Lisa the Lotus - Part 2

Ok, so I got the car home and was pretty sure I'd made a BIG mistake. I rang the dealer and asked if I  could give the car back. He suggested that "I live with it for a bit and then see where we get to...". If he had someone in the the wings who was willing to take the car for anything like the price I paid then that would have been the end of the story.

BUT

Lotus' are strange beasties. They are horrid to drive one day and marvellous to drive the next. And for good or bad, I had an amazing few drives over the next week or so. Roof off, sunshine, empty English 'B' roads, that's where a really sporty Lotus is at it's best.

So I decided to 'sort the car out'...

Although the first owner had spent a King's ransom getting the car to full S190 spec, not much had been spent in 'snagging' and making it nicer to live with.

I very quickly got to know Barry Ely in Maldon (not far from where I live). He really is Mr Lotus and knows pretty much everything about them. He's an ex racer and is a mine of information. We agreed to crack on with a partial restoration:

Step1: Make the car nicer to be in!

(a) Change the smelly nasty old red 5 point harnesses with some new Black Schroth harnesses - plus pads Madam? £500

(b) Get some sound insulation on the fire wall and seal the rear window properly...

(c) The muffler on the car was a ordinary Elise item, not a Sport 190 item. The exhaust tips were all sooty, so the engine was rich as hell. So, fit a new Janspeed exhaust and reduce the back pressure a bit.

(d) Give the car a service - engine and gearbox oil change plus all the usual jazz.

So, first the first bill was nicely into 4 figures - BUT the car was much nicer to drive. I went for a 50 mile run. Lisa and I were bonding.

Still not happy about the handling - something wasn't right and the car didn't stop properly. AND it was
making a terrible whine form the engine which can only be the cambelt - oh dear...

Polished and with new belts!

The Story of Lisa the Lotus - Part 1

Goodbye and Hello

In March of this year I sold my beloved Porsche 996 Turbo. Even typing it now makes me feel sad. It was a funny sort of an un-special thing most of the time but those 996 turbos are true monsters and mine made a deep impression on me.

I sold it for 3 reasons:

1.    It was bleeding me white with maintenance bills

2.    I barely used it – it became a 3^rd car and was used for about 3,000 miles per year

3.    The market was dropping quite quickly and it made no sense to keep hold of an expensive to own but barely used super car which is depreciating faster than a race horse with an STD.

4.    Oh and I wanted to do track days and doing track days in a 996 turbo can be a very expensive exercise (that’s 4 reasons).

I was going to buy a Porsche 944 Turbo S. I love those cars. I owned a red one with cream leather (very 1980s) back in the day and really really loved it. The trouble is that many of the these amazing machines have become so cheap that the are own by the ‘wrong sorts’ Wrong sorts are those who refuse to spend £1000+ per year maintaining a car worth less than £6000, when they should clearly lavish money on the car through devotion to the art.

I must be a wrongish sort too because I added up the cost of sorting out an ok-ish car to my ‘happy’ standard and got to £4,000 before I even looked at engine rebuilds. Crazy money pit idea. All of these cars are old and have big miles…

So that was out. 

The next idea was an ordinary water cooled 2003 Porsche 996. These are smashing cars to drive and they’re great value. They were not best made Porsches ever and getting one to track day spec would have cost £5,000 without breaking sweat. Oh and knowing my luck I would have gotten one with cylinder bore wear or intermediate shaft problems (nice cheap sort of engine out / engine in bits job to fix). See 1^st paragraph on reasons for selling the 996 Turbo

So that was out.

Then I had the nostalgic idea of buying an aircooled Porsche 964 from the late 80s/early 90s. Great. The trouble is that a lot of people who owned these the first time round (I’ve had 2) now want them again. Not that many were made and so guess what is happening to the prices? Yep, sky high. Oh and they are getting old now and old cars need lots of maintenance to get them A1. Oh and everything on a 964 takes ages to do so the bills are always high (See 1^st paragraph on reasons for selling the 996 Turbo).

So that was out.

Then I decided to become a heretic and started looking at Lotus. Maybe the menopause is coming and I’m getting hormonal or something but these looked good.

I liked the idea of the Exige: Toyota engine, world class handling, quick, simple design. Very striking design, solid residuals. All perfect except that they were (and are) outside my £15,000 budget.

So that was out.

So then I looked at the Elise. I discarded the Elise Series 1 as being too basic and mickey mouse. The Elise S2 R looked perfect but then I saw one driving by and thought. That was soooo boring. Is that it?

All the cool ones like the super-charged car or the Sports Racer (me likey that one) were way out of the price range.

So that was out as well.

