step back and gather your thoughts

When things seem to be all over the place, and you find yourself getting sucked into all different aspects of business and life generally, it’s time to step back and reassess.

By mid december, that was the state meenal and i were in and we decided to take a holiday and have a complete break from everything. We went to Mauritius, what better place to gather your thoughts. While there, I woke up every day and meditated for about an hour. In the process I was able to really gather my thoughts, highlight what was and wasn’t working, and decide how to proceed.

By now, Tonic was losing it’s appeal. While we both still loved the concept, the fact was that for the time and effort that was going into it, there was no return at all, and very little light on the horizon. At the same time Abbey was moving forward. I managed to secure the mezzanine funding for it in days and managed to convince the bank to lend us what we needed too. I realised that I was actually good at that. When Abbey started it would take up some time, and it would be more fun to find other projects like that. Investors were crying out for good things to invest in, and I had the ability to bring them together with good opportunities, which I enjoyed searching for and analysing. At the same time, I was enjoying work (I remembered how much I actually did enjoy it after a few days of being there) and I loved working with such sharp people in a fast environment. In short, I didn’t have the patience any more for Tonic, and I didn’t want to keep pumping in time and energy into a business that really didn’t look like it was going to break even any time soon. In the long run it probably could have worked but it would take so much time and effort that all my other ventures would suffer. Also TFL were looking like they were not going to come down to the rent level we needed. They agreed to some initial discounts, but being the stupid people they were they imposed conditions – like I had to sign a personal guarantee. Why on earth would I do that, and specially for only a small discount on the rent!?? The problem was I was dealing with stupid people. While they wanted me to sign a personal guarantee, they were not willing to accept the fact that I could walk away from the business at any time as it was set up in a limited company. They thought they could still pursue me for unpaid rent (but then why they wanted PG I have no idea!) Anyway, they were starting to annoy me...they did not believe that the unit would remain empty if I vacated it, despite the fact that there were two other empty units in the station.

So during this holiday, in the midst of my deep meditation, I decided I’d spent enough time and money on this project and it was time to end it. That one clear decision was like a huge awakening and weight off my shoulder. It was only then that I realised just how much of my emotional energy was also being sucked into the business. Meenal also agreed that it was probably time to throw in the towel. Neither of us regretting the time and money spent on tonic, it was an experience and sometimes if you don’t try you’ll never know. So by the time I returned from Mauritius, I was completely relaxed and had a clear plan to work with.

Everyone needs a big laughing Buddah

Things weren’t as bad as many people in the world have it, however in our lives they had hit a low point in the Autumn of 09. It was as if a big black cloud was hanging over us. So when I saw this huge laughing Buddha at my sister’s house it really made me smile. A big laughing buddha has always been my thing – the joy of life while remaining balanced and at peace. I meditate and do meditative breathing exercises every day, but even I was starting to get down. Tonic wasn’t doing so well, it was becoming very real that we’d lost money in the other investment as well, and there were a few other peesonal and family things going on.

So I met up with my brother in law to discuss business. He’s possibly one of the greatest influences in my life – his sense of morality and ethics combined with his business drive and ambition and a real joy for life, a guy with few if any, hang ups. He, and my other brother in law, also a successful businessman who is very down-to-earth, both became business mentors and I’d occasinally meet up to discuss ideas and problems. Anyway when I met Sam, he gave me the Buddha as a present and despite all my protests, he insisted I take it. I loved it!! Meenal made me take it back but they weren’t having any of it. So in the end it took place in our lounge and we rub his belly every day.

The odd thing is, while I’m not really superstitious, everything turned around at that point. I managed to secure the job at UBS, which worked out really well for me because the hours are much better than they used to be, and I was doing something I know inside out and enjoy, and it gave me time to do my meditation in the mornings, and I had enough time to run my other business on the side. Other things on the personal and family level started to work out. I have no idea if it was the buddha, but everyone should get a laughing Buddha. If nothing else, it makes you smile every morning when you see it, and when you come home from work!

The things is, you can’t do business alone. It’s all about people – mentors, guidance, advice, and also constantly educating yourself so you’re always moving forward. Keep moving forward. And get a buddha.

