Getting Your Hopes Up – Creating My Chilli Sauce Brand – Part 4

Getting your hopes up when promised great things can leave an entrepreneur down and out in no time. Don’t get emotionally attached to great promises until they materialize. This is why.

Today Was an Interesting Day

Early May 2016

Today was an interesting day. I’m playing with the big fish now and feel like I’m in way over my head. There is just so much to learn. I spent some time working out how many bottles of chilli sauce I need to make and bottle per hour to deal with an order or five thousand. It worked out to be 50 bottles per hour, 5 hours a day, 5 days a week! Now if you are familiar with making and bottling your own hot sauce then you will know that making this amount of sauce would take some serious effort and time.

I had an interesting conversation with a fellow chilli sauce fanatic and brewer at one of my favorite restaurants. In summary he made me realize that I needed to out source the process of bottling and perhaps even the making of the hot sauce! A few phone calls and meetings later I found a local factory to bottle and make the sauce.

There is still mounds of red tape to overcome and the big boys are breathing down my neck for accreditation from the factory I intend using. Never a dull moment in the hot sauce game. One valuable lesson that I’m learning is that sticking by those that do and love what you do is a very powerful thing. There is support and so much information out there if one is just willing to help, share and ask questions. Louis and his concept of The Chilli Revolution will be a great success because of the agreement that we all have to stick together and help each other.

Visiting the Factory

Tomorrow I’m off to visit the factory that will be bottling and making SPAIS Chilli Sauce, while stopping by at a new spice supplier and then a little visit to do some research and pick up another product that I am developing for another business that funnily enough ties directly into this one. Never mind my full time day job that pays the bills while I develop all these ventures and my after hours iPad music lessons and trumpet teaching. Did I mention that I compose music too…

The life of an entrepreneur is never dull. I live with my fast forward button permanently wedged down and multiple projects happening at once. I enjoy it but the hundred hours that I seem to create in one day never  seem to be enough.

Fast forward to September 2017

As I said in the beginning of this blog “getting your hopes up when promised great things can leave an entrepreneur down and out in no time. Don’t get emotionally attached to great promises until they materialize”.

Turns out of all that excitement and hard work that the “big boys” that I was dealing with were not so big after all. They were lovely and their intentions great but they could not pull it off.

Since May 2016 I have had many great offers. I have had distributors call me up urgently wanting to distribute my product around South Africa, only to never hear from them again. Yes I did try call back (several times). I also sent emails and messages.

This also goes for shops that shops that also show great interest in stocking my product then ignore every email and phone call there after. There is one thing you need to be to become a successful chilli sauce company owner and that is resilient.

On a Positive Note

I have had some real deal exporters show interesting in exporting my sauces to about 30 countries. It seems to be a very lengthy process this whole export thing. I watched one of my mates go through it. It cost him a bucket and took about ten months from the time the exporters actually signed his products. The great thing about exporting is that it pays big. The money needed to get it off the ground is also big but the returns are bigger.

I no longer get emotionally attached and over excited about these great offers. I will definately get very excited anf do some mega celebrating when my export deal is signed off.

Hold thumbs and shoot positive vibes my way.

Thanks for reading.

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