Food, Thoughts, Market, Companies

I like a lot the SaaS model - it has its own complexities but I believe it is one of the best ways for companies to advance fast (hiring such services) and increase competitiveness. I found this article, and it offers some interesting insights if you are a SaaS's entrepreneur - and the conclusion showing the chart with seven high-profile, public SaaS companies is a great conclusion.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/01/the-saas-travel-adventure/

By Neeraj Agrawal @ Techcrunch - Feb 01, 2015

Editor’s note: Neeraj Agrawal is a general partner with Battery Ventures in Boston.

“What does it take to build a billion-dollar SaaS enterprise-software company?” I hear this question a lot in my work as a tech investor, and it’s incredibly tough to answer. I bet mountain climbers feel the same way when they’re asked how they conquered a major summit. The answer is both incremental — you succeed by placing one foot in front of the other, of course — and more pragmatic, in that the journey is always broken into multiple, distinct phases.
You don’t climb all of Mt. Kilimanjaro in one day, and you don’t build the next SaaS standout quickly, either. Instead, you shrink your focus and keep your goals clear-cut then recognize what the next level looks like and scramble like mad to get there.

I started thinking about how my job in venture capital resembles mountain climbing thanks to a very unlikely person: my mom. She and my father immigrated from Rajasthan, India, to Queens in the mid-1960s. My parents are both smart, hard-working, practical people who don’t really understand what I do at work.
I’ve described my work so many times to my sweet, tiny mom (she’s just 4’11”) but she can never remember exactly who I work for. Recently at a party, she proudly told her friends: “My son works at Battery Adventures.”  Her friends smiled, but they were disappointed that I was neither a doctor, like my dad, nor working at a brand-name bank like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley.
Her remark got me thinking. Maybe she captured my career better than I’d realized. Maybe the right way to think about building a company is going on an “adventure,” not merely a “venture.” And perhaps my role as a VC is that of an adventure travel guide: someone who’s climbed the mountain many times before, who knows both the terrain and the phases of the climb intimately, and can serve as a guide for others brave enough to take up the challenge.

I’ve had the amazing fortune to work with many world-class founders over my 15-year tenure in venture, including many B2B, SaaS enterprise-software companies such as Marketo, Omniture, Guidewire, Bazaarvoice and Sprinklr (for a full list of all Battery investments and exits, please click here.)
So I’d like to share some stories and advice from my personal travel log — call it a tale of “adventure” and a guide to the mileposts entrepreneurs will need need to traverse to reach their summit: a billion-dollar valuation.

7 Phases of go-to-market success for SaaS companies
I believe there are seven key phases in SaaS companies’ go-to-market success. Most of the phases center around a mantra I call “triple, triple, double, double, double,” (T2D3 for short), referring to a company’s annualized revenue growth.
This is not the only growth path to SaaS success, as enterprises like Cornerstone, ExactTarget and SuccessFactors have shown, but it is one sure-fire way to get there. Each phase demands a different focus, such as adjusting your sales process; growing your team and your organization strategically; and expanding internationally.
You’ll notice that I specify “go-to-market” because there are many other critical phases of SaaS company growth, as well. They include selecting a co-founder, choosing a capital partner, developing a scalable product architecture and fostering a winning company culture, among others. Here, we’re focusing only on the mechanics of the “climb” itself. So grab your outdoor gear — we’re hitting the trail and heading to the peak.

Phase 1: Establish a great product-market fit. This involves finding and prioritizing customer pain points, then aligning your product to address those pain points precisely. Many founders ask me how they’ll know they have product-market fit. Unfortunately, there’s no clear test here.
I usually ask several prospects or customers in a specific sector to describe their pain points. When I hear consistency across the sample set, I know we’re there. Once the product is developed, it’s easy to run tests to see if customers are actually realizing a benefit. It’s also critical this pain be among the top one or two pain points for the company’s target customer. I’ve noticed over the years that customers never really get to priority three on their list.

