The Blues Brother A youthful rock tour of the US inspired Jordan's chairman to build a business that's worth £50m. mary Carmichael reports Being a drummer in a blues band called the Cereal Killers is not a conventional qualification for the position of chairman and joint managing director in an established niche food company. Neither is having a long haired Alsatian dog, called Louis, as your almost constant office companion, but then Bill Jordan doesn't really do conventional. Health and safety officers will be pleased to hear that Louis' attendance is confined to the office rather than the manufacturing sites, but his presence is a calming one which may go some way to explaining Jordan's relaxed demeanour and the management style which he characterises as, "walking around a bit, talking to people and smiling". It's a style that pays dividends. From a "hippy-esque" beginning 20 years ago, W Jordan (Cereals) has carved itself a 2% share of the UK breakfast cereal market and accounts for around half of organic cereal sales. Its turnover has doubled in the past five years to £50m. It now employs 350 people over four sites, has recently built a new plant, is a significant exporter to Europe and has just invested £7m in promoting its brands. Jordan is unwilling to claim too much credit for himself however. He uses the word "lucky" over and over again to describe the company's fortunes, emphasises its teamwork ethic and seems to finds it nearly impossible to answer questions as anything other than "we". This can refer to the company as a whole or to himself and brother David, the other half of the managing directorship. Jordan enjoys working alongside family, describing it as being able to share the load with someone you really trust, and says he enjoys being part of a team. Besides the blues band, which also includes other staff members, he runs triathlons and marathons with a team of people. He makes participation sound like geriatric one-upmanship: "No-one wants to be the first to drop out and say they're too old for it". However, he is running the London Marathon for the fourth time at the end of April and has respectable times. Jordan is adamant that he needs a strong team because he's not a good organiser. "I don't mind setting things up," he says, "I'm just not good at keeping them going." However, he concedes that he is probably good with people. He has had little specialist training­ "not such a bad thing. You don't have any fear of making a prat of yourself because you don't know any better," he says. And he's proved adept at employing people with the skills to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. Staff turnover is small and Jordan attributes some of this to the company's size. "In small companies people can see their results," he says. "Whereas in a big company people complain because their ideas get grabbed by someone else." But some of it must be due to the company's relaxed ethos that seems to permeate through to all personnel. Staff greet Jordan readily by his first name and he seems to know them well ­ although so far, he's the only one allowed to bring his dog in. "The atmosphere is a lot more friendly because we're small, and it's always been something we value," he says. "People who have been at business school would probably find the way that we operate a little eccentric, but it seems to work." But Jordan nearly didn't go into the business at all, because he harboured serious musical ambitions as a young man. He left school at 18 and trained as a flour miller for six months at Holme Mill. This had been the centre of the family milling business since 1855. It still produces animal feeds and features on the cereal company's logo but in the 1970s its future was looking precarious, and it held little attraction for the young Jordan. So he hooked up with a rock band for a tour of the US. They hit the US at a time of awakening interest in wholefood. "It was a sort of evangelical thing," he says. "Ralph Nader [American consumer crusader] was being rude about Kellogg and young people were cynical about big food companies and nutrition." On his travels, Jordan discovered two things. The first was that he wasn't going to make it as a professional musician and the second was granola ­ a toasted honey and oats-based cereal. He also revealed some decidedly un-rockstar-like business sense in realising that granola was a product Jordans would be able to make and sell. He returned home, persuaded his father to let him give it a try, and with a second hand oven, brother David and an engineer, began producing Jordans Original Crunchy. He admits that there was an element of crusading behind the move; a mission to improve the eating habits of the British, but business survival was equally important. Britain proved slower to awaken to the wholefood revolution but health food stores were the pioneers and the milling background gave the venture credibility. "Probably more than we, with an average age of 21, deserved," says Jordan. Youthful impetuosity led to some interesting choices, including basing a decision to target health-oriented cereals at transport cafés on the premise that their own lorry drivers stole them occasionally, but it also meant grassroots experience. Market research revolved around agricultural shows and deliveries were face to face. The growth of the company is a feat of which Jordan is proud. "In one sense we're fifth generation, but this particular business was only started in 1980 so it's not as if we've got to touch our caps to ancestors who have done this before. It's ours and we built a market that wasn't there before." And he obviously relishes some of the David and Goliath achievements, including pioneering cereal bars in 1980. "I like to think we're a guerrilla organisation; slightly anarchic," he says. "Although we're very small guys, we've managed to make a mark against big companies ­ that's what drives us." But any apparent diffidence gives way to determination to stay one step ahead in the race. "All these big buggers have copied us and we feel a bit of defiance," he says. "We're going to hold on to a bit of the bar market; we're not going to give it all back to them." His plans include expanding into new sectors. Savoury bagged snacks and organic yogurts with cereal are the latest products to roll off the Jordan production line but there will probably be others. "There's still a little of the mission to improve nutrition there,"Jordan says. And he points out that the company is well aware of the need for aiming the products at the mainstream. "When we first started in this job we thought that nothing could be more basic than wholefoods," he says. "But these days it's more like the fashion industry. You have to appeal to a wider range of people and you can't be too fabulously ethical or no-one will buy the stuff. After all food is only nutritious if it's eaten." The company's long-established naturalness' is a strong selling point. It uses organic or conservation grade products (from farms with traditional methods and strict controls on pesticides and other chemicals). Jordan concedes that wholefoods may have focused too heavily on naturalness and health aspects in the past and says that is changing. He feels the company is still slightly vulnerable in an increasingly global age and lists petrol station forecourt shops, impulse outlets, hotels, foodservice and schools as markets that the company is keen to develop. He's also planning to grow the company's Continental market. It has a bigger share of the cereal market in France than here, and the European markets, although smaller than the UK, are growing faster. But as the company grows, will it be able to retain this little guy status? "You've got to be a certain size nowadays to afford TV advertising and to have some of the specialist skills such as marketing and logistics," he admits. "But we'd hate to become the size of, say, Kellogg. I suppose we'll be too big when we become less effective. You still need to be fast on your feet in any industry." Being fast on his feet is something Jordan can still manage. He is 52, but looks a decade younger and is a powerful advert for the health benefits of the company's products and approach to food. His father, who still runs the animal feed business, is 80 and his mother is in her late 70s. Jordan says both are "amazingly well". And he's relaxed because he likes what he does. "I like the products. I like the company. It has grown slowly, it's doing well and I know where it's come from. I think if I'd been dropped into it and found I was running something on a scale I wasn't used to, then stress would set in." {{FEAT. PROFILE }}

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