New companies which start on a shoestring share a common problem: too much to do, not enough people to do the tasks. It’s a fine line between finding what you are best at and delegating the non-genius work.

In my quest to break even, I have delegated the book keeping to my newly appointed book keeper who is also doing some admin work for me. Other than that, I am putting in the hours to manufacture everything myself to save on costs, but then I have the big picture and strategic stuff, that I have been trying to juggle. The production has been fine, and I love it, but I haven’t had much time for the strategic stuff which I enjoy too.

The orders are really increasing and though I have enjoyed working 15 hour days, (especially because it means that the business is growing!), this is just not realistic or healthy. This is the time I need to bring in reinforcements for production. I know a catering company with some spare capacity and they can help me with production, once per week to start with and then we’ll take it from there. Although this means less profit in the short term, this is more likely to lead to orders delivered on time, and then I will have time to move the business forward.
The difficulty lies in striking a fine balance...If anyone has any thoughts on how to achieve this, please get in touch on Twitter.

Update on tackling the paper mountain and breaking even.

Labels: break even, fishbowl2, marcela, paperwork, video

Labels: fishbowl2, marcela, update

I think that marketing is a really important key to open up the sales door for my yummy sauces. I regularly do food tasting sessions at the shops where they sell my products.

It's time, however, to up my game and analyse return for investment on all the marketing activities - they all cost money. Now this is another tricky task for a novice like me: do I know how to measure the effectiveness of a marketing event, and the get figures to quantify? Er, I think you know the answer.

Take last Saturday, for example. I had discussed with Selfridges the idea of having a Mariachi band at the Food Halls. It turned into reality on Sat 31st Jan, and we had such a good time. Clearly a good thing. These are some benefits from this tasting session:

• The event was nicely publicised on the Selfridges website for three weeks and was advertised on their newsletter too.
• People tried the sauces, enjoyed the music, took photos and videos, bought.
• They took photos and videos and that will hopefully remind them of the brand. Creating awareness=sales??
• Two videos taken were particularly interesting: -one was for a blog for the daddydonkey website, they sell Mexican food off a van in London, have had some rave reviews, and have lots of followers; -another video taken by this man, the Mariachi band and I (!) sang a Mexican birthday song for his young daughter, and again, will be posted on their blog.

This is where I reach my limits as I don't know how to quantify whether the event was good R.O.I. How do I measure this? It's not straightforward. On the day, we saw 300+ people, and I will get sales figures next week.

This is what we spent:

• The Mariachi band fees.
• The time of 3 adults, including me, my lovely hubby and volunteer Rosie- thank you, Rosie!
• We paid for 4 return train fares from Derby. The tickets were cheap as we used a family railway card (The kids came with us, which could've been a good plan but they were a real pain as they were tired from a busy week, but that's another matter!).
• Samples, tortilla chips.
• Subsistance costs: meal, drinks etc.

To summarise, I think that the event was worthwhile: we sold, created awareness, and have been/will be on other websites. However, this is only my gut feeling, and I need to take the guesswork out of investing on marketing to focus my very limited resources wisely. Do contact me through the twitter link if you have any ideas or comments on this...

Labels: fishbowl2, marcela, marketing, return on investment, ROI