How I left my rugby career to make best-selling sausages with my brothers
Running a family business for 15 years isn’t always easy. For this week’s Ambition A.M. profile, Jennifer Sieg sits down with the three brothers behind The Jolly Hog meat producer to find out how they’ve made it work all these years.
Plenty of entrepreneurs have interesting stories about how their business got off the ground.
But Olly Kohn’s is remarkable even by those standards: gifted a sausage maker by his wife as a diversion from a professional rugby career, a business was born.
He began selling them as a hobby – often to punters at the Stoop, where he was then plying his trade as a Harlequins player.
Olly tells us he went into the world of business with one goal in mind.
“It was just about making the very best sausages we could and we were completely obsessed by it,” Olly says.
It worked. He didn’t have to wait long until the hype began to grow – and at that point he realised it was time to enlist some added muscle to the operation in the form of his two brothers, Josh and Max.
He tells me the name ‘Jolly’ came even from an earlier mix of Josh and Olly.
“I got left out,” Max bursts in as all three brothers laugh.
Now, 15 years later, the brothers (Max included) have grown The Jolly Hog into one of the UK’s first B-Corp certified meat producers and one of its fastest-growing – racking up £7.7m of retail sausage sales last year alone.
Foundations
The Kohn brothers know a little something about family-run businesses.
Even now, the three of them still recall watching their father’s entrepreneurial efforts closely as children.
With the sausages going down well, Olly wanted to see if it might come together.
“If I could convince Max to bin up shipbroking and then Josh bin up being a cabinet maker, we could maybe combine forces and create something that works together,” he says.
It all made sense after the three spent their first day together selling sausages at the Stoop.
“That first day we’ll never forget because we took in 500 quid and we high-fived each other thinking we were going to be millionaires, and actually it cost us like 800 quid to be there,” Olly says.
“Which proved to us that we had no idea what we were doing, but we loved making sausages and people loved it,” he adds.
For all the natural camaraderie, family businesses aren’t always easy. But it’s obvious the three get on very well indeed – comparing their complementary skill sets to that of a hard baguette, a bread roll and a brioche – and that’s bound them together.
“When shit gets tough, we can combat it,” Olly — who whilst building Jolly Hog just happened to win a Premiership final with Quins and make his international debut for Wales — says.
Bouncing back
Shit did, indeed, get tough. The pandemic wiped out The Jolly Hog’s main sources of income at that point – events and one of their two restaurants – and forced them to think differently.
“It was the first time in 10 plus years where we had no events planned for the foreseeable future, which was a really strange experience,” Josh says.
Making do with what they could, the brothers took their summer stock – that would have otherwise gone to waste – and began dishing it out in the parking lot of their local hospital, giving back to those in need.
This spontaneous yet charitable effort seemed to stick around, with the three later introducing their Jolly Good Deeds donation programme in 2022.
“It really sort of sparked a fire in the business… How can we do more?” Max says.
Whilst the brothers had begun selling into retail in 2015 — first sausages, then bacon — the pandemic saw them double down.
They’re now stocked in retailers nationwide and have just added a new Korean-themed wrap to their collection in Sainsbury’s, winning a tractor-load of Great Taste Awards along the way.
Now a 30-person team, the brothers have kept their original Bristol restaurant, Pigsty, ticking in the background.
Laughing as the three of them agree that they take their product more seriously than themselves, Olly says reflecting on the hardships – coupled with some good tasting and charitable giving meat – is what will spring The Jolly Hog into even more sausage making success.