Launching in 4 weeks

How many times have I said these very words, fully believing it was possible? Well now I will not utter these words until I am absolutely positively certain that it’s true. Yep, you’ve guessed it, I’m learning that all-important business attribute – patience.

Let me start by telling you that we finally completed on the legal process a couple of weeks ago and formally signed the lease, so I am now the proud owner of…a six year debt.

Following numerous conversations with the shopfitters, I was under the impression that the shopfitting work would start immediately upon completion of the lease agreement. Unfortunately that did not happen. For those that don’t know, there are three parts to the shopfitting process – the designing, and subsequent submission of designs; the building of the bar itself in a factory; the internal works and decoration of the store. After initial faffing on the design part (due to overthought on the design, and multiple designers working on it) we finally agreed the design and submitted the plans. This had to be done prior to completion. I was then told that the bar would take 4-6 weeks to build in a factory in Poland. Since I was keen to launch asap after completion, they agreed to build it more quickly in the UK, and secured a 4 week timeframe. This was about 5 weeks ago. We signed the lease 2 weeks ago, but the internal works still have not begun. The long and short of it is that they have overstretched themselves and are finding it difficult to complete all the current jobs within the timeframe specified. And although the internal works should only take a couple of weeks, they now think that the bar-build won’t be completed for several weeks and thus the shopfit won’t be completed until mid-july…arghhh!!

Unfortunately I did not get the timelines agreed in advance of awarding the contract. There was so much we had to get underway with, that I had to just take their word that work would be completed within a certain time frame. While I still trust them to get the work completed to a good standard, it will be a bit behind schedule and it’s not the end of the world. But in retrospect I wish I had a more watertight agreement in place. Not that it would change much or affect anything, but at least it would give me a more solid ground to stand on when harassing them to complete the works. Oh well, live and learn.

And talking of learning along the way, we are having our web design and marketing materials design completely re-done to achieve a look and feel that is more consistent with the image we are trying to create. In fact I have actually taken to working on the design work myself. I had awarded the web/marketing company all the work on the basis that they would bring creativity, together with experience to put together a coherent branding package for our website and marketing materials. But I was so disappointed with the creativity and type of design work, that I took over much of the process and put it together myself, including things like images to use, fonts, text size, colours, layout, etc. All the type of thing you would think I was actually paying for. I handed it back at the end for them to ‘professionalise’! It’s a shame, it’s not that they didn’t work hard, it’s just that, in my view, they lacked the creativity required for the city market, and they lacked the attention to detail I would have expected. I went with this firm partly because a friend is a co-owner, and I like to support other small businesses, but also because one of the owners has extensive experience with marketing in large firms like pepsico and Disney. However his wife had a baby, so he was off at precisely the time that all this work was going on, and we lost his creative input. Unfortunately the others lacked city-experience and therefore their creativity was just not what we were looking for. Hence I had to take over much of the process, and work with Meenal as well as friends and cousins to put something good together. It is finally taking shape though.

Apart from this, I hired a manager to start around the beginning of May, as I thought we would be launched by then. Nevertheless he was happy to work on half pay until we do actually launch, and he has proven to be excellent, both in his dedication and attitude. He is doing research that I cannot get around to, he is taking over the recruitment process, and he has made contact with excellent suppliers for the food side, whom he has worked with previously. He is also learning about our USP and getting very good at explaining our key differentiating factors to other people.

Finally, another exciting development is that when I was looking to go into the salad bar business, I got talking to a branding/marketing company that also worked as business advisors to small companies. As it happened, they worked closely with what would have been one of our competitors. Upon further consideration, I decided that we were two years behind our competitors, and it would be silly to launch, when the four companies out there were about to go into expansion phase. Hence I decided to focus on the juice and infusion bar. However the owner of the branding company got in touch recently suggesting that we meet with the owner of the salad bar company that they work with, with a view to expanding it together either through a franchise or some other relationship like a joint investment. So many people have expressed an interest in investing in whichever business I start up, that I thought this could be a good opportunity to help other people invest their money in an area that is definitely growing. So I should be meeting with them in a couple of weeks to see if there is any potential there.

OK, that’s it for now, while there is still plenty to do, such as work on marketing plans, etc. it really is a matter of waiting for the shop-fit to be completed. I’m using the time wisely, to sort out my piles of admin! Not fun. But at least I’m learning about patience. And I’m getting back into my yoga and meditation…can’t be a bad thing.