STILL here. Hopefully doing the same but will get bigger and expand what we do. We will keep moving ahead hopefully and making nice tasty things.