In a Muddle?

What a wait you've all had for me to write inspiring words... and yet again you may have to wait a little longer! I'm certainly going to bring you up to date, but inspire, we'll see.

The last few weeks have been a feverish bed of activities as we juggled the tasks that could lead us to hitting our targets. These targets are the ones that Henry had previously mentioned to really help us focus. When you have no office politics, managerial or even shareholder direction (or hassle) then it is easy to stare wide eyed each morning at the realm of possibilities and end up getting none of them done. We're managing to avoid this by keeping our eyes on specific targets....

Or are we?... with a range of other enquiries and distractions coming in you have to learn to juggle everything and on top of that there is 'play time' which currentl is the the Rugby World Cup.

Last Friday Henry argued with van hire companies, ended up with a people carrier, took 5 hours to get to Manchester, lugged a load of stock around and then presented Muddler to the shoppers of Oasis in the Trafford Centre. This was a great opportunity to gauge customer reaction, promote the drink and for Henry to hang around in a ladies store. With a number of people driving to the Trafford Centre the samples were small but there was the increasingly familiar mix of lovers (who REALLY like it) and those for who you wont get them off their usual tipple. The biggest disappointment for Henry was going back to the City where we were students and ending up getting into the middle of town too late for a curry (well a civilised one) and the kebab he had was really poor. Our ex-housemate, Will, who kindly put Henry up in Manchester has promised better when we go up for our house re-union. Henry's demanding a Manchester curry!

Whilst Henry was pushing Muddler north I was pushing south to Marseille. The tickets I bought 21 months ago for the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals had come good and I made the long train journey to watch us smash the old rivals Australia. What a weekend, what a game, what an atmosphere in the town, what a location we had for our accommodation (a cheap and strategically placed yacht in the port). That marks the end of me seeing World Cup games live, and it is now on to shouting loudly at the television and reminding my Aussie housemate about the score last weekend.

Anyway, what have I been up to on the Muddler front. Henry mentioned the success of our Muddler Launch Party. Well last night I confirmed it by going to collect the cases that they did not use in the White Horse that night... it was surprisingly few so it obviously went down well!

Also on the day of the party I got stuck in to the first rugby game of the season for me. So I have more PR to note, as Muddler Cocktails made it into Park News (Rosslyn Parks newsletter) - click here to see the article (on page 4 about the Hatters). Thanks to Pat (aka Skipper) for blatantly lobbing in Muddler Cocktails for a plug.

Whilst on the subject of PR we have recently mailed out a number of samples to the press (the postal strike will have meant that they are still crawling towards them). Prior to all this I gave a sneak peak of the PR to a friend of a friend who worked at www.urbanjunkies.com (a massive what's hot daily email for Londoners). Even without a link to our website the hits on our website went up by a few thousand that day.

Next week sees the launch of our first advert in The Grocer (it is actually out tomorrow - Saturday) a trade magazine for the supermarkets and independent shops. We think we've been cunning to make it stand out, but the proof will be when we see it in the publication. The aim is to re-enforce the messages that we are putting out to the Supermarkets et al. We also think that they've written a bit about us, but you can never be sure. If you want to grab a copy (it is in some newsagents) and delve in to the alcohol special.

Other business has seen me wrestling with our accounts as I've managed to get out our first VAT return. Having been waiting for this for 6 months it is nice to think that we may actually get back the VAT we have spent setting up the company.... but it did lead to a day a half of me going back through all our expenses and trying to get it all okay in our accounting system!

Hopefully, the HM Revenue and Customs will not need to post me anything... just a bank transfer will be sufficient. The other issues of dealing with a small business is the joy of a postal strike. As I said above we did a big PR push on the day before the strike - sending out approximately 40 boxes of stuff but I doubt they will have got to them by now. I still really haven't had any post so the prospect of the strike starting up again are not great for any small business.

The other battle is with couriers, in the old days Henry used to lob stuff at the post room and it magically disappeared off to its destination. I just used to zip some stuff up and email, ftp it etc and there were the couple of occasions where we were desperate for time and the stuff was too big to send electronically that we would burn a stack of DVDs and bung someone on the Eurostar to make sure it got somewhere first thing. BUT all of that was easier than trying to get couriers to actually collect our stuff, not break it and deliver it in a timely manner. Those bright yellow vans that storm around towns could do with improving customer service quite a bit. So we've both spent time emailing and phoning couriers to try and locate a large number of samples and presentation boxes etc that have been sent out.

The other job I currently have that you never (or rarely) experience in a large organisation is chasing down outstanding debts. Almost all of our customers have been timely in paying (far better than I expected). However, there are a select few who are becoming a bit slow so need that nudging. Interestingly it is both the big and small businesses that fall into this category. Things will now get more interesting as the postal strike means that 'the cheque is in the post' is not a ridiculous suggestion....

In between all this Henry and I have started reading books again... and it is NOT Harry Potter. This is all part of our look at our strategy for the future. The current book that I've completed and Henry is ploughing through is the story of Cobra Beer, the result is daily discussions between us that help shape our thoughts. Let me make it quite clear, we are not imitating anyone... whoever said writing endless Blogs like this are a good idea?

Looking forward we met our 'juice guys' or should that be 'juice gals' on Wednesday. The aim was to discuss where we take the products going forward and to try out a new flavour that Henry and I had come up with from our garden tasting session. We always new that so many of the juices in supermarkets were not a true reflection of a 100% natural product and have all sorts of sweeteners etc in them. The reality is that they don't actually taste like the actual fruits. At our juicers they put together a 100% natural equivalent and the taste was very different to those un-natural imitators. Next time you are in the supermarket whether it is in the chiller or not take a look at the back of the carton to find out what is in the product, you may well be surprised. So we have pushed that flavour to the side and will go back to the drawing board. A discussion then kicked off about potential fruits and purees etc so then followed a large barrage of stupid questions from Henry and I to understand more about the taste/ texture properties of various fruits. You don't want to even begin to imagine what the weather this year has done to juice prices - almost all of them have gone up as harvests are down but the juicers are once again scouring the markets to find the right quality of fruit. So thanks once again for the help of our juicers who continue to support us as we build the brand and come up with flavours that do not work!

So the main focus is the future as we decide how to prepare for 2008 across all aspects of our business. The future's bright and orange (or maybe pear or strawberry). The question we currently wrestle with is how best to make it work and get the message of 'Real fruit cocktails' out there. In between all of this we run an entire office and business in the current time.

The answer to my title question is - NO far from being in a Muddle we are looking at putting Muddler on the right course for the future.