A Bad Month

Crikey it's been ages since I posted on here.
Last month has been really crap, I think the stress of the past six months finally caught up with us. Up till now we have been pretty much working on auto pilot and really just getting on with what had to be done to set up the business, house etc.

The new international website was finally launched a few weeks ago and I think it was only then that we realized the enormity of what we have taken on. After thirteen years of trading in the UK we have a database of over 12,000 customers, we get by on repeat orders and word of mouth recommendations. In terms of promotion we don't have to do very much at all.
When we first saw the new database set to zero it was just so scary! and it really hit home that we were in a country where nobody has a clue who we are or what we do. It is like going right back to square one, and it is sobering. We have no guarantees that we can make this work.
This month has been a round of see-sawing emotions, one day we are elated by the challenge of doing something new, then the next day we are worrying about what will happen if we can't pull this off. Ultimately we always seem to come back to the old cliche that 'you'll never know if you don't just go for it.'

It is going to be a long up hill struggle and certainly the biggest challenge that we have ever faced. I am having real problems coping with the lack of technology! New Zealand is a good ten years behind the UK when it comes to Internet usage, we were aware of that but I don't think we realised how much it was going to affect us. Dial up Internet is still very common here, broadband is taking off but finding an ISP who could provide the monthly bandwidth that we use has been very difficult. We have also had to resort to hosting the website on our UK server because there is just nobody in this country who can host a site that is the size of ours. It is things like this that you just don't anticipate that makes the whole thing more complicated than it should be.

Overall though, we are still mostly optimistic and looking forward to the challenge of taking on this New World.