Owning a Business You Don’t Love

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I've just got a question about your you've you you said in your in your feedback to us that you one of the obviously embracing market mistakes people share their mistakes that they've made in business. Um on LinkedIn you could make loads, but um one of the ones that you said that you'd made um was you started a business um that you weren't interested in. Yes! Funny fascinating. How do you start a business that you're not into at all?

Early Entrepreneurial Roots

The Craft Shop Gamble

Hard Numbers, Hard Truths

Pivot to Social Media

SPEAKER_00 0:28

So I grew up so I live in Northern Ireland, in Belfast in Northern Ireland, and I grew up with a father who ran his own business. Now he his business started in the 1970s. Northern Ireland was a very different place then. Very, very hard to have a business uh in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s, and he said to me, never work for yourself, never. But entrepreneurialism runs in the blood. Like my cousin has a business, my little sister has a business. It's something, if it's in you, it's in you. So I uh I start I started selling Avon to my mum's friends when I was like 16. So it was always something in me when I look back at my my my life. But you were the I was the Avon lady, yeah. It's another big dog. No, no. I used to be in um a church organization and I would literally go on a Monday night and hand out my little things to all the mums and the other adults there, and they would buy anyway. It was a whole thing. You were pre-inkling networking, look at that. Yes, that's what I mean. It's always it was always in my blood. So, anyway, so whenever I had my kids on my first maternity leave, I'm just not the kind of person who, when the baby's asleep, you're meant to be asleep. It's just not who I am. So my little sister is very creative, and I thought, oh, why don't we we ended up having a card making business and then we sold craft supplies online in 2000? When was my first child born in 2005? So 2005, we had a crafts website. I then, like a crazy person, decided the only way to build this business was to open a bricks and mortar craft shop. But I wasn't the creative, I wasn't the crafter, it was my sister, and she had zero interest in turning this into an actual shop. So, but I was convinced that I had something here, so I opened a bricks and mortar shop and I made no money at it. So I had three three small children, worked part-time as an IT project manager in the health service, and had a shop. Now, I think all this all came off the back of my dad passed away at 59. And if that hadn't happened, if he hadn't died so young, I don't think that I would have started a business so fast. It was definitely a thing about life is too short, you've got to go for what you want to do. I want to have my own business. I thought my own business was this craft shop. I made no money at it. Somebody from the council came out, the economic development officers would have mentors and stuff. This mentor came out and sat with me and said, Louise, can we go through your books and your spreadsheets? And she said to me, You are like not killing yourself, but you are doing so much work and doing putting so much effort into this, and it's exhausting, but you're not even paying yourself because I had to hire people to work in the shop because I was working in the health service as a project manager. Um, so the money was going into the rent, the rates, the stock, the staff, and I was maybe walking away with a couple of hundred pounds a month. It was brutal. And she said, I think that you know, if you can get out of your lease, I really think you should. Because she basically said to me, Are you open to to what I have to say? And I was like, Yeah, of course I am. I mean, I need I need help here. I just thought it was going to turn a corner because I didn't really know how to run a business. Um, anyway, she said, one thing you are really good at, Louise, is social media. And I meet so many businesses who haven't got a clue how to do social media. She says, I actually think you could run a business teaching other companies how to use in back in 2000, this is now in 2010, how to use Facebook. Instagram didn't even exist. And she says, but I think you could do Facebook pages for small businesses. So I was so lucky that I was able to get out of the lease because it was within a non-profit, was the landlord. So I got out of the lease, closed the shop. My customers were devastated, and I was like going, Jesus, you pay 100 parts. They would come in and tell me, I just spent£110 on um one of those QVC channels, and I need a 99p double-sided tape. I'd be like, okay, couldn't you spent£100 in here anyway? Um but part of the issue was I was not passionate enough about crafts to have those conversations to make the sales easy. Um and then I went into social media and I am like I love tech, I love uh figuring out how things work, and so it just became really fun.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Couldn't you someone who's just tech and social though, couldn't you have gone completely