Cowshed

WhenI first started my business properly - i.e. I was working in it full time - I didn't really know what I was doing. I mean, I knew about software and the web, and I was confident I could do that bit of it well enough, but I knew nothing about starting, running, and growing a business. Even my years of experience managing teams didn't seem to apply to when it came to employing people.

I've always slept well but within two years of starting the business, I would wake in the dark hours - my rational mind still unconscious, the irrational awake and screaming - and I would worry about the business going under and making people redundant and letting my clients down. And failing.

Within a couple of years after that, I'd begun to get the hang of it, and the business became surer and more successful but I have never lost that familiarity with the fear of it all going tilt. I remember receiving the papers for a client who went into receivership and feeling heartbroken as I saw the figures laid out in front of me. The owner had put nearly a hundred thousand pounds of his money into trying to run his own café.

I had that feeling again, today, when I went round to the Cowshed in Buckshaw Village and found it had closed down. This was my favourite place in Chorley to go and work, somewhere I could have a coffee and concentrate on large pieces of work, my concentration somehow aided by the background noise. 

In a blogpost, I was startled to find the owner had been paying £74,000 a year in rent and rates, all based on promises that the developer had reneged on. Apparently, they have had their planning restrictions overturned and now a Costa will be opening nearby. Not that I think that would have threatened the Cowshed, actually, but the fact that plans to make the area the hub of the village were cancelled probably did sound the death knell.

This kowtowing to business 'needs' really annoys the hell out of me. We've seen something similar in Kendal where the assurances given to local businesses when the K Village retail park was redeveloped were rescinded by the district council's planning department. The burden of the failure of K Village was effectively transferred to the shoulders of Kendal's businesses. This in microcosm is the same thinking that saw the government bail out the banks - as they were "too big to fail" - which quickly returned to profit while the rest of the country was still suffering (unnecessarily) with the government's ill-conceived austerity programme. 

My heart goes out to the Cowshed's owner. "We would like to pass on our sincere thanks to everyone who has supported us over the past 3 years.....I'm sorry that I let you all down." She didn't, of course.