Leadership!
Good morning!
I can’t believe it's Thursday already, even though it clearly is!
Yesterday was spent mainly bottling, waxing and labelling. We did manage time for a quick breakfast round next door, Gema’s idea not mine, so she took me for breakfast. We were caught in the act as my phone went from one of my daughters asking me where I was, at work I said, no you're not, we are outside the distillery…oops! It was a working breakfast…honest!
Today will be more of the same really, I spend some of my time going through emails, chasing up orders and thinking about the next steps, in between this I help out with the waxing and labelling. The waxing is very relaxing and quite often some random idea will pop into my head and then we will have a go at whatever it is. There was one important job, the recycling bin was full of cardboard so I showed true leadership and took on the task of crushing it down so we can get more in. If I say so myself, I did a bloody good job of it, that's something else that's going on the CV!!
One of the things working for yourself and running a small business like this is there is no script to follow, we have an overall plan of where we would like to take the business, but on a day to day basis we are just going with the flow. Because we don’t really follow the market or any other drinks company, we stick to what our gut tells us, part of the morning meeting is coming up with ideas, its not forced, then tend to just happen through general chit chat. It reminds me of the days many years ago when I was employed, you would just be chatting by the photocopier or coffee machine and that's usually where the ideas come from or the solutions to current problems happen. It's very much the same throughout the day here just through chatting. It is very rarely quiet.
One of the things I work on is not taking things for granted, I see pretty much every comment, I don’t have time to respond to them, but I see them so thank you for each and every one of them. You often see posts saying how you can support a business like ours and commenting, liking or sharing what we do is fantastic support. In the world of the internet and especially on social media, it's these small things that get it out there and create some noise. The way the algorithms work, you have no idea how impactful a comment or a like is, it can mean that someone sees what we do who wouldn’t normally. I saw a lady’s comment on a live recently, she had never seen us before, she had no idea what was going on, but liked it! No one has any idea how that actually happens, but it only happens because you react to what we do and it somehow appeared on her feed. Because we don’t do the classic marketing stuff to push people into buying, we let people choose themselves if they want to, then the more noise the better. So I repeat, thank you, it really is appreciated.
We will also be getting ready for tomorrow's taster evening, it will be good fun, and the show on Saturday, we will be right in the centre of Spalding, weather is looking great, so if you are local come and see us and all the other stalls that are there.
Right off to a meeting!
Catch you later
Ant x