AFTER 15 years of working as a homoeopath with a strong interest in nutrition, I felt I would like to use these skills in a more sociable environment.

Opening a juice bar seemed like a natural progression from using juices as therapeutic aids.

So, in the summer of 2001 I set up at a local literary festival — in a garden tent, with a domestic juicer, a lot of fruit and an 11-year-old son doing the chopping.

Throughout that summer we chopped, pressed, squeezed and blended every imaginable combination of fruits and vegetables, laying the basis for what would be the core menu still in use in the cafes today.

We did a few more small festivals that year and were well received at all of them, allowing us to consider going into a permanent site.

We knew that items selling at a low price per unit would require a high footfall, so it had to be a city rather than a small town. Unfortunately, high footfall equals high rents, which are usually out of the reach of most start-up businesses.

We quickly found a site just off Exeter High Street that was due for demolition. Its rental value was low, despite its reasonable location, but the bad news was that we had no security of tenure — the lease could have been 18 months or 18 weeks.

We jumped in with both feet, doing the place up as though we had a secure lease.

In many ways Juice Moose was started in all the ways people are warned not to start businesses. I had no business or catering experience, no business plan or financial budgeting skills nor cash flow or takings projections. Juice Moose started as a family-run business and remains so today. We have most skills in-house, from bakers to architects and, of course, quality control.

The one thing we did do was a huge amount of research. At the time there were very few juice bars in the UK, so after exhausting the cafes in London for inspiration on interior styles and display ideas I went to New York, where there is a juice bar on every block, spending five days walking all over Manhattan, going into every juice bar I came across, taking photos, writing down menus and checking out the displays.

We knew juices alone would not pay the rent, so we developed a menu of lunchtime foods, along with a range of cakes.

We use many small, local suppliers and really believe that if you use good ingredients to start with you don't have to do very much to it.

The biggest boost to the business and morale came in 2005 when we were voted one of three top takeaways in the UK by Radio 4's Food Programme.

Shortly after this we opened our second branch in Drake Circus Plymouth. This was a roaring success.

Everything that is said about moving from one to two is true — if anything is not quite right when you have one, it is magnified when you have two.

That said, all runs pretty smoothly these days. In terms of staff we have come a long way from myself and my son.

We currently employ 38 people and with the opening of our new kitchen/bakery, from where we plan to provide corporate lunches and wholesale cakes, along with our third cafe opening in Bath this summer, our staff will increase to about 60.

It has been fun, but not easy. Up until one year ago my daughter and I worked 12-hour days and barely had a weekend off for seven years.

The best business advice I can give is to do something you are passionate about, listen to your instincts and be wary of so-called experts, especially the kind that have never run their own businesses.

Do the research yourself, read business books and apply it to your idea.

If we had followed advice we would not have opened in Plymouth but in a disastrous site elsewhere.

It isn't enough to have an idea and a business plan — you have to put your heart into it and be prepared for the long haul. My favourite business quote is: "Overnight success usually takes at least 15 years."