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.