Sam Kidd's thoughts on business

Well this year is flying by, and yet again after saying to myself to write more blog posts I find myself 20 odd days into this new year and still no bloody posts.

I'm finding it hard to get time to write posts, but I do think a lot of this is down to the fact that I find it harder to get down on paper (screen) what it is I want to say. Writing has never been my stong point so I look for any excuse to get out of it, and being too busy always sounds great in my head.

So far this year is looking good, we are flat out in Digital Crew with work and hope to have a few big jobs coming up sson. TeamworkPM is also really starting to go places now, It's getting very close to the point that we are going to have to look at getting a full time person on board to deal with feedback and questions and just general chat with our customers. We even had one of the major film studios in the States onto us last week about using TeamworkPM, it will be great to have a big name on board.

On a totally different front now, Sam&Dan's is now finally open at nights. We started the late openings towards the end of December and it's been going great inside there. I have to say I enjoy working nights there when I get the chance, the chatting to the customers there at night is always a good laugh and we have been getting a great amount of positive feedback as well.

I know all the talk on the radio and newspapers at the moment  is all doom and gloom, but I can't help but feel really excited about the changes in the economy.  The world was starting to get a bit crazy and it just seemed like it was going to be fecking impossible to move up the ladder in business at times because everything had gotten so bloody expensive, and the barrier to entry just seemed so high at times.  Now it's fair game to anyone with the balls and vision to take this recession on, things are cheaper, people are looking to do deals now as businesses are fighting for work and I think it could be a very interesting year ahead.

It is the year of the OX and as they say about Oxen, they were used in farming because they were able to pull harder and longer than horses, particularly on obstinate or almost un-movable loads, so here's to hoping we can all be Oxen and start to pull our businesses out of this recession and  on to great things

What a savage Sunday we just had, wish we had more days like that during the summer.  After my Sunday morning coffee in Sam&Dan's Billy and myself headed for Grand Parade to find a full food market set up. It was cool to see the Grand Parade since it was done up being used for something.  We were in walking around before the crowds found the place, we stoped at one stall and had a box of roasted potatoes with sausage...amazing! I'm drooling right now.

It would be nice to see them do more stuff like this more often, the Grand Parade is such a great space now. I picked up some savage home page jam from McBride&Flynn, they are based down in Kinsale and I have to say the jam was unreal, homemade jam just has so much more flavour. I also picked up some Banana bread and Goats cheese from a few other stalls ,mmmm making me hungry writing this now.

I never seem to see these events advertised any where, I always just happen to stumple along and find them. Where do they advertise these days? is it in the paper or radio? Where ever it is I never seem to ever see any press about the events which is a shame because I would love to go to more of them. You can easily forget that there is such great foods made right here in Ireland, I'm always saying how good food in other countries is,but do you know what, I think the west of Ireland is right up there. (most of the food stalls seemed to be from down that direction.)

The guy in McBrides was saying that there is going to be another market on Patrick St this coming weekend, so if you have nothing on and want some savage food I would recommend getting in to Cork over the weekend.

Yes I am still alive and well. It's just been a crazy summer. I have been meaning to update the blog for quite sometime now but just never manage to get around to it. The days are just flying by, I can't believe it's nearly September already, bloody crazy!

Digital Crew has been eating most of my time lately, we are just up the walls at the moment which is great, but is also stressful. We have a new member joining the Crew next month, I'm sure Dan and Topper can't wait, he's another programmer to help us with our workload.

Teamworkpm is going well now and we have had a lot of new signup as well. The guys have been working on getting the API up and running as soon as possible. We hope to have it good to go during September.

Sam&Dan's is now over a month old as well. Things are going well there, the Donuts have been the big hit there so far. We have also added topped ones to our menu now. (so tasty)

AREA51 is still rocking away as well, been back in there for the Tuesday night gaming the last few weeks and had a good laugh. Nothing beats kicking your customers asses in a game of Call of Duty 4.

The next thing on my list is to give this blog a face lift. It's pretty old at this stage and it was a template I stole from Dan to save time.

