My first real start up was a free range ready meal business selling in affluent food markets in Kuala Lumpur as well as a deli.
My mistakes or learnings from the business:
- Don’t trust anybody (I hate to say this, but its unfortunately its true)
- Make sure that your creditors have money to pay you.
- Don’t do business with family. If business isn’t supposed to get personal, then that's difficult when working with family.
- Always get proper contracts in place — a hand shake won’t stand up later down the line.
- If you think that your business is going to get really busy, make sure that you plan out the first 6 months — 1 year before that time comes. You won’t have time when you are working 80 hours a week.
- If you are going to buy anything without a guarantee, e.g. a second hand item, make sure you know it works before you exchange money.
I started this food business with 14K MYR in my bank, and with this money, I had to pay for rent and food as well. I wanted to launch quickly to get my product out there and start making some income.
Within 2 months, I was selling 3 days a week in four markets. I was doing my prep and cooking for 3 days and I rested for 1 day. I was working about 16 hour days on average. I had loyalty cards so I could measure if my product was good, and it was great that I was getting repeat business.
To speed up prep and cooking times, I bought some food machinery from a shop, cancelled the order, got the ok from shop owner, quickly bought the same product on eBay for a lot cheaper. The shop owner changed his mind about the refund a few days later, and the seller from eBay dropped the product off at my kitchen 8 hours late at midnight, I paid him, and the next day found out it didn’t work, and he disappeared. I spent a lot of time trying to track him down and sued him in court — but that wasted a lot of my time.
I sold the machinery from the shop to a friend I made in the food business, and we did a hand shake, but he paid about 25% of the money back and then disappeared not answering calls and hiding.
I had a deal with the deli I was selling to that I would make them a website in return for selling my product on a decent shelf and taking 100% of the revenue. I decided to not invoice for my product until I had the website ready as wanted to do good business and keep my end of the deal. The deli went in to administration and I lost all my revenue.
I employed someone to run one of the markets 1 day a week as he showed a really good interest in the product, but the money at the end of the day never added up to how much product was left.
I was working in the same kitchen as my brother and I think it is a well known fact, but business with family just doesn’t work.
As I wasn’t sleeping much, and I had lots of dramas going on around me, I struggled with loving the business any more. I really loved it when a customer would compliment the food, but I hated almost falling out with my brother; that people would sell me broken things and then hide; that I could cook some great food, but if it rained, nobody showed up to the market, and I would have to waste the food. I realized that I couldn’t make the best decisions when tired but if I had a proper plan for each stage of the business then I could read that and have much better discipline and make better decisions.
I tried to put the business on hold, and come back to it when I had everything back in order, but I had never felt so poor after running that as I had spent all of my money by the end, and had to take a loan so that I could pay rent and the only way I could take a loan is if I had a job, so I did have to go back to an office job to get myself sorted.
You live and learn, and I think mistakes are great, because as long as you come out still motivated to start another business, you have so much more potential to be successful.
