On a short trip to Cornwall recently to visit a couple of potential authors for my publishing company, I was reminded of the joys and vicissitudes of start-ups and takeovers.
We were in a restaurant in Mevagissey which had opened a month before.
It was small and French, the husband cooked, the wife was the only waitress.
"Oh, you are brave to be opening in the winter when only the hardy visit your town," more than one set of diners told her.
Our waitress explained that the theory behind this apparent madness was that all the start-up kinks would be ironed by the time the season tourist started properly in May. Good thinking, I reckoned, if they have the luxury of finance to sustain the business through the lean times until then, although at least the restaurant was full on the Saturday evening we were there, which may say much about the couple's better grasp of their business's true, year-round potential than their customers might guess.
But at the next table was a couple who were evidence of the more usual way to go for business in that part of the world. I first noticed them when a couple on another table were about to leave. "If the barman's asleep when you get back," she said to them, "give him a good kick."
How unpleasant, I thought. But then we discovered that the woman was in fact the proud new owner (with her husband) of a small hotel and the potentially somnolent barman/night porter was her son.
I understood and empathised immediately. The couple had left Kent earlier in the year to buy a 14-room hotel in Mevagissey. The woman had been an administrator, the man a builder and like many a couple before them, they had been seduced by the warmth of Cornwall.
So how had the first season gone I wondered. "We've gone from making money to not making it," said the husband, I suspect only half-jokingly.
Their business plan had changed rapidly. At the beginning they were offering three options, half-board, dinner or bed and breakfast. But the dinners had rapidly been discontinued. The emmetts (the Cornish name for tourists) had plenty of choice about where to eat; Mevagissey, in common with most Cornish towns, has a large number of restaurants, and as was obvious they were still opening.
Then there is the difficulty in getting staff.
The new hoteliers' part-time chambermaid left to become full-time at a rival establishment which had resulted in non-stop work all day, every day for the couple who had through that they would be "downshifting".
But they had kept the bar going, which meant visitors had somewhere they could relax in the evening before and after dinner.
Did they have a problem with people leaving without paying? I had once been in a West Country B&B (in Devon where the tourists are grockles) when a nice young couple we had smiled to at breakfast for two days did a runner without paying.
That wouldn't happen at this Mevagissey hotel. The front door was alarmed she said, and the bell was in their bedroom.
So would they do it all again? Certainly, they said. The money wasn't as good, they were working twice as hard but the quality of life was better. They were in charge of their own destiny. And I suppose as long as you kicked the barman, you could always get a drink.
"We call it living the dream," said our landlady when we mentioned the couple to them. Once a prominent businesswoman in Gloucestershire, she had got fed up the the accountants, the lawyers and the banks and moved back home to Cornwall a couple of years before.
"They see the TV programmes about getting a new life," she said, presumably meaning one of the new downshifting makeover shows, rather than Fawlty Towers.
"A lot of them think it's easy and then they disappear back to England after a year or so."
I left the following morning, hoping that the couple we had met would prove to be like our landlady and made of stronger stuff.
If you would like to contact Randall Northam about an issue that is affecting your business, e-mail him at randall@sportsbooks.ltd.uk
