ESPRESSOLOGY
When reality bites Espressology’s Instaurator paints a genuine picture of why business ownership is a complex beast that isn’t all rainbows and unicorns.
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inston Churchill is quoted as having once said “success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”. Certainly, it is hard to maintain enthusiasm when things don’t go your way – take the industry’s current impact of the coronavirus for example, which has forced businesses to close – some temporary, others not – and reduce staff. However, it is important to learn from these lessons so that, hopefully, we can move onto success and leave COVID-19 as all but a distant memory. But what does success look like? At the height of mine I was a partowner in a coffee-roasting business that supplied about 350 in-house stores. The business was making a lot more than it was spending. Then, one of my business partners had a serious heart attack and was clinically dead for several minutes. Thankfully, he was revived, but he did have to have a
pacemaker permanently inserted. Not long after this, he suggested I might want to think about the possibility of selling out of the business. I wasn’t interested at all. It turned out, even though I wasn’t aware at the time, my partners wanted to join a completely independent coffee business together with their main franchise business that would make it easier and more valuable to sell the business as a package deal to investors. In the process, I was laid off without pay a few weeks before Christmas. Then, we were at a stand-off and the negotiations began. They made me an offer for my shares in the company but I thought their value was worth a lot more, and so I declined. I did, however, stay on as a director. In my mind was the fact I had four children in good private schools with expensive school fees, a new house with a large mortgage, an investment property, and not enough income to cover the costs of this lifestyle. In retrospect, I should have sold the larger
Instaurator says no matter how small the business, traders should always operate with a profit and loss report.
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second house straight away and reduced our loan expenses. I could then have probably hung on without taking the kids out of the very good schools they were attending and have avoided disrupting their lives too much. It would have been humbling, but it took quite a while to realise this was even necessary. In the meantime, the debts were mounting up and the negotiations stalled. Having less income than expenses is a very stressful way of living. At the same time though, I figured I could open a new café near to where we lived and not have any conflict with my directorship of the wholesale coffeeroasting business. I approached my brother-in-law, Rob Murrell, to invest in the business with me. At this point in my career, I had established two successful wholesale coffee-roasting businesses and three of my own successful cafés in the competitive Sydney market, and helped establish training and support systems for hundreds of coffee entrepreneurs with their own
