Belu Water testimonial transcript

Hello. My name is Karen Lynch and for ten years I was building a brand called Belu Water.

I met Vicki a few years into that journey when I was very clear that as a business we wanted to grow our penetration into the hotel and restaurant market.

I already knew that Belu was the best water choice for them whether they were looking for mineral water at the time or indeed now a filtration system.

But my challenge was: how did I get the marketplace to know that too?

Like all businesses we were really busy - always - and we never made enough time to do enough cold-calling or to figure out which relationships we needed to invest in building.

And that's where Straightahead came in.

We used Straightahead from that point for several years to increase our reach into the marketplace of leads that we'd identified. And I can say it was an absolute success for us. It was key to the strategy of growing the business at a point where the brand wasn't known as it is now in that sector.

It gave me great pleasure, last year actually, to be able to recount one of those stories to Vicki. We went to a celebratory event by one of our clients, Hard Rock Café, and I was able to introduce Vicki to Alison. Alison runs Hard Rock in Europe and Alison was delighted to be able to say, "it was me, I was the person who answered the phone when Straightahead called me," and from that point on, seven years now, Hard Rock have been an absolutely fabulous supporter, and not just customer, of Belu Water.

And so I'd like to say huge thanks to Vicki and the Straightahead team for playing their part in helping to grow the Belu business, because all of Belu's profits go to Water Aid and we've transformed hundreds of thousands of lives over the last decade and without Straightahead we would not have made as much progress as we have.

Thank you Straightahead.