The Accidental Entrepreneur, The Survivor Edition

4Growing like a weed

At the opening of our first Boost store, all I felt was excitement. It happened on King William Street in Adelaide at 11.15 am and, to my great delight and shock, over 50 people were waiting to come in. We had queues going out the door! With no marketing! (That was planned for later.) I could not get the smile off my face. I couldn’t believe the number of people so I asked one of the customers how she’d heard about Boost and its grand opening.

She asked, ‘What opening?’ and then explained that there was a bomb scare next door and the building was evacuated, and ours was the only café on the street not affected!

I laughed so hard. A bomb scare is no laughing matter, but we had one of the strongest launches ever in our very first store!

Vision to fruition

Launching Boost was that little bit easier because I could build on my previous experience. I used most of the same suppliers, so I simply got the same terms I had already spent hours negotiating. I was having fun, doing the business the way I wanted to do it and not having to go through committees to get decisions made. Because of this, every process was so much easier, from designing uniforms to choosing product names to the creation of the products themselves.

We still made some mistakes in those very early days and continue to make mistakes. We worked on the logo and decided on the look and feel of the first store — but, I have to admit, we got the first store’s look terribly wrong. The colours we chose ...