Returning to Planet Organic feels like a “business fairytale”

The entrepreneurial journey is famously a bumpy one and Planet Organic founder Renée Elliott’s story is testament to that.

For her, seeing the vision for the business she founded interpreted (she prefers “eroded”) through other people’s priorities over the years has been “excruciating, infuriating…and exhausting”. But in 2023, Elliott returned to Planet, more than a decade after she and her husband stepped away from the company.

This unlikely “business fairytale” had an inauspicious start: a phone call informing her that Planet would be giving notice of administration in 30 minutes’ time.

In this week’s episode of Leadership Lessons, Elliott revisits that moment, the scramble to rescue the company, and the collective effort since to pull Planet “out of the mud back into the light”.

“There’s no magic bullet in retail, as any retailer will tell you,” she says. Instead there are “50 or 100 things” you need to do to achieve a given goal (for Planet this is returning to profit this year).

It’s lucky, then, that the 30 years since the company's first store opened in Westbourne Grove, London, have taught Elliott a lot about resilience, which in her view starts with “care of self”.

Just as important is to “trust yourself”. If you’re having a tough time, Elliott says, there are many different ways in which you can respond. “But if you go into fear, panic about the future, or any kind of what I call contracted state, you go into stress and then you're not thinking your best; you're not accessing the knowledge, answers and intuition that you have inside of you.”

If, on the other hand, you can trust yourself, “that stress falls away and you're in a much better place to manage through difficult situations”.

*This interview with Renée Elliott was recorded in December 2024.

Credits:

Presenter: Antonia Garrett Peel

Producer: Inga Marsden

Artwork: David Robinson

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