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Kate Hofman, GrowUp Farms

GrowUp Urban Farms: lessons on starting a sustainable business

Kate Hofman and Tom Webster left secure jobs and careers to launch the GrowUp Urban Farm project in 2012. Kate reflects on what they have learned about starting a sustainable business.

We started GrowUp Urban Farms around 18 months ago because we believed in the idea. There is a role for commercial urban farming in how we feed our cities, and for us that this represented a distinct business opportunity from the community-based projects that have seen a fantastic accelerated growth spurt across London over the past two years. 

Starting something from nothing is a labour of love, but you’ll burn out if you try and do everything on your own. Finding the right team to work with is a fundamental for a sustainable business.

It’s been an incredible journey so far – but I imagine most people say that about starting a business.

In our case, setting out with the intention of creating a business with a set of environmental and social values at the core of a commercial enterprise has given us an additional set of challenges – but it’s also provided a strong framework which has helped direct our development.

We’ve learnt a few key lessons so far that we’d like to share.

First: this makes “business as usual” look easy.

For lots of start-ups, getting that bottom line to look right is the key focus to make your business viable. But when you’re starting a sustainable business, and measuring your success against a triple-bottom line, you have to make sure your social and environmental aims are as achievable as your economic.

Balancing these is a challenge – but we think it’s the only long-term way to have a positive impact and sustain a successful business.

We want to create jobs in inner city areas – but we can only pay those salaries if we can grow enough salad to cover our costs. Our impact is also the key driver to why we’re doing this in the first place – so we wouldn’t be keeping true to our values if we didn’t give our environmental and social impact the same weighting as our finances.

Having said that, it’s building the business that allows us to have the impact – not the other way around.  

Second: Keep your focus.

With a concept as exciting and cutting-edge as urban farming, there are always interesting opportunities and collaborations popping up around us. As a start-up we have to constantly remind ourselves that we won’t be able to have a positive impact if we can’t stay around long enough to succeed.

So it’s really important for us to focus on validating the business model we’ve worked so hard to establish - commercial-scale aquaponic farming in urban areas – and not to let the potentially exciting, but also potentially destructive distractions, get in the way of achieving our aims.

Third: Share your passion.

Starting something from nothing is a labour of love, but you’ll burn out if you try and do everything on your own. Finding the right team to work with is a fundamental for a sustainable business.

You will need a diverse mix of skills to pioneer a business in an emerging industry - we work with architects, energy specialists and horticultural system designers to name but a few.

And finally: people buy people.

If you’re going to engage with the stakeholders who are key to your business succeeding then you’ll need them to feel and share the vision of what you’re trying to achieve. 

 

GrowUp Urban Farms was founded by Kate Hofman and Tom Webster. For more information see www.growup.org.uk.