Control – an illusion?

Maybe I’m a control freak (or, as someone recently said, everyone in banking is a control freak!) but I like to have a very clear idea about what is going on in my business. So it was quite frustrating when, despite asking Paola to manage the administrative work at Tonic, I often felt like we were not controlling costs properly, and the day-to-day operation was starting to slip into inefficiency. Our sales were going up, that was good, but our margins were dropping again. There were times when J&P came in late and were the only people working that day, so we lost some of the crucial morning takings. There was also the problem of one of them being off sick, then one person could not cope and we’d have to get extra staff in, but that couldn’t always happen instantly, so we lost business. In all, there were numerous aspects of the business that made it so reliant on these two people and I was getting very uncomfortable. It wasn’t that they weren’t good, it was just that there was no margin for error. Ultimately, they were being paid regardless of whether they made profit or not (they would get profit share once we made a profit, but that was far off!). Therefore their incentive and hunger was limited. When you’re an owner operator it’s your business so you work hard on every aspect of it. When you’re getting paid however, you will never be as committed. And that’s when I decided that I had to seriously consider the future of the business. I was enjoying being back in Banking and doing the property business on the side, so I was not in a position to be there full time any more. It was becoming apparent that for this business to work I needed to consider selling it to owner occupiers. So I started looking for buyers.

I have since learnt that it’s not about control, so much as having a handle on every aspect of the business so that you can be sure it is being run efficiently and that your money is not being wasted. That’s the only way a business can grow. Inefficiency is like a mould that will keep growing, so you need to always make sure you run a tight ship. Give employees the freedom to perform, but make sure you know exactly what is going on and where money is being made and lost, then act quickly to plug the holes while encouraging the positives.

Making tough decisions

When tough decisions need to be made, there’s no point messing around. When Emanuele suggest that he needs to look elsewhere for work with more income, I understood immediately. We had had similar conversations in the past when, as I was paying him much more than the other staff, even he suggested that I cut his wage bill and get other more cheaper people in to run the place. Previously I had rejected the idea as I thought his managerial expertise and commitment were crucial (and he was VERY committed) . However now with J&P doing a lot of the day-to-day work as well as pushing forward the change initiatives suggested by Mandy, Emanuele was quickly started to feel like an old-school manager who was holding the business back. At the same time, he could be earning more money, even by moving back to his old friends at P. Express. So this time I agreed with him and I think both of us felt a bit gutted, but both also agreed it was the right decision. By letting J&P run the place, it would also be a significant cost saving, and they could get in one part time person. Given the amount that we would save, it was only right to also increase J&P’s wages a bit as they would not effectively be running the place. We implemented this change fairly quickly as Emanuele already had a standing invitation to rejoin his old gang.

I had already haemorrhaged a lot of money in this business, but things were started to look a bit better. Assuming the rent negotiation came down to the level we needed, we would just about be breaking even soon. But until then I was still putting more money into this business. I had a lot of faith that eventually it would work so I didn’t mind, however it was becoming a problem. I realised at this time that another investment had gone bad and I may have lost some good money in that. Will talk more about this later but suffice to say that trusted someone that I didn’t know very well with an investment, and while I insisted on a personal guarantee on the money, he turned out to be more crooked than I could have imagined and basically I lost the lot. However I learnt two lessons in that: 1. Always be in full control of a deal, ie. if investing in property via someone else, always make sure it is transferred into my name or joint names rather than just theirs. If they don’t like that, then walk away. 2: Always use lawyers to seal the agreement with proper contracts. While you may trust someone, things can always go wrong and change the dynamics. I used a contract and did background checks, but I should have done it all properly through a lawyer. As this was my mistake, I honoured the investment in this deal made by all the partners and I paid out of my own pocket to recompense everyone. It was important for my reputation that I did that. When you make a mistake, put your hands up and own up to it, people respect you more for it. However this also meant that in on go, I’d lost a lot of my savings/capital. So i needed to do something.