Phase 2: Get to $2 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue). In this phase, the founders are closing all the new sales, so the name of the game is landing the “right” starter clients and perfecting your sales pitch and funnel strategy. Assuming your average deal size in the $30K-$80K range, this means getting to 30-60 customers. Completing this phase usually takes a year or two.   

Phase 3: Triple to $6 million in ARR. I often see SaaS founders take two paths to reaching this first “triple” goal. In the first scenario, which I call the “hero” approach, the founders close just about every deal. That’s a tenacious strategy, but not scalable.
The second, “sales machine” approach is more difficult, but preferable. It involves hiring the right sales leader, plus five to 10 reps, and priming them to scale the next peaks. Perhaps half of these salespeople will be productive during this period, but others will be ramping for the following year.

Phase 4: Triple to $18 million. Here’s where the magic kicks in, similar to how you feel when you reach the first base camp on the mountain. Here, renewals and referrals help fuel sales, likely driven by just 10 to 20 sales reps, of which half might be fully ramped. Then you reach another milestone: adding a second layer of sales management underneath the VP of sales.
This can be difficult for a founder/CEO, as he or she is now three levels removed from the actual people selling the product. But at the same time, a founder/CEO can really grow during this phase, transitioning to thinking about cultivating new managers and landing really large accounts. The magic moment is when deals start closing that no founder was actively involved in pitching/closing.
The seeds for massive scalability are planted here. In my experience, successfully adding a second layer of sales management is one of the most difficult milestones for SaaS companies.

Phase 5: Double to $36 million in ARR. This phase involves fielding a team of about 20-30 sales reps and three to five front-line managers. Its major challenge, though, is getting sales in Europe working. International efforts often get started in this phase with a VP or sales rep hired somewhere in EMEA (some combination of U.K., France and Germany). Many companies make the mistake of entering multiple international regions at once.
I encourage my founders to get EMEA working first; go deep versus wide. Put a team of three to five reps in the U.K. versus one to two in each country. This allows you to build customer references, develop a playbook and cultivate country leaders who will make sure you have success.

Phase 6: Double to $72 million. This phase is rife with operational challenges. Should you promote someone within sales to run your North America division or hire from outside? Hire a worldwide CRO or have EMEA report to the U.S. leader? Another thorny issue many companies tackle here is establishing non-linear growth or getting the reseller or partner channel working.
In my experience, it’s premature to get a reseller network up and running for a SaaS company before hitting a $50 million run rate. There are simply just not enough economics for the channel partner to prioritize the effort. In addition, I prefer quality over quantity – just try to get one or two channel partners productive versus dozens. It’s so hard to get even one reseller relationship working in the field. 

Phase 7: Double to $144 million. The summit is close. The $1 billion valuation milestone, and a potential IPO, are both within sight. However, with luck and hard work, this will be just the beginning. At a recent IPO celebration, the head of NYSE remarked that, for the exchange’s great companies, 90 percent of value is created post-IPO. I firmly believe this. It’s the reason why I invest across early and late venture stages. If I’m doing my job right, all these private companies are just early-stage businesses. After completing Phase 7, the next major milestone is now set — getting to $1 billion in revenue!

The following chart gives a real-life illustration of how seven high-profile, public SaaS companies we have identified — Marketo, NetSuite, Omniture, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday and Zendesk — each roughly followed this triple, triple, double, double double (T2D3) growth path to achieve their success.

Happy with Blogger - currently transferring content from here to this space.

Interesting definition about leadership.

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/carlos-brito-you-have-treat-people-different-ways

By Carlos Brito @ Stanford GSB - Jul, 2014 (Bill Snyder)

Anheuser-Busch CEO says a people-friendly company is a successful company.

