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One day several years ago, I walked into a local deli and bought a loaf of bread the likes of which I had never eaten before.
Its crisp, dark, poppy seed crust was quite delicious on its own and the bread itself was so soft and squishy it was like biting into a pillowy bun.
“Where do you get these things?” I asked the deli owner on my next visit. “The Dusty Knuckle,” he said, explaining that it was a bakery in east London and that what he had eaten was something called potato sourdough.
The Knuckle, as I came to know it, is now a growing star with 118 employees across three sites selling what Nigella Lawson calls magnificent breads. He supplies Ottolenghi restaurants, Michelin-starred restaurants and hordes of hipsters queuing for his £4.50 sausage rolls.
Not bad for a company that seven years ago its three young founders ran from a shipping container in a parking lot: Max Tobias, a youth violence prevention worker; his childhood friend, chef Rebecca Oliver, and his former restaurant colleague, Daisy Terry.
But this year I discovered that Knuckle makes more than great baked goods. It also helps young offenders get their lives back on track. Each year, it puts dozens of young people between the ages of 18 and 25 through a paid training period that aims to teach them everything from basic time management to how to behave in a professional environment.
More than 70 percent of apprentices move into paid work, receive further training or education, and demand for places is so high that the business last year created a community interest company to help find more potential employers for its students.
All this has led the group towards commercial and social success, which is not easy at all. So what are the do’s and don’ts of creating a business like this?
This is what Tobias, 41, the son of two doctors, told me when I went to see him at Knuckle’s main bakery in the London borough of Hackney, which is where he grew up.
First, focus on making the business shine and don’t say too much about your social mission, especially to frontline customers. That mission should influence everything in the business anyway, says Tobias, who thinks it’s wrong to “sell your product at the expense of someone else’s vulnerability.”
Second, try to avoid conventional outside investors because, as Tobias says, the kind of geezer with 60 grand left over is probably more profit-oriented than you.
Dusty Knuckle has received significant help from charities but still has no outside investors, mainly because its three founders worked terrible hours in stressful conditions for years, for £800 a month or less.
This reminds me of a successful green energy entrepreneur I know who likes to say that being a entrepreneur It’s a joy when everything goes well, but otherwise it’s like waking up every day and having to drink a cup of cold.
Tobias and his partners paid themselves nothing when they started the business, and worked second and third jobs before a 2014 charity award gave them the free but uninsulated shipping container.
For three years, with new babies at home in Tobias and Oliver’s case, they worked all night to make bread and in winter temperatures so frigid it was difficult to get the dough to rise.
“It was just carnage,” says Tobias. “We all have pretty traumatic memories from that time.”
Still, the founders were encouraged by something they did early on that helped: finding people who had already done what The Dusty Knuckle intended to accomplish.
Among them was James Timpson, who employed hundreds of ex-offenders at his family’s eponymous retail chain before becoming Prisons Minister this year.
Tobias says Timpson gave helpful advice on funding (there were agencies that would help) and resources the company would need to find and hire ex-offenders.
Ultimately, however, any successful business needs something that no advice can offer: value.
Knuckle’s partners were repeatedly warned not to rent a second property during the risky months of the pandemic, but they went ahead anyway and soon moved toward further expansion.
It was another terribly stressful time, says Tobias. “But it also transformed our business.”