TEA ROOM: Jane Smart

In April 2005, Jane Smart and her partner Nick decided to take their futures into their own hands after getting fed up with their jobs. Jane had also had an accident which meant she could no longer carry on teaching.

“We really wanted to take more responsibility with regards to what decisions were being made and we wanted to not have to answer to people,” she explains.

“We knew that we wanted to run a tea rooms/café type business in our local area – between Winchester and Bournemouth.

“We also wanted to buy the kind of place where people could nip in for a cup of tea, but also sit down for a few hours and read through their papers. We were after somewhere where people could come to relax.”

DUCKING STOOL TEA ROOMS

After making some decisions about what they were looking for, the couple began their search.

“I initially went online … and then from there I started looking at agents sites and getting on their mailing lists.

“On paper I looked at lots of businesses but I only actually went to see seven places.

Doing the homework

By May, they’d drunk many cups of tea after visiting several tea rooms, trying to get an idea of what that type business is all about.

“We also talked to lots of people about what they wanted from a tea room. We practiced loads of recipes, and spent a lot of time looking at menus and prices.

“We went to Business Link in Southampton to get advice. They were quite helpful, but we found all the advice they gave was really quite general.

“It was one of our friends who runs her own business that was the most helpful.

“We had already bought a house so we thought we knew the score with the buying process – we hoped it would be different with buying the business, but it wasn’t. However, dealing with a broker was slightly different to working with an estate agent.”

Ensuring you are paying the right price is always going to be hard. Jane and her partner found talking to the agents the most beneficial.

“The price had dropped a lot because the previous owner wanted a quick sale,” Jane explains. “We ended up paying around half of what it was originally on for – a few of her previous sales had fallen through.”

Steakout

The sale went through in July and things didn’t go as smoothly as anticipated.

Jane reveals: “The trouble we had was that the business had closed when we bought it – it was a going concern. We had no way of proving what the previous owner said about how busy it was.

“The previous owner had been slightly economical with the truth about the trade and the actual business itself.

“I would recommend to people that they should stake a place out before they buy it – watch when people visit, find out when it’s busy and when it isn’t,” Jane warns.

“This was hard for us to do as the place was closed by the time we found it.”

Progress

The important question is, have things gone well for the couple since the business opened?

“Overall, the business has been doing well although it has been slow in the last few weeks – but I think that is largely down to the cold weather. It is paying for itself, and it is just coming up to being able to pay for us.”

She adds: “You really need some financial back up when you go into business. You’d be very lucky – if you take on a business on this kind of scale – if you are making enough money to take away a profit immediately.

“Running the tea room is a lot harder than we thought it was going to be. It takes a lot more of your time than you expect,” says Jane.

“Even though we open at 10am, we have to be here at 7.30am to do all the preparation. But, ultimately, it’s much more satisfying because we make all the decisions.”

Jane, especially, is a lot happier in the tea room than she was in front of the blackboard.

“When I was a teacher I was doing two or three hours of school work a night and working at least one day at the weekend. Now it’s great, once I am home that’s it, and the only paper work I have to do is the accounts once a fortnight.”

She adds: “My partner found it harder than me to adjust to working at the weekends as he’d always had a Monday to Friday 9-5 job, but we’ve both settled into it now.

Boosting the business

One of the other problems the couple of encountered is that the hotel across the road from the tea room has closed down since they opened, and as a consequence, a lot of their walk-in trade has disappeared.

“We are trying to overcome this by opening regular, set hours every day so people know if they want to come in for a cup of tea they can.

“We’ve also put out lots of chalkboards to advertise ourselves.

“We are trying to be consistent. Even if we sat there in the afternoon and no-one came in – we’ll always stay open. We just have to keep going.”

Jane has also tried to work with the local community to encourage trade through word of mouth.

She says: “We invited the Women’s Institute in for their Christmas lunch and they loved it so much they have already been back. Not only did they have a good time but they’ve told all their friends.

“Sometimes the local community are a lot more important to a business than tourism or passing trade – it’s the locals who will keep you going through the harder winter months,” she states.

Jane admits there are things she would do differently if she could go through the process again – after all, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

“I might be prepared to haggle more for the price of the business. Although this place was a bit of a bargain, we just paid exactly what the previous owner wanted… in hindsight, maybe we could have argued her down a bit more.