Back Against the Wall

We have never been in a more interesting position at Eatwright and I am a little stuck as what to do next.

Having sacked our original development agency, web marketing agency and exhausted almost all the options on the table we a now in a very challenging position.

But as I said to Caitlin, our intern, today on the way back from an eye opening meeting with our warehouse partners; if it was easy to create a profitable business everyone would be doing it and heck we are having fun and learning a lot in the process.

The business model, systems and processes and market assumptions that we have attempted to realise are not working.

We are currently changing much of what we are doing and in the process we are uncovering cracks in systems and relationships that are unacceptable.

The question is whether there is enough money on the meter to have all the changes happen, bear fruit and get us back to somewhere we can grow from. I wouldn’t be continuing unless I thought we had at least 2:1 odds.

That is against a backdrop that over 30 percent of web development teams deliver projects late or over-budget, according to a survey commissioned by Ruby development in 2008. These findings are consistent with studies of larger IT initiatives showing failure rates of 30%-70%. WOW what a fantastic world we live in!

Sometimes selling up from Sydney, quitting the e-rat race and opening a sandwich and juice shop somewhere on the far north coast of Queensland looks seriously attractive.

Over the next 5 days we will have shrunk our warehouse footprint and product range by around 30%, completed a ‘new voice’ project and have 5 new offers out in the market place that talk to customers in a different way, reconfigured the website (both look and feel and technically), our product catalogue will be improved making it even easier for customers to find amazing and delicious products in time to serve up for the Christmas entertaining season and we will have made ourselves as lean as possible (in the last three months I have stripped out around 40% from our fixed costs and we really are running on vapour right now).

I don’t what what to do next.

The cookandkitchen website is currently down as the new men in white coats tinker under the hood, we are helpless. It’s like when you go to the dentist and they have a bright light in your eyes and a couple of steel instruments in your mouth – oooh Sir you should really get a root canal while we are polishing…. what are you meant to say to that?

There’s a team of people in India being managed by Skype by a team of people over here telling me that everything will be alright in the morning, well maybe Thursday or Friday morning….

We are almost ready with the new voice project and as of tomorrow evening everything will be ready to push live as soon as the website works again.

Australia, brace yourself we will be relentless – unsubscribe or buy. We have no choice but to play that game for the next ten weeks.

Right now I am going have a another $5 schooner and keep my fingers and toes crossed that there is an earthquake somewhere near Eastern Creek that sucks up the warehouse with no casualties and we get to the claim the whole thing on business insurance next week (joke – almost).

The one thing that I do know is that we have our integrity intact – all our supplier payments are up to date, we owe no one of our partners any cash and we have delivered our brand promise 100% for every customer we have served and have had some awesome reviews to prove it. We’ve done exactly what we said we were going to do.

I think I might buy a timer on the way home. Australia day is judgement day.