But then I saw an advert on Pistonheads for an Elise S1 Sport 190. Not a genuine factory Lotus one but a standard car which had been back to Lotus (and others) to have the sport 190 bits added. A King’s ransom had been spent doing this by the owner (It would have been MUCH cheaper the buy the genuine article in the first place but perhaps he couldn’t get one from Lotus – they were hard to come by). There were still a few things that had not been upgraded to S190 spec but I thought: “That’s no big deal, a couple of brake disks and a front anti-roll bar isn’t going to break the bank” –

So I agreed the price with the dealer and collected the car a couple of weeks later. By the time I had got it home I decided that I hated it and wanted to give it back. After a 2 hour drive I was deaf, stinking of fuel and fumes (and man-smell from the seats). The car was bogging in side and my back hurt like hell. I thought I was going to be sick on the drive way and started crying. On reflection, that was as much the exhaust and petrol fumes as anything else. So I had a shower to wash the muck me and gave the car a wash too. I felt sorry for us both. 

Wednesday is Karma Day

I guess my buddy at the Founders' Club, Andrew Romans set me off on this idea...

Here it is. In order to 'feed the soul of the entrepreneurs World', we should all give up 10% of our week to helping others - Not for money or gain of any kind. Just for the Karma Credits (thanks Andrew).

Sometimes I have a hectic week and I forget to do it  - this means I need to catch-up' the following week.

Help others because you can not because you hope to gain something directly from it.

The economy in the west is little better than dead in the water at the moment. We can actually make a difference at a micro level as well you know.

So go on, start getting those karma credits.

Women, clean tech and Venture Capital

I recently was a panelist for a women's cleantech forum. I was invited along as the "entrepreneur that has successfully raised money in this sector". I really liked the format -it was just a well managed Q and A. It made me think that:

1. VC's get a bad wrap at the moment.
2. We need them. Without VC our great ideas will remain just that, great ideas.
3 Seed investment is harder than ever to find !

I've probably said it before but VC allows entrepreneurs to take risks that they would otherwise be unable to take. It also allows you to break the 'prime directive' and change the space-time continuum by doing things much faster than be possible any other way.

So what are the downsides ?

My perspective is very EU centric here but... investors look for reference points in order to gauge risk. If those reference points are in the form of milestones which are aligned with the company's business strategy then that's fine. If they're not then you might end up deviating from your strategy in order to satisfy the need an investor has for reference points. let me rephrase that: No matter whom you investor, is you will be very lucky if you don't have to tweak your strategy in order to satisfy investment milestones!

What companies need to become winners

A company needs 2 things to become a success:

Scale and governance

Governance you can get by putting skilled non-execs on your Board and by putting in proper reporting processes. Financial governance should be straightforward in an early stage business - there will probably be insufficient transactions to make an audit complex...but there still maybe skeletons to pull out !

Scale is hard to assess and harder to improve. The ability to scale is determined by a number of factors:

Size of the market opportunity

Quality of the management team

Clear and well defined (make that well understood as well!) strategy

Shared vision

Sales pipeline

Product quality

Customer satisfaction (happy reference customers - ideally flagships)

IP

Innovation

Culture

Competitive advantage

Funding (and quality of funding)

Some of these things are easy to change, some are hard to change and some are impossible to change...

Are zero gravity strategists just space cadets?

The whole idea (I think) is that you strategise without constraint. That you allow the most ideal circumstances to exist which promote creativity  - great stuff.

The trouble is that we live in the real world where profit and loss exists. Where lead times and resource constraints are part of daily life. Where existing tactical commitments cannot be 'walked away' from in an instant. Where money changes hands in exchange for goods and services.

I think it's bad to make strategic sacrifices for tactical reasons...BUT

Gravity exists for a reason. It keeps our feet on the ground.

What ever clever ideas we come up with - someone will have deploy them...

Must not forget that.

How long does an idea take - start to finish

I was speaking to Pilgrim Beart the other day - he is one of the founders of AlertMe.com

When people talk about serial entrepreneurs, I think it's Pilgrim they are talking about ! Boy, does he have ideas. He has created more products, businesses and entities that I could have believed.

We discussed how long it takes...from the time that you have a good idea, to the day the company (which you build to commercialise the idea) is sold. We agreed that from a cold start you're looking at about 10 years. Yep - it really is that long. So if you want to be a founder CEO and exploit your ideas one after the other, then you're looking at 2-3 good ideas in your working life...tops.

So next time you have a great idea and start thinking about all the Ferraris you're going to buy with the proceeds, think on a 10 year turnaround for the investment of your time and effort...

Now you can see why some founders hand the company to someone else to run while they work on another idea !