
Vegan Business Tribe Podcast
If you have a vegan business, or are thinking of starting one, then Vegan Business Tribe is here to support you, inspire you, connect you with other vegan business owners - AND give you the knowledge you need to build a successful vegan business.
Hosted by Vegan Business Tribe co-founder, David Pannell. Lisa & David have worked with some of the largest high-street brands and food manufacturers to help them understand and connect with the vegan marketplace. David is also the official UK agent for The Vegan Society's Vegan Trademark and Lisa writes the monthly business column in Vegan Food & Living - the biggest vegan print publication in the UK.
Vegan Business Tribe is where they give back with weekly content, seminars, business clinics, networking events, mentoring and online courses to help you create a successful vegan business. If you want to go beyond the podcast and connect with our community of like-minded vegan entrepreneurs or get support from Lisa & David, then head over to www.veganbusinesstribe.com where you will be welcomed with open arms!
Latest episodes

Jul 27, 2021 • 48min
038 - How to prevent burnout (and what to do if you're already there)
Tackling burnout when you run a vegan business. If you drive a car, do you just keep driving until you completely run out of fuel leaving you stranded at the side of the road, unable to continue your journey? Of course not, so why do we treat ourselves this way?It's easy to get stuck in the trap of working longer and longer hours until you get to the point where you feel that you can't carry on, but you can't afford to take time out to recharge either. The more burnt-out you become, the less productive you are making the problem even worse, so what changes can you make in your business to get out of this? How can you reduce the amount of work you actually have to do without your workload suffering? And how can you create the time and space you need to avoid actually hitting burnout in the first place?About Vegan Business TribeHosted by Vegan Business Tribe co-founder, David Pannell. Lisa & David have worked with some of the largest high-street brands and food manufacturers to help them understand and connect with the vegan marketplace. David is also the official UK agent for The Vegan Society's Vegan Trademark and Lisa writes the monthly business column in Vegan Food & Living - the biggest vegan print publication in the UK.Vegan Business Tribe is where they give back with weekly content, seminars, business clinics, networking events, mentoring and online courses to help you create a successful vegan business. If you want to go beyond the podcast and connect with our community of like-minded vegan entrepreneurs or get support from Lisa & David, then head over to www.veganbusinesstribe.com where you will be welcomed with open arms!

Jul 21, 2021 • 48min
037 - How to scale-up your vegan business
How do you scale up a business? When you talk to the founders of vegan companies who have successfully scaled up their businesses, you start to see a lot in common with how they did it. The testing they did to find the thing that they could scale, how they interacted with their early customers and the mindset of being open to following opportunities and going where the business took them (not to mention making the connections needed to be in the right place when those opportunities came along in the first place).In today's session, we look at how three vegan businesses successfully scaled up and what we can learn from how they did it, including vegan craft-ale Fungtn, Better Nature Tempeh and Miami Burger - who first started out thinking they were in the restaurant business but soon found the secret to their success laid somewhere else entirely. Watch the separate video interviews with the vegan founders of each of these companies here: https://veganbusinesstribe.com/scale-up/About Vegan Business TribeHosted by Vegan Business Tribe co-founder, David Pannell. Lisa & David have worked with some of the largest high-street brands and food manufacturers to help them understand and connect with the vegan marketplace. David is also the official UK agent for The Vegan Society's Vegan Trademark and Lisa writes the monthly business column in Vegan Food & Living - the biggest vegan print publication in the UK.Vegan Business Tribe is where they give back with weekly content, seminars, business clinics, networking events, mentoring and online courses to help you create a successful vegan business. If you want to go beyond the podcast and connect with our community of like-minded vegan entrepreneurs or get support from Lisa & David, then head over to www.veganbusinesstribe.com where you will be welcomed with open arms!

Jul 13, 2021 • 1h 27min
036 - Live Vegan Business Clinic with Lisa & David
We take you to a live vegan business clinic with four Vegan Business Tribe members. Today, we're going to do something a bit different and pull back the curtain to let you listen in on one of our live business clinics that are usually reserved for Vegan Business Tribe members only. Four members, one problem or question each and (as a room) we try to answer them. In this session we are joined by Vegan Business Tribe members Mitali from Let’s Tell Your Story Publishing, Laxmi from Visual Synapses web agency, Ellie from Vojo Health and Sara from Truckel Creative. The four questions they bring to the clinic are: 1. How do you use 'scarcity' in a genuine way to get people to sign-up to a self-learning course?2. How do you find more leads and convert customers in a service-based business?3. How do you create a bespoke and automated online service when you don't have the budget to spend tens of thousands of pounds on a custom website?4. How can you plan and create a course for those people in your audience who love what you do but can't yet afford to use your main service?About Vegan Business TribeHosted by Vegan Business Tribe co-founder, David Pannell. Lisa & David have worked with some of the largest high-street brands and food manufacturers to help them understand and connect with the vegan marketplace. David is also the official UK agent for The Vegan Society's Vegan Trademark and Lisa writes the monthly business column in Vegan Food & Living - the biggest vegan print publication in the UK.Vegan Business Tribe is where they give back with weekly content, seminars, business clinics, networking events, mentoring and online courses to help you create a successful vegan business. If you want to go beyond the podcast and connect with our community of like-minded vegan entrepreneurs or get support from Lisa & David, then head over to www.veganbusinesstribe.com where you will be welcomed with open arms!

