Time for a comeback
It’s been a seriously long time since I’ve posted on here. A shamelessly long time. Well, it’s definitely time for a comeback.
My biggest piece of news from the last few months is that we’ve moved our business (Webfooted Designs) out of the home into an office. This is something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Earlier this year we made a concerted effort to find somewhere but couldn’t find anything suitable.
We really wanted to keep our business in St Just, where we live. It’s a great place and we love being part of the community here. However, St Just is a very small Cornish town and doesn’t have a great deal of office space available at the moment. So, after a lot of asking around we decided to call a halt to the search and make more of our home office, making room for a meeting space so we would feel more comfortable asking clients here.
Of course, no sooner had we rearranged our house and got ourselves set up then the perfect office landed in our laps. It’s funny how that happens isn’t it? It has meant that we’ve had to move out of St Just but we’re only 5 miles down the road at Trereife (just outside of Newlyn). We’ve got a lovely spacious office, loads of easy parking and all in a beautiful setting. We feel very lucky.
A motivated weekend
I’ve got a good dose of motivation this weekend – feeling full of energy and enthusiasm. Maybe not the best thing if I was hoping for a chilled-out relaxed weekend, but great for tackling some business planning. In fact I got up nice and early this morning to have a head-start on it.
What am I planning? What we can do to start bringing in more money. I honestly didn’t go into business to make huge amounts of dosh, I’d be more than happy with a comfortable income that allows us to keep on top of the mortgage, buy the occasional book/dvd/computer game and have an occasional meal out. Not much to ask is it? Well, the truth is we haven’t quite achieved that yet. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really happy with the progress the business has made over the last couple of years – I thought at this point we’d still be relying on part-time jobs but instead both of us are working full time on the business, which is great. However, our financial situation is a bit pathetic. I’d say we’re just about ‘getting by’.
So, the ultimate aim of my business planning is to make more money. We’ve had a few ideas of things we can try out but with the day-to-day running of the business it’s difficult to find the time to focus on them. Well, I guess that’s what evenings and weekends are for… Using the framework set out in Steve Parks’ Start Your Business Week by Week I’m going to set aside one evening a week and one day a weekend to do some ‘business planning’. Although our business is up and running it will be an interesting exercise to treat our plans for business improvement as if it was a new business. Will see how it goes!
Five Star Service, One Star Budget
Some of the advice may seem like it’s common sense in a ‘I already knew that’ kind of way, but as the author points out – it’s not the knowing, it’s the doing that counts. If nothing else the book acts as a reminder of what you should be doing. You can use it to dip into when you feel your business needs a boost, or as a manual for transforming your customer service if you work through it a chapter at a time. Well worth a read.
A truly brilliant business book.
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