Thursday 24 June 2010

Change is coming, and it's good


We've finally decided to take things to the next level !


Up until now, SnM Stuff has been run by myself, Sean, with plenty of help from my wife Mel, and moral support from Tabby the office cat (or managing director, as he likes to think of himself...). I've been fitting everything around a full-time day job, while Mel already has another business based from home.


After three years of ploughing the profits back into the business to keep growing it, we've finally decided that the time is right for me to leave the day-job and focus on SnM Stuff full time. It'll mean taking a drop in my total earnings for a little while, but we've done our sums carefully, and will still have enough to live on.


For our customers, the benefits will be great. We'll be able to respond to emails and ship orders more rapidly, and will finally have time to give the website a big update, including lots of new products we've been building up especially for the occasion. We'll also be able to do all those little things that there hasn't been time for until now, like create occasional email newsletters, price lists on CD-ROM, "How to" videos for YouTube etc. Just as important, there won't be any need for us to create any big price increases to pay for this, as our business model always included taking things full time into the plan. The only price increases will be if suppliers dramatically increase the wholesale prices, or when we have to take the business VAT registered (in which case, we'll probably have to increase some prices a little, but won't be adding anything like 17.5% to everything !)


On a totally different front, there's another change which might be happening. There's a scruffy, fluffy black cat who has been visiting us to steal Tabby's food. Amazingly, Tabby seems to be happy to have this newcomer around, which is unusual as he's the most territorial cat I've ever known. We think our new little friend is either stray or feral, as he's completely unsocialised and very nervous around humans, but at the weekend we'll be asking up and down the road to see if anyone claims him. If they don't, we'll see if we can get him to the vet to be scanned to see if he's got a microchip, and if not, we'll see if he wants to adopt us. So we might have a new office junior ! That's him in the photo attached to this post, making himself comfortable on the patio.

1 comment:

Rawrgh said...

Hi there just got a delivery from you and must say I'm extremely happy with both the products and the service. Only ordered on Wednesday and its jsut arrived and about to be put to use.

Best of luck turning this into a full time thing, I'll certainly be ordering more from you and recocomending to my friends.