Driving back to London from a break in the wilds of North Yorkshire, I pondered that message you sometimes see on wing mirrors, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” When you’re looking around a corner what you see is always distorted, one way or another.
My previous break was a year ago this month. I went to Sri Lanka. It was my first holiday in two-and-a-half years and I needed it. The last one was hiking and biking the stunning mountains of Andorra in 2013, where I came up with an idea which grew, evolved and eventually became Here & Now, a business I launched and ran with an amazing team until we sold it in May 2016.
Briefly, Here & Now was a tech start-up in the entertainment, leisure and tourism sector. It helped families find awesome things to do all over the UK, and helped those venues market to and attract new paying customers.
We bootstrapped, then raised significant SEIS and EIS funding from incredibly supportive angel investors. With this cash we grew our consumer numbers quickly through marketing and commercial partnerships, launched repeat-revenue subscription-payments for venues across the UK, and developed the user experience to continually improve our percentages.
It looked rosy for raising our next, larger round of funding. But by December 2015 it seemed clear that we couldn’t raise enough to take the business up a level. Tantalisingly, we were offered smaller pots of money at different stages, from existing and new investors and from our technology partner’s parent company. But they added up to month-to-month survival, burning cash whilst holding steady. That felt a lot of failing slowly. The Worst.
Without certainty of much chunkier investment we couldn’t scale up the business. Taking those ad hoc smaller pots of money felt unethical because the numbers told me we wouldn’t generate enough growth and therefore a return for the investors.
I needed the mental space to work out what to do. So I set off for Sri Lanka, for fifteen days of twice-daily yoga, plentiful reading, good food and sound-of-the-sea-soothed sleeps. Naturally I worked every day for the first ten days.
There’s rarely a big flashing STOP sign in business. It’s subtler and more chimerical than that, annoyingly. Towards the end of the holiday, I had the time and space to think through my company’s position from first principles. Do I believe this business model can be a success? Yes. Do I believe we are the team to do that? Yes. Can we secure the financial resources to do it? Empirical evidence said no.
One of the best pieces of life-enhancing advice I have ever been given is this – it’s never too late to turn back from the wrong road.
With the help of the incredibly clever and inspired finance nous of my long-standing colleague, Joanna Dennis, we sold the business to the parent company of our tech partner, completing the deal in May 2016. Someone, some day will make this business model a huge success. We had seen around a corner, but the timing was wrong. The object in the mirror was closer than it appeared.
It’s a common feature of start-ups. I’m proud to have co-founded Blackwood Distillers, parent of the lovely Blackwoods Gin. It was the world’s first vintage gin, made with hand-picked botanicals gathered each summer in Shetland. This sounds a familiar story for gin-lovers now but at the time it was brand new. No one else had come up with a localised, hand-crafted story for their drink and brand. We were the pioneers. We grew from a standing start in October 2003 into an international business, with energy, belief, commitment – and passionate trade customers and consumers in key markets all over the world. I treasure my old passport from those days. It tells the story of our growth. Every page is splatted with a crowd inky stamps from immigration controls all over the world. But the idea was just a little too early. We saw around the corner and again the object in the mirror was a little closer than it appeared.
Shortly after Blackwoods was sold, five years after we founded the company, to Blavod and then to Distil where it currently resides, I and another colleague were approached by Sam Galsworthy and Fairfax Hall, who wanted to build the first copper pot distillery in London for almost 200 years. There’s nothing like working with people who have already been through what you’re about to embark on, and so we started working on their idea with them.
Blackwood Distillers operated from a kitchen in south London and a ‘but and ben’ in Skellister, Shetland, which we named ‘Peerie Hoose’ (little house in Shetland dialect – it really was tiny).
Sam and Fairfax’s company started in 2009 in the sitting room of a flat in Shepherds Bush. The name of their company, Sipsmith, came about when I thought about the nature of hand-crafting, the history of distilling in London and Fairfax’s family heritage as silversmiths. I loved that ‘smith’ idea and I finally articulated the creative concept as ‘Drinksmith & Still’ in an early investor’s flat in central London. The concept was right, but the ‘drink’ bit seemed too ‘guzzly’ so it was refined and compressed to Sipsmith, and I topped it off with a tonic of a strapline, ‘Independent Spirits’. It’s a really wonderfully defined brand.
Sipsmith’s first distillery was in a small site on Nasmyth Street in Hammersmith, then a larger space in Chiswick with room for a second and then third copper pot still, and a growing team.
And last month a controlling stake in Sipsmith was sold to Beam Suntory, reports valuing the deal at £50 million. A *massive* round of applause for these two phenomenal individuals and their team. Sam and Fairfax, I salute you.
In commerce, seeing around corners is not a perfect science. Like wing mirrors and those round convex mirrors for drivers to see their way clear out of hidden turnings, it isn’t precise and there’s an illusion of time and space. You can see the gap but you have to judge it correctly and adjust your moves. The Sipsmith team saw around the corner, perfectly gauged the proximity of their opportunity and went for it.
If you have the experience, or maybe it’s the trick, of seeing around corners you can see what’s coming up. And if you adjust your position and judgement, you’ll reach your destination.
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