At the same time, my old love started popping its head up again – property. My good friend Sandy and I decided to look into potential property investments – either buying blocks of well-priced new-build flats from struggling developers or renovation projects. Several potential deals came up and we found there was a lot of interest from investors. However a lot of them fell through for one reason or another. Finally however, while looking for a new apartment for myself and my wife, I came across a great renovation project in St John’s wood which, by our calculation, had anywhere from £250k to £400k of untapped profit potential. My role in our partnership was the preliminary work – as well as sourcing, due-diligence, raising funds, arranging finance, dealing with agents, lawyers, etc. Sandy’s role was to initially determine the level of work required, and then to oversee the actual renovation work. We both focused on our strengths. Unfortunately the world of property is VERY slow moving and progress on this purchase was no exception. At the same time Tonic was also starting to get boring because all I was doing was constantly streamlining the operation to save a few pounds here and there. Each day was becoming a bit boring. I was now starting to really miss banking: the routine of going to work, the fast paced environment where things happen quickly, working with really sharp people that understand what you’re talking about, the challenge of the work you do and the general buzz of the banking environment. I always did enjoy it, and I was pretty good at what I did, maybe I just needed some time out. But now I was really keen to go back. Of course, having the income would be good as well and I could put the money into more projects. But the best part was that the property ventures and Tonic could both be run on the side, in evenings and weekends, more as a hobby. That was the way it could work, so I’d have enough to keep me busy during the day, with a hobby that I really loved working on and that would be very lucrative. So I started looking at my options and in the end decided to take a contract role with my old group at UBS, where things were not starting to pick up after the worst of the crises.

Networking, meeting people, joining forces

No matter how much you are involved in your business, I think it’s really important to take time out to learn more, meet other people that might have good ideas, get inspired by other people who have been successful and generally just see what’s going on in the world.

I tried to attend numerous entrepreneurial business events where quite often you’d get to hear from successful entrepreneurs as well as those still slogging but well on their way up. It was good to hear success stories and also about failures and how they cope. It makes you realise that all the problems you face are completely normal in a start-up business. Anyone that says their business was success from day 1 with no hiccups along the way are generally talking crap. They probably just don’t want to mention that they made any bad decisions and had sleepless nights. But on the whole, entrepreneurs love talking about the tough times, because it makes their success even greater.

At those events you also get to networks and speak one-to-one with other entrepreneurs. One person who was instrumental in this business was Mandy. She probably doesn’t even realise it yet, but because I met her before I even started my juice bar, I was always being given tips by her and we would discuss general problems we were having. When I started to experience serious problems, I asked her to pop down for a chat. She was very excited too by being involved in our operation, which she considered a more up-market city operation. Her juice bars were very successful and in shopping centres. One of the worst things that happened to her was that the company she originally bought her franchise from went bust and she ended up losing a great deal of money in the process. Nevertheless she picked herself up, borrowed some money and got on with rebuilding her business. This time she did it all herself and built up everything from the brand to sourcing supplies, to making the process extremely efficient. As an ex-chef, she knew how important it is to control costs and wastage.

So I suggested she get involved in our business using her expertise. I offered to share the profits with her if she could find a way of trimming costs enough and push the business into profit. She instantly came up with lots of ideas for improving the operation, and with her market runs she also suggested pushing ‘specials’ based on what we could find a deal on in the market. Given that she was going to the market anyway, I also convinced her to buy for us so that we could buy more volume and share the discount. She agreed. My chats with her about the operation were great and we implemented a lot of her ideas. Once again the biggest problem however was that the staff in the shop often fell back to old ways when Mandy or I weren’t there, or they were unable to cope with all the administrative requirements such as creating a specials board on the day the discounted fruit comes in. At times however it did work well, and on those days you could see the impact on the bottom line. For example, the guys started a competition to see who could sell the most specials, another one of Mandy’s ideas, which worked really well at pushing up sales of these higher margin products.

Other people I met were also very influential in my thought process and just to keep me inspired and propped up when things were starting to look glum. Through this networking I also met some people that presented other business opportunities. So it’s very important to keep the mind open and allow time for looking outside the business.

