Arena Flowers is based in Park Royal, in West London, an area which has Europe’s largest concentration of businesses; Park Royal is home to over 2000 companies and over 40,000 employees. We chose to base Flowers HQ in Park Royal because of the excellent transport links and great business environment, plus because it’s an awful lot better value than swanky offices in central London (a saving which we can pass on to customers). One of the things we did before we signed up to our lease was to call in on the Park Royal Partnership (PRP). The PRP is a membership organisation founded in 1997 to regenerate and improve the Park Royal estate and Howard Beaumont, the PRP’s Business Development Manager, was incredibly helpful to us when we were setting up, providing employment support, introducing us to Prestat and their luxury hand made chocolates, and arranging for an environmental review of our business. Howard also let us know about a grant available to PRP members to support marketing programmes. Hence the giant cheque, which part-funded the branding of four of our delivery vans. Whilst Park Royal is unusually well supported as a result of the number of businesses based there, most areas of the UK have similar government-backed schemes and equivalent funding opportunities.

2. The London Development Agency

A case in point is the London Development Agency (LDA). They have a far wider remit than the PRP, and can support businesses based across the Greater London area. The LDA has recently been dragged into some tough PR to-ing and fro-ing as part of London’s recent mayoral election. We steer clear of politics on this blog but we’re pleased to say that our experience of the LDA has been overwhelmingly positive. In fact, without the support of David B and James S at the LDA, who helped us secure a “Selective Finance For Investment in England” grant, Arena Flowers simply wouldn’t exist. The essence of these government grants (also including the PRP award) is that applicants must demonstrate that the government funding will create new UK jobs. For our LDA grant, we needed to create 35 new jobs plus meet a capital expenditure target. Once that was achieved, the money was released. The level of any grant award is linked directly to the forecast capital expenditure figure (as a percentage of the capex). If I remember rightly, the % is capped at c 20%, in order to avoid healthy government support becoming anti-competitive government subsidy. Notably, the LDA can also assist businesses in the often expensive process of fund-raising through its Access To Finance grant. A fairly comprehensive list of funding available to businesses across the whole UK can be found on the government’s under-publicised Business Link website.

3. Small Firm Loan Guarantee

Arena hasn’t applied for a Small Firm Loan Guarantee (SFLG), though our very helpful Barclays bank manager, Alun, was kind enough to talk us through its ins and outs. The SFLG scheme is designed as a “lender of last resort” option for businesses that can’t secure funding from other sources. It’s a joint scheme by the government and SFLG approved lenders. Loans of up to £250k are available, with 75% of the loan guaranteed by the government and a maximum repayment period of 10 years for any approved loan. Repayment holidays will also be considered. There are certain qualification criteria, relating to age and turnover of the business, and it’s not particularly cheap (interest rate = Bank of England base rate + lender margin (typically 2%) + 2% guarantee fee), but it may well be cheaper than giving away a share of your business. Lenders are reputed to be fairly circumspect about approving such loans, despite the government guarantee, as, if banks are cavalier in their approach and approve dubious loans which fail and the government repeatedly has to pay out under its 75% guarantee, the government’s sense of humour failure is likely to be fairly titanic. Consequently, banks’ credit committees tend to be more interested in keeping on the right side of the British government than in putting additional small loans onto their books, meaning it can be quite hard work getting an SFLG approved. Apparently, the best tactic is to go to your bank’s competitors and say “If you get my SFLG approved, I’ll switch my banking to you”. Banks are reputed to be much more likely to approve an SFLG if they can win new business through the approval.

And that’s it for this post. There are obviously lots of other sources of finance, in particular business angels and venture capitalists / private equity, all of which are well covered on non-flower blogs. But there’s nothing a young business welcomes more than (sort of) free money from the government. Good luck with securing it!

