Then there was the crash… We were offering free delivery at the time (great for customers of course) BUT when the financial crash happened our order value plummeted pretty much overnight from £45 to £22… Imagine the impact of free delivery then… The result? Several years of in the red, a long road to recovery, many redundancies and bad feeling, and then a sustainable delivery charge put in place in order to move forwards…

It can be tough running a small business - we managed to negotiate to buy our warehouse down the road and had shook hands on the deal with the owner - a RICS surveyor only to have him and the agent sell the warehouse from underneath us to a solicitor who’s firm was dealing with the sale and who operated literally 20 metres from the agents office. That one left a very sour taste in the mouth but we did get to understand the power and limitations of social media at that point and became a David V Goliath case study in Social Media for the marketing course at Harper Adams :)

There’s always plenty to learn from the challenges! See below for one that my Mum was fairly horrified with…. This article was twaddle :) and is more funny now than at the time :)