Well thats the story so far not the most exciting blog post in the world but at least it proves if still alive and kicking.

If you're around from 6pm-8pm any week day call into Sam&Dan's some time for a coffee and a dog. I'm working there most evenings. Dan and I were talking today over coffee, saying we must hold an open coffee morning there one day as well as start to get to the others held round Cork. It's another thing I need to add to my list of things to do as well.  I was sorry to miss Techludd yesterday, I would like to start to meet up with all the guys in Cork that I'm now following on Twitter. There's a good bunch of Tech heads around in Cork, to be sure! (I'm so Irish now!)

Myself and Keith started smashing down a few walls in the new shop today. I Can't wait to get the builders in to really go to town on it. Still it felt great to smash a hole into a wall of a property we have been fighting for now for and tied up in legals now for about 9 months. I will post up some pics to my Flickr account of how the shop looks now before we really get started.



Hopefully it will be cool to look back in a months time and see the before and after pics.

We are aiming for a early June opening, if all goes to plan. (fingers crossed)

Yes I'm still alive incase anyone was wondering. I have just been working away flat out the last few months. I keep meaning to post here but I have been finding it hard to find the time.

So what have I been up to thats made me ohh too busy? Well I have joined the Crew, I'm now working away with my friends Dan and Topper in Digital Crew. I have been in and around their office for years now and we have AREA51 between us as well. So now I have moved in and am working away pretty much full time inside. It's been a bit mainic getting myself up to speed. I'm now the new business development manager inside. Dan and Topper are still the programming nerds.

Digital Crew has been up and running 9 years, and they have some top class clients on the books now, so it has'nt really been a hard job for me yet to bring in the sales. It's been a nice change for me to do something different for a while and I do believe a lot in the products and sites that we are developing here. The Skills thats the guys have now is class and we must have the best CMS (Content Management System) out there now.

We are also, as I have said in an early post,  TeamworkPM. We have been using TeamworkPM inside Digital Crew now for the last 5 months I would say and it's really changed the way we work inside. It's made us much more orginised and it's really helped us stay on top of clients needs. There is a free version for anyone to try so I would say, give it a go ;-)


Right I must get out of the office and head home, I'm really going to try to get back into my blogging from now, I'm always coming across things and thinking shite, I should have a little rant about that but I just have'nt gotten around to it, so I hope to get back in the game again.

 

 

 

 

 

Building Coffee Republic From Our Kitchen is the book by Sahar Hashemi and Bobby Hashemi. I read Building Coffee Republic From Our Kitchen over the christmas break while dying from that bloody flu that was going round.  It's not a big read and I got through it in a couple of sitting. I picked it up in Waterstones in the after Christmas sales, for about 13 Euro. 



The start of the book is all about how you too can be an entrepreneur, and giving people advice and encouragement for taking the leap into running your own business. So if you already own your own business the start of the book is a bit boring and is just telling you what you already know and do.

However I found the book really good once I got half way through. This is when they are about to about open the doors on their first Coffee Republic shop. Once I got to this part it was a really interesting to read. The reason I got it was to see how someone goes from one small coffee shop to becoming one of the biggest brands in the UK.
And for this part alone it was a great book.  Its written by people that you can tell love their business and have worked bloody hard in it.  If your thinking about open a coffee shop or any business really in the retail trade I would recommend you give this a read.

Link to it on Amazon

I can't believe another year has passed by. In some ways it feels like it has just flown by, then again, it does seem like a age that I was in New York during February last year.
I have to say I'm looking forward to 2008, 2007 was busy but in someways not much happened for me. Last year was filled with a lot of ground work, which I know is important, but it just ain't as exciting to be honest. I'm now hoping this year I will see a few of these things startup.

Also the wisdom teeth coming out was fantastic. They came out on a Thursday and I was eating by Sunday. So much for my diet plan before Christmas, that didn't work so well. Still I don't know why I waited so long to get them out, I'm such a wimp when it comes to the dentist. Life in my mouth is much better now, I don't keep trying to eat my cheeks which is a nice change.

