We have now completed our year-long mentorship with The Icehouse and I’m very pleased to announce that we have turned our first profit for three months’ running. This, after four years in business where for three years we were basically running a charity, is huge!
We believed strongly in Wendyl’s mission to help people to live a 100% natural, chemical-free life through easy to follow recipes, well-priced quality products and a strong back up of a weekly newsletter with tips and hints for old-fashioned living which goes to more than 12,000 people. But while we got to wear good karma halos for our contribution to the environment and covered our costs, we weren’t making any money.
Then The Icehouse introduced us to our mentor Debra Chantry who taught us three essential things.
The first was to be tidy...literally. On her first visit to our shop and workshop she told us to tidy it up. Admittedly it was a mess, my son Daniel Ellison and I who manage Wendyl’s are creative people, we have no time for order.
So we hired someone to keep it tidy. Then we paid people to tidy our accounts, tidy our business systems, tidy our website and most importantly tidy our reporting systems.
Once that was all done we could sit with Debra each month and actually read trends within our business. Which recipe did my customers like best? Which product did they like? Which Facebook post got the most results?
And through our new tidy approach we began to work out where and how our business should proceed.
The other thing Debra taught us was to act on things. As a family business Daniel and I were very good at talking about ideas but when it came to actually doing them, well, there was always another day.
Debra gave us deadlines and told us off (very nicely) if we didn’t meet them. She motivated us by predicting great results, based on sound statistics, and of course she was right. And like Pavlov’s dogs, the more motivated we were, the better results we saw.
And finally Debra did a very simple thing as a mentor. She held our hands. Making change, especially in business, can be very frightening. Getting a bank loan scared me a lot. We’d never had one before and I didn’t want my business to be in debt. But I did it, even if Debra had to give me three cuddles and several pats on the back to get me through it.
Now instead of dreading our monthly meetings with Debra because we hadn’t done everything she suggested we do, and we were scared that she would make us do more, we look forward to it. We feel successful and after a very hard work year we feel as if we have achieved what we set out to do, which was to turn Wendyl’s from a charity into a proper business.
We don’t have to continue to see Debra but we have decided we will spend 2015 with her as well. She’s a good friend with so much knowledge and she doesn’t even mind doing an Excel sheet for me when I can’t work it out.
This blog post is written by Wendyl Nissen, owner of Wendyl's all natural cleaning products.
Read the rest of Wendyl's story:
- Wendyl Nissen and The Icehouse Part 1: A Confident Start
- Wendyl Nissen and The Icehouse Part 2: Charging Forward
- Wendyl Nissen and The Icehouse Part 3: Success