Introduction and Bio

Daniel Valdur Eha founded Pure Pet Food in 2013 with his childhood friend. After a successful appearance on Dragons’ Den in 2014, the business has grown exponentially and is accelerating at an ever-increasing pace. They have now delivered over 40 million meals to dogs across the UK, employ around 100 team members and have contributed to longer and healthier lives for many of our canine friends!

Dan launched Pure shortly after leaving University, and as the business began to scale decided to embark on the ACCA qualification for the skills he felt it would bring to the business. Juggling a fast paced start up and growing family, Dan was fully self-taught, studying for exams via textbooks on weekends and evenings.

Tell us all about the Pure Pet Food story to date

The truth is Pure was not the first business Mat and I started. We launched at least two ideas between leaving Uni and launching Pure, both of which failed spectacularly. Looking back, it felt like life or death at the time. Friends were climbing the corporate ladder, doing well and going on nice holidays, whilst Mat and I lived at home with our mums, living on unimaginably small budgets. It would have been the perfect time to quit and join our peers, but somehow that just didn’t cross our minds. We were both hellbent on making a success of ourselves, no matter how long it took, to us that meant growing a business and brand.

Living life on a budget and scraping by wasn’t about to end anytime soon, but the minute we had the idea for Pure, we were filled with optimism for the future – I think we were both certain that this idea was going to work. Mat had read an article about a US based pet food business, listed as one of the fastest growing food companies in the states. That gave us the inspiration for what became Pure Pet Food, and we began working towards that ambition immediately. Aside from our previous failed ventures, we had no business experience, whilst we certainly had no experience of manufacturing, pet food, or just about anything else which might make for great dog food entrepreneurs. But actually, that naivety played into our hands. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, we had no fear of failing, whilst coming at the market from a completely fresh perspective. As a result, many of the decisions we took for how we produce and deliver our service and product are very unique within the industry and have proven to be huge advantages to the business to this day.

We initially attempted to make the first Pure recipes in my mum’s kitchen, using a small dehydration machine we’d purchased online. We quickly realised that approach wouldn’t get us very far and by a stroke of luck came across a small local business, who were manufacturing human grade food products in a very similar way to how we wanted to make Pure for dogs. The owners were incredibly helpful and supportive, spending months helping us find suppliers and getting the regulations we needed to produce the first batch of Pure. We built a basic website, and with my bedroom as our first warehouse, the first bag of Pure was sold.

The business was incredibly hand to mouth, especially in the first 24 months. Mat and I did cold calling for a local insurance company alongside working on Pure to get the business going. Mat would arrive at my house around 8am, we’d cold call until midday, turn our attention to Pure for the afternoon, before jumping back on the phones for the evening shift of cold calls. It was extremely hard work looking back, but as orders for Pure slowly grew and success stories from dog owners started to trickle in, we saw enough green shoots to spur us on.

A pivotal point for the business came when we appeared on BBC’s Dragons Den. With a product we and our growing customer base believed in, but with little to no marketing budget, we felt we had nothing to lose. We applied and were quickly called back for an audition, which led to a day of filming, where we pitched and I infamously ate our dog food on national TV. A brief moment of embarrassment personally, but one which put more eyeballs on the brand than ever before. Although we ultimately turned down the offers of two dragons, the next week saw more sales than in the previous 18 months combined. We finally had some momentum, and as sales grew, we were able to stop the cold calling and take over the small manufacturing facility that produced our products, as the original owners looked to retire.

The next few years the company grew and grew, although very much in start-up mode still. We were a small manufacturing team of half a dozen or so, with Mat and I still performing almost every other admin task. By 2019 we had built a fast growing, profitable little family business, with a unique product that serviced what was still a relative niche in the market. Interest in the pet food sector was high, as the trends to humanise our pets grew, leading to much M&A and investment activity around us. We still believed in our brand and concept, but it was clear that if we didn’t kick on, someone bigger and better funded could easily become an existential threat to what we’d worked so hard to build. We decided to go out and raise an initial round of venture capital investment. Much like everything else we’d done to that point, we did ourselves, getting to grips with how it all worked along the way and ultimately bringing in a significant seven figure investment into the business in 2020.