Right people for the right job

When I hired the staff to run Tonic, I’d read a tonne of business books and spoken to countless people – the hardest part to get right is staff. Finding good staff and retaining them. It’s also crucial that you fill teh gaps in your own knowledge and experience.

I didn’t think it would be a problem to retain staff, given that I would am a fair boss and I plan to share the profits with the staff. However finding the right staff was going to be a bigger issue. I tend to work on the premise that if I like someone and think they are trustworthy, I’ll take them at their word about what they can deliver to the business. This was a mistake in hindsight. All my staff were excellent as people, and worked hard. The problem was that there were serious gaps in the skills I’d bought on.

My manager, whom I was expecting to play a key role in the operational management and building the framework for the business, was used to working in larger chain operations. Therefore, while he was a good manager, he was used to following the a rule book and when it came to creating all our processes and systemising them to make them efficient, he found himself outside his depth. Similarly working in an entrepreneurial environment requires everyone to pitch in and run with new ideas, but trying to find a food offering to go with our product was proving quite difficult. He could not think outside the box, and since we had tried a couple of suppliers in the sandwich market, and found that their products were either too expensive (the organic ones) or not up to the high standard and creativity we would expect, we had to consider making food ourselves. Not only would that help us to keep costs down but also create the product range we felt could work in this environment. As manager, Emanuele was tasked with this for many months, but he just was not getting there. He tried creating things in-store but he just could not grasp the natural, healthy angle we were aiming for. In the end, Jonathan and Paola actually drove the food element. They started by doing some good research on-line and in shops that did the type of food we wanted, and then then started creating healthy and unusual salads and wraps. This really should have been driven by Emanuele, or he should have coordinated it with J&P, however a rift was already starting to emerge between them. Paola and Jonno had a lot of get up and go. Paola in particular (being a fellow capricorn) had the ‘just get on with it’ attitude (I think Jonno got dragged along, but he seemed to be up for it as well). Jonno by contrast was completely in his element when he was being creative on the food front, and came up with some great items. Emanuele, rather than embracing this, took their initiative as a sign that they were not happy in him being the boss and he became quite agitated about it. I can understand his annoyance, however he was asked to deliver a good food offering for months and had failed, so I was just glad that someone was stepping up.

Another thing he failed in was creating a proper, streamlined operational process to manage/cut costs and reduce waste. I even went as far as suggesting that he take individual areas of the operation and see how they can be streamlined and then create a formalised process. When I took him on as manager, these are some of the key things that I thought he would do. When Mandy came to look at our operation, she loved it, however one of the first things she noticed was that we were wasting a lot of money by having inefficient processes. Even, for example, the way we made our smoothies using heavily frozen fruit which, according to her research, used up a lot more ‘mixer’ juice such as apple or orange to properly blend the fruit. She said that we could shave about 30% off the production cost by just letting the fruit thaw a bit, or storing it at just under freezing rather than -20 degrees!!

In short, it’s important to ensure that you employ the right skills. I liked Emanuele and because he had been manager in numerous food places, I accepted that he would be good in this entrepreneurial environment. In the end however, no matter how much I liked him as a person, on a business level it was becoming apparent that he was not the type of manager we needed. He clashed heavily with Martina, who ended up leaving a few months earlier, and now he was clashing with Jonno and Paola, and the reason was that they disputed what he was saying. Don’t think that people should necessarily disagree with their managers because they tend to play different roles. However in this case the manager did not have a clear plan and I had to take this into account.

You can’t fool yourself

In business, you have to be honest with yourself. Honest about what’s working and what isn’t. And most importantly honest about what you enjoy and what you don’t. Business is all about living a life of passion, doing something you love, otherwise it just won’t work. If you’re doing something you love, then it’s no longer work but a hobby, and you just have fun. Challenging it may be, but that’s still part of the fun. Challenging is good. A tennis player doesn’t only want to play against those he knows he can beat, where’s the fun in that.

