Selling my business advice required

[Mr D]

Maybe I misunderstood your previous question. I'm not sure what you are referring to?

And the fulfilment warehouse does the QA checks? And stores the right amount of stock, sending the rest on as required to the seller?

 

[Pish_Pash]

be that slightly goofy GnuCash or a more adult SAP system. Farting about with spreadsheets and some boiled down version of Visual Basic for just one part of the business is really not an option.

There's not farting involved (well, at least not with spreadsheet ...there may be the odd 'peearp' heard in the general vicinity of my desk). VBA does everything I've asked of it (some of it quite involved ...the Amazon APIs I coded are a bit of a head trip actually, due to the hashing/keys involved)...so it's not like we're talking about some noddy 'hello world' language.

SAP is for incredibly large businesses (I'd be very surprised to learn of any business turning over £0.5M & running a 'big lads' SAP system. The VBA thing is a little bit of a misnomer...my business runs on MS Access (a JET Database)....the VBA is merely a programming language that allows me to do stuff with that data.

As I say there are many off the shelf solutions (Linnworks for example could be used...it's what I used to use), but then you'd be faced with several disparate systems...all requiring a subscription.

I would be looking to add value by expanding the company into France and Germany with French and German websites and fulfilment.

You've hit the nail on the head - this would be where the (possibly sensational) growth would come from...I've alreay a supplier contract in place with Amazon UK (well oiled now) .. with this in place I managed to get a supplier contract set up with Amazon.de ...it's all in place, but I've not pursued it (mainly due to my domestic woes) ....they mandate that I'd have to get all my listings professionally translated ...but also, becuase Amazon.de a little more draconian when it comes to chargebacks...plus the overstock returns (which most suppliers have to pick up the tab for), might be a little overwheleming bearing in mind we're talking international. But without a doubt for someone that happens to speak German...then my business would be perfect (are you sure you don't want to buy it?!)

my 30 cents worth - keep the company and follow @JamieM's advice!

I always have an ear open to well meant advice ...but if you've ever been through a divorce, you'll relate that the practical (or 'best') solutions aren't necessary first & foremost...there's a lot of raw emotion in play here & - as it stands at the minute - I'd just like to close this chapter of my life quickly & hit the big red reset button.

 

[The Byre]

I'm not sure, but my wife is - and as I have been through one failed marriage a long time ago, I do know what a PITA and a destructive experience that really is. I nowadays avoid repeating that with the words "Yes Dear." and leave it at that!

The strange thing is, our next adventure is totally whacky and off-the-wall high risk and she is totally happy with that. Buying a boring online shop selling kitchen stuff is the sort of thing most sensible women would go for, but I married a nutter who latches onto my crazier ideas and thinks that they are great! Go figure!

BTW, it's German consumer law that forces Amazon.de to be stricter about charge-backs and other things.

 

[Pish_Pash]

The strange thing is, our next adventure is totally whacky and off-the-wall high risk and she is totally happy with that. Buying a boring online shop selling kitchen stuff is the sort of thing most sensible women would go for, but I married a nutter who latches onto my crazier ideas and thinks that they are great! Go figure!.

What springs to mind is Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets ending in ... "Sell crazy somewhere else ...we're all stocked up here"

...whenever faced with 'crazy', hopefully the phrase will now stick in your mind!

This will be the end of my THIRD marriage (I've always followed the Goldilocks-esque guiding principle..."this one is too boring", "This one is too crazy", "This one is just right")...but as the old adage goes "when you can't see the problem ...you ARE the problem", therefore I'm stacking my hand wrt the traditional relationship model ...it'll be 'independent living' for my next one (i.e. we'll just meet up for joint visits to the Pharmacy)

Re the Amazon.de chargebacks ...I should clarify, whenever you hear the word chargeback used in the same sentence as Amazon Retail ...it means a fine - a fine for not applying a particular sticker to the carton, a fine for not confirming the PO in time, a fine for not getting the PO to the Fulfilment Centre in time. Amazon Retail UK are bad enough, but apparently Amazon Retail DE are even worse.

 

[The Byre]

I love that movie and the script from Brooks and Andres is just perfect. It has several great lines - "People who talk in metaphors ought to shampoo my crotch!" "You make me want to be a better man." "Try not to ruin everything by being you!"

And it has some of the most beautiful declarations of love ever written - "how they can watch you bring their food and clear their tables and never get that they just met the greatest woman alive. And the fact that I get it makes me feel good about me."

But crazy works for us and despite many setbacks, crazy has served us well. Someone once said about me "He says he's going to do something and one says 'Yer, right! Like he's really going to do something as extreme as that!' and the next thing you know, he's gone and done it!"

I have a customer that is very much like Melvin in 'As Good as it Gets' - he's a right royal PITA and his agent once told me (in confidence) that everybody falls out with him sooner or later. He couldn't understand why, after 14 years of working with him, I had not yet tried to kill him, or at least told him to F-off and never come back.