This funding enabled Mat and I to grow the team around us, investing significantly into our technology platform and marketing activity, whilst allowing the move to our current production facility in Cleckheaton. I’m sure it felt to many of the team who joined at that point that they were joining a brand-new business, yet in reality there had been seven years of incredibly hard work to get there, no doubt the most challenging period of the business so far was getting it to that point. The COVID induced lock downs that then came and the pet ownership boom that was created, provided a strong tail wind for the business as more people bought dogs and shopped online. That, combined with the continued growth in humanising our dogs, created significant product/market fit and has accelerated the company’s trajectory quite exponentially over the last 3 years. We’re now a team of around 100, we’ll deliver over 30 million meals to dogs across the UK just this year alone – it’s genuinely pinch yourself stuff from the bedroom business that we started a decade earlier.

At what point did you decide to become an entrepreneur

I’m not sure that I am a stereotypical entrepreneur, I certainly wasn’t selling sweets at school. In some ways I am actually quite risk averse, certainly considered and pragmatic. Mat has always been the “ideas man”, your typical big dreamer and I think being fortunate enough to have grown up together and being the first person he convinced to start a business meant I fell into entrepreneurship to some extent. When I look back into why that journey has ultimately ended in success to date, the key attribute both of us possess is resilience. For me this is the number one essential ingredient in business, regardless of what other abilities you may or may not have.

Personally I can quite clearly attribute that resilience to my upbringing. My father was an antique dealer, and my mother was a school administrator. Whilst I may have picked up some business acumen from the years of watching dad “do deals”, what both of my parents instilled in me, through example, was the virtue of hard work. My mum worked at Pure for the first decade of the company’s existence, building a reputation by the time she left, whether that was as the fastest packer in the factory, or the person who would reply to e-mails through the night - working fiercely hard is the only mode she has. My father is a very stoic man, his family immigrated to the UK from Estonia. It was very clear growing up the immense sacrifice that both he and particularly my Grandad had made to provide our family with the opportunities we had. Although very much unspoken, I grew up, and still hold, a very conscious motivation to pay back those sacrifices by doing my very best in life and making my family proud.

Tell us about your ACCA qualification

I started on my ACCA journey around 12 months after launching Pure. Mat and I possess a very different set of skills, which naturally led me to focus on the financial and operational side of the business. It became clear quite quickly that we could only get so far running the business by looking at the bank balance, so it felt a very natural move to start upskilling myself in this area. As with everything else we’ve done at Pure, I adopted a very DIY approach to my studies, buying a textbook for the next module, which I’d read through at the weekend, before booking the exam and giving it a go. I completed around 8 or 9 of the 14 exams required in my first 18 months of studying, albeit that rate of progress did start to slow as my children made their way into the world. A busy family life in combination with just how all encompassing Pure became as it started to grow with pace made the last few exams admittedly quite a slog, however the feeling of satisfaction when I eventually became qualified, I would put up there with anything else achieved through my time with Pure.

Practically ACCA has been a huge asset to the business. Playing a quasi-FD role for many years, amongst wearing many other hats, made the experience and knowledge invaluable. Certainly it’s hard to see how we would have successfully navigated our initial venture capital raise without it. It’s something I would recommend without hesitation for any budding entrepreneur as a great foundation for running a business.

Post ACCA, I continued my personal development journey by completing a year long, practitioner level diploma in Coaching & Mentoring. As the business has expanded, the importance of Leadership qualities has of course grown and I found what was a very intense qualification, extremely stretching, practical and fulfilling.

What is next for your business?

The future at Pure looks as exciting as ever. Although we’ve reached some significant milestones recently it feels like the start of a new chapter all over again. The business has matured significantly over the last couple of years, that’s particularly evident through the team we’ve assembled. From bringing in our first CEO 17 months ago, to the more recent hires like our Operations Director and Finance Director. It’s really energising to work with such a talented team, whilst the mental bandwidth that creates is giving us the opportunity to think outside of our current box – there’s for sure some very exciting possibilities for the business on the horizon!

Tell us about Dan outside of work

Outside of Pure most of my time is spent with my family. My wife Lara and I have three children, 5 and under, so we have our hands full to say the least! When we’re not spending time together as a family, I like to keep fit, in particularly I love practicing Brazilian Jiujitsu. I’ve found it a great way to completely forget any stress I may have picked up through the working day, it’s a real mental release, as well as being very physical challenging. I’d very much recommend everyone, young or old, give it a go at least once. Aside from that I love to run and cycle, once a year I’ll work towards a particularly challenging physical activity, for instance last year Mat and I did a Coast to Coast bike ride. Certainly, some of the mental strength we’ve built during our time growing Pure came in handy on that particular trip – like most things in life, it was a marathon not a sprint.