Meet Kieran Fisher, founder and MD at KBF Enterprises

KBF Enterprises was established in 2008 by Managing Director, Kieran Fisher and is the business behind two of the most recognised sports nutrition brands in the UK – Bodybuilding Warehouse® and Warrior®.

Today, KBF Enterprises operates from its premises in the North-West and is a £24m turnover business, achieving over 50% annual growth for the last four years in a row and named one of the UK’s largest sports nutrition companies. KBF Enterprises is on track to achieve £35m in sales in 2023, whilst being EBITDA profitable, net profitable, cash flow positive, and entirely independent.

What inspired you to launch your business and what is the end goal?

I wanted freedom more than anything else, and to feel like I was really making a difference and building something. I also didn’t feel like I fit in, in a more corporate environment. When everyone else was going for dinner and drinks after work, I wanted to go to the gym or do martial arts. I didn’t feel comfortable in a suit, it just wasn’t me. So, I started the business because of a combination of factors, mainly because I felt I wanted the freedom to create an environment that worked for me rather than squeezing myself into an environment that felt foreign.

I’ve never really felt like I fit in, be that in school where I wasn’t into football or what everyone else was into and was probably a bit socially awkward when I was younger. The most amazing thing about creating a business is that it’s your opportunity to create your own world – you decide what the product or service should be, how it should be delivered, what processes you should have in place. All this must be in line with market forces, but you have a huge degree of creative and intellectual freedom that I think many people crave. That’s why so many people love working for entrepreneurial businesses as opposed to big corporate ones. Creating a business is much harder than working in a big corporate, because there are no set pathways to progression and success, but there’s this amazing freedom to create your own.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur?

Bite the bullet and bite it early. Not having the courage to address issues early on will come back to haunt you and it’ll be much worse than if you just sorted it out at the beginning. Here’s an easy example – in order to grow, you must use leverage. Leverage can be financial (borrowing some money to buy some kit that allows you to make more, and hence sell more, faster and sooner than you could if you saved up), or intellectual (e.g. hiring people – as you cannot do it all yourself). However, I remember countless times when I was younger hiring someone to do a job, and when they did that job wrong, instead of addressing it there and then and saying, I would go back and redo the work myself as it was quicker in the short term. You do this partly because it’s quicker than training someone again, but also partly because most of us are uncomfortable with conflict – and telling someone they messed up, is conflict. Most of us, most of the time, want to be liked, and as the entrepreneur (or in fact anyone’s boss), you MUST be comfortable being disliked at times.

There will be plenty of times where if you want to be successful, you have to deliver hard news and give negative feedback that will make people dislike you. There are zero billionaires where people have written “he was so easy to work for”. In fact, most of the stories coming out of places like Microsoft, Apple, Tesla and others are of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk being hard to work for – why? Probably because they’re demanding and tell things straight. That isn’t a side effect of being successful, that is part of the reason they are successful.

You will have to fire nice people who may have been trying their best but it’s just not working. If you don’t bite the bullet early, your business will fail. It’s difficult if you’ve never done it before because you become friends with those you work with (it’s who you spend most of your time with as you’re working all the time!), but if you don’t fix things early on, and have difficult conversations, you’ll end up paying out wages for work that gets done wrong and needs to be redone.

So, any issue, address it early and fix it to ensure it does not happen again, to avoid causing you stress and slow down company growth.

There’s always a lightbulb moment before the beginning of a new venture. What was that moment for you?

Probably managing by numbers – ultimately, do your accounts. Know what makes your business grow and what makes it profitable. What drives customer acquisition, retention, sales rate, what are your costs, what drives these costs? How can you minimise costs? Selling is sexy – everyone loves sales, because it’s fun to launch new products and market them to go and sell it. But costs are half the battle. Understand your costs, understand your numbers. If you don’t understand at least on a colloquial level how your accounts work and the numbers driving your business, you will get robbed. I know of a number of entrepreneurs who got robbed by people in their finance team because they weren’t looking at the numbers and understanding them. You can’t abdicate from the numbers.

My lightbulb moment was running the business not as my baby, but as a data driven business. You love your business and your brand, but when you treat it like a baby you let it get away with things. You must run it, like you’re going to sell it, because then you run a better, tighter business that gives you more pleasure and grows faster.

How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?

We have better products and a better brand. There’s a huge amount in a name. When someone owns a Ford Mustang, they don’t tell anyone they drive a “Ford” – they say they drive a “Mustang”. Warrior is the same. A Warrior is the hero of their own movie. They’re jumping. They act and they make their life how they want it to be. Who wouldn’t aspire to be a Warrior? The name counts for a huge amount, and it resonates with our customers and is essential to our brand ethos.