Quote : "Hard work never killed anybody but it is illegal in some places."

One of my must buys to start the year the Demotivators Calendar 2008

Also I see now on the despair site they now do T-shirts, I thought this one would be good.

By this time tomorrow I will no longer be as wise as I am now.
I'm getting all 4 wisdom teeth out in the morning. The only good thing is that I will be knocked out for this. I'm such a wimp when it comes to the dentist. I should have got this done about 5 years ago.

I have been been reading all the nice stories online. Curse the Internet and its wealth of information!!!

 

Just rang another property crowd today that I'm dealing with. I'm waiting for the rent on this property to be set, as it has just come to market at the time of a rent review.  I spoke to them about this 2 weeks ago and it still has not been agreed it. WHY???

How hard is it to sit down with the 2 parties in a room and say, hey what about this? Lets have a bit of a discussion here and now, and agree on an amount, and save us all a load of time.

In business are we trying to make things harder and seem more complicated than they need to be?  Days seem to fly by so fast, so each day waiting for a simple decision, in my mind a bloody waste of time.  Why can't business people shake up this system and say 'we are sick of waiting for months to do deals and waiting for solicitors to get back to us' Lets cut the crap and do deals now.

I posted a blog about this cool idea of Guinness's, which was to hunt online for their new advert to win some sort of a prize. Well that idea sounded great but I was reading a favourite blog on mine, adfreak  and he had the link to the ad on YouTube.

Well I'm to lazy to search the net for it, and for the others of you who are also to lazy to search for this 'great' new Guinness ad, here it is.








Guinness has said that no special effects were used in this ad, and that it cost a reported £10 million to make.  Honda’s ad does come to mind when you watch this.

 

When you walk down Patrick St these days you can’t help but notice the amount of retail property that is for rent. Now you would think that because it is the city centre that people would be fighting to get into these places. But this does not seem to be the case. It’s not just Patrick Street either where you see vacant property. If you walk down Oliver Plunkett St and other surrounding streets in town it’s the same story. There are quite a few places for rent. Some of which have been sitting empty for over a year now.

I can’t help but feel it has a lot to do with greedy landlords.

These days a shop in Cork City is not just competing with the shop down the road anymore. Local competition has increased with the new large shopping centres out of town, and their offer of free parking. Now if that wasn’t hard enough., you are also competing with the rest of the world as well. Online shopping has grown massively in the last few years. Now it's not uncommon to purchase every day items online, and from other countries, and have it arrive at home the next day.

I keep hearing people giving out about the price of things in Ireland, and how the shops are ripping us off, and how expensive it is to eat out in town, and “man how the shops must be cleaning up”. I’m sure some are ripping us off, but I do feel that a lot of them are just trying to survive. To do this your going to need massive volume, and goods that have a high mark up on them. 
Everyone is blaming the shops for ripping us off but are the shops being ripped of first? The fact is, the reason most shops are charging so much is because they're being screwed from the top. Rent in town is nuts, rates are huge, of which I have yet to work out what they actually pay for, because you have to pay for rubbish charges, and soon water charges. Customers have to pay for parking in town as well, and if they're not careful could be clamped or towed. This does nothing to encourage people to come into town to shop.

I can’t help but wonder how the shops in town can survive.

Recently I have been looking at a lot of property in town, and the rent is just nuts. 40-50K a year for a place you couldn’t swing a cat in,and that’s for propertys that are not in prime locations. Most property in top locations are from 70k to 90k for better spots.

As an example say you had to pay rent of 50k.
You have to pull in €60,600.00 to just pay the rent. That’s because once you get hit for 21% VAT on the 60k it leaves you with $50,082.64. So that’s your rent covered.

You will have rates of around €8000 so that’s another €9500 you must pull in.

So before you pay any bills and have any staff or pay high insurance costs you must pull in profit of €70,100.00

That’s €192.00 of profit a day.

You can see why so many shops in town must stay open 7 days a week. €192.00 doesn’t look like much but when you have all the other bills on top it sure adds up.