Jul 6, 2021 • 36min
035 - How to deal with anti-vegan comments on your social media posts
Dealing with negative and anti-vegan comments. If you promote your business on social media, then at some point you will inevitably get someone writing an anti-vegan comment on one of your posts. The first time this happens to you it can be really distressing and your first reaction might be to go full-on vegan Rambo in response! You reply with links to studies, YouTube videos and before you know it there’s an absolute trainwreck happening on your company’s social media page.So in this session, we're going to count to ten and look at better ways to deal with these kinds of comments. Because, most likely, your company has appeared uninvited in this person's news feed meaning YOU might actually be the intruder here. So should you just delete these comments, or should you try to engage with them to bust some vegan myths and plant some seeds? And if so, how do you do it whilst keeping your inner keyboard warrior at bay?About Vegan Business TribeHosted by Vegan Business Tribe co-founder, David Pannell. Lisa & David have worked with some of the largest high-street brands and food manufacturers to help them understand and connect with the vegan marketplace. David is also the official UK agent for The Vegan Society's Vegan Trademark and Lisa writes the monthly business column in Vegan Food & Living - the biggest vegan print publication in the UK.Vegan Business Tribe is where they give back with weekly content, seminars, business clinics, networking events, mentoring and online courses to help you create a successful vegan business. If you want to go beyond the podcast and connect with our community of like-minded vegan entrepreneurs or get support from Lisa & David, then head over to www.veganbusinesstribe.com where you will be welcomed with open arms!You can join as a 'fan' for free to get access to our weekly content, or sign-up as a full member for £12.99 to get full access to our community, our online events, our vegan marketing course, and all the support you need to grow a successful vegan business.

Jun 29, 2021 • 31min
034 -Are you using non-vegan language in your business?
Speciesism in business language? Lots of the words, phrases and metaphors we use in business - without even realising it - have some very non-vegan origins. Have you ever talked about 'killing two birds with one stone' when talking with a customer? Or should we be comfortable talking about our 'brand' when the term originates from plunging a red-hot implement into the side of an animal to mark ownership of it?Our choice of language in business is powerful because it normalises behaviour and attitudes. And because the language we use controls our narrative as a culture, should we aim to avoid and replace animal-negative phrases with more vegan-positive ones in our businesses? If so, how can we do that and what can you actually say instead?About Vegan Business TribeHosted by Vegan Business Tribe co-founder, David Pannell. Lisa & David have worked with some of the largest high-street brands and food manufacturers to help them understand and connect with the vegan marketplace. David is also the official UK agent for The Vegan Society's Vegan Trademark and Lisa writes the monthly business column in Vegan Food & Living - the biggest vegan print publication in the UK.Vegan Business Tribe is where they give back with weekly content, seminars, business clinics, networking events, mentoring and online courses to help you create a successful vegan business. If you want to go beyond the podcast and connect with our community of like-minded vegan entrepreneurs or get support from Lisa & David, then head over to www.veganbusinesstribe.com where you will be welcomed with open arms!You can join as a 'fan' for free to get access to our weekly content, or sign-up as a full member for £12.99 to get full access to our community, our online events, our vegan marketing course, and all the support you need to grow a successful vegan business.

Jun 22, 2021 • 35min
033 - What's going on with Oatly?
Why are Oatly upsetting so many of their fans at the moment? Oatly have been one of the leading lights for vegans, almost single-handly exploding a new plant-milk sector into the mainstream and being tipped as the next 'Beyond Meat' for investors. But following taking investment from a global investment fund with a checkered history, and after being criticised for taking heavy-handed legal action against small family-run competitors, many of the company's fans have become increasingly unhappy.So what's the truth about what's been going on at Oatly? How did the company that said (on its packaging!) that "the reckless pursuit of profit should be criminal" end up on the wrong end of so much bad press? How does a company that subverted the dairy industry now have the same people who championed their mission calling for a boycott of their product? And can a company scale up and grow whilst still getting all the ethical decisions right?About Vegan Business TribeHosted by Vegan Business Tribe co-founder, David Pannell. Lisa & David have worked with some of the largest high-street brands and food manufacturers to help them understand and connect with the vegan marketplace. David is also the official UK agent for The Vegan Society's Vegan Trademark and Lisa writes the monthly business column in Vegan Food & Living - the biggest vegan print publication in the UK.Vegan Business Tribe is where they give back with weekly content, seminars, business clinics, networking events, mentoring and online courses to help you create a successful vegan business. If you want to go beyond the podcast and connect with our community of like-minded vegan entrepreneurs or get support from Lisa & David, then head over to www.veganbusinesstribe.com where you will be welcomed with open arms!You can join as a 'fan' for free to get access to our weekly content, or sign-up as a full member for £12.99 to get full access to our community, our online events, our vegan marketing course, and all the support you need to grow a successful vegan business.