PS if you’ve read this far, 1. well done!, 2 thank you!, and 3. here’s a nice random factoid for you, to reward your diligence. The image in para 3 shows the Bank of England. In my former career I walked past “The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” daily for 5 years but it was only after I moved on that I learnt that it has no adjoining buildings and no windows on the ground floor. The reason? So that any ambitious ne’er-do-wells find it mighty hard to purloin the large piles of gold bullion stored therein. Still, one of my ancestors was Captain Blood, who famously failed to steal the Crown Jewels, so I wouldn’t fancy my chances of success even if the whole ground floor were made of tracing paper. I’m happy sticking to points 1-3 for Arena’s funding and focusing my efforts helping people send beautiful fresh flowers to their nearest and dearest. :)

PPS clearly, we are a flowers business, not a corporate finance house. Please do not rely on the information in this post in your decision making process and do seek your own, professional advice before making any funding decisions!

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Sam mentioned a new arrival for his family last week, and this week it’s the turn of the Arena family to welcome its own new member: our Dutch language site, ArenaBloemen.nl!

Our team spends a huge amount of time and effort securing deals direct with the best growers so that we can ensure great prices, superb quality, ethical sourcing and freshness second to none. Excellence in flowers is the core of what we offer our customers. As part of that mission, we have a facility in Noordwijkerhout (NWH), west of Amsterdam, to receive flowers and to make some of them up into bouquets before they come over to the UK. Our Dutch team is led by Ronald, with Marion, Merel, Ellie and Mariska performing floristry magic crafting the bouquets and with Lyn assisting Ronald with everything else. Clearly, Ronald and Lyn weren’t pretty enough to make the group photo!

Given we already have the NWH facility, it was a natural next step for us to launch a Dutch language site, fulfilling from NWH and sending to the whole of the Netherlands and the Flemish speaking part of Belgium. We’re fairly certain that the quality of the product and the ease of use of the site that we built in the UK will also appeal to customers beyond our little island. Through the Send Flowers To Holland page on our UK site, we’re already sending a number of orders to the Netherlands every day. Now that we have our Dutch business out there, we can obviously guarantee the full “Arena experience” for our Dutch orders placed from the UK. For translation fans, our UK strap line “An experience delivered” becomes “Wij bezorgen emotie” in Dutch!

The project hasn’t been without challenges! Zach, our amazing developer (who built the whole Arena site and all the back end systems that our customers never see), and Sam, our head of design (who makes everything look pretty and shiny (amongst other things)), had to rebuild the whole way the website works so that it could be translated easily and do clever things like handle different VAT rates and different depots and different currencies. PayPal already allows us to accept Euros, but the Dutch also use a payment system called “Ideal” for a lot of their online payments, so we’ve had to integrate that too (it’s not live on the site just yet – we’re still testing it). Squirting orders placed on the Netherlands flowers page on the UK site into the fulfilment order table for the NWH depot is not easy either (that’s still in the testing phase on our development site) .

We’ve also had to spend a lot of time researching the language, with Ronald and his team, and with Elsa, another native Dutch speaker, to ensure that we are set up well for the search engines and online marketing. Adarsh and Stan, who run Arena’s marketing, have, for example, been spending a lot of time working out which keyword combinations we want to be top for in Google NL’s search. Bloemen bestellen in Amsterdam, Nederlandse Bloemist and Bloemen bezorgen anyone?! And of course, we’ve been giving a lot of thought to the right type of products for this market as, naturally, there are some differences in national tastes.

Zach actually lives in New York, 6 hours behind Holland, but this presents far fewer problems than one might imagine. The pictures below shows the moment last week when, with Steve and I sitting outside our hotel connected to the web via wireless broadband and with Zach in his apartment in Brooklyn talking to us via Skype, we put the site, hosted in Wembley, London, live. It’s amazing how small the world is, when you’ve got a latpop and broadband at your fingertips!

And finally, the point of it all. Our first orders. Here’s Ronald with our first five orders for delivery in the Netherlands. Not a huge number to begin with but then this was a soft launch. We’re shooting for 50 a day within three months. Time will tell!

PS It wasn’t all work and no play. While over in the orange country, we also got to sample a quite extraordinary Dutch musical phenomenon called “The Toppers” (in Amsterdam’s Arena Stadium no less!) plus we went on a 200km moped ride around the canals and roads of the famous green country outside Amsterdam. Beautiful and lush…and very very flat!

