After banking, everything seems slow

Things are progressing sooo slowly. Now I appreciate the speed at which things were done in banking. (although, as I write, I have just finished reading about the rapid demise of Bear Stearns…so perhaps the fast pace has it’s pros and cons!)

The St James Park terms have finally (finally!!) been agreed and it has been passed onto the lawyers to scrutinise. In fairness to my broker, he was doing all he could to secure me a good deal in the face of transport for London, who are tough negotiators. All the while, I was calling him every couple of days to push things along. The poor guy is off sick this week…hope it wasn’t my fault.

Meanwhile I am trying to push along the shop fitters to complete a deal. While I am trying to get a decent price, I already know the look and feel I want to go for, and it is important to me that I work with people I like working with. I have found an excellent company whose product I like, and have been ready to proceed with a formal agreement for the past few weeks. I just need to see final plans and a formal quote. Unfortunately, the process is dragging along. They sound like they are keen to get the business, and build a longer-term relaionship to win future business, but I just can’t seem to get them to get a move on and start working on plans. I even got the designs done externally and gave it to them. You might think that they are not really interested in the work, but then they have spent many hours with me going through stuff related to it and continue to do so!? Finally a few days ago I met with them and said that I need them to be able to deliver as soon as the legal work is completed, ie about 4-5 weeks time, and unless they formalise the quote and agreement by the end of this week I cannot work with them. The build alone will take about 4 weeks!! I think they get the point. Lets see what they come back with. While I have spoken to other companies, I like these guys and their product so I hope we can reach an agreement.

On the tea front, I have finally had much better luck. When I came back from the US, I had thought about trying to become a UK distributor for one of the US companies I liked – Mighty Leaf or Serendipitea. Either way, I thought it would be great to use their product in our stores and sell the stuff for home consumption too. It turns out that Mighty Leaf have already paired up with a UK distributor, a small family outfit. I like their product and have been sampling loads of it recently. Only downside is that we have to redistribute under their brand, while I thought it would be great to do it under our own brand. If we become quite big, which I think we will, then it would be a shame to not benefit from the brand awareness that will come from selling these teas in our stores.

However in the meantime, I also finally managed to get hold of the owner of Serendipitea. She was really excitied about what we are doing, and is also happy for us to market under our own brand name. She even went as far as to say that we can effectively become their UK and European distributor. I need to formalise this, but they already have similar agreements for the far east, and it would be great to market their stuff into the UK market. Once again, I have been sampling their stuff and it’s amazing. The only downside is that we have to deal with import costs, duties (did u know there is a 13% duty on importing herbal teas!!), and repackaging. But it could be fun, and give us a new business opportunity, ie. Website orders, selling it into the supermarkets, etc.

Finally another very exciting development has been my work with Mikael from Gogo juice. This is the company I mentioned previously that I had approached about a franchise opportunity, but walked away with a view to working together on building a bigger, stronger chain of juice or tonic bars based on the new concept we were introducing. With Mikael’s experience in the business, and my background in business/finance and this new concept, it would be a fantastic partnership. We have agreed recently that it would be great to go back and rebrand the existing juice bars, and offer the broader range of products that TONIC is bringing in. This gives TONIC an instant chain of outlets and a broader brand recognition, while it brings more business opportunities for the individual juice bars. Then, going forward, we can continue to open some company-owned stores, and also franchise out the broader TONIC concept. It has been really good fun working together and thrashing out ideas, and we both have complimentary skills, so I’m really excited about formally joining forces and attacking the market together.

Anyway, I guess when you think about it, a lot is actually happening. I’m just used to being busy all the time and it feels weird when I suddenly get times when I have nothing more to do and am waiting for people to come back to me. I guess I could get my butt into the gym.

It’s weird, whenever I talk to people about what I’m doing, I get really excited about it. It’s not just the concept, it’s having a free hand to build the business in any direction I like, it’s working when I like, and having flexibility in my day to day routine. If anyone is thinking of starting a business, I’d seriously recommend it…it’s definitely more fun than I ever had working for the bank. Of course I miss working with the people at the bank, because on a day to day basis it can be quite lonely working on your own. That’s another reason why I think it will be fun to partner up with someone. But I’m sure that as soon as I launch I’ll be a lot busier, so in the meantime I better make the most of things like going to the gym…