Small steps forward

Today I've met with our business coach Christian Zanders from Jethsop.

Christian is a really good guy to work with and he has many good ideas. We met for three hours and I left the meeting with my head full of new thoughts about how we should do things.

I don't think we will pursuit ALMI until later in the project, so now we are trying to piece things together to see how we can set up our business without them. Right now I'm trying to set up a meeting with a representative from the regional government, they might be able to assist us.

People are answering the e-survey we've sent out. If you haven't received an invitation and you can read Swedish, please check out http://ow.ly/ak2Z

Sebastian Stjern

The Fair Tailor

-Dress Responsible

First e-survey, inspiration by Drivhuset and more about ALMI

I've just sent out our first e-survey and I'm really excited about the response we'll get.

I've sent it to 151 persons. If you are not one of them and if you can read Swedish I can send it to you as well.

The e-survey will be a base for the development of The Fair Tailor, I hope it will give me a few pointers about what people are interested in.

I really like Drivhuset!

I have mostly spoken to Andreas there but today I spoke with Maria and it was very inspiring. We and ALMI have different ideas on how to solve things but there are other ways of doing things and Maria was good at pointing them out.

I spoke to Carin at ALMI today and we agreed to disagree.

They have their view on how things should be done and we do not share that view.

And that's to bad.

But it was a good talk with Carin, she managed to explain their view, earlier ALMI has not informed us on why they feel they way they do. They believe that a project like ours should be financed strictly by own capital, i.e. you should not loan money for a project like this.

Sebastian Stjern

The Fair Tailor

-Dress Responsible

Mingle with Maud

I'm just back from having been at the mingle session with Maud Olofsson, Sweden's Minister of Enterprise.
It was inspiring to hear her speak about the plans they have to make things easier for small businesses. Hopefully they will do something about office turnaround time at ALMI...

There was a panel discussion about how to make it easier for entrepreneurs at the end and it was really interesting to see the difference between a professional speaker, the Minister, and the representatives from the University. She was so much better at getting her opinion expressed in a clear way.

Sebastian Stjern

The Fair Tailor

-Dress Responsible

I get knocked down, but I get up again, they're never gonna keep me down

The title of this post is a line from a song by the band Chumbawamba and it symbolize pretty well how I feel right now.
So, ALMI turned us down. They believe that for a project like this you should not work with loans, you should only use money you already have.

What to do?
Lay down and die? Give up the project?
Of course not, we just have to change a few things. Be smarter, do things differently.

I am stubborn so I haven't completely given up the idea of ALMI, but we need an alternative. And that's what I'm working on right now.

Today we're meeting with the Minister of Enterprise, Maud Olofsson. Well, we're not the only ones she's meeting with, Drivhuset has organized a mingle with Maud and Lena Ek who is a member of the European parliament.
I hope to be able to talk a little with them.

Sebastian Stjern

The Fair Tailor

-Dress Responsible

ALMI said no, again.

On the ALMI website FAQ you can read "It's about taking risks when nobody else dares to do. ALMI dares."
We have 1/3 of the money, the bank is positive to provide 1/3 but the government agency that is supposed to give loans when the bank says no is not willing to provide the last 1/3.

If you are an investor and you have the money we need and are looking for a good investment, please contact us.

Sebastian Stjern

The Fair Tailor

-Dress Responsible

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.

Drivhuset focus group

This morning I was part of a focus group for Drivhuset. 

Some students from IHM Business School had put together focus groups to evaluate a new product from Drivhuset. Since both Lina and I have had a lot of help from Drivhuset I hope my input was of some use for them.

The blog statistics service told me that this blog was the number one site in Google if you search for fair trade tailoring, that's kind of cool.

Right now I'm just waiting for ALMI to call and say that they will give us a loan.

I'll keep you posted on what happens.

Our first newsletter is out

Today we sent out our first newsletter. 

Would you like to receive it, please send us an email and we'll forward it to you.

I took most of the weekend off from work, but I did put in some hours on trying to write the spec for our website. And besides that, Lina and I talk about The Fair Tailor most of the time when we're awake =) No, it's not that bad, we have other things to talk about as well, but we both have ideas on what we shall do and how to do it.

ALMI is investigating if they will perform a new investigation regarding our loan application. Tomorrow we'll get information on what they decide. It would be a really tough blow if they would turn us down, so keep your fingers crossed. 

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.