Carlos Brito is the man who engineered the surprise 2008 buyout of Anheuser-Busch and its iconic American brands and brought them under the umbrella of Brazil’s InBev. A Stanford MBA, the Brazilian-born Brito worked for Shell Oil and Daimler-Benz before joining Brahma, a beer and soft drinks company. Over the years, Brahma merged with other companies in Brazil and Brito’s career grew with it. He became CEO of InBev in late 2005 and CEO of the combined Anheuser-Busch InBev following the merger.

It’s almost a cliché to say that “people are the most important factor in a company.” Brito says that too, but he’s no pushover; he has a reputation as a tough-minded cost-cutter who does not sugarcoat bad news or a deficient performance. Addressing Stanford Graduate School of Business students at a View from the Top talk in November 2013, Brito outlined his formula for making a people-friendly company a successful company.

Be fair
Being fair to your employees doesn’t mean that everyone should be treated alike, says Brito. “Our definition of fairness is that you have to treat different people in different ways. That’s being fair. If you treat everybody the same, that’s unfair.” A business should be a meritocracy, and if that means sharp, young employees outperform their seniors, they will be promoted at Anheuser-Busch InBev. “That’s fair,” he says.

Be informal
Informality, says Brito, goes beyond casual Fridays and wearing jeans to work. It’s about creating structures that facilitate communication across traditional corporate boundaries. Instead of working in his own office, Brito sits at a large table with his direct reports close at hand. Other Anheuser-Busch executives follow suit. Why configure offices that way? “Because information flows. People can speak up. You don’t need to be booking meetings all the time,” says Brito.

Be candid
It’s not always easy to be straightforward with an employee, but talented people want to know where they stand, says Brito. At Anheuser-Busch InBev, Brito evaluates his employees twice a year, and in the same one-on-one, 90-minute meetings they evaluate him. Hesitating to tell an employee how to improve is a mistake; what’s more, it’s patronizing. “You have to tell what’s good, what’s bad, and how you can help him recover and get back on track.” That’s candor, he says.

Build a culture of ownership
Professionals are just trying to build their resume; owners are trying to build the company. For example, a U.S. company Anheuser-Busch InBev acquired had a three-year vesting period. “We said, ‘Forget it.’ That’s short term.” Brito increased the vesting period by two years. “If they’re going to be here for 30 years, what’s five years?” says Brito.

Reward success, not just strong efforts
Business is not a place where everyone gets a gold star just for showing up. Efforts should be recognized, but results are what should be rewarded. Normally, great results come with great efforts but the two are not necessarily the same, says Brito. Customers are only interested in what you deliver. Some companies that don’t produce high-quality results still pay bonuses; they still celebrate. “And that’s the beginning of the end,” he says.

Avoid executive status symbols
Brito flies commercial and stays in the same hotels his team stays at. He doesn’t have a company car or a driver or an office. Status symbols destroy the idea of an engaged group, he says.

Don’t sugarcoat bad news
No company really has a “feel good department,” but for Brito it’s a metaphor for reluctance to confront bad news openly and honestly. Some companies will take bad news and rebrand it as good news for the sake of morale. If a company has a “feel good department,” he says, kill it.

--
Bill Snyder

Interesting reflection about pricing, market share and both inserted in the dynamic market of mobile phones, its competition and ecosystems.

http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-6-prices-2014-7

By Jim Edwards @ Business Insider - Jul 7, 2014

I recently moved to London and in doing so I decided to replace my iPhone 5. I needed a British phone number, and the iPhone 5 is two years old. I'm in the upgrade cycle, as it's known in the business.

As an Apple user, I faced an unpleasant problem: upgrading to an iPhone 5S isn't much of an upgrade, and it would cost full price, £569 (about $974). If I bought that, I would miss out on iPhone 6 coming in the fall, which is expected to have a nice, big 5.7-inch screen. I could pay again for iPhone 6 of course, but that would have cost me £569/$974 for two new iPhones in less than three months, leaving me with three perfectly good iPhones — and a $2,000 hole in my pocket.

