I'm Employed as a General Manager in the Electronics Recycling Industry

by Jo

My current situation is that I'm employed as a General Manager in the electronics recycling industry at the moment but because of the recession I've reduced my working days to a 3 day a week (working Mon, Tue and Wed). Going into the catering industry is something I've thought about for a long time as I'm very ambitious and driven to succeed.

I actually went to look at a shop a couple of years ago as a potential butty shop but I bottled it. Problem always has been that I earn £30k a year and I just can't give my job up and take the risk because of my financial commitments/family, children etc.

The fact that I'm now working only 3 days a week has given me a bit of a kick up the backside and I thought as a 'meet in the middle' solution, it would be a good idea to either get myself a catering trailer (and find a pitch) or the option of a jiffy truck and go out and sell food.

I have the personality and drive to push things if I go for the latter option but at the moment (because I can't give up the day job fully just yet) I would only be able to go out on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

I have therefore got natural concerns about Mon, Tues and Weds as when going out on a jiffy truck I imagine that businesses will come to rely on you to bring their food and it doesn't look good to let them down 3 days a week!

It would therefore seem that the sensible option would be find a pitch and go for a trailer as it wouldn't be as bad by not being there for 3 days, people coming to you instead of other way around, but there are obviously similar concerns with the missing days as with jiffy truck.

I even thought that to start me off I would prepare food at home and take out in baskets but I don't think this is going to be on a big enough scale for me and I'm stuck with the problem of keeping food warm when taking it out in my car. I want to aim for a professional image, quality product and achieving a high turnover as soon as possible, goodness me the other job has to go!

I am a bit of an entrepreneur, completely desperate to get out of the rat race and make full use of my business skills to line my own pockets. I've got experience in sales, marketing, financial planning, employment law, and supplier negotiation.

I have been droning on for about 4 years now that I'm going to work for myself, I've done some employment law consultancy work (on the side) and even dabbled in buying and selling mobile phones but the consultancy work bores me to tears and the profits in phones is just not there nowadays.

I'm now drifting close to failing my personal goal of having my own business by the time I'm 35 (I turned 35 in January!).

I love to cook, I make the best bacon butties, I live in Stoke on Trent where Staffordshire Oatcakes are a speciality and I would push the Oatcakes side - they are just delicious. I am just passionate about hard work, customer satisfaction and making money so I'm hoping that mobile catering will be perfect for me.

I hope you find my story of interest and any advice you can offer is greatly appreciated David.

Your guide is great and please keep sending the updates.

Kind regards

Jo