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Anyway, here are lots of pictures of our adventures in the country that gave us our favourite flower, the tulip. The post will be about embarrassing pictures and the amazing Dutch flower industry and will feature no blatant attempts to sell our loyal readers red roses, designer flowers, birthday bouquets or anything else. Oh. :)

One caveat: Sam, who deprived the world of the colour orange last month, is our resident camera wizard but sadly he wasn’t match fit so couldn’t come to NL. Therefore you will have to make do with the less, erm, professional photography of myself and Ronald. Let the shaky-handed, mobile-phone photo-montage begin…

It was an early start. To compound the pain, both Mariusz, our head of operations, and Steve, our finance guru and inspiration, were trapped inside a yellow submarine, looking scarily hard for two guys in the flower industry.

The auction we were visiting, the Westland auction, is the largest flower auction in the world. The auction is built on three levels, with the total buildings area covering the equivalent of 180 football pitches. Over eight million cut flower stems from 2,250 suppliers from around the world pass through Westland every day, on ten different auction clocks. Westland even has its own hairdresser to cater for the countless people working at Westland. Sadly neither Ronald nor myself has much hair left with which to trouble the hairdresser. Fortunately, the camera blur spares us our blushes here (click to enlarge if you must!).

Here Ronald wows Steve and Mariusz with the true floweriness of it all:

The flowers in Holland are bought in a process known as a Dutch Auction. Sounds simple but, in fact, it’s a very difficult game of chicken which is not for the faint hearted. 100 men and women, who have generally got out of bed at 0330 in the morning and who are monitoring the other flower auctions simultaneously on laptops, sit in the “tribune” intently eyeballing a clock (between Steve and Ronald in the picture – click to enlarge) that rapidly ticks down the price for the current lot of flowers. The first person to press the button on their desk stops the clock and wins the current lot of flowers. That person pays the price showing at the moment they stopped the clock.

If they stop the clock too early and pay too much, they’re likely to be on the receiving end of hoots and jeers from their gigantic countrymen (the average Dutchman is 6 foot 1 tall, a full 3 inches taller than the average Brit!). If they leave their bids too late, they can miss out on all the lots and may leave the auction empty handed. Oh, and if no one stops the clock before it reaches zero, the unsold flowers are incinerated. Tough crowd.

What kind of supermen could possibly do this job? Well, for starters Arena’s own Ronald – “the man who never sleeps”. Big Ron is ably assisted by Gerard Heemskerk and Jan Durieux, two Dutch legends of the flower business and, thankfully, friends of Arena Flowers. Between the three of them they outchicken and outpsyche the rest of Holland to buy Arena’s flowers across ten auction clocks whilst the rest of the world sleeps. Like the special forces, their images must be blurred to keep their identities secret but here is a pixellated version of them (I really need a better camera phone!). NB Gerard also finds time to be honorary chairman of local football team, VVSB, which meant we were treated like royalty when we were with him.

We then went on to see two of the biggest rose farms in the world, to negotiate a better rate for Valentine’s flowers for Arena’s customers (we’re actually considering boycotting roses altogether for Valentine’s Day, in protest at the prices, though that may be commercial suicide). One farm was quite old school and the second was super hi-tech. In the latter, hundreds of square metres of flowers were continuously moved around, bit by bit, by the equivalent of a NASA mission control centre. All whilst meeting the highest ethical and sustainability standards. Superb.

Next – an important meeting to discuss Florisoft, the market leading software application for flower nerds such as ourselves. Important, but also very very boring for non flower nerds. So instead, we will draw a veil over that with a three question quiz:

1. Look at this picture of Mariusz in a 400 year old pub in Amsterdam and spot what’s wrong with the picture:

Didn’t get it? The man behind him has a green moustache. Of course. Don’t we all?

2. What about this one? What happened next?

Correct. Steve, Ronald and Super Mario were spotted by a Hollywood casting agent and asked to star in the new movie: Reservoir Dogs vs Quadrophenia.

3. Can you spot Arena hide and seek champion, Steve?

(My 1/16th Dutch ancestry is clearly not helpful in this game!)

