Now the fun begins!

Garry and I have bought a toy company. Yes, you heard that right. After almost five months of due diligence and fraught negotiations, we’re now the proud owners of Artiwood. The company was established in 1999 by its founding owner, John Daniels, who has just sold it to us.

We signed the paperwork and handed over a fat bank cheque at a signing ceremony at our solicitor’s office in North Sydney on 11 June. We’d already paid an initial deposit a month earlier. Here’s an industry magazine’s story about our acquisition. 

Since then, the last six weeks have been a blur. We closed the business for a week to manage the transition of its back-office systems and bring a new IT network up to speed. Garry’s burnt the candle at both ends to ensure we hit the ground running. John Daniels also flew down from the Northern Rivers to help with the transition. He based himself at the Meriton serviced apartment across the road for a week.

There's plenty to do. John has done a superb job implementing a host of business processes, largely driven by Excel spreadsheets. They generate some impressive data. However, the entire setup is labour-intensive, requiring lots of manual rekeying. For example, the website captures orders, but isn't linked to any back-end system. It simply sends through an email. As a result, every order has to be rekeyed and stock availability confirmed.

We've also rearranged our home office into a twin desk configuration. It's not exactly elegant, but it works. Now it's heads down, tails up until Christmas. The emails are pouring in, and the phone rings constantly.  Talk about a baptism by fire.

Let the fun begin!