… but is it recognisable?!

The last 12 months have been a whirlwind of proposals and business plans for various audiences and we’re now discussing with a possible investor in JP Morgan!

I don’t want to jinx it, as it all just feels like talk at the moment!But we’re finalising a presentation for the bank in March, so hopefully I’ll have some news in the next few months.

Needless to say, when you involve investors, the plan changes shape, so it’s morphed into something much larger than we had originally planned, but it’s not a bad thing!

But I have discovered something interesting… Having spent much of the last 10 years in a small business environment, where private, charity and public sectors have to battle for funding, it is refreshing to position a business plan slightly differently for a change.

High street banks and funding pots expect you to work for free; never take a holiday; work seven day weeks; send your children out to work as soon as they can walk (!) and pay the money back as a priority over your health and well being!

Not so, investors…

We were told when our figures were first looked at, that we weren’t paying ourselves enough! The investor wants assurance that his returns will come to fruition; that we won’t have to go out and ‘get a proper job’! We were also told to make sure that the business is sustainable and can operate without us; we should not be delivering tours and cookery lessons – staff can to do that and, of course, the business needs to earn enough to pay for staff.

Quite an interesting juxtaposition – and refreshing, to say the least. We have set bigger and better (and harder) objectives and the point is, that assuming we achieve them, the returns will be impressive!

More to follow…