There was much more and it was a very busy weekend of work and stupendously early mornings. We will, as a result, be bringing even better flower knowledge, expertise and excellence to the UK market…if you have any questions about anything to do with flowers or the auctions, please feel free to email ronald @ arenaflowers.com. Meantime, I’ll finish off our post with one final tale. At the end of our time in Holland, Ronald decided to initiate us into wakeboarding. Primarily, in my opinion, to humiliate me utterly. :)

Here I am, innocently happy, moments before being dragged head first at Mach 1 through the largest reservoir in Holland. I’ll never be thirsty again. :O

However, Ronald, like Jan and Gerard, is a truly class act and has been a key man in helping Arena bring fantastic flowers to UK flower lovers. He buys the best flowers in the world at the best flower prices. He is the reason Arena was the first UK florist to sell FFP-accredited flowers. He works all the hours that God sends on behalf of our great customers with never a word of complaint. And now we know that in his spare time he is moonlighting not only as a doting father and husband but also as James Bond.

Holland, The Netherlands, Jan, Gerard and Ronald…we salute you all!

PS but don’t milk it! No one likes a smart a***!

:)

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So recently, when we were just about to kick off recruitment for an accounts assistant, we were very happy to field a call from the gumfolk themselves, asking us if we wanted to try out a new feature.

“What’s the feature?”, we asked, and the gummers pointed us to this listing, featuring two highly amusing and idiotic students in Oxford advertising for a flat mate. The feature is the ability to add a video to your listing. Hardly revolutionary, but pretty neat.

Why do it? The theory is that it should ensure that, having viewed the video, people will better understand you as a business and then decide that yes, they think they definitely want to apply for the job or no way, Arena looks rubbish, I’ll look elsewhere thanks very much. It sounded like an excellent idea and good fun to boot, so we got it all set up and before we knew it Ray, from Strip Studios,

and his ace sidekick Nico

arrived at Flowers HQ to film the video.

Given we were recruiting for someone to work with Steve, it would have been handy for him to be part of the video, but sadly he was on holiday that week. So instead we did a speedy guided tour of Flowers HQ showing all the key parts and people at Arena.

So without further ado, here’s the video that lens-wizard Ray produced:

Thoughts:
* It was great fun to do and a welcome change from the day to day for the whole team.
* We got over 100 CVs for the job, of which 60 were strong.
* We interviewed 18 people, all of whom had seen the video and found it useful in understanding Arena. They appeared to have got the message that we were trying to convey; that Arena is young, fast growing and fun.
* It was felt there was too little about the actual job and responsibilities in the vid, so we’d do more of that next time.

Was the video worth doing? Yes it was. It definitely relaxed interviewees and set discussions off on a good footing. On a practical level, it also saved us time, as we had to do less explanation about the business.

Did we fill the role? Yes we did! Take a bow, Francis, Arena’s new book-keeper. Today is Francis’ first day and, typical of the spirit of versatility that is a must at Arena, Francis is not going to spend his first day ploughing through numbers but out delivering flowers with Steve across London – we had a giant order for 450 bouquets come in recently and, at such times, it’s all hands to the pumps. We wouldn’t have it any other way!

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I had a job at the time (at eBay UK), but, having agreed in principle with Steve that we should set up Arena, I then had to work out if it was a feasible project or just optimistic pub chat. Unfortunately, I couldn’t simply say to my boss “I’m off to America to spend a week learning about setting up an online business, see you next week!”. So I needed a smokescreen.

My trip to Jaipur was already booked. Yet I needed to go to America. The answer was obvious. Regretfully, I cancelled my ticket to Jaipur and booked one to San Francisco instead, feeling 1) like a rubbish friend and 2) guilty about the white lie to my eBay colleagues.

I went with Steve to meet up with Pete Flint, one of the first employees of lastminute.com, who subsequently set up the brilliant US real-estate website, Trulia.com. We also went to see Alex Schultz who, at age twenty-nothing, had already proven himself to be an absolute genius in online marketing and site structure – if you want a cocktail recipe, or instructions on making paper airplanes, you’ll find him impressively high on Google’s search rankings. SEO magic.

