First Week Trading Was Nightmare But Not Defeated!

by Lorna
(Stoke On Trent)

Well I thought I would share my story of setting up and trading for my first week.

I decided back in February that I wanted to go back into running a catering business but i didn’t want the expense of overheads in a shop so decided to buy a trailer. After been "guzzumped" many times, i eventually bought a custom made 10ft x 6.6ft trailer for just under £4000.

Please check everything carefully when you view as i didn’t and it turned out to be costly. Anyway, nearly £7000 spent in total I was ready to go on the building site development I had secured (months of nagging by email and telephone does work!)I took the trailer to site ready for trading.

On the first morning, it was raining really heavy and windy but I thought I was going be ok, so got stuck in cooking and preparing. Now I was running my trailer with gas and a 6kva generator (which i thought was plenty power) but when it came to the builders breakfast rush, the toaster wasn't cooking the toast, I lost my lighting, everything was getting wet from the rain and thank god everyone was wearing hard hats as the hatch kept coming down because of the weather!

I went home that afternoon thinking, "oh it can’t get any worse so chin up!"
On my second day of trading, the weather was just as bad; half the builders had gone home as they couldn't work in the weather and just as i was about to serve people, the generator made a shocking sound and all my electrics went off! Surely this wasn’t happening to me I thought! Luckily, I was allowed to hook up to the sites electric and carried on trading for the rest of the day.

Now I am connected to the site's electric I thought great, nothing can go wrong now! I was mistaken! Day three, again my electric tripped and went off! Turned out to be a sensitive rcd!i had the trailer rewired as it only had one socket and rest was extension cables! But I didn’t have the electric box changed so that will have be the next expense. Anyway i eventually got the rcd to go back on and the rest of the day went ok. (even the sun made an appearance!)

Day four (which was a Friday as I started after the bank holiday)i had been warned that everyone would want a cooked breakfast but as there wasn’t that many on site yet as it’s still early stages of development I thought "yep, i can do this!

Timing is the key" well all i can say is trying to cook 8 full breakfasts (16 rounds of toast, 16 eggs in one go)all for 10am was a nightmare! the toaster I had was really slow and i could only cook 8 eggs in two pans in one go. Anyway the lads were patient with me with it being my first week which is great and I did really well on the money side considering the site isn’t in full swing!

The reason i thought i wanted share this with you is because even though it’s been really hard setting up my business and my terrible first week, I know I have done the right thing! I am not going to be a millionaire just yet but I am already thinking, "mmm should i buy another trailer and put it on a different site!" yes I must be mad, but the satisfaction you get from starting something from scratch and seeing it all come together is a wonderful feeling!

The site i am on will provide me an income eventually as they are expecting to have 150-200 men onsite when it is in full swing, and I am on there for at least 18 months so all i want to say is "go with your instincts" as I did and I hope to have a bright future despite my first few months of stress!