When I started going to the market, I never really minded getting up early in the morning – at 4am!! I didn’t mind carrying the boxes and delivering them to the shop. What absolutely annoyed the crap out of me however was dealing with the people at the market and having to do the same negotiating every single time, and having to walk around the market every time to find the best deal. After a while it was just becoming a chore, especially because I didn’t particularly care for the attitudes of the people there..proper barrow boys, jack-the-lad types, who acted as if they were doing you a favour by selling you some products. Obviously by the standards of many of their customers, I was buying small numbers, but that did not justify their attitudes. Don’t get me wrong, many could be pleasant too. But it was a lot of hard work going round an d negotiating with all of them. What started off being fun just became boring and after a while I hated going to the market. I just couldn’t be bothered to deal with them any more. However right now I had no choice because we needed to keep costs down, so I just convinced myself that I enjoyed it. It was only later, when I stopped going, that I realised just how much i hated it.

The market could have become a much more long-term thing if I hadn’t negotiated with Mandy to pick up our supplies when she got hers. It made sense – better economies of scale, plus I’d pay her some on top for the trouble of dropping it off, plus I was trying to get her more involved in our business anyway on a profit-share basis, so it made sense for her. She was very keen to do something together as well and this was a good starting point. Plus she had a huge van (whereas I used to go in my little car!) and she had storage space so could buy items in bulk. However she did not take over until September, and until then I was getting increasingly frustrated – sales were going up but we still weren’t breaking even. TFL were very difficult to deal with and the renegotiation was dragging on. Despite hiring what I thought was an experienced manager, I found myself drawn into every part of the decision making process in the shop. The manager I’d hired was not used to working in an entrepreneurial environment. At the same time the marketing company were sucking up a lot of time and I found that they just could not act independently and I had to effectively check and redo everything they did. So not only was I doing the early morning market runs, I was then getting sucked into a lot of the day to day running of the business as well, areas that I thought I had delegated!!

Nevertheless I convinced myself that this was all fun and part and parcel of the role I was playing as entrepreneur. The problem with that is that deep down I was getting tired and frustrated with everything – the market runs, the operation of the business, the staff, the customers (or lack of them), the landlord and the market generally. But I managed to convince myself and other around me that all was good. At the same time I had made an investment which was going badly wrong. I’ll talk more about that later, but suffice to say that I was starting to realise that saving 5p here and 10p there on the cost of a drink was not really my strength, especially when the other investments I was working on could make tens of thousands. How can you focus on pennies when for the same effort you can actually be earning pounds (and lots of them) Of course that was all in property, a market I know, understand and love. The problem was that due to lack of time I invested money in someone else who was, in theory, doing exactly what I wanted to do in that market 0 buy cheap, distressed property from investors and sell them on at higher prices to owner occupiers – in the right areas the market was still strong, but investors that had overstretched themselves needed to get out quick. So it presented great opportunities. However I had no time to focus on this due to Tonic. In the meantime, I gave money to someone that did have time to deal in it, and they effectively screwed up. My own fault, I didn’t secure the investment properly and I would spend a long time trying to get that money back. However for now it was starting to frustrate me that I was spending so much time on Tonic and still losing money, when I could make 30-40k per deal on property – something I know and love. But I still wasn’t honest with myself, I thought I was enjoying Tonic, but even I started to realise that the shine was wearing off.

Always fight to be leaner, more efficient

When a business is making a profit, you still have to look for more ways to generate profit and cut costs. If you don’t do that, a more leaner operation will enter the market and overtake you. When you are a new business not even having achieved breakeven, it’s even more important. It’s life or death.

We started looking at everything, every ingredient in every drink, all other expenses, wastage, overheads, etc. We found numerous drinks that were just very low margin because the underlying products are so expensive. Mandy helped us identify some based on her experience too. In fact our most popular drink, the berry bonanza, is our lowest margin product. Mandy has something similar which she removed from her menu because it just was not profitable to keep it on. We also started trimming costs and controlling wastage better – it was amazing how many wasted drinks and staff drinks we were getting through in a day. Also we started finding cheaper suppliers without compromising quality. But the most important shift was that I started going to the market myself – the covent garden market – London’s wholesale supply of fresh fruit and veg. I had been a couple of times before when I found new suppliers that were cheaper than before. However what I didn’t realise was that I was dealing each time with distributors and wholesalers. What I needed to do was speak with the actual importers. Mandy had been doing this and was saving a fortune. By taking overstock items, she negotiated huge discounts that hammered down the cost of drinks and made the difference between loss and profit for her business. The wholesalers I was dealing with were keeping this difference for themselves because when they delivered the items, I was none the wiser whether they had got a good deal on them.

