Diary of an SME Owner – the 'start' part of 'start-up' is the easy part; it's the 'up' that's hard
Michael Taggart
mdteashop.co.uk/wholesale 👈 Beautifully-crafted teas & infusions for hotels, resorts and health & wellness settings. If style and independence are Your Thing, we can help you bolster that hard-earned reputation
In my regular monthly column, “Diary of an SME Owner”, I tell all about the highs and lows of running a tea company, MDTea, alongside my wife, Helen.
This month, I visit an unwell parent, defend consumer rights and celebrate my first paycheck.
January 1st
Despite mildly malfunctioning with what I'm confident will be my last hangover for a few weeks, the dawning of 2024 finds me grinning like a Labrador that has just snaffled a slab of cheddar. My veins are pumping a mix of plasma (11%), blood cells (8%) and optimism (81%).
This is because I’ve seen off the interminable holiday period, which made my skin bad, gave me violent dreams and placed too many children in my company for too long.
There were nice parts. Helen and I spent four days in France with my parents, who I hadn’t seen for a few months. My mum's in a care home not far from the traditional detached house she shared with my dad in rural Brittany until last May, when her health deteriorated to the point at which living at home became impossible. She has a rare neurological condition, which has taken her ability to walk and, more recently, made talking difficult.
It’s called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and whoever insisted on that first word, did so with good reason. Happily, my mum was still well enough to enthuse (genuinely, I think!) when she opened her Christmas present, a posh scarf.
I hope Helen and I make MDTea a success while my mum is around to witness our accomplishment. This aspiration motivates me to move faster, although I know she already thinks everything I do is a triumph. Mums do, don’t they?
January 7th
I’ve become engaged in the niche field of retail ethics. Not so interested that I’d raise the topic down at the gym – that would be embarrassing, like when a good friend starts getting into Jordan Peterson – but I’ve been mulling over the question “when is the customer right?”. The received wisdom, of course, says always even when that's patently not true but how far are we supposed to take this dogma?
How about when the customer orders from your website a heart-meltingly beautiful ‘earthy oatmeal’ cup that was handmade by artisans in the Gifu prefecture of Japan, only to complain, upon prompt receipt of the item, that it wasn’t as advertised?
For context, these £10 miracles of artistry are individually fashioned from clay before being kiln-fired, according to a method passed down through generations. To buy one is to participate in the revival of a proud handcraft tradition that began millennia ago. Varying ratios of love, pain, sweat, blood, joy, tears and swearing are expended on each.
So what if that customer, having bought an earthy oatmeal cup, then requested a refund because “the cup I received was lighter coloured than the one in the photo on your website”? Well, Diary, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that I’ve come to a firm conclusion – and it is this: the customer is always right. That’s a basic retail detail, dude.
January 15th
Thriftiness has spread like pox through the nation, emptying high streets, cash registers, and the souls of Britain’s small business owners. I felt like Father Mackenzie today. You know, the priest from The Beatles’ 1966 reflection on loneliness, Eleanor Rigby. Verse two of this Baroque pop classic finds our melancholy protagonist “writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear” and “darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there”.
Similarly, we had no customers at our shop at Brighton Open Market today. Nary a soul – two-legged, four-legged or winged – so much as glanced through the glass door to disturb my solitude for six straight hours. As it happens, there were moments when I thought about darning my socks but I settled for repetitions of squats and lunges behind the till, the boredom drafting me into the ranks of the demented.
Yet again, I had to force myself to remember that 80% of our business is wholesale (which is growing nicely), not retail, and this led me to thinking about how far we’ve come in the year that we’ve been doing this. In 2023, we:
Most importantly, Helen and I are now paying ourselves, albeit modestly, having survived on savings and the odd freelance writing gig for most of 2023. Apologies, Diary, for the annual report but it must be recorded that, as this new year gathers pace, there are reasons to be cheerful.
In 2023, our job was to get the patient, MDTea, out of intensive care and into the convalescence wing (don’t write in please, nurses, it’s just a metaphor). In 2024, we need to transfer MDTea out of the hospital altogether and into society. So what does that mean? (Yes, I know a metaphor that has to be explained is a bad metaphor – I'm on a deadline here.)
One word: funding. Money makes the world go round and we need more of it to rev up MDTea's growth engine. A cliché followed by another metaphor. Facepalm. Yet my tortuous prose does not undermine the truth of the key lesson I have taken from a year starting up a start-up: that the “start” part of “start-up” is the easy part. It’s the “up” that's difficult.
Our "up" in 2024 will begin when we secure cash to buy tea in bigger amounts, find better warehousing and start employing people. And it’s the “up” that will, ultimately, I hope, make my mum proud.