CARL SAXTON-PIZZIE trained as an actor, with roles in major TV shows including Eastenders, before founding sustainable grocery delivery company, Wholegood, in 2007. Carl has been eating organically since 1992 and set up Wholegood in response to the poor availability of organic food in North London.
Today, Wholegood turns over around £45m a year and employs more than 150 people, sourcing fresh produce from biodynamic, organic and conventional fruit and vegetable growers to bring quality, flavour and sustainability to a wide audience. The business, which supplies the likes of Ocado, Milk & More and WholeFoods, doubled in size when the Covid lockdowns sparked a surge in demand for fresh produce and home delivery.
Earlier this year Wholegood appointed a CEO which saw Carl move from the day-to-day running of the business to focus specifically on its growth.
What prompted you to start Wholegood?
I’d had multiple businesses previous to this, but they were all small. They were all just about me, doing things I enjoyed – mainly galleries and art dealing – but these were all passion projects that were making enough to survive, to support my family, not for buying yachts or houses. I set up Wholegood in a similar vein – because I was amazed at the lack of access to organic food in London – and its success caught me slightly unawares. It turned out I was quite good at growing the business and so the business just grew, and did so beyond what I expected it to be.
What is the best part of being a Founder and CEO?
I hadn’t really considered what it would feel like to employ people, that it would feel really good to create jobs. I wanted to be in business for myself and my family and for the people that I then chose to work with, like the organic growers – I saw the purpose in selling their products. I hadn’t made a connection in my mind about selling high volumes of their products and being able to support other people but I ended up creating a business that employs people and actually has a purpose. You can have a career at Wholegood and that absolutely blows my mind – both that people would want to do it but also that people can.
What is the most valuable skill you’ve learnt and how does that serve you now?
I know how to get stuff done. That was behind the early success of Wholegood. So many things don’t get finished because people look for that perfect ending when actually jobs need to be finished so you can move on. For example, get the website done. It might not be the website that you imagined but it’s functioning and it’s working, and it can be improved. When people procrastinate and don’t close things they don’t get anything done.
How do you keep motivated to do things you don’t want to do?
I think 95% of what we do is fairly reluctant, it just requires discipline. There might be something at the beginning where there’s a natural motivation or you’re driven by purpose, and that feels good, but the rest of it is discipline. When I used to get up at 2am and go to work I would love to have stayed in bed, but I didn’t because, on that day, I needed to get in 18 or 20 hours to achieve what I wanted to achieve. It’s very simple and people really tend to overcomplicate this.
When did you first feel like you were winning?
I’m yet to feel that. And I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like that. I know it’s my own psyche that stops that and it’s part of my internal mechanism and I need to find and understand what success looks like, but I never feel like I’m fully achieving much.
What keeps you up at night?
The fear of failure. I’ve always been scared of failing, and I’m aware it’s a waste of time but I do feel like an imposter, that it’s all luck. And I worry about getting found out – by whom I’m not sure.
What’s your next goal and when will you retire?
We’ve got a lot of internal goals within the business – not just financial targets but around sustainability, supporting the people we work with and making sure we’re driven by purpose and kindness and not an obsession with growth. Making sure we’re doing things in a balanced way is very important to me – and I include myself in that.
I’m still dealing with total burnout and no longer being the CEO so I’m trying to be mindful of letting other people run the business while making sure that I’m match-fit to do my own job within that, and to help everybody move forward. But ultimately, I can only do that if I’m not in bits all over the floor.
What is the most important lesson this journey has taught or reconfirmed for you?
I grew up in a working-class family from a poor background and I’ve done nothing but work for myself from the age of nine when I went to theatre school and started paying my own school fees. I am a working-class man who has no aspirations to be any other class of man. And I’m just trying to move forward with purpose and try to find stability for myself and my family.
There’s a lot of middle- and upper-class business leaders with a completely different life experience to me – from their education and upbringing to having staff from a young age – and they think they’re amazing, and their business is amazing, and maybe that’s a level of ego that people should aspire to, but I won’t ever shift my attitude. I recognise my business is absolutely meaningless without the people who work for it; if others want to sit and marvel at their kingdom that’s fine but it’s not for me.
If you could do it all again, what would you focus on more? And if there was one thing you would do differently, what would it be?
I would raise money – I bootstrapped Wholegood for the first 14 years, building it on about £50,000 – and give myself more of a senior team earlier on.
When you’re building a business from scratch, and you’ve never done it before, it’s hard to know what you should be doing next and the problem is everybody’s got an opinion on it, 95% of which are terrible. You must lean on your gut instinct but on reflection I would have liked to have not always followed my gut, but had somebody beside me to advise, drawing on 20 years working for Costco or something similar. I’m drawing on 25 years of acting experience! How does that help you with health and safety law?
How environmentally conscious are you?
Wholegood was created with sustainability in mind, it’s not something that we bolted on to the business but is at the core of what I started. The business was built to protect and encourage organic agriculture and sell organic, fresh produce to make sustainable choices more accessible.
We started using plastic-free packaging in 2011 and now we’re virtually plastic free and all of our fresh produce packaging is home-compostable. We work in biodynamic agriculture now, not just organic agriculture, which has been a major focus for the business, and we work with still smaller growers with even more sustainable methods.
I built the business around that ethos so it’s hard to be unsustainable when that is your purpose.
60 SECONDS with CARL
Where is your happy place?
With my kids.
What tool couldn’t you work without?
My laptop.
Go-to tipple?
I don’t drink alcohol so probably tea.
Favourite brand?
It’s got to be Patagonia. The owner of that brand is absolutely bossing how to do something sustainably.
Favourite song or piece of music?
The Funeral by Band of Horses.
Dog or cat person?
Neither.
Favourite city to spend a weekend?
Berlin.
Which book do you recommend?
“Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki changed my life when I was 20. It really helped me understand money.