So around mid-April I started going to the market. Instantly I was finding amazing deals – boxes of apples previously cost me £15/box. I could now secure them at about £4 by buying 30 boxes upfront, which is about what we went through in a week. Similarly bananas cost £18/box, I got the singles or ‘repacks’ for £3. These were not damaged or faulty products, they might just have been ‘class II’, ie. odd shapes, large, small, etc. For juicing you don’t care what shape they are. Class I was for supermarkets where display matters.

So I started shaving costs on the products. We combined this with ‘specials’ based on the deals i got from the market (another of Mandy’s ideas). As the weather was starting to pick up, smoothie sales were rising, however we realised that people actually wanted to buy food as well. So Jonno and Emanuele started looking into making food. Top quality sandwiches and salads. Some of their combinations were amazing and we soon had people coming in regularly. However as a whole we still weren’t selling loads of food, and as a whole our gross income was not really impacted by food. It was still smoothies that drove business and that still needed growing...more marketing.

Always start on a shoestring budget

One of the things about starting a new business is that you should always start on a shoestring budget. It’s easy to get carried away, especially if you have a lot of savings. You’re not going to start a business thinking it will fail, therefore you will always be over-optimistic and that can lead to poor discipline in cost-control. And a business is all about cost control – every business, if it is going to be profitable, has to control costs. So it’s best to start small and on a shoe-string. Test the waters and make sure you have a profitable concept before throwing everything in.

When starting Tonic, we were so enthusiastic about it that, as often happens, we over-forcasted sales, underestimated costs and were slow in adapting to the reality of the market. I realised this most fully when I met Mandy, who has a juice bar in a shopping centre. Being an ex-chef, she knows all about managing costs in a food and drink environment and admits that it is VERY easy to get wrong. At the same time I have done lots of other research and found exactly that – our product costs are not properly calculated, and we are bleeding money everywhere in this business – high raw product costs, wastage (this is huge!) and more. For a £3 our gross margin is £1.50 and once you deduct other costs and VAT, there is very little contribution to fixed costs. And the fixed costs are about £70k per year!! It;s ok for Starbucks because their baseline product has a 90% margin so they can absorb ore cost. Our gross margins are just too low and our overall costs are just too high. If we really want this to work we have to reassess al costs, every single one. So I started breaking down the costs of everything, and I mean everything. Every ingredient in every drink. All overhaeads and more. At the same time I started trying to renegotiate the rent and try to get a rent-free period. At the end of the day, retail is generally struggling due to the credit crunch. In this particular location all the shops in the mall are struggling. Everyone is trying to renegotiate the rent. I don’t know if we’ll get it, but we’ve got to try. At this rent level and in this economic climate and at his location, it’s just not going to work and no other business will survive so the landlord is going to have to cut us some slack otherwise we have no choice but to cut our losses.

marketing and outsourcing

I love the term ‘outsourcing’. It means so many different things and so many different levels of responsibility for the company doing the outsourcing. However as a small business, there are some things you just can’t outsource and one of them is marketing.

While we were marketing by giving out samplers, leaflets and menus, our biggest problem was that the same people use the station everyday and we were marketing to the same people every day. When we went outside the station to do marketing, it sometime improved business, but there wasn’t a great impact. So when a woman from a marketing and PR company contacted me offering their services, it got me thinking. In fact Sahar Hashemi, who started Coffee Republic, mentioned that her business took off only after some great PR.