Feedback tab

If you are a frequent visitor of The Fair Tailor blog you might have noticed a green feedback tab to the right.

If you press this tab you will come to our customer support area. I know that we don't have any products yet, but we want to evaluate the system before we decide to use it.

We use a system called Get Satisfaction, were both employees and customers can answer the questions. 

Please check it out and see what you think about it.

You can suggest and idea, ask a question, report a problem and give us praise =)

It feels really good to have handed in the business plan, now I'm really looking forward to hearing from ALMI.

Are you following The Fair Tailor on our Twitter yet? Check it out at twitter.com/thefairtailor

The business plan is sent to ALMI!

I had decided that midnight today was the deadline for us to send an updated business plan to ALMI, and we made it! We actually had 21 minutes left...
It feels really good to be done, now we can move on with the work until we wait for a response from ALMI.

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. 

A new era has begun

A new era has begun, we have moved The Fair Tailor from our apartment to IQube, a company incubator.

I think I will come here most days, Lina will also come by from time to time, she is still doing her internship at Universeum.

Today I have done a lot of things, but the business plan progress is slow. I don't know why, but I cant seem to get any flow in that work. And I need to finish it so that I can send it to the bank, to Arbetsförmedlingen, to ALMI, to...

To put it simple, it has to get finished.

But on the other hand there are quite a few things that has to get finished. I suppose the best way to solve it is to do everything at once...

Our first major setback

I just got of the phone with ALMI, a governmental organization that can assist companies with loans.
They take a higher interest rate than banks, but on the other hand you don't have to have the same type of security for the loan.
The setback is that they won't give us a loan, and if they won't give us a loan it will be much more difficult to finance our company. Far from impossible, but without doubt more difficult. Up until now everything feels like it has gone our way, so I suppose a setback was unavoidable.

Right now it doesn't feel to good, but I am convinced that we will have many, many more setbacks before we are ready to launch our website :)
I hope to find answers to a lot of the questions ALMI had during my time here in Kathmandu.

And we still plan to win the Venture Cup, and once we have done that we won't need to take a loan from ALMI =)

Now I'll go out try to get a feel for the city of Kathmandu.

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.

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…

An important meeting

Time does what time usually does when a deadline approaches, it runs out. The Venture Cup deadline is now just 27 hours away.
Last night Lina finished the budget, and I must say that it looks promising. Let’s just hope that the Venture Cup judges feel the same.

At 1pm today we have an important meeting, our first meeting with ALMI. We are hoping that the will like our idea and agree to give us a loan. I think we have a good business case, but then again I might be biased…

I am also trying the get a hold of a person at a bank that we have been recommended to contact by Drivhuset. Besides from ALMI we will also need to take out a conventional bank loan, and of course but in a lot of our lives savings =)
Drivhuset is an organisation that helps people who want to start up their own business and we have got a good contact there.

Now, it’s back to the business plan for me. I hope to be able to give a short summary on the ALMI meeting later today.

Some breakthroughs

Today we have made some breakthroughs, I have managed to get in contact with ALMI and set up a meeting for next Monday and I have talked to a person at Öhrlings PriceWaterhouseCoopers and set up a meeting for this Friday. Luckily the meetings will be when Lina is not at IHM (business school).

ALMI is owned by the government and if you have a good enough business idea they can provide your company with seed money, a sort of venture capital light. Since we are not able to pay all starting costs for The Fair Tailor with our savings it is very important that we get some external financing and ALMI is an important piece of that puzzle.

We are competing in something called Venture Cup with our business idea. The main reason for our participation in Venture Cup is the feedback we get after they have read our business plan. They have people from various branches of business that looks at the contestants’ business plans and then give feedback. So far we have got very good feedback from them.
Besides from that you can also get private guidance from some of the companies that sponsor the competition. And this Friday we will get helm from a guy at Öhrlings PriceWaterhouseCoopers concerning import/export and our budget.

I am waiting to hear from a contact in Nepal, I have planned to go there by the end of the month but I have not yet booked any tickets. I need to make sure that I have things to do when I get there.
I am also waiting to hear from one of the companies that we hope will be able to design our web site, I have not been able to get a hold of my contact there today. But maybe I’ll have better luck tomorrow.

Tuesday 1p.m. is the deadline for the business plan to Venture Cup, that is the next big milestone. It’s going to take a lot of hard work over then next couple of days, but it will hopefully be fun.