We’re also vertically integrated – we were messed around by suppliers, so I built our own factory and did a lot of hard work and took a lot of risk to do it. Now we can go from concept to finished product in 48 hours. No other company in our sector can do that. When you get punched, you learn to duck, bob and weave. We had suppliers mess us around when we originally used contract manufacturers, so I thought “forget that we’ll build our own factory”, and we did. That gives us a ton more flexibility, agility and control than putting your brand in another person’s hands.

With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people have to be to take the leap. How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?

We’ve innovated in several ways but one of the most effective and probably the least sexy – but most important for the consumer – is price point. Our customers are typically 20-40, we have many thousands of customers older, and younger, but most of our customers are around this age bracket. They want to look good in tight clothing, feel great, but still enjoy taste. They want to have their cake and eat it too – healthy products, that taste amazing. Right, well that demographic earns on average £25-30k a year, which is £60 a day after tax. Most protein bars on the market were £3.20 or so, which is 5% of their take home pay. That relegates protein bars to a treat purchase when they should be a stable. The average amount someone in the UK spends on lunch each day is only £3.40, that person isn’t going to buy a protein bar on top of that even if they love your brand. Warrior Protein Bars are available in ASDA for £1.75 (and many thousands of other retailers), and that means you can buy lunch, and a Warrior Protein Bar, for a fiver. Remember, the average customer is on £60 a day after tax – we are incredibly proud of our products being not only the best in the world, but also affordable.

Far too many brands focus on being premium in price and ignoring the vast majority of the market – yes maybe it works in London, but the UK is not London. I passionately believe healthy food should be affordable to everyone and I’m not going to add money to a product just to make it posh. Healthy food should be a staple, it should be eaten every day, and it should be affordable. We are making that happen, no one else in our sector is.

What plans do you have over the next two years?

Our goal is to achieve £100m in run-rate sales by 2026 – and we are on track to do that. This year we’ll achieve or exceed £35m, and last year we did £23m. We have an amazing team, incredible retail partners, and fantastic customers we love serving every day. We love our customers, and they love our products and brand. I’m personally incredibly passionate about creating the very best products we can for them at the right price, in the right place, that taste fantastic.

Over the next 6 months, we will be expanding our portfolio and releasing Protein Cookies, Mini-Bite Sized Protein Bars, and a whole range of delicious drinks – as well as upscaling our operations to meet demand. We’re launching a new £1.5m factory line this month, and we’re presently in negotiations to extend our space to over 50,000sqft. We’ve also got some incredible new locations launching with national retail accounts both in the UK and abroad.

We’re investing in the front end, and the back end, to deliver incredible products to our customers – every single customer buys one of our products because they want to make their lives better. They want to look and feel better. It’s a privilege to serve people like that and we’re incredibly lucky to have that opportunity. Our goal is to keep on doing what we’re doing and make it even better for our amazing, incredible customers.

How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right?

This is extremely important. Make sure that you enjoy working with everyone you hire – don’t hire bad people no matter how talented they are. Hire people who have the same ethos and sense of mission that you do, who want more than a 9-5 job. Hire people you would happily have a drink with. Life is too short to not enjoy time with your co-workers, and once you’ve created that environment, invest in it and protect it. Above and beyond just making your business better, it will make your life better.

Your life is the sum of time spent with those around you – make sure you’re spending time with people you like, who like you, and you enjoy spending time with!

Good people make each other better.

Any new product launches we should know about?

Lots, which have been mentioned above – the Warrior Protein Cookies will be epic, easily the best tasting product of its kind ever launched. The Warrior Pre-Workout Energy Shots have just launched and again, taste like candy in a shot bottle! They’ve also just secured a national listing. Warrior Crunch Mini Bars are out soon, plus a ton of new cool products like Warrior Collagen, Warrior Reds (a fruit and vegetable powder that’s an easy addition to your morning routine and packed with healthy, natural vitamins and minerals), Warrior Greens (a green vegetable powder that tastes unreasonably delicious), and much more!

Why do you think your business has had such a positive impact across your industry?

Because we believe in what we do, and nothing will stop us. We believe we’re creating products that make our customers lives better and that makes you feel good about your day. That’s what all businesses, and all brands, should be about – making consumers lives better. In all seriousness, that’s what we’re passionate about. We want to make products you love, that help you make your life better, and that you love using. If we do that, I’m super happy!

What’s the single most important decision that you made, that contributed to your business?

Leaving my job and having the guts to set up my own business. 

What do you think gives a brand longevity?

Being good and managing the numbers – if you have a good product, that’s marketed well, and positioned and distributed correctly, you’ll have consumer demand. But you need to manage your numbers. Plenty of good brands and businesses have gone bust because they don’t make money. You need to be profitable. Profit is often seen as a dirty word, but that’s how we pay our staff – they have lives, families, homes. We pay our staff because we make a profit. We support families, through profits. Good brands have great products and make a profit and that’s what you need to be around in 100 years’ time.