So she found our business online. The marketing company she was working for was quite new. The founder had experience from a large agency and started his own business and the woman had been working with him for a while and was tasked with finding new clients and managing the projects. So a young firm looking for clients. What they promised was PR, hands-on marketing, design work for leaflets, menus and more – this was perfect, exactly what I needed. Given that we are a new company, and so were they, I got them to agree to a deal where we paid them a low amount initially and then this stepped up once sales hit certain targets, proving that their marketing was working.

They loved the shop and the concept and had some great ideas about the way to market it. Some great initiatives instantly kicked off including loading up all the email addresses we had captured on the loyalty cards and doing a monthly themed email focusing on specific health-related issues and within that marketing some of our products. On some occasions we would also do a leafleted marketing campaign and offer some special offer to the customers that day on both forums, like buy one get one free, or free tea with porridge. These coordinated marketing efforts were quite successful, however after the initial lift in sales, they’d drop down again.

After a while we realised that, being at the height of the recession, people in that area just were not willing to part with much money on a regular basis and still saw what we did as a treat to have only once in a while. Whenever we did campaigns it bought people in, especially if there was special offers, but they were not going to become regulars.

At the same time, over the few months that we had the marketing company, I was constantly involved quite heavily in everything from design to coordinating the on-the-ground marketing, to rewriting the way they had written emails (even pulling out punctuation and grammatical errors). Even though I thought I had outsourced all that work, the fact was that I had to be constantly involved, and I often felt like a teacher correcting their work. Meenal often got involved with these tasks to fine-tune the marketing and even she commented that she thought what we were doing was what we were paying the marketing company to do!! It took up a lot of time. What I needed was someone on the ground who could coordinate them and the actual in-store marketing and everything else we needed on that front.

This is when Jonno introduced his girlfriend Paola. She was excellent – she was talkative, energetic, very enthusiastic about what we did, and she could be loud when promoting our products. She was also organised. This was perfect. I spent a lot of time on the marketing, and also a lot of time on basic admin like entering invoices onto a spreadsheet. She could help take over the administrative burden as well as help with on-the-ground marketing and liaise with our marketing and PR company. Perfect. I finally had time to focus on the broader aspects of the business and look at the other sources of income.

Business has a natural rhythm

Business pioneers are only rich and famous when what they pioneered was successful. However for every one pioneering business that has succeeded and made it big, thousands failed. On the other hand, if you start a business in something that already exists and is known in the market, your chances of success are much higher. That’s why banks love it when you buy a franchise, and they’ll lend you loads of money. Because what you’re going into has been tried and tested.

Tonic is a new concept in the market. We’re not a healthy nation, so proper juicing is still a very novel concept. We know about smoothies because of companies like Innocent, but we don’t understand the idea of paying more money for a fresh smoothie when you can buy one in a bottle at a fraction of the price. They pasteurise milk, so it must be ok for smoothies, right? Errr...no. But for people to understand that, you have to not only educate them, but explain that it is worth paying for the health benefits of drinking fresh. Most people buy smoothies for the taste with the firm knowledge that it is made from fruit therefore it mush be healthy. Finally we live in a cold, damp country most of the year so we prefer hot drinks. That’s understandable. That’s where the whole loose leaf tea concept comes in. We have accepted that coffee cannot be instant, it must be some espresso-based concoction that costs £2.50 and we’ll buy at least one everyday. However when it comes to tea why the hell would I pay more than a quid when i can easily make one from a tea-bag!!?? The whole idea of drinking loose leaf tea, specially brewed in our tea makers, is not really taking off despite lots of marketing. People like our teas, they agree that they are much more superior in taste to tea bags, plus we pump the health angle too. But they just cannot get their head around paying £2 for them.

In short, we chose a business that was always going to be an uphill struggle. Even Starbucks took a long time to convince people that they should drink espresso-based drinks and pay double the amount the normally pay. Unfortunately we were not prepared for this uphill struggle and expected people to instantly fall in love with our products (which they did, just not enough of them!).

So we really need to work with what people already know and understand, and also work with the weather. In the end we decided that we needed to introduce porridge, since it still has a healthy theme and we can top it with lots of fruit. We also decided that people would want coffee in the morning with their porridge and, considering the margins on coffee, we’d be stupid not to do it. We’d retain our high-quality angle by using freshly roasted Monmouth coffee beans for the coffee, and organic oats and milk for our porridge.

