Cobwebs

[Insert generic excuse for prolonged blogging absence here]

This evening I received the phone call that I’ve been waiting for for the past week or so. It wasn’t from the estate agent to give me good news about the house (sold in record time then promptly collapsed even quicker so currently back on the market). Rather it was from someone who has introduced me to a potential investor for a new venture.

About six months ago we began a project with a new customer. I should explain that the life cycle on the major projects we focus on can easily be 6-12 months from conception to final delivery. During this time we learnt many things about how this customer went about its business, and where all the inefficiencies, that they refused to accept existed, created pinch points. As we went into the first phase of go live, this customer decided they no longer wanted to work with us and ended their contract before the ink upon its pages had even dried.

You would expect that we would be disappointed about this decision. However commercially it worked best for us, we lost the support cost of a troublesome customer with a blame culture towards everyone they dealt with, and we removed the potential conflict of interest that stopped us looking at our venture.

A week later and the draft business plan is produced, the technology needed already sits within my main business, what we do need though is some significant investment capital to cover the marketing budget. With that in mind we dusted off old business cards, made some calls, tickled some tummies and outlined a brief proposal.

This evening the call was to ask me to send over detailed numbers and an executive summary prior to a meeting.

This evening we are a small step closer to finding the £1.5m of funding that we’ve calculated we need to make this work.

Don’t come around here no more

There are a number of ways in which you can tell if you don’t spend much time at your home. Piles of unopened post after returning from holiday, the flashing beeps of messages on your answering machine, or having no fresh milk in the fridge.

The alternative ones are where you simply don’t see your cleaner for weeks on end because you’re just never in that particular home on a Friday morning any more. Communicating instead via a cheque stuck on the fridge door every four or five weeks.

More worryingly is the situation whereby two weeks ago one of your very good neighbours who lives exactly opposite your house, who you’ve seen in mornings, afternoons and evening for the best part of ten years, turns out to not only have died two weeks ago, but also have been celebrated at a funeral and bode a loving farewell already.

Ironically, it was Dawn who found this information out last Friday morning. She was here when my cleaner was, whilst I was somewhat predictively in an early meeting before we snuck away for Christmas party weekend away.

It is never too late to send a condolence card is it?

Housework

A stake has been thrust into the ground with steely determination, a line drawn in the sand and a statement of intent strongly made.

I am putting my house on the market in December. It is time to leave the memories of this house behind, the home I bought with my now ex wife, where I slept on the old sofa the days after I’d told her that our marriage was definitely over. The home that over the years simply become a house, a place to sleep and to exist within.

Slowly though it has become a home again. In early 2009 the old man came down and helped me spend a long weekend painting and refreshing the décor, shortly after that the tired and rotting windows and front door were replaced, a few months later the bathroom and en suite ripped out and updated.

However, the place does look tired once more. The dogs do create mess and the paintwork is marked where they’ve run past it and in some cases into it. There are places where Hades has chewed wood as she was nervously settling in to her new home.

So with a goal set, there is much work to be done and not much time left to do it. With the property market as it is, I want to present this house in the best possible condition that I can. There are no other properties for sale on the street that I live in, so the timing in that respect is ideal. Whilst I know that just prior to Christmas isn’t the ideal time to try to sell, I am in no rush to sell and won’t be in a complex onward chain, though the simple psychological act of being on the market is important. To this end there is a list of work that needs to be done to ensure that the house is in perfect condition for someone to just move straight into. I think it is important to let someone see it and realise they need to do nothing whatsoever bar move their possessions in. I also want to ensure that we enjoy a last birthday and Christmas here before moving to pastures new, and ironically away from the small town that I once swore I’d never leave. *

So each room will be repainted, new carpet is being laid in every room bar the bathrooms and kitchen (already tiled), an electrician is coming round to change all the power sockets and switches to new ones, a carpenter is booked to hang a couple of doors and replace some Hades chewed window sills.

Following a lunchtime trip to the local carpet place, I now have just 26 days to get the whole house painted. The last thing I want to do is paint walls with new carpet laid. I am very much looking forward to ripping up the laminate floor downstairs, so much so that I bought a crow bar to speed things along. I suspect that as per the last time, I’ll find the decorating process quite cathartic too.

* My ex wife has decided to stay in the same town, it’s just a little too close for comfort in all honesty. We are friends, but it is time to move on, and away.

Coastal erosion

There is something to be said for a bracing walk down the beach on a weekend morning. Even more so when you do it two days in a row with dogs that are having the time of their life.

For Hades, the beagle cross that we rescued via the Dogs Trust many months ago, it also gives us the ideal place to let her off the lead without the worry of her running away. Lord knows just how badly that poor dog was mistreated as a puppy, but the sight of her bounding round the sand, chasing Kasey (the 3 1/2 year old Weimaraner) with tail wagging and ears flapping certainly warmed the heart.

When I was going through the rehoming process, I went to visit her twice at the rescue centre. The first time I was on my own, the second time I took Kasey so that they could get to know each other in neutral surroundings. The dog that I was introduced to was absolutely petrified of everything. Her tail was wedged firmly between her legs, she was shaking and so nervous that she soiled herself.

The only way I could get her to see that I wasn’t a threat was by lying on the floor, getting down to her level and allowing her to slowly realise I wasn’t a threat.

After about half an hour she slowly crept closer towards me, though each time I acknowledged her presence she shrank away as far as she could and we’d start again. Eventually she got close enough for me to take this picture.