People always assume that the best technology triumphs in the marketplace. They forget that price is a huge factor.

The high-end Android phones on offer were much cheaper. The store I was in sold Samsung's Galaxy S5 for £500, the Note 3 for £560, and the HTC One M8 for £460. The original HTC One was even cheaper, at around £400.

That made me stop and think.

Why am I paying so much money to be an Apple user?

Suddenly, HTC's lovely all-metal Androids looked extremely attractive. And paying $1,000 for an iPhone that's going to be obsolete in three months seemed ridiculous.

Note that in the U.S. a new iPhone tends to cost between $600 and $700. That price falls to about $200 out-of-pocket for Americans who get them subsidized when they buy wireless service carrier contracts.

Now I am acutely aware of the real price of new iPhones: about $1,000 a pop.

While this sounds outrageous, it's a commonplace outside the U.S. iPhones are nearly $1,200 in Brazil and more expensive than the U.S. in every other country where they are sold.

As we approach the launch of iPhone 6 in the fall, most of the attention is around its features. Will it have a 5.7-inch screen? Will it be thinner? Will it have sapphire glass?

But the most important attribute for ordinary consumers will in fact be its price.

Federal court

So Apple CEO Tim Cook will be having some interesting meetings right about now, on the nature of price elasticity and iPhone demand. Apple will likely want an initial price that's north of $600, to maintain its profit margins (and to maintain the "premium" halo on its brand).

Apple knows that it is pushing the limit when it comes to price. Everything you need to know about smartphone pricing can be found in these two charts, one from Apple's internal marketing executives and one from Kleiner Perkins analyst Mary Meeker. Apple's chart, titled "Consumers want what we don't have," shows that all the growth in the phone market is for devices that cost less than $300 and have big screens.

KPCB

Meeker's chart shows that the average price of smartphones is in a long-term historic decline. Apple is selling phones at twice the price of the average device.

There's an army of Chinese companies racing to make pretty good Androids for $100 each.

The price of iPhone 6 will go a large way to deciding what level of market share Apple will win. Right now mobile devices running Apple's iOS operating system claim about 18% market share. Devices running Google's Android have about 78%.

The greater the price Apple demands, the fewer people will be able to buy it — and the more Apple's share will decline.

Now, Apple can still sell more phones while its overall percentage share of the total market declines. I'm not saying that Apple's iPhone sales will go into decline. The opposite is likely to happen: A huge number of iPhone users are still on iPhone 4S and they're due for new phones soon. That will trigger a massive wave of new sales for iPhone 6. The new phone will, undoubtedly, be massive.

But Apple needs to ask some serious questions about how it will continue to charge $600 for a large-screen smartphone in a market that is headed to $200 for a comparable phone. Samsung's Note and Galaxy phones, and HTC's One models, are healthy competitors. (The saleswoman in the store I was in had an iPhone 5S and told me she couldn't wait to switch to a Samsung because the camera was so much better.)

It's not just about whether consumers will pay more for Apple. Many people make the argument that BMW does just fine in a world full of Fords, because some people will always pay more for the best. But BMWs and Fords both drive on the same roads — they inhabit the same transport "platform," so to speak. A Ford can go anywhere a BMW can go. That is not true of phones. Apple and Android phones do not share a platform. Many apps, products, accessories, and software packages are only available for iPhone. You can't listen to iTunes on an Android, for instance, and you can't get a 16-megapixel Samsung camera for an iPhone.

So market share is important: Apple users only get to drive on 18% of the roads on the map, so to speak. They're nice roads — and Apple users are paying high tolls to drive on them — but most people are paying less to connect to a far larger ecosystem.

This is why the price that Tim Cook sets for the iPhone 6 will be by far its most interesting new feature, because it will send a strong message to the market about what kind of share Apple feels it needs to maintain its market position. (And it's really interesting that Apple is selling the old iPhone 4 in India at discount rates — that proves Apple understands how prices affect market share.)