If you look at a coffee shop as an example. It would take about 90 cups of coffee a day to make this.
It will be interesting to see if Cork City centre can survive and if the council will do anything to help traders. Now that Cork City centre is starting to look really nice it would be a shame for it to become a ghost town of retail units.

 

It's been a very long weekend here. A project that I have been working on now for 5 years is really starting to move along again. It's getting all the excitement back that I had towards it a long time ago. It was great to have a weekend working away with the guys. It's cool watching them code away and trying to help out with problems and coming up with new methods for doing things.  It's also great to have such a long period just working on the project and as a team again. Working away by yourself is never as much fun. We ended up working from 10am to 4:30 am on Saturday then were up early Sunday for a presentation of it at 12pm.

I think the presentation went really well and it was great for everyone to see all the working really starting to come together. There is still alot of work to do but we are really close now to running the first pilot. It will hopefully be sometime next week. 

I'm looking forward to seeing what people think of it as well. Dan and I are working on the website at the moment, well when I say we are working on it I mean I sit there while Dan works away bloody hard and I just nag him about things that I want in. Still we have worked well like this before and we still talk to each other most of the time so it seems to work.

I will look forward to hearing what you all think of the site once it is done and also being able to explain what the project is for those who aren’t in the small loop.

As we got up for day 2 on Cape we realised that the weather was going to be shite all day.  Still at least it wasn't cold.  We had a nice breakfast and headed down to catch up with the other two. The walk down the hill was certainly alot easier in the day and going down hill that it was coming home in the pitch dark the night before.  We walked down past South Harbour and stopped to have a look.  Not quite swimming weather so we carried on.

 

We met up with Gill and Aileen down at the shop/pub and grabbed a bite to eat. The guy running the shop was really sound and even gave us the keys to the pub over the shop so we could hang out up there. In fairness he looked out for us all day bringing us drinks and food and even putting our wine on ice. He must have hated us by the end of the day. But in fairness he managed to get most of our money out of throughout the day.

We got the bus tour of Cape around lunch time.  It was a great lazy way to see the whole island. The tour took about an hour as we travelled the roads in second gear.  There are some savage hills on this little island and walking it would certainly be a good work out.  But I will never know. (I'm a lazy shite)

 Once we got back to the Pub/shop we were wrecked .So we thought it was time for more food and drink.  Had a lovely steak there for dinner. MMMM hungry now thinking about it. Of course when our dinner arrived up guess who turned up.  That little fecker Pearse.  I couldn't believe it. He bitched and screamed and ran around while his parents yelled at him to sit,stay,stop and loads of other commands that the little devil ignored, generally he was just a pain in the ass.

After dinner we headed back to Danny Mikes. There we continued our card games of which I never one a round. We also found an old trivia pursuit questions book. Emma was the quizmaster and asked questions throughout the night. I ruled in the Cartoon section, comic section and at least in the respectable section of geography.

We had a laugh all night and we were joined by a guy working on the island for ESB called Seamus. He sucked at cards ended up hold most of the pack. Was bloody funny. Don't think he really got the rules of our game. He moved on to pool, which was his game. Seamus and myself took Team Aileen, Which was Aileen and another guy we met Tadgh, who was a laugh. Anyhow I sucked at pool and just did enough to piss them off while Seamus actually potted the balls.

 

All in all it was a good night and we headed back to the B&B about 3ish. As we walked back in the pitch dark we could hear a group of girls up ahead of us laughing and trying to scare each other.  As we approached them in the dark from behind they shit themselves. They jumped and screamed so much they actually gave us a fright.  They were completely embarrassed, it was bloody funny.

We woke late to similar weather and made our way down to get the boat back to Baltimore at 12.  Of course that little fecker was on the boat as well. All in all in was a great few days away and I would recommend a trip to Cape to anyone for sure.

I decided to take a few days off work before work gets really busy. Myself and Emma along with Gill and her sister Alieen decided to head for the island of Cape Clear. We headed down to Baltimore on Monday to get the boat across to the island at 5:30pm. As we sat at the pub in Baltimore we watch our boat pull away we realised that the boat left at 5:00pm and not 5:30pm. So a few drinks later and a bit to eat we caught the last boat at 7pm. The trip across was cool. It lasts about 40mins and you get some nice views of the sea and the surrounding countryside.

