Into The Woods (or How Coffee Craft Changed My Life.)

Following on from Kelly Wolf’s look back at our very first (unpublished) blogs from last April, here are my fretful musings on starting a company and some notes on what’s changed in the past year…

“Into The Woods.

It’s Friday and the end of Week One at Good Wolf People Ltd. And what a week it’s been!

I honestly didn’t know what to expect. What should we hope to accomplish in our first week? A tidy stationery cupboard? The tea rota? My biggest fear was that we’d start the week with some coloured pens and a blank sheet of paper, then finish the week the same way. But with frowns and greyer hair.

But the ideas have come thick and fast. We’ve already written a pitch for one piece of work and come up with our Paw Values so we have a great sense of who we are and where we’d like to go. Although we still don’t have a tea rota.

And as well as the creative stuff we’ve been sorting out insurance, banking, DSBs, payroll and IT. Luckily I had a Marmite easter egg to help me through the boring stuff. Kelly doesn’t like Marmite, so I have no idea how she’s going to cope when I go on holiday next week and leave her to the dreaded Policies and Procedures. I should probably leave her some cake.

Talking of cake… we’ve been checking out the local area, starting with a wander around the Triangle in Crystal Palace where we read all the public notice boards, ate the gorgeous chips at Domali followed by the equally gorgeous banana cake and biscuits at Dalhousie. The sense of community in this area is so full on it’s like being smacked in the face with a great big Community Kipper.

I can’t wait to start giving something back to all the amazing people around here.

Probably not a metaphorical fish though.”

So what’s different now? Well, most notably our location.

We still love Crystal Palace (especially Dalhousie’s biscuits), but one fateful day, as we worked our way through all the local cakeries, we stumbled into Coffee Craft and completely fell in love with it and the brilliant Stanley Halls in which it is based. We very quickly decided that this was the place we were supposed to be, surrounded by creative people in a growing community-run venue in the middle of South Norwood – which we’ve also fallen in love with!

South Norwood is grungy and funky, run down and coming up, vibrant, dirty, friendly, completely off the wall and totally down to earth. We fit right in.

So other than shifting our focus a mile or two up the road, what else has changed?

Well, we realised that “Paw Values” doesn’t sound as good as it looks, so it’s “Claw Values” now.

I have learnt that it’s DBS, not DSB.

I think I’m close to getting Kelly to like Marmite.

The stationery cupboard finally got tidied last week.

And we no longer need a tea rota. Our office is directly upstairs from Coffee Craft. What we need now is a dumb waiter. Or just a hole in the floor and a bucket on a rope.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I hear the Strawberries-And-Cream cake calling my name…

Until next time,

Love and biscuits

Johnny Wolf