Making the leap… 12 months on

In Le Petit Sommelier in Paris

It’s been 12 months since I left a comfortable job to start my own business, WineSpark. If you’re thinking of doing the same, here are 5 things I learned from that time!

1. Commit
   I’d been thinking about making the leap for a while — but was far too scared to do it. Then I heard a corker from Holly Tucker — confide in a very small number of trusted friends that you’re going to take the plunge. You’ll then feel bad if you don’t do it!
2. Iterate, then iterate again
   I always knew I wanted to make amazing wine accessible and affordable to people. How I’ve actually ended up doing that with WineSpark is a far cry from version 1.0! I had my 10-page deck (mostly full of pretty pictures) and talked it through as many people as possible over a coffee or Zoom. I found the sweet spot for great insight was someone who was experienced in business but also your target customer.
3. Plan
   Now you’ll need a business plan — where do you even start! I don’t know why but this seemed like the most daunting task to me. Until I came across LivePlan — a brilliantly simple bit of software. You just need to fill in the template and away you go. Sounds obvious but it was exactly what I needed at the time.
4. Find money
   You’ll probably need money at this stage — like most people I went straight to traditional investors to pitch. However something didn’t feel right — after 10 years as an employee, it didn’t feel like this type of investor relationship so early on would give me the freedom I was so badly craving.
   A desperate phone call to my old mucker Rowan Gormley changed everything — he told me to think about which kind of investor would be most aligned to the quality aspirations I had for the business. And the most patient.
   Bingo — that would be my suppliers. A couple of months later I had eleven of them on board and I was ready to go.
5. Do it yourself
   You’ll need to hire full-time people at some stage, but just be aware that every additional fixed cost you take on in the early days, will potentially force you to compromise on your principles to make ends meet each month.
   I’ve opted for for slower, organic growth instead of turbo-charged paid marketing, because in the long run I believe it’s the most sustainable way to grow (and believe me I did the latter for 10 years).
   There are amazing tools like Shopify and Mailchimp now that my 5 year-old could use. Find brilliant freelancers like Heidi Morgan, Natalia Brown, Dave O’Carroll who can plug in the gaps that you can’t. And most of the rest — you can figure out yourself. No better way to learn your VI1s from your EADs and CCTs anyway :)

12 months later… here I am in Paris this week, in a bistro with gruff service and frantically tasting Beaujolais and wolfing the most sensational boeuf bourguignon before my flight leaves. I wouldn’t change a thing!