I said that I didn't mind him being a nutter - I'm easy to get along with. My wife is easy to get along with. We have our opinions about certain people, but if you try to annoy or upset us, we just step back from the situation and leave you dangling. A bit like a good butler!

And that brings me neatly to you - something tells me that you are one stubborn SoB and not easy to get along with. Your insistence that VBA is the cat's pyjamas seems to point in that direction. You are probably right! VBA may indeed be a great system, in the same way that my Word-Perfect and dBase-III formed a perfect system to find an article written ten years ago and only published in European Plastics News.

So bloody what! Who cares? The people buying the company sure as hell didn't! It had to go.

My heartfelt advice to you is to turn that business into a company that runs itself. It that means spending real money on some standard industrial software and paying a fulfilment centre, then so be it. No sane person is going to buy a company that involves wrapping parcels in the living room! They will want something that works 'out-of-the-box!'

Just going on what you have said here, turning your operation around as a complete outsider would cost at least £50k and possibly £100k. That's £20k for software and IT that will allow the owner to scale-up to cover Europe and £30k to hire at least one person to faff about in the meantime to keep things going. And both those figures could easily double.

Add to that the risk of having just one supplier when there ought to be ten and you see that a buyer could drop £50k and end up with a whole lotta nothing!

I can almost hear you now crying out "£20k for software and the rest of the much-needed IT! Are you completely mad???"

In answer, let me tell you about my old friend Dave. Dave and I started out in business at more or less the same time. Today he owns a wholesale company with about 240 employees (if I remember rightly!) and many millions in TO. Back in the late 70s when his company was just a part-time secretary and a part-time packer, a large schnauzer (dog) and himself, Dave knew that he needed to restructure his tiny operation if he was going to grow.

The old card index system had to go and he bought a Nixdorf mainframe with a massive 80MB disk storage. For such a tiny company with only about one hundred retail customers (of which I was one!) was absolutely unheard of and the salesman from Nixdorf was baffled that they were installing this giant system in a rented office in a barn.

But Dave was right - he needed that system and soon they moved to a dedicated industrial building and bought an IBM AS400 (loaded I think with Mapics).

SAP only for 'incredibly large companies' -??? SAP Business One ERP package for non-manufacturing companies - prices start at $39 per month or about $1,400 one-off for up to five users. There are plug-ins for eBay, Amazon, banking, etc., etc. but I have no idea what they cost. And as a German company, yes, it'll do Euros as well as UK exchange beads.

SAP was created by two engineers who used to work for IBM and thought that they could do better than Mapics.

The time has come to think like my old friend Dave and not Dell Boy. Or as we say in German "Nägel mit Köpfen machen!" (Make nails with heads on them!) i.e. do things properly!

 

[Pish_Pash]

Your insistence that VBA is the cat's pyjamas seems to point in that direction. You are probably right! VBA may indeed be a great system, in the same way that my Word-Perfect and dBase-III formed a perfect system to find an article written ten years ago and only published in European Plastics News.

Stubborn? Perhaps. Entrenched? Not really. Not easy to get along with? Hmm, a little aloof (I traverse my way through life feeling like a square peg faced with a plethora of round holes). I choose my friends well.

VBA may indeed be a great system, in the same way that my Word-Perfect and dBase-III formed a perfect system to find an article written ten years ago and only published in European Plastics News.

Don't get me wrong...I have no allegiance to VBA (nor Access) ...it was simply the path of least resistance when Linnworks went from 'Free' to 'stupid-o-clock' pricing. I've added to it as needs have arisen over the years & I am where I am. The beauty is, essentially, my whole business's data is in a database...and because of this the database can easily be migrated to any otherpackage (SAP is ultimately just load of features all built around a database - it'll surely have an import functionality). So anyone a little bit techy/savvy would find it easy enough to migrate.

My heartfelt advice to you is to turn that business into a company that runs itself. It that means spending real money on some standard industrial software and paying a fulfilment centre, then so be it. No sane person is going to buy a company that involves wrapping parcels in the living room!

All logical well meaning stuff...but currently, mine are not the actions of someone logical...just someone who's tired (& mightily peeved) & would like to get out of this messy/entangled situation & lead a simpler life. The mere thought of polishing up my company (with all the work that infers/incurs) at this (jaded) point in my life timeline ...makes me want to curl up into the foetal position. Not saying your advice is wrong (indeed it's usually bang on).

Also....we're back to that one supplier thing...imagine I deploy the whizziest SAP system currently available...I'm still ultimately running a company skating on thin ice. So even if I was full of zest/zing, I'd still be questioning is it all worth all the migration? As I've said before, I'm dancing with the devil on my back (one brand/supplier ...& supplying a large customer - Amazon)...it's a case of make hay while the sun shines.... as it goes, I think there's a lot of shine left in the sun yet, but as it stands right now, I fancy a bit of snow.

