A broken record player

After having spent a long weekend almost without working I now feel energized and ready to get back to work.

I know I sound like a broken record player but the main thing this week is the decision from ALMI.
Right now the situation is like this:
We are ready to put in 1/3 of the money we need.
The bank has not made any promises yet, but they like our idea and are positive to put in 1/3 of the money.
We are still waiting to see if ALMI will put in 1/3.

This week I'm also meeting with an agent for the unemployment agency to see if I'm qualified to get money from a fund called "Start your own business". If I'm qualified I will get money from them each month for six months. Not much money, but hopefully enough for me to pay my bills.

The e-survey I wrote about is almost finished. It will be sent to everyone who receives the newsletter or is a member of our Facebook group.

ALMI and e-survey

I got a call from ALMI yesterday and they have not made a decision yet, we'll have to wait until Monday.

They will have a meeting on Monday where they will discuss our project, but I'm not sure on what they will decide on. They might decide to do an investigation regarding whether or not we will get a loan.

They might decide give us a loan.

They might decide not to even investigate if they should give a loan or not.

I might me biased, but I vote for the second option...

Right now I'm working on an e-survey. If you are a member of our newsletter mailing list or our Facebook group you will receive it. If you're not and you still want to participate in the survey, please send me an email.

The bank and DEM Collective

Yesterday Lina and I went to meet Marja, our bank contact.

We discussed The Fair Tailor for over an hour an she likes our project.

She will now talk to her colleagues at the bank and with ALMI, things might actually go our way.

Yesterday we had a breakfast meeting with Annika at DEM Collective. I have written about DEM in earlier posts and I'm impressed by their work, we can learn a lot from them. They have their own factory in Sri Lanka and they are hard core about ecological and Fair Trade issues. Annika had for example a plastic bag filled with buttons for the next three months production. She buys the buttons in Borås, Sweden, and then she brings them when she goes to Sri Lanka. Impressive.

Almost finished!

I've spent a large portion of the weekend working on my old friend, the business plan.

The work has come along nicely and I'm almost finished, I just have to re-work the summary and the risk analysis tomorrow. Then we will be ready to apply for a loan from ALMI.

When I worked at Saab and Volvo I used to get the weekends off AND get payed. Those were the days ;) No, to be honest I like what I'm doing now much more. I'm happy about the change of careers. 

Fair Trade students

Tonight I met with a group of Swedish Fair Trade students who are in Nepal to see how fair trade and fair production works in real life.
We talked for four hours and they gave me a lot of good information, including the name of some people I should meet when I'm here in Nepal. They had actually met with Watabaran here in Nepal and with Bjorn Soderbergs mother back in Sweden.

One thing we discussed was Ekobanken, a social banking bank. We will definitely try to meet with them when I get back to Sweden.
Ekobanken helped to finance a company called DEM collective, a Swedish fare trade company. What DEM has done is really impressive and we hope to learn a lot by studying what they have done.

Tomorrow I'm changing hostels, I'm moving to an are north of the tourist area. Hopefully it will be a bit more quite there.
Right now there is a guy playing trombone just outside my hostel, it is 11pm and tomorrow is a work day here... I've been to almost 40 countries but I think this is the loudest one =)

I spend a lot of time here in Nepal thinking

Before I went with Tirtha to Watabaran I had seen children on the streets here in the tourist district of Thamel, but I had actually not really considered that they are actually the street children of Kathmandu.
Last night I had no problem identifying them. They are so young and so small. They run around and collect plastic that they might be able to sell. The use glue to get high. They are very likely to have a short and rough life. And they are one of the reasons that I'm here in Kathmandu today.
Lina and I want to be a part of the network that are giving the street children a chance. A possibility to not be saved, but to save themselves.

I also think a lot about what we need to do to start up The Fair Tailor. There are a lot of things we need to figure out, a lot of paths we might take. It is a very interesting journey and I am glad that I have the opportunity to do what I'm doing.

I am also happy to see that so many persons wants to read our blog and see what we are up to. So far people from 15 countries have read it and last week we had 178 unique visitors.
But we need all the publicity we can get, so tell all your friends about us.
If we can show that there are a lot of people who are interested in what we do it will make it easier for us to e.g. convince the bank that we have an excellent business idea and that they should loan us a big bag of money so that we can make The Fair Tailor happen.

Meeting with the bank

This is going to be interesting; today is our first meeting with the BANK.
I don’t know exactly what to expect, banks don’t tend to give loans to great ideas unless I have something to use as security. We are going there to see how things are done. I am sure that we will have a need for a good bank to pull this thing through.

But before meeting with the bank I’m saying goodbye to a part of my old life. I have my last meeting with my old boss at Etteplan. I have worked there for four years now, that’s quite a long time for a first job after I finished the university.

Feeling a little bit more relaxed

After the last couple of day’s hard work on the business plan it feels good to be able to relax a little.
We still have a lot of things to do, sure, but we met the deadline and now things are a little bit more relaxed.
Money is a major issue right now, and it doesn’t seem like there are too many ways to go. We hope to be able to solve it with a mix of our savings, a bank loan, a loan from ALMI and something we don’t know about yet. And of course by winning Venture Cup. If we were to win both the regional and the national finals, that would cover our financial needs. So as long as we have the best business plan in the country we have nothing to worry about =)

We will have to investigate the possibility to try to get venture capital, but first we want to see what the bank and ALMI has to say.
If you know anyone who likes our idea and who has a money to invest, please let us know =)

Even though money is an issue, it doesn’t matter if we don’t think we can get the company up and running in Nepal. I hope my trip there next week will give us some answers.

Later today we have a meeting with Drivhuset. The meetings I have had with them before have been interesting, so I hope something good will come out of the meeting today as well.

In the nick of time

When I was travelling in Asia many years ago I met a Canadian guy who was very surprised that I, a Swede, knew the expression “in the nick of time”. I’m not sure on where I learned it, but if describes our timing today perfectly.
The deadline to upload our business plan to Venture Cup was 1pm; we uploaded the final version at 1:00:00pm. I didn’t feel exactly like Tom Cruise in a Mission Impossible movie, but it wasn’t far from it ;)

Yesterday we worked until midnight and today we started around 7am.
Six hours and no breaks later we are finally finished, and exhausted.

All we have to do now is to implement the plan and start up the business…

This morning I got a call from the banker I tried to get a hold of yesterday. We set up a meeting for this Friday, hopefully Lina will be able to join us, even though it would mean that she would have to skip school.

Today I got my new business cards, and I must say that they look nice. The front is pretty standard, but the back of the card is what I like about it. It says:

Dress Responsibly
www.thefairtailor.com

It’s all about the money

We have our meeting with ALMI and I feel that it went OK. We met with our contact there and discussed our business idea. He had some interesting things to say, and if we managed to convince him I think we might get more out of our contact with ALMI than just a loan.
It’s good to talk to someone about your ideas, because they have always a different opinion about something. They are of course not always right, but it is good to question your ideas from time to time.

Even if it is a challenge to get a loan from ALMI we fear that it will be even tougher to get a loan from a conventional bank.
We are feeling a bit low right now, but I hope things will feel better as soon as we have sent the business plan to Venture Cup…