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.