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See how Caolán planned and started a coffee shop in his town.
We decided, 'we' being my sister and I that it was time to do it for ourselves, we had an opportunity with Tisos to open up a café establishment within their store. You have a draw of their customer, which is a person who might just be in to buy a jacket and then vice versa, it works good for them in a sense that we have a draw at lunchtime. When it came to us doing a business plan we established which suppliers we were wanting to use and we had no contracts with them or anything at this stage but we had asked them for price lists and stuff like that so we had a fundamental foundation to the whole costing of what we were wanting to do for our menu.
So then we had a good base to start in the plan of how much it was going to cost us and what margins we would need to be able to make it profitable and then how many numbers through the door, so then from that we were able to generate our monthly forecasts, our annual forecasts against our costs and be very realistic because you're only going to fool yourself if you're being too ambitious in your figures and it doesn't add up.
We researched the environment that the business was going to be in and then we created our theme that would fit in and maximise our profit or sales within that environment. You've got to sort out your bank, your tax, telephone lines, accessibility for disabled people, do you comply with the law on music, for example, you've got to have a licence for playing music. For us, coffee was a major thing as we probably tried fifty coffees - fifty different coffees before getting the one that we liked but for the price as well. So we needed to establish our own marketplace, so locally we did flyers, we did newspaper articles, magazine articles, instant café magazine, a bit of a success for us with that, it's distributed all throughout Edinburgh, there's no point in us advertising anywhere else.
Firstly, approaching banks I was a bit dubious in a sense, I didn't know how to sit there and speak to someone, so again, a learning curve and it honestly felt like being up in front of your head teacher, it really did, you know, and you thought, well - but once you'd got someone who warmed to you and believed, sort of, well, this is a good idea, and you know you seem a good person or whatever, then that barrier kind of breaks and you develop a bit of a relationship with them. The business development package or whatever it was that they gave me at the beginning had a great sort of plan, it was like a do it yourself kit of what you need to go through before you even do your business plan. Some people fail, some people succeed, you know, but that's the risk you've got to take and just believe it. I think if you believe in yourself and what you're doing and you get up and you enjoy what you're doing I don't think there's much that can go wrong.