Blue Dog Jewellery looks at a succesful monkey business!
How I Made It: Tristram Mayhew, Founder of Go Ape
Soldier who swapped army career for monkey business
AFTER Tristram Mayhew left the army in his twenties to join Coca-Cola and then GE, he struggled to find the fulfilment he had felt as a tank commander in the Royal Dragoon Guards.
“I had enjoyed army life but I wanted to get married and I didn’t want to drag a family round the world,” said Mayhew. “The jobs I had after the army were interesting and the people were good but at the end of the day these were big companies that were only interested in making a dollar.
“I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with corporate life so we started thinking about what type of business we wanted. It had to be one that allowed us to live in the country and do things together.”
While he was mulling various business ideas, he and his wife, Rebecca, went on holiday to France and visited a forest adventure course. Mayhew was immediately taken with the idea of opening a similar business in Britain. “We were watching this family having the time of their life. The 10 and 15-year-old were loving it, but so were the parents.”
Convinced it could work in Britain he began planning. Realising that he needed forest locations with car parking and basic amenities, he contacted the Forestry Commission, which had such facilities, to see if it was interested in leasing land to him.
His first meeting went better than he had hoped. “I went in to see the East Anglia District people with a video and a Power- Point presentation. They told me this was the idea they had been looking for. Timber prices were low at the time and the Forestry Commission was trying to find ways to bring in revenue by bringing the public onto its land.”
Encouraged by their enthusiasm and anxious to get an agreement that gave him the best chance of success, Mayhew rejected their initial offer of a three-year deal and went up the chain of command to the English Forestry Commission.
“I asked them for 21 years, expecting to get 10. I came away with an exclusivity deal for 26 years for the whole of England on the understanding that I had to open at least six sites within six years.”
It was a better deal than Mayhew had dared hope for. “Looking back, I realise that safety was important to them and this would be guaranteed by working with one organisation rather than several. Working with one partner also meant they would not need to have so many meetings.”
After signing an agreement in November 2001, they sold Rebecca’s flat, raising £118,000 in start-up capital and by March 2002 were running their business, Go Ape, from a second-hand shed.
Customers loved the experience, and in its first year Go Ape made a £10,000 profit. Eager to head off copycats, Mayhew decided to expand into new sites around England as fast as possible in the second year, a move that nearly ended in disaster.
“We remortgaged everything to build three more sites that winter. One site was delayed by planning and another did not perform as well as we had forecast. I spoke to my bookkeeper and my accountant and they both said we had enough cash to get through to the summer, but it soon became clear that we did not.
“With only one year of trading behind us we did not really understand the working- capital side of the business. With a wage bill of £21,000 we were running out of cash just before the summer holidays. I ended up embarrassingly asking my mother if we could borrow £40,000 for six weeks. It was lucky she had it as the bank would not have lent it in time.
“That summer we went hugely back into the black but it was a real lesson for us. We nearly went under, so I decided to go out and get a finance director.”
The company has expanded steadily in England and Scotland since then without any bank borrowing. Sales are £8.3m with earnings before interest, tax and depreciation of £750,000.
Mayhew is busy planning judicious expansion in Britain as well as America and Australia, despite professional advice not to do so in a recession. He has learnt to treat such advice sceptically. “If you’re looking to do something unconventional then conventional wisdom does not apply.”
His advice to anyone considering starting a business includes thinking big and working backwards from there. “It’s powerful thinking big. Our plan was 25 Go Ape courses. It felt right so we came up with that as the objective and worked out how we were going to get there from the start.”
He also advises that before taking the plunge, you should work out what you might lose if your venture fails.
“Will it destroy you if you fail or if you don’t try at all? If this business had failed it would not have been good but it would not have been a disaster. Not doing it and knowing I had never tried would have destroyed me. For me, what I chose to do was also about lifestyle. I wanted to create a life around a young family and from that perspective we have succeeded. The financial side of it is important, but it is ancillary.”
Posted by Shona Lockhart, 9th January 2009
Posted at 05:27 AM in Inspirational Men | Permalink
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