Named ‘Sandy’ by the girls at the trust, she was thought to be about a year old and was a stray taken in from Ireland. With bigger legs than a pure bred beagle it wasn’t known what she was crossed with, just that she had been very badly treated and was scared mainly of men.

A week later, it was time to take Kasey to meet her an for them to get to know each other away whilst I had my adoption briefing and sorted the paperwork out.

Kasey has been with me since she was 12 weeks old. She is her fathers dog and is fiercely loyal and protective of me. However she was now of the age where I felt she’d enjoy having another dog for company, this was also the thoughts of the kennels who look after Kasey when I’m away but even still there was a sense of anticipation as we introduced them both.

There was nothing to worry about whatsoever. They sniffed, they played, they rolled and an hour passed in the blink of an eye. Though still very wary of me, Hades was much more relaxed in the company of another dog.

Having been declared acceptable to be able to rehome, the two dogs getting on was the final hurdle. Now it was just a case of arranging when I could come and officially pick her up and bring Hades back to her new home. Given that she needed to be spayed and I was imminently off horse riding in Rome, we agreed a date one week away.

I had arranged for Kasey to be out for a walk when we got home, so that Hades could explore her new home on her own for an hour. The first thing she did was run away and hide behind the garage as far away from me as possible.

Within a few hours Hades was starting to relax a little bit and look slightly less terrified. It was apparent though that she had been very badly treated in her previous life. Any sudden movement or noise that I made would send her shrieking away in terror, hiding as far away as possible.

Slowly over the past few months she has come on leaps and bounds. She still shies away from other people when we are out and remains very scared of men in general. I have to be careful when sweeping up or mopping as the sight of the handle of either sees her regress to the scared dog that I first met.

So, Hades (quite an accurate name considering the coffee table, Sky+ remote, numerous DVD’s, Maui Jim sunglasses etc that have been eaten) is certainly settling into her new home(s). Though I don’t doubt it will be a couple of years before she is properly settled in. She has adapted to the change in things at home as well as spending time split between both houses and the sight of her chasing Kasey round the beach on Sunday morning was a certainly joy to behold.

At that point we knew we’d done the right thing in bringing her into our now family and that the beach where she was so happy was the town where we’ll make our home in the years to come. So to the seaside we shall go, in a few years though as we’ll need many more pennies in the bank first, in the meantime we’ll all just have to enjoy our weekend walks there.

Shotgun wedding

There are very few things in life that genuinely shake me up and make me think twice about what I am doing. This is not be being bolshy or showing some form of internet bravado, rather just an honest take on life. I’ve always been a risk taker and an opportunist, traits which have certainly helped me get to where I am now.

In late 2008 I was approached to join a business that worked in the same industry as my business albeit on a white labelled, wholesale basis. There were plenty of similarities between that business and my own and a deal for me to consult as Technical Director was quickly done. Within my own business, my founding business partner was looking to leave and move to pastures new and there was much talk of merging the two businesses into one to combine the expertise that lay within both.

I am an inquisitive person, and as those who have met me will easily testify I often ask lots of difficult questions. From the outside this new business looked stable and even though it was less than a year old it had a good order book and the founders seemed to be well known within the industry. However as I asked more questions and delved deeper it seemed that all was not as it should be.

The first warning came when my consultancy fees went unpaid. I had to chase and chase, to harangue and harass in order to see my invoices paid. It soon became apparent that the founding directors were living a champagne lifestyle off the sales turnover of the business rather than the profit. In the blink of an eye they were ordering expensive cars, setting up a Spanish office and flashing the cash in an obscene way.

The second warning was when they started to make excuses as to why they couldn’t raise the money to buy my business partner out of our business. He had offered a knock down price for a quick sale yet their futile attempts to raise capital seemed to fail with the excuses as to why growing from rejection to rejection.

However, the cunning fox within me saw an opportunity and I managed to manoeuvre my main business into position as the sole supplier of services to them. I then manoeuvred myself into effectively running their UK business from a technical and operational point of view, thereby shielding customers from the issues and firmly establishing my business as the true supply chain.

When it appeared all was lost and they refused an offer of a rescue company to give them something for the future it was time to extract myself and protect my main business. After all as the main supplier we needed to ensure our own revenues and associate profits.

Then it got nasty. Very nasty. A lot nastier than ever expected.

It turned out that to support the business and their lifestyles they had been borrowing money. They hadn’t been borrowing off their bank though, but off money lenders. £50k here, £80k there, £20k on a Friday afternoon for a quick weekend fix. They’d pay some back through some sales, then borrow immediately again. Unbeknown to me at the time they’d proceeded to ‘secure’ some of this money on an asset that belonged to my business and not theirs.

This came to light when I was introduced to two of these guys who were after their money back. I pointed out that the paperwork they showed me had no legal standing as it was secured on something that belonged to my business. This meant nothing to them whatsoever. I tried to argue with them and at that point found myself wedged in the corner of a booth in a restaurant with a sawn off shotgun pointed in my face. Like it or not I was stuck with these guys. A marriage certainly not made in heaven.

It took many months to sort out and extricate both myself and the business out of it. When this blog took an unscheduled hiatus earlier this year, the above was the reason. There was a time when I was sleeping with a baseball bat by the front door and a tyre wrench next to the bed.

I was scared, edgy and nervous and remained so until it was all resolved and the dust had settled. I saw a side of life that I knew existed but was comfortably a long way away from. Now I can look back at it and breath a sigh of relief. I learnt a lot, I dare say I aged a little and became a little more worldly wise. I really should put the baseball bat away though, the fact that it is still by the front door is freaking my cleaner out.