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. 

Change we can believe in

Today I have spent most of my time so far working on the business plan. The version I'm re-working is from the end of March and was the version we handed in to Venture Cup. It was written about 1.5 months ago and I'm surprised that so much have changed in such a short time.

The trip to Nepal changed a lot, the feedback from Venture Cup gave us a few new ideas, the move to IQube has changed things.

When I'm working it is easier to focus on the things that pile up on my todo list than what we actually do. It feels good to see signs of progress.

Moving forward, and backward

Today I have felt some of the advantages of sitting at IQube, I meet people here that might have solutions to some of the problems we face. 

I have also spoken to Viveca Reimers at Västra Götalandsregionen, she is an environmental coordinator at their purchasing department. She was very helpful and took time to give me a few tips, but the conversation also made me realize that we have a long way to go before we can deal with such a large organization as Västra Götalandsregionen...

Today I have made some progress on the business plan, I have set a deadline to finish it this week.

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I plan to spend a big portion of the day together with our business plan.

The plan we have now is good, but it was written over a month ago and it's a living document, it needs to be updated every now and then.

And even though the feedback from Venture Cup was very positive, there are some things we want to change based on their advice.

The Fair Tailor will start a newsletter where we will give a summary on what has happened lately.

If you want to start receiving the newsletter please send an email to sebastian(at)thefairtailor.com

Nerves

In about 1,5h Lina and I will make a very important presentation, maybe the most important so far.
So for obvious reasons we are both quite nervous now. I do actually think we will do fine. We know what we are going to talk about, we have after all worked on this business for 4,5 months now.
It's going to be interesting to see what kind of questions we will get afterwards.
Now it's time to do the final preparations.
Wish us luck!

We keep on working on our business plan

Today we have spent the entire day so far working on our business plan. We are moving forward, but the deadline is now only about 69h away… I just hope we will be able to finish everything on time.
Lina is doing a great job on the budget, that stuff is way beyond my core expertise, to say the least. But it is fun to try to figure out how much a sewing machine would cost in Nepal, or how much we will have to pay in rent for our factory in Kathmandu.

Last night we met some friends at a Nepalese restaurant downtown. We talked a little to the manager and he gave me the phone number to his brother and said that I should call him if I needed somewhere to stay when I go.

Today we managed to set up a meeting with our Swedish contact who lives in Nepal. He is in Sweden now and has agreed to meet us in Stockholm next weekend.
I think we can learn a lot from talking to him, he has done many of the things we hope to be able to do in Nepal.

I volunteered to go to the grocery store today, just to get away from the computer for a little while. When I come back I will have the great privilege to finish our risk analysis, so at least I have something to look forward to… =)