Blog Post 1: From Sir Richard Branson’s Accountant to Local Yarn Shop Owner

It’s funny what inspires one to take action.  Take today for example.  It took today’s curbside clusterf*#k! to make me finally write my first Blog post for Tribe. 

Ok, that’s not technically true, I have drafted some “adding-value, it’s-good-for-your-website, engage-your-customers type pieces, but I haven’t hit POST on any of them yet.

Because, let’s face it, if you really want that info, it’s already out there in Google-land in droves.  I know this because I consulted the Googledom for back up on my “Health Benefits of Knitting” and “Natural Fibres vs Synthetics” articles which I have yet to publish because they’re naff.

So here is official post number one.  Which was inspired today by this episode:

I won this gorgeous hunk of sodding-heavy shop counter on eBay for mucho pesos when I might have gotten caught up in the bidding war with d***s (127).  Nevertheless, I was wicked proud of myself for snagging a unique and super cool retro piece of retail history.

Calamity No 1 occured when Mr Seller texted me to say that Vinton-the-man-with-the-van (who might be a little stoned) had dropped my shop counter and the corner was buggered.  Bugger.  Ok, well I was going for vintage-industrial, so…

I hadn’t banked on Calamity No 2:

I call this piece “When The Goddamn Furniture Won’t Fit Through The Door, And The Hubbie Is Away, And I’m Not The Most Patient Girl In The World, And The Russian Has A Handsaw”. 

Catchy, right?

What the heck as any of this got to do with how I became a Yarn Shop owner? 

Well, here’s the thing.  I have an ENTJ personality type, as displayed above.  This means that I really like to get shit done.  And I don’t like to wait. And I leap in energetically with both feet.  And in the end, it was this trait that got me past my intense fear of failure and got me to drop the safe and lucrative world of Accounting for the unpredictable and crazy world of entrepreneurship.

You’re going to run a wha??

Rewind a few months… We moved back to the UK when Hurricane Irma decided to shred a large portion of the Windward Island in the Caribbean back in September 2017.  We left England’s sunny shores in search of adventure in 2004, and had been living on beautiful Virgin Gorda, a teeny-tiny island in the British Virgin Islands for the previous 5 years. We had had every intention of returning to VG after dropping Indi off to school in London in September and the empty-nesting-consolation-trip to Hawaii and Fiji in October. 

Well, Irma had other plans.

(photo credit: www.travelerbase.com)

And it’s not like I hadn’t been wingeing about needing a fresh challenge, and being bored with paradise (“careful what you wish for”??).  Actually, Mother Nature really helped with rearranging priorities and life-stocktake, and we both realized that London is where we now wanted to be (despite having vowed not to come back 14 years earlier).

Whenever I have a big decision to make, I do the Rocking Chair test: I picture myself rocking on the porch at age 88 and think of what will I be glad I did/didn’t do. It never fails.

What we would regret the most is missing out on seeing our only child enjoying this crazy new chapter in his life  – Harrow Football matches, singing weird Churchill songs, wearing a dress on stage… He will be at Harrow for 5 years, so we need to be close-by for minimum 5 years.  Okay then.

I’ve been an accountant since 1999.  That’s 19 years, not including 3 years reading Accounting at university.  Given that I never wanted to be one in the first place, I’d say that was long enough in the land of debits and credits!  What to do instead…

We spent a couple of months assessing and making offers on businesses to buy/start in the UK.  It was after the “pretty and quaint established tea rooms” rejected our 2^ndoffer that I sat in bed with my needles a-clacking and grumbled to Darren that I now won’t have a nice place for running knit nights.  Oh, and wouldn’t it be great if I was one of those people who had a burning passion and knew what they wanted to do with their days.  Well slap my forehead and call me a D’uh!!

Owning a Yarn Shop was on my Bucket List, of course.  But it was filed way under W for “When you are retired, and have made your millions”, because no one actually makes a real living doing this, plus our bank account has seen better days, and our son has chosen to go to the most expensive school on the planet.  Right? 

Well, something from my previous 12 months of travelling the globe with Mr Anthony Robbins, must have stuck, because Sally-Subconscious sat up loud & proud and screamed at me “LIMITING BELIEF, BITCH!!”.

I don’t do shying away from challenges. I don’t do pussying out.  And the thought of buying yarn and espousing the virtues of knitting for a living makes me deliriously happy.  AND Irma-the-Mega had penned in red and double-underlined for me that life is in fact too darn short.
 

Stay tuned for Episode 2 where I chat a bit about the challenges and joys of learning how to retail!