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By Jenny Hirschkorn (Telegraph.co.uk)
If you ever thought running your own business would be easy, take a moment to heed the experience of Barbara Genda.
When she started her mail order furniture business, she spent the first eight months doing everything from logistics to advertising, from design to marketing. She even did the bookkeeping.
And when her distribution company let her down, she and one of her partners spent a week on the road making deliveries.
Polish-born Mrs Genda, 30, set up the company with three business partners - all members of her Scottish husband's family - in 2000 when she was still working full time as a tax specialist with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Aberdeen. Between them, they put £60,000 into establishing the business.
"Working in tax never really clicked with me, but I managed to stick with it for three years until I qualified." All the while, she had been planning the day when she would open her own business, but it wasn't until she bought a house and had a problem finding furniture she liked that the idea of running a mail-order furniture company took root.
"It was 1999 and contemporary furniture was just coming into fashion. Until then, the choice started and ended with pine." She had always had an aptitude for design, so she began researching the possibilities in more depth.
"Few people realise how important a producer of furniture Poland is," she explains. "During the 1970s and 1980s it was one of the biggest furniture manufacturers and exporters in the world, and under the Communist regime was very cheap." She was full of ideas on the sort of pieces she would like to produce, but lacked the technical expertise that such a complicated manufacturing process requires.
Luckily, she discovered a website dedicated to the Polish furniture industry through which she made contact with a technologist to help her with the technical drawings and find a manufacturer. "He's a marvellous man, and is still with us today."
Together, they drove over Poland's single-track roads for a week in their search for companies who would be able to provide the sort of quality and reliability Mrs Genda was determined would underpin her business.
Why did she choose mail order as her main sales channel? "While I was at university I worked in the mail order division of Tesco and I really warmed to the idea of selling that way. I realised that if I opened a shop in Aberdeen, which was the nearest big town to where I was living, there would be a very limited market for the type of furniture I was offering.
"Mail order, on the other hand, would give me access to the entire UK market." With a modest marketing and PR budget, she placed well-targeted ads in leading interiors magazines and sent out a series of press releases. In 2001 she finally left her job, and by the autumn of that year the orders started rolling in.
"The most important thing for me," Mrs Genda stresses, "was to raise the trust in our products and our reputation. That is not easy when you are starting from zero, but we have a very personal relationship with our customers and it is my job to ensure that everyone who is involved with this company must have the same values and ethics as me. I train them all personally." She employs four staff in the UK and one in Poland.
Customers appreciate touches like early morning or evening deliveries, and the guarantee that they can return their furniture within the first seven days if they are not happy with it. "We barely get any returns because people don't take a decision like ordering furniture lightly, but they find it a comfort to know that we have that much confidence in our products.'
The past year has been one of growth, with sales more than doubling to almost £1m and the opening of the first showroom, in London's West End. If it goes well, a second is planned for the autumn. With funding from Scottish Enterprise, development is also underway of a full e-commerce site, making the company into a true multi-channel retailer.
What a good thing that Mrs Genda finally learned how to delegate.
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