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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!

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.

How the pandemic has turbo-charged the vegan market place. Before the pandemic, half of all UK adults already said they had adopted some form of vegan buying behaviour - such as having meat-free days or choosing plant milk over dairy. But a recent survey by The Vegan Society also found that 1 in 5 people in the UK cut down on eating meat as a result of the pandemic, supercharging the plant-based sector even further. We know that Covid-19 is a zoonotic disease, or rather it is a disease transferred from animals, usually as a result of eating them, farming them or wildlife trading. And with three-quarters of the world’s new infectious diseases emerging this way, a lot more people are examining our species' relationships with animals. This is now playing out on the supermarket shelves, in the food and the products that people are buying. What does that mean for the meat industry? What does it mean for consumer buying behaviour? And what does it mean for your vegan business?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!

What is a marketing funnel, and how do you create one to get more customers? If you understand the journey your customers take before they buy, if you map out the steps that someone has to take to become a customer, then you can develop strategies to move people along those steps instead of just leaving it to chance.This is what we call a marketing funnel - but don't think that people will move through your funnel on their own. Some will, but the vast majority won't. In this episode, David takes a look at the three stages of a marketing funnel, how you can take customers from the top to the bottom, and (if your funnel isn't working) where people are probably getting stuck.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!

Why do so many of us absolutely HATE selling and how do you get over it? Why do we have such a revulsion to selling ourselves? Being vegan, we're not usually afraid to push a cause - but promoting ourselves or making money from the vegan sector seems to really make us feel uncomfortable. Your experience of 'sales' is probably someone trying to pressure you to buy something that you were not really sure you needed or even wanted - but that's not sales, at the best that's scamming people. If you genuinely believe that your product or business will improve someone's life or solve a significant problem that they have, then it is your duty to help that person become a customer so you can solve their problem. In this episode, David takes a look at how you can reframe 'selling' into 'helping', and how to develop your own confidence in your product and your pricing (did we mention that membership to Vegan Business Tribe is equivalent to buying a coffee a week from your local cafe?!). Because if you don't overcome your aversion to selling then you will always be holding back, you will never be giving your business your best shot.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!