Errands

Encouraged to write another blog, I opened a box. And found this!

It was 1987. I was hanging around waiting to go to Warwick to do an MBA. My friend J was pregnant on maternity leave. Neither of us were (are!) very good at doing nothing.

J had lived for a while in Saudi Arabia and cleverly saw a gap in the market for a business that would be attractive to expats abroad who found it difficult to organise things in the UK. It was, after all, the time of NO laptops, mobile phones, internet, email, or Google.

We brainstormed ‘delivering gifts’, ‘arranging property viewings’, even ‘picking children up at airports and transporting them to school’ Essentially it was, you name it, we’ll get it done!

We called ourselves Errands (good eh?), designed a folder containing order forms which we sent to J’s contacts who pinned them on notice boards in offices in the Middle East. And we waited……

There was one order if I remember correctly. For a hamper. I delivered it with friend M as J now had a new baby. It was snowing and our trip to the Cotswolds almost ended in disaster when the car skidded into a ditch.

We eventually arrived, without the aid of satnav, at the house of an elderly woman who invited us in for a cup of tea. She regaled us with stories of her son living many miles away. The son who’d ordered the hamper. She thought we knew him!

A lot of effort went into sourcing special goods for the hamper but there was no doubt that the recipient enjoyed the chat most of all.

Perhaps there was another order. I don’t remember. Errands fizzled out and then in 1994 along came Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Ha! If only we’d thought big!

Years later another friend and I got together to cater private dinner parties.

They were delicious affairs which resulted in a gross profit of approximately £20 per event.

Dragon’s Den is definitely not for me!