It was an instant hit. Queues were out the door. Sales finally started picking up. Still nowhere near where we needed to get to, but definitely improving. We figured that as it went on, we’d get more people buying our other products too like snack bars. I also figured that they would start to try some of our other products like the juices, and just being there everyday we could start to really market the benefits of our juices and smoothies. The value of a porridge is low, but that of a breakfast smoothie is double. So as we move towards summer I figured we’d get them to switch to the breakfast smoothies and bingo, we’d be breaking even. We also used the opportunity to market the teas, and did tasters on many mornings. It was time to step up the marketing.

Life is short – take the time to enjoy it

December has not been a good month. Mum had not been well for quite a while, and she had been deteriorating very rapidly since she was diagnosed with cancer about 2 years ago. She was always quite tough when it came to fighting illness and she was determined to fight this one. However despite going into the first round of chemo with absolute determination, the whole process absolutely hammered her and she got steadily worse. Around mid-december she went into hospital and while I thought that she would be out soon after (she has been in and out a few times over the past few years) something about this time just seemed different. The doctors kept saying that these were probably her last few days, but we couldn’t understand that, given that we’d seen her in that state before and she’d always been fine a few days later. But something made us stay there round the clock, like we didn’t want her to be on her own in case something happened, or she needed something. We were all really tired because of this and weren’t sleeping very well. But loads of family were visiting constantly and they all bought food, so that kept us going. When she passed away, all her family were around her (and we’re talking lots of extended family too). She was obviously so loved because of the kind of person she was, she was always so giving. Following her passing, there was two weeks of mourning and ceremonies at home. Needless to say it was a very emotional time and all of this really put life into perspective and during the daily prayers I had time to finally reflect on life and what it meant.

Since nobody that I was actually close to or saw on a regular basis has ever passed away before, this was probably the first time I realised what life meant and the fact that death is a reality. Therefore what’s the point of not living the life that you want. You’re going to be dead anyway at some point, so you can either enjoy your life doing what makes you happy, or you can spend your whole life doing what other people expect you to do. We spend so much of our lives running around meeting the expectations of others, that we forget to breath, to enjoy the journey. I’m talking about fitting in big family commitments (we’re always yoyo-ing back and forth from where we live to where my parents and other family live), social commitments, work, business, exercise, downtime, and actually enjoying life amongst all this. I know those things should not seem like a chore, but when you have very little time to yourself everything else becomes a chore, something you have to do. And if you don’t do it you’re walking around feeling guilty, and therefore not enjoying whatever else you’re doing. Anyone from an Indian family will understand what I’m talking about.

Anyway the conclusion I came to was that we need to take control of our lives again. Identify what we want and what’s important, and then prioritise those things even if it means that we’ll miss numerous events. As people get used to the fact that we’re not attending everything, they’ll accept it and in fact it will be more enjoyable when we do attend. Something I learnt from the Art of Living is that whatever you do, enjoy it fully and be in the moment. Don’t think about other things and have 100% focus. When you attend a social or family event out of a sense of obligation, and if you would rather be doing something else or getting some time to yourself even, then there is no point in going. That way, when you do attend such events you might actually feel positive about it and want to be there and actually enjoy it! Now this does not mean being selfish. It’s about prioritising and assessing how important it is for you to be somewhere. The reason that Meenal and I were so healthy and happy in New York was because we had downtime – we had time to ourselves and time with each other. We actually got to experience the city we were living in, and take time to just be. In London everyone (as in our family/friends) is always rushing around and I think everyone forgets that life is a journey and you need to look around and take in the scenery as you go through it.

Ultimately life is about balance. Taking the time out for yourself will also give you time to unwind and take exercise and fresh air, ultimately improving your health and your life, which in turn will make you more successful in whatever you do and overall more happier. This then puts you in a better position to help others as needed and whole-heartedly be there for others, and have enough backup energy to deal with problems that will inevitably come up. Everyone’s a winner!! Everyone is happy!