It was the right decision – we came back with our heads full of ideas and brimming with new-found web marketing know-how, determined to forgo our 9-5 jobs and forge ahead with Arena. Unfortunately, what we gleaned from these gurus meant that I missed out on a great friend’s wedding, including the highlight of Ash riding a white stallion to the ceremony – I’m assured that that sight alone was worth the trip.

The strangest thing was going straight from Heathrow to eBay HQ and rushing to my desk to Google timezones before anyone spoke to me (should I be jet-lagged and if so, in which direction (tired or wide awake?)?). And then going to lonely planet to dig up a couple of stories about Jaipur so, if asked, I’d have some good chat about where I was supposed to have been for the preceding week. All very silly really.

Still wracked with guilt, I recently I sent Ash and Julia my favourite bouquet, saying “Sorry I didn’t make the wedding!”. My luck was in – I happened to send them on the exact day of Ash and Julia’s wedding anniversary. Score! They were delighted, feeling that I’d done a great job in making up for my absence by remembering their anniversary a year on. Here’s hoping they don’t read this post. :)

I certainly wish I’d been there. Congrats, Ash and Julia – Arena owes you one.

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No sir! We spent the weekend installing a gigantic fridge the size of a squash court in our warehouse. Here’s the space we had to fill (that’s Arena’s Dutch masterpiece, Ronald, waving).

We originally thought (hoped) that this might be a “roll out of bed, turn up and supervise”-type occasion, fully replete with serious nodding and delegation-style behaviour. Rather than the “this fridge appears to be made of razor wire, it’s raining and slippery and no, we haven’t got any titanium gloves or supernatural strength with which to hold on to it before it slices our skin from our hands and rends the tendons from our bones” wake up call that we actually enjoyed.

Just to add some Monty Python style absurdity to the situation we happened to have the world’s favourite Irish leg waggler’s Rolls Royce Phantom parked up in our warehouse at the time. Our landlord is an amazing, larger than life character and his businesses happen to deal with lots of snazzy celebs. We agreed, somewhat foolhardily, to allow the gigantic (and very ungreen) motor to be parked in our warehouse over the weekend, prior to going to service. Car thieves please note: it’s not there any more, so please don’t burgle us.

So, we unloaded the giant fridge, sinews straining and eyes popping, with the added challenge of trying not to ding an inordinately expensive car parked right in the way.

Anyway, enough blah blah blah…here are our pics of getting our fridge in on a rainy but very entertaining Saturday nine months ago…

Stage 1: Impressed.
The fridge man is here, in his big truck. He must have loads of umpa lumpa style helpers to unload that giant wagon of his. The whole thing is full of fridge…they couldn’t have sent him alone…could they?

Stage 2: Denial.
Hmmm. He appears to be alone. Perhaps the helpers will come out soon. His name is “Klaas” after all. How could he let us down with a name like that?!

Stage 3: Gratefully received diversionary Rolls Royce (why isn’t there always one?)
Our physical torment and non-manliness are not things to dwell on at this stage, so instead we happily introduce the car we really really hope we didn’t dent.

Stage 4: Achievement
We made it! We emptied the whole trailer of fridge!

Stage 5: Self-awareness
Well, actually, he did most of the hard work, even without any umpa lumpa help. And he had time not only to make a phone call, but also to roll a cigarette. And he didn’t even appear to be bleeding. Klaas is well named.

Stage 6: Cover up
No one must ever know. We must always tell tall tales of how we unloaded the fridge ourselves, in a meteor shower. Klaas? Who is this “Klaas” of whom you speak?

A brilliant day, and one we shall always remember.

Our flowers now sit happily in 6.4 degrees Celsius environmental optimality every day, comfortable as can be. No baking hot florist’s window for our flowers. No sir. That’s why our flowers live longer and are the freshest flowers possible. Thanks be to Klaas.

Here’s the finished fridge, up and running:

Our only regret? That we never had that game of squash in it. Now that it’s stuffed full of flowers every day, we’ll never have that chance again.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

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