Hellooo Lucifer

First meeting with business bank manager; feeling a little smaller but largely unscathed and I think my soul is still in place. Giving myself a few weeks to rewrite portions of business plan into bankspeak and add fictitious data to back it up; if that's what it takes... It does feel suspiciously like selling my soul, just to be able to do what I want to do; because at the end of the day I get to do the hard work and take the results. They get to sit in an office and demand demographics.

And so began my few weeks of hell; trying to research and complete a marketing plan that I will probably never read again. I know that isn't the point but there is just sooooo much information out there now and it is so hard to find the needles in the haystacks. I don't want to be arrogant and say that I know who the customers are, where they are and what they want, but I kind of do... I just need to write it all out in the shape and form desired and put some ribbons and bells on it. Send out questionnaires, ask questions of unsuspecting shoppers, or trawl the internet and find the results of someone else doing the same. I just feel that it is an exercise in reinventing the wheel; people who want to drink coffee and view art in a friendly, hip and bohemian area will find us, come back and tell their friends. It boils down to excellence in service and product with some word of mouth and reviews in the right place - which depend on excellence in service and product, being in the right place to find the right people and getting on with it.

I guess the only thing I would like to know is 'footfall'. How many people are going to come through that door. But anything I do to project that is just... speculation. It can be refined or educated speculation but that is all it is at the end of the day, and I would bet my bottom dollar that for every business that has gone on to succeed with an excellent marketing plan there are any number of businesses that have failed with an equally excellent one. Life is just not logical and cannot be reduced to numbers. Chaos theory, I can accept; a chaos marketing plan? Here goes..