If ever you feel up to it one day
@StewartR I would be interested to hear your story about your business and how it came about
How it came about is the easy bit.
Some time around early 2007 I finally persuaded my wife that we should go on holiday to Svalbard to see polar bears. I can't remember exactly how I managed that. I probably threatened to scream and scream until I was sick, or something like that. Anyway she agreed. But it's my project, she said, so I'd have to do all the work to make it happen. That seemed quite reasonable to me.
Now I'm not and never have been a serious photographer - I'm just a bloke with a camera - but obviously I wouldn't want to go there without being able to come back with some photos of polar bears. I remember being quite disappointed with the photos I got when we had gone to Kenya on safari a few years previously, and I knew I'd want something longer and better than my 18-200mm lens. So I went into the big Jessops store in New Oxford Street, just near where I worked at the time, to see what my options were. And I absolutely fell in love with the Canon 100-400mm.
Trouble was, I couldn't justify buying a lens like that because I didn't think I'd have any use for it beyond this trip. So I asked the bloke in Jessops whether it was possible to hire these things. He looked at his shoes and mumbled that I could try Calumet. So I did. I distinctly remember that to hire a 100-400 for 2 weeks would have cost me £384, which I thought seemed quite a lot for a lens which at the time cost about £950 to buy. I remember being frustrated that their list price was much lower, but it didn't include VAT and it didn't include the (compulsory) damage waiver. (And I would still have had to arrange my own insurance against loss or theft.) I remember that they didn't seem to be advertising any kind of delivery service, and there didn't seem to be any way of reserving in advance. Plus of course they'd want a big deposit. It seemed that the only way to hire was to go into Calumet on the day before my holiday of a lifetime, plonk down my £384 + £950 deposit, and hope they had one in stock. If they didn't, I'd be stuffed.
So anyway the Svalbard plans hit the buffers.
(Please don't misunderstand me: I'm not knocking Calumet. I'm sure they provide an excellent service to their target customers. It's just that their targets are working professionals, not blokes with cameras like me.)
Now about this time I "met" Roger Cicala on the internet. Roger runs the fabulously successful LensRentals business in the USA. It was much smaller then, of course, but still it seemed to be offering something that didn't seem to be available in the UK - online reservations, nationwide delivery, sensible prices, and no deposits. I couldn't help wondering why something like that couldn't work here, especially because delivery is so much easier in a small country. Also at this time I had fallen out of love with the job I'd been doing for 22 years, so I was unusually receptive to the idea of having a change. (In retrospect I guess this was my mid-life crisis.)
I got talking to Roger, and he was incredibly generous with his time and his advice. I don't mind admitting that a lot of the things we do at LensesForHire are based on LensRentals. Around this time I also "met" Mark Gurevich who had set up BorrowLenses in California. By a fortunate coincidence we had a holiday to California coming up, so I arranged to meet up with Mark in San Francisco. He was also very generous with his time and advice, and showed us the operational side of his business.
Back from California I was convinced that there was an opportunity to set up a business in the UK, running along the same lines as LensRentals and BorrowLenses. I crunched some numbers and it looked like it could be profitable if the market was there, and my research suggested that the market might indeed be there.
I think my wife could see that I was unhappy in my job, so she agreed to let me try this as a sideline. I must have been very motivated because if all happened very fast. Despite doing it in my spare time, within 4 months I had written a business plan; set up a limited company; engaged a lawyer to write me a contract; researched and devised solutions to issues such as packaging, transportation, credit card payments, and insurance; built a website; bought 35 Canon lenses; and gone live.
I remember how excited I was when I took our first order, and when I took two orders in a day for the first time. I remember how amazed I was when I got two pings from the website - two orders - within 5 minutes whilst in a taxi to Heathrow for a holiday in Dubai. (The last holiday I would have for ages, as it turned out.) We had four orders that day, which was astonishing.
That's basically how it came about. After 3 months I started stocking Nikon kit as well as Canon. After 5 months I gave up my real job to run LensesForHire full time. After 8 months I took on my first part-time employee. After 12 months my initial investment of a manageable and affordable £25k had grown into - well, basically all the money we had, plus quite a lot we didn't have. The business had totally taken over our home by this time, so I had to move into an office and I took on my first full-time employee.
I still don't know what on earth possessed me to do this. I'm the least proactive person I know. I had basically had continuous employment for 20 years in a well paid job which I was very very good at. I had absolutely no entrepreneurial drive. I had no interest in working for myself and no concept of what owning and running my own business would entail. I must have been mad.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if my mid-life crisis had gone in a different direction. Maybe take a year off work, buy a Harley Davidson and ride it from New York to Los Angeles, or something like that. It doesn't sound particularly stupid by comparison.
hello again freedom!
