Know when to let go

Having made the decision to shut tonic, it was interesting to return to London and seeing a county court summons from TFL for unpaid back rent. Despite the fact that we were negotiating the rent reduction and rent-free period, and that they were coming up with some ridiculous suggestions (sign a personal guarantee!!) they thought it would be better to play hardball. Well, in this case it backfired on them. I told them that I’d had enough and was ready to close the business in large part due to the fact that we could not come to an agreement on the rent reduction. I think this caught them by surprise. They had never thought I’d be prepared to close. So finally they came back with a proposal agreeing to 6 months rent free (which would take me to the end of the previous year) and a rent reduction of the amount I needed, but that they would do it on a year-by-year contract. They caved. But in their stupidity, they didn’t realise that their hardball was quite destructive in the trust process, and having seen the summons I decided that there was just no point dealing with such idiots. The last few months had been so stressful that I’d lost all my passion for the business (still loved the concept, but lost the passion for running it as a business). In addition, the rates would also soon be due together with the back-rates for the previous year (which they let me postpone while negotiations were taking place), and I just wasn’t sure if I now wanted to pump another £20k-£30k into the business. I think J&P were also tired, since business didn’t pick up in Jan at all. Over Christmas I expected it to drop as everyone was away, but with the cold weather and guess everyone having spent so much money over christmas, sales were really low all of Jan. So we finally decided to close the business and agreed a date on Feb 12th.

It was sad to think that Tonic would be closed, especially after all the hard work we had all put in, but by now I was pretty cold about it and just wanted some time back to focus on other things I enjoyed and which could be more fruitful (no pun intended). Like the property business, or banking, both of which I loved. I’d had my shot at Tonic, had lots of fun in creating this concept, and in the process I realised that working in the food and drink sector or retail was just not my thing. I’m a service oriented person, like banking, or even in property, my role was finance and research. Always stick to what you’re good at and what you enjoy, and know when to let go of anything that becomes a drain on money or energy.

With Tonic, it would be interested to do a full post-mortem on why it didn’t work. In short, there were loads of reasons as you’ve probably gathered above:
- It wasn’t my area of expertise and the manager was not able to fill the skills gap
- We struggled to control costs, especially with very high fixed costs
- Our supplies were expensive, and cheaper supplies required market runs at 4am!
- The location was not actually very good in the end, not enough high-spending people, lots of government offices
- We launched heading into the worst economic crisis of our lives, everyone cut back on spending
- We didn’t have enough of a food offering to balance the drinks
- The juice market is just not progressed enough in the UK, and we were way ahead of our time on the teas and even fresh-roasted coffee...everyone’s happy with Starbucks and not enough people appreciate the difference
- We had great regular customers, but generally the British mindset doesn’t fully appreciate yet the difference between fresh juices and those in a bottle
- We were trying to be too purist, which meant that our product costs were higher
- We struggled with marketing
- Not enough passing trade in the daytime
- And lots more...

I could probably write a book just on what went wrong, but there’s too many other things to do right now. I know what went wrong, I’ve learnt from it, not it’s time to move on...