And in case Cook is reading this, he ought to note that I bought a Samsung Galaxy S5. This is not good news for Apple: I use MacBooks both at home and work, and I have an extensive iTunes library. (iTunes is a surprisingly powerful sticking point when you're facing the grim reality of paying hundreds of dollars for a device that isn't compatible with your music.) I ought to be fully tied into Apple's ecosystem.

I went with Samsung partly because it was cheaper. (I was caught in that awkward forced-upgrade cycle, remember?) But also because when an iPhone sits next to a Samsung in a store, it looks small and feeble like a child's toy. I was bored and frustrated with my tiny screen, which makes it inconvenient for serious work tasks.

Apple's marketing slide about not having what consumers want turned out to be completely true for me: I wanted a big phone at a cheaper price. Apple doesn't sell such a thing.

I don't believe that Apple will sell the iPhone 6 at a lower price, of course.

But I do believe that the price will decide its fate more than sapphire glass will.

I've cooked this twice already and would eat in any special occasion - its awesome!

By Jennifer Olvera

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/02/balsamic-brown-sugar-short-ribs-recipe.html

Ingredients:

For the Short Ribs:
1 tablespoon olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 (6 to 8-ounce) pieces boneless short ribs
1 medium onion, chopped (about 1 cup)
2 large cloves garlic, smashed
1/2 cup red wine
2 cups low-sodium beef broth
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 bay leaves
1 (1- by 3-inch) strip of orange zest, white pith removed

For the Potatoes:
2 pounds red-skin potatoes
4 cloves garlic
3 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup milk
1/2 cup sour cream

Method

Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position and preheat oven to 325°F. Coat a large Dutch oven with olive oil and bring to high heat. Season meat with salt and pepper. Working in batches to avoid overcrowding, add short ribs and cook without moving until well browned on first side, about 4 minutes. Flip short ribs and add onions and garlic. Continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until short ribs are browned on second side and onions and garlic are softened but not completely browned, 2 to 3 minutes longer.

Add red wine to pan. Bring to a boil and let it simmer for a minute before adding beef broth, Worcestershire, vinegar, brown sugar, bay leaves, and orange zest. Return to a boil, cover, and transfer to the oven to cook until meat is fork-tender and sauce is rich and full of depth, 2 1/2 to 3 hours total, flipping meat once during cooking.

While the meat is cooking, bring potatoes and garlic to a boil in a large pot over medium-high heat. Cook until tender when pierced with a fork, 20 to 25 minutes. Drain, return to pot and add butter, milk and sour cream. Season with salt and pepper, and mash with a potato masher or a fork.

When short ribs are done cooking, discard bay leaves and orange zest. Season salt to taste with salt and pepper. To plate, place a mound of mashed potatoes on each of four individual plates. Top with a short rib, and spoon with sauce. Serve immediately.

The first part of the interview where he describes the interactions with Ballmer and Gates is particularly interesting...

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/business/satya-nadella-chief-of-microsoft-on-his-new-role.html

By Adam Bryant @ The New York Times - Feb 20, 2014

This interview with Satya Nadella, his first since taking over as chief executive of Microsoft, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. What leadership lessons have you learned from your predecessor, Steve Ballmer?

A. The most important one I learned from Steve happened two or three annual reviews ago. I sat down with him, and I remember asking him: “What do you think? How am I doing?” Then he said: “Look, you will know it, I will know it, and it will be in the air. So you don’t have to ask me, ‘How am I doing?’ At your level, it’s going to be fairly implicit.”

I went on to ask him, “How do I compare to the people who had my role before me?” And Steve said: “Who cares? The context is so different. The only thing that matters to me is what you do with the cards you’ve been dealt now. I want you to stay focused on that, versus trying to do this comparative benchmark.” The lesson was that you have to stay grounded, and to be brutally honest with yourself on where you stand.

