国外媒体:经济危机造就金融畅销书

经济危机下，为什么相关金融的书籍会如此畅销？是因为人们想要知道在这样的大环境下如何赚到钱，还是想要了解这一切的危机究竟是如何产生、发展和演变到现在这样的境地的？

We felt that good ten years we've been very lucky.
And now you are writing books, first of all...

Oh I see, yes, well that too, that too. Well obviously our main business is making smoothies. But we’ve had such an incredible experience over the last ten years of setting up the business, and we have no experience of having done it ourselves before. And I'd love for other people to have that experience too. So we put everything we've learned in the book to help, encourage people to start their own businesses.

So you think that's why people are reaching for business books from the bookshelves in a time of recession, because they want to learn how to make money themselves, or do you think they’re trying to make sense of where everything’s gone wrong?

Well, I think it's both, isn’t it? But there is something so exciting about entrepreneurship, and the reality is in a down market, there are still great opportunities, and this could be the time, if you’ve always had that thought about wanting to set up your own business, maybe now it's the time to go for it.

But then, books like this often sold as a 'magic formula', ‘make yourself as rich as me’, kind of thing, but there is no silver bullet, is there? There is no obvious formula that people can follow.

I think the formula is an awful lot of hard work, a great amount of persistence 1. You’ve gotta make some smart decisions and then you’ve gotta get really lucky. And we kind of put that in our book about the fact that there will be some big decisions you need to get right. You’ve absolutely gotta keep going, banging your head against the brick wall.

Oh, yes, it's interesting coz you talked about how you can't get any funding from the banks or from venture capitalists. There was such an email you sent out to your friends, saying 'do you know anyone rich?', that pulled in someone to back you.

Exactly, we’ve thrown in the towel basically, I mean, Innocent is a business that literally 2 was not gonna happen for so many different reasons. It’s only coz we kept going and trying and trying and trying, and then got lucky right on the limit of how we managed to get the businesses up and running.

And you've been resolutely 3 ethical 4 all the way along, but, do you think other businesses will think, well that’s a good marketing 5 ploy 6, I’ll follow that kind of ploy, to try and get ahead in these more trouble times.

Well, we've done things the way we've done them, because we believe in them. We give 10% of the profits to charity, coz' there is something that we want to do, and we make ethically 7 sourced, uh, fruit smoothies and things like that. I think if you're faking it, consumers these days are absolutely incredibly smart and they’ll get there and they’ll understand that. So if you don't care about it, then I'd say don't do it. It's certainly different strategies.

In that case people can see through things. She thinks people were worried you’ve now got a tie-up with Coca-Cola.

Well, actually the great thing about that investment is, it’s allowing us exactly what Innocent said, we had to do, which is make natural healthy food and drinks, sustainable source ingredients, donate money to charity.

You got the money, but it does not compromise your brand at all.

No, they got the great thing; it absolutely allows us to do more of what we've always promised to be about. You know all the money that’s been raised goes into the business. We're using it to get more of the healthy drinks as more people are in places.