So, what shall we do now then?

What shall we do now then is the question we asked after selling our newsagents business and still not having enough money to retire. And after 6 months of living off our capital we needed to establish an income somehow, somewhere, and sometime soon. At 60, finding a job was not really an option.

A friend suggested we take on running a pub. Now, neither of us had worked in the licensed trade before but nevertheless we researched and found that pubs were available, tenancies for as little as £10,000 from Elgoods Brewery at Wisbech. We contacted them and were offered a 3 -day course in Pub-keeping. We took this up and Elgoods, satisfied with our potential, provided a list of premises that they would be happy for us to take on. We looked at several, but in the meantime had decided that our venture would have to be a freehold property, and our ambition had expanded from a basic pub to a hotel with a full on-licence, restaurant and accommodation.

Time went by whilst we travelled around the country. Blackpool to Cornwall to the Isle of Wight viewing businesses in our price range. All of this of course was costing, draining our capital even further. Every pound spent brought us closer to the edge, increased the risk of running out of reserves and required more nerve and a tighter grip on a surging panic and an exquisite sour climax. But It was an interesting exciting adventure giving us insight into the industry because we usually had to bed and breakfast as we searched, and the time cost did reveal issues to resolve. One issue being the matter of the kitchen and the food. We are both vegetarians so could we compromise and cook meat? However finally, and at the end of that search and think rainbow, we found the Hotel Continental, Harwich. It had all our specification requirements.

So, one miserable Sunday morning in January Blossom found herself knocking on the hotel door to be greeted by a large growling Alsation. It looked closed from where I was sitting in the car across the road, but eventually the manager came, and after some preliminaries explaining our interest kindly showed us round. We were not impressed by what we saw. But by now we recognised our choices were limited and this was probably the best we could hope for, after all, all it needed was some customers and TLC. Consequently, we took the plunge and made an offer even though we only had half the cash.

Raising the other half of the necessary money wasn’t as easy as we expected. Accounts supplied to us were questionable and took months to acquire. One bank said, “Not in Dovercourt.” And another, a building society, found it easy to turn us down on the grounds suggested by the 15-year-old on work experience from the local comprehensive “No experience of the trade”. It was July before the deal was finally done and we moved in.

Of course, we had stayed at the hotel several times in the months between first contact and getting the keys. The idea being we could gain a bit of experience, meet the people before taking over and as well try to speed up the process. Each time we stayed we were put in room 10 and each time, we learnt later, the outgoing owner activated his rent-a-crowd network to fill the bar during our visits. Clearly, he must have thought we were absolutely stupid and couldn’t read the obvious, the fact plain to see that the business wasn’t working and didn’t realise we were going ahead with the purchase regardless of any off-putting observations and helpful advice given by his staff and local customers. The man didn’t understand buying a business at the bottom, a business performing badly, possibly at its worst, could be very gainful. We believed buying at the bust end meant scope to recover to success whilst buying at the boom end could easily mean nowhere else to go but down to failure.

To demonstrate our commitment, we actually paid for some draught beer to be sure the bar stayed open during a bank holiday prior to our moving in.