Q. And what about Bill Gates?

A. Bill is the most analytically rigorous person. He’s always very well prepared, and in the first five seconds of a meeting he’ll find some logical flaw in something I’ve shown him. I’ll wonder, how can it be that I pour in all this energy and still I didn’t see something? In the beginning, I used to say, “I’m really intimidated by him.” But he’s actually quite grounded. You can push back on him. He’ll argue with you vigorously for a couple of minutes, and then he’ll be the first person to say, “Oh, you’re right.” Both Bill and Steve share this. They pressure-test you. They test your conviction.

Q. There’s a lot of curiosity around what kind of role Bill is going to play with you.

A. The outside world looks at it and says, “Whoa, this is some new thing.” But we’ve worked closely for about nine years now. So I’m very comfortable with this, and I asked for a real allocation of his time. He is in fact making some pretty hard trade-offs to say, “O.K., I’ll put more energy into this.” And one of the fantastic things that only Bill can do inside this campus is to get everybody energized to bring their “A” game. It’s just a gift.

Q. What were some early leadership lessons for you?

A. I played on my school’s cricket team, and there was one incident that just was very stunning to me. I was a bowler — like a pitcher in baseball — and I was throwing very ordinary stuff one day. So the captain took over from me and got the team a breakthrough, and then he let me take over again.

I never asked him why he did that, but my impression is that he knew he would destroy my confidence if he didn’t put me back in. And I went on to take a lot more wickets after that. It was a subtle, important leadership lesson about when to intervene and when to build the confidence of the team. I think that is perhaps the No. 1 thing that leaders have to do: to bolster the confidence of the people you’re leading.

Q. Tell me about your management approach in your new role.

A. The thing I’m most focused on today is, how am I maximizing the effectiveness of the leadership team, and what am I doing to nurture it? A lot of people on the team were my peers, and I worked for some of them in the past. The framing for me is all about getting people to commit and engage in an authentic way, and for us to feel that energy as a team.

I’m not evaluating them on what they say individually. None of them would be on this team if they didn’t have some fantastic attributes. I’m only evaluating us collectively as a team. Are we able to authentically communicate, and are we able to build on each person’s capabilities to the benefit of our organization?

Q. Your company has acknowledged that it needs to create much more of a unified “one Microsoft” culture. How are you going to do that?

A. One thing we’ve talked a lot about, even in the first leadership meeting, was, what’s the purpose of our leadership team? The framework we came up with is the notion that our purpose is to bring clarity, alignment and intensity. What is it that we want to get done? Are we aligned in order to be able to get it done? And are we pursuing that with intensity? That’s really the job.

Culturally, I think we have operated as if we had the formula figured out, and it was all about optimizing, in its various constituent parts, the formula. Now it is about discovering the new formula. So the question is: How do we take the intellectual capital of 130,000 people and innovate where none of the category definitions of the past will matter? Any organizational structure you have today is irrelevant because no competition or innovation is going to respect those boundaries. Everything now is going to have to be much more compressed in terms of both cycle times and response times.

So how do you create that self-organizing capability to drive innovation and be focused? And the high-tech business is perhaps one of the toughest ones, because something can be a real failure until it’s not. It’s just an absolute dud until it’s a hit. So you have to be able to sense those early indicators of success, and the leadership has to really lean in and not let things die on the vine. When you have a $70 billion business, something that’s $1 million can feel irrelevant. But that $1 million business might be the most relevant thing we are doing.

To me, that is perhaps the big culture change — recognizing innovation and fostering its growth. It’s not going to come because of an org chart or the organizational boundaries. Most people have a very strong sense of organizational ownership, but I think what people have to own is an innovation agenda, and everything is shared in terms of the implementation.

Q. How do you hire? What questions do you ask?

A. I do a kind of 360 review. I will ask the individual to tell me what their manager would say about them, what their peers would say about them, what their direct reports would say about them, and in some cases what their customers or partners may say about them. That particular line of questioning leads into fantastic threads, and I’ve found that to be a great one for understanding their self-awareness.