I can see how this will probably map out...I'll list it up for sale - I'll get a lot of tyre kickers...I'll let it run 'up for sale' for a while, after which it'll be clearer which version of cleaners my ex intends taking me too ...if I don't like their tariff, then I'll probably err on the side of winding down with an MVL...hand her half & wish her good luck.

 

[Chawton]

In all seriousness and with all due respect (undoubtedly merited given what you've achieved), if you have built yourself a slight buffer from the profits over the years this sounds like one to walk away from with your sanity and pride in tact. You've made it what it is and she's had a nice living out of it. If she's decided to bail on you then perhaps it would be good for you to demonstrate that-whatever negatives she feels she's extricating herself from by leaving the marriage-this is also where the benefits of being your partner stop.

I dont know what your personal/financial circumstances are but the way you describe the process of trying to make the thing saleable sound borderline traumatic for you to even contemplate. Doubtless you'd be doing that all yourself just to lose half of it. If it even came to anything.

Whatever you end up doing make sure you put your health/peace of mind first as it sounds like you'll need the reserves of energy as much as anything else. Hope it works out!

 

[The Byre]

In other words, what you need is a life coach and not a business advisor.

I am getting on in years - 68 and counting, but who's counting? I have had a wealth of bad things happen to me and to those around me. So? "Suck it up and move on!"

I just remember the words of HG Wells, "Today's crisis is tomorrow's joke!"

What you need is a woman! I very much doubt you need a fourth wife - that gig seems to be played out! Your wives seem to be rather like the cook in 'Jeeves Takes Charge' - "She was a good cook as cooks go and as cooks go, she went."

Wives come and wives go. Lovers stay with us forever!

I mentioned Dave - well he too had a string of wives, though I have forgotten how long the string was, at least two, maybe three. It never seemed to get him down. One never was quite sure if his wife was his secretary or his secretary was his wife or his ex-wife was his former secretary or exactly what the state of play was! If an employee did not actually have a beard, he seemed to end up marrying them.

But around 1997 or 98 his older German model broke down and needed to be exchanged. On a trip to China sourcing some parts, he found a far newer and faster model, lean and with a far faster CPU, several Gigabytes of RAM and headlights that penetrated the darkness - one of those lean, mean Far Eastern models and fully kitted out with all the accessories, apps and options!

The last time I saw Dave, he was about to take that new model on a test drive around the Caribbean on his newly acquired boat.

As for the company, if you are fed up with the whole thing, walk away. Give the whole thing to the wife and tell her to knock herself out. "It's all yours Darling. I'm outta here!"

Then start again - a wiser and better man!

 

[Pish_Pash]

What you need is a woman! I very much doubt you need a fourth wife - that gig seems to be played out! Your wives seem to be rather like the cook in 'Jeeves Takes Charge' - "She was a good cook as cooks go and as cooks go, she went."

Wives come and wives go. Lovers stay with us forever!

My friend is the same age as me (56yrs old)...he's managed to duck marriage all his life - I've always envied his lifestyle...he answers to nobody, does what he wants when he wants ...he doesn't need much now - his house is paid for. Actually he found himself a 'partner' a few years ago but they've opted to stay living apart...this is the template (IMHO "apart" is the new "together")

As for the company, if you are fed up with the whole thing, walk away. Give the whole thing to the wife and tell her to knock herself out. "It's all yours Darling. I'm outta here!"

I offered it to her "Here, you can have the whole company for yourself ...it's generating a trouserable £120k pa ...so whaddayathink?"

Her reply? "I don't think I can do it"

No surprise there - she'd much prefer I ran it on my own (& continue with the long hours & continued stress) while she gets to do coffee mornings & potter about - a life financed by me. Erhmm, that doesn't quite work for me anymore!

Then start again - a wiser and better man!

I'm 56yrs old...I'm not starting anything again - nope, this will be heading for a simpler (low cost) existence & watch the wheels of the world turn as a spectator ...not a participant.

You've made it what it is and she's had a nice living out of it. If she's decided to bail on you then perhaps it would be good for you to demonstrate that-whatever negatives she feels she's extricating herself from by leaving the marriage-this is also where the benefits of being your partner stop.!

Yay...someone who thinks like me.

I dont know what your personal/financial circumstances are but the way you describe the process of trying to make the thing saleable sound borderline traumatic for you to even contemplate. Doubtless you'd be doing that all yourself just to lose half of it. If it even came to anything.!

Exactly! (Are you sure you aren't me?)

 

[The Byre]

I'm 56yrs old...I'm not starting anything again

Oh, for heaven's sake! Stop whining! Get a grip - or as Melvin said "Cheer up! You'll be back on your knees in no time!"