Jun 15, 2021 • 57min
032 - Becoming your own boss: going from employed to having your own vegan business
How do you go from working for someone else to having your own vegan business? A recent survey showed that nearly half of us want to launch our own business, yet the majority of us are employed by someone else. So what's getting in the way of you launching your own business? Is it a lack of time, is it a lack of money, or do you just not know how to do it?In this session, originally recorded live as a workshop on The Vegan Business Tribe website, I team up with business mentor Trevor Banerjee to talk about the realities of going from being employed to launching your own vegan business: what you need to consider, how you can break down the process into steps and (most importantly) how to keep motivated through the entire process.About Vegan Business TribeHosted by Vegan Business Tribe co-founder, David Pannell. Lisa & David have worked with some of the largest high-street brands and food manufacturers to help them understand and connect with the vegan marketplace. David is also the official UK agent for The Vegan Society's Vegan Trademark and Lisa writes the monthly business column in Vegan Food & Living - the biggest vegan print publication in the UK.Vegan Business Tribe is where they give back with weekly content, seminars, business clinics, networking events, mentoring and online courses to help you create a successful vegan business. If you want to go beyond the podcast and connect with our community of like-minded vegan entrepreneurs or get support from Lisa & David, then head over to www.veganbusinesstribe.com where you will be welcomed with open arms!

Jun 8, 2021 • 34min
031 - How to create your elevator pitch
How do you answer when someone asks: "So, what do you do?" As a vegan business, we're all really excited about our companies. But how do you get someone else excited about your business when you've only got a really short amount of time to explain what you do? Maybe you've got 60 seconds to introduce your company at a networking event. Or perhaps you've got just the time it takes an elevator to go between two floors to tell your dream contact what it is you do. What do you say?!David gives you seven fundamental points that every 'elevator pitch' needs to have - starting by explaining what problem you solve for your customer rather than just saying what you do, through to how embracing your vegan mission might be the most powerful way you could ever introduce yourself.About Vegan Business TribeHosted by Vegan Business Tribe co-founder, David Pannell. Lisa & David have worked with some of the largest high-street brands and food manufacturers to help them understand and connect with the vegan marketplace. David is also the official UK agent for The Vegan Society's Vegan Trademark and Lisa writes the monthly business column in Vegan Food & Living - the biggest vegan print publication in the UK.Vegan Business Tribe is where they give back with weekly content, seminars, business clinics, networking events, mentoring and online courses to help you create a successful vegan business. If you want to go beyond the podcast and connect with our community of like-minded vegan entrepreneurs or get support from Lisa & David, then head over to www.veganbusinesstribe.com where you will be welcomed with open arms!

Jun 1, 2021 • 49min
030 - Vegan crowdfunding follow-up with Happy Carrot Skincare and Primary Veducation
How two of our Vegan Business Tribe members hit their crowdfunding target. We recently teamed up with CrowdfunderUK to take a group of our Vegan Business Tribe members through a crowdfunding programme. In this episode, we follow-up with Victoria from Happy Carrot Skincare and Laura from Primary Veducation about how they hit their targets. What is really interesting though is where the money came from. For Victoria, she already knew most of the people who backed her project or they were already customers. For Laura, the majority of the backers were complete strangers.David speaks to both about how they decided how much money they thought they could raise, how they kept the momentum going through their campaigns and what they would do differently if they were trying to hit bigger targets.About Vegan Business TribeHosted by Vegan Business Tribe co-founder, David Pannell. Lisa & David have worked with some of the largest high-street brands and food manufacturers to help them understand and connect with the vegan marketplace. David is also the official UK agent for The Vegan Society's Vegan Trademark and Lisa writes the monthly business column in Vegan Food & Living - the biggest vegan print publication in the UK.Vegan Business Tribe is where they give back with weekly content, seminars, business clinics, networking events, mentoring and online courses to help you create a successful vegan business. If you want to go beyond the podcast and connect with our community of like-minded vegan entrepreneurs or get support from Lisa & David, then head over to www.veganbusinesstribe.com where you will be welcomed with open arms!

May 25, 2021 • 32min
029 - How to find your niche... and no, your niche is not 'vegan'
Discover how to dig deeper than just being vegan to find your true niche in an oversaturated market. Understand the importance of targeting specific audiences, like pigeon lovers, to foster loyalty and minimize competition. Learn through unique examples, including Brompton Bikes, that show how a focused approach can boost connection and marketing success. Explore the journey of experimentation and community support that empowers vegan entrepreneurs to align their passions with their goals for better business outcomes.