I also ask: What are you most proud of? Tell me where you feel you’ve set some standard, and you look back on it and say, “Wow, I really did that.” And then, what’s the thing that you regret the most, where you felt like you didn’t do your best work? How do you reflect on it?

Those two lines of questioning help me a lot in terms of being able to figure people out. I fundamentally believe that if you are not self-aware, you’re not learning. And if you’re not learning, you’re not going to do useful things in the future.

Q. What might somebody say in a meeting that, to you, sounds like nails on a chalkboard?

A. One of the things that drives me crazy is anyone who comes in from the outside and says, “This is how we used to do it.” Or if somebody who’s been here for a while says, “This is how we do it.” Both of them are such dangerous traps. The question is: How do you take all of that valuable experience and apply it to the current context and raise standards?

Q. Any final big-picture thoughts on how you’re going to approach your new role, and how you want to make your mark?

A. Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future. In our case, given 39 years of success, it’s more about reinvention. We’ve had great successes, but our future is not about our past success. It’s going to be about whether we will invent things that are really going to drive our future.

One of the things that I’m fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything, from civilizations to families to companies. We all know the mortality of companies is less than human beings. There are very few examples of even 100-year old companies. For us to be a 100-year old company where people find deep meaning at work, that’s the quest.

This was prepared for new year's eve... absolutely delicious.

By Jamie Oliver

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pork-recipes/6-hour-slow-roasted-pork-shoulder

Ingredients

2 kg higher-welfare shoulder of pork, bone-in, skin on
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
2 red onions, halved
2 carrots, peeled and halved lengthways
2 sticks celery, halved
1 bulb garlic, skin on, broken into cloves
6-8 bay leaves
600 ml water or organic vegetable stock

Method

Preheat your oven to 220°C/425°F/gas 7.

Place your pork on a clean work surface, skin-side up. Get yourself a small sharp knife and make scores about a centimetre apart through the skin into the fat, but not so deep that you cut into the meat. If the joint is tied, try not to cut through the string. Rub salt right into all the scores you've just made, pulling the skin apart a little if you need to.

Brush any excess salt off the surface then turn it over. Season the underside of the meat with a few pinches of salt and pepper. Place your pork, skin-side up, in a roasting tray and pop in the preheated oven. Roast for 30 minutes, until the skin of the pork has started to puff up and you can see it turning into crackling. At this point, turn the heat down to 170°C/325°F/gas 3, cover the pork snugly with a double layer of tinfoil, pop back in the oven and roast for a further 4 and a half hours.

Take out of the oven, take the foil off, and baste the meat with the fat in the bottom of the tray. Carefully lift the pork up and transfer to a chopping board. Spoon all but a couple of tablespoons of fat out (save it for roast potatoes!).

Add all the veg, garlic and bay leaves to the tray and stir them into the fat. Place the pork back on top of everything and return to the stove without the foil to roast for another hour. By this time the meat should be meltingly soft and tender.

Carefully move the meat to a serving dish, cover again with tinfoil and leave to rest while you make your gravy. Spoon away any fat in the tray, then add the water or stock and place the tray on the hob. Bring to the boil and simmer for a few minutes, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon to scrape up all those lovely sticky tasty bits on the bottom of the tray. When you've got a nice, dark gravy, pour it through a sieve into a bowl or gravy boat, using your spoon to really push all the goodness of the veg through the sieve. Add a little more salt and pepper if it needs it.

Serve the pork and crackling with your jug of gravy and some lovely roast potatoes (As a treat, you can try roasting them in the fat you spooned out of your roasting tray. Some stewed red cabbage and a dollop of apple sauce will finish this off perfectly.)

Adaptations:

As there was no way to find shoulder of pork with both bone-in and skin on I bought with bone-in and the butcher of Lunardi's had a good idea of getting a cooking rope and use it to attach a piece of skin to the meat - and it worked.