 

 

 

Once we arrived on Cape Clear we got the only taxi to our B&B up a bloody big hill. Of course Gills B&B was right next to the pub (how convenient) the roads there are bloody shocking. I would say that our Taxi has never seen 3rd gear. All the roads are just little lane ways with potholes everywhere. Our B&B was really nice and at €15 each per night it's hard to complain.

 

 

The weather was on and off over the whole weekend. Never really cold at all, it would just rain every now and then. Because of this we saw alot of the inside of the 2 pubs that were open. For the first night we stayed in Danny Mikes pub and had dinner there and thought well since we were here we should stay on and have drinks till about 2ish. Sure why not. Dinner was alright there apart from a little kid called 'Pearse' this little fecker would go on to appear everywhere on the island that we went. Little Pearse, I'm guessing was about 4 years old, yelled screamed and bitched during our whole meal no matter what his parents tried to bribe him with. Alieen who hates kids alot wanted to have him beaten within an inch of his little life. To her disgust this never happened.  The only other interesting thing to happen during this meal was to come from a pack of butter.  Now the packs of butter that I'm referring to are the ones you get in restaurants. They come in little fat rectangles made up of a foil type thing covering the butter. Now me being me, I kept playing with mine till it was nice and soft. (as you do) I was then squeezing hard when to my shock I shot the butter across the room and spat on to the far wall. Along the way Emma took a bit of a hit to the head as well so we had to pick butter out of Emma's hair. I thought it was bloody funny. Emma was not as amused. But still it was amazing how far it went.

 

 

 After dinner we played pool for a while. I now remember how shite I was at pool when I was at school.  We also played cards for ages which a bloody laugh. Been ages since I played cards. It's strange how you always have to go somewhere far away to do things that you could do at home no problem. We played a type of last card with a few new interesting rules added such as touch your nose or make bunny ears if a seven was put down. This got very sneeky by people as the night went on and as more drink was had. Also when a ten was put down no one could speek till it was covered. This resluted in you having to pick up the whole discard pile when you spoke. It's amazing how sneeky people get as the night goes on. Such as asking questions or getting someone to sing before putting the card down. What a laugh!

To be continued.......

Howdy,

This is my new and really exciting Blog. (hopefully) I have no idea yet as to what I will put into this Blog but after time I may find some sort of route that I want to go down. Untill then it will probably just be a mix of shite. So enjoy and feel free to drop in and let me know what you think

Who am I ?

Well My name is Sam Kidd ,as the website suggests.  I was born in New Zealand in 1979 (dam that sounds a while ago now) I have moved round this planet quite a bit as my dad is a rugby coach. I have lived in France, all round New Zealand and Ireland. I am now currently living in Cork Ireland, where I been now for 10 years. The rest of my family are now back in NZ now for the last 3 years. I stayed on here for a few reasons. One being of course a girl, and second being business. I have a few things on the go but the things that are up and running at the moment are AREA51 and Scorch. AREA51 is a 24 hour gaming café that I opened with 2 friends of mine, Dan  and Topper in late 2004. It's been a massive learning curve and something that I may go into at some stage in more detail another time. Infact I could write all day about the things we have learn't there.  AREA51 has been a big success for us and long may it continue. The other business is Scorch which is a filming company. Emma (the girl I stayed for) and I set up when we got out of college. They were hard times and again I learnt a massive amount from that too. Again something I could talk about all day. At the moment all I do with Scorch is Filming rugby games for UCC the IRFU and Munster development dept. It's great work and pays well and because it is mainly weekend work enables me to concentrate my time on AREA51 which is great. Well I hope this gives you some idea of who I am to start with and I hope you enjoy and find something that interests you here.

My Work place- http://www.area51.ie

Dan                  - http://www.cfdan.com

Topper             - http://www.cftopper.com