3 days ago
We quit London and learnt how to be baristas who bake
Ten years ago I lived in London where I worked in luxury hospitality as a commercial director for a swanky hotel company [Simon Kerr, 58, says]. My husband, Andrew Talbot, worked in Whitehall, in public health.
One day I remember sitting in a meeting room in one of those boring presentations full of corporate speak and watching a couple of guys abseiling outside, cleaning windows.
When the meeting finished, I started chatting with them. They told me they loved climbing mountains and that they made a lot of money going up and down buildings in London for six months purely so they could go to do the things that they enjoyed for the rest of the year. And it just got me thinking.
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Andrew and I already had a holiday home in Falmouth in Cornwall, so we spent a lot of time down there. One day I saw this advert on the internet for a café in Truro. I asked Andrew: 'What do you know about running cafés?' Neither of us knew anything at all, but we went to have a look at it the next day.
It turns out a guy had built the café for his wife using reclaimed wood and it was an absolutely stunning space. Then after all that his wife turned around and said: 'I don't really want to do this.' He was stuck holding the baby and had to sell. So Andrew and I decided to take the plunge, give up our lives and take a big leap of faith. We bought the lease to the café for £20,000 and rented a house about four miles away in a little village called Devoran, which is on the edge of Falmouth Bay.
We called the café Lily's of Truro after our dog, and we threw ourselves into it and learnt from scratch. We learnt to be baristas, we learnt to work in the kitchen, we learnt to bake cakes — and we burnt a lot of cakes. I've lost count of the amount of times I've sat in bed looking at YouTube videos on how to poach the perfect egg.
Owning and running a small business is phenomenally different to working in a larger corporate environment. We had to learn about cashflow and keeping your margins tight to maximise your profit — because in the hospitality industry things are so, so tight. We learnt to deal with staff — everyone from 16-year-old kids with their issues all the way up to older adults, some of whom come with their issues as well. We built it up to be a very successful business.
And then, five years ago, a lady called Amy approached us and offered us £120,000 to buy us out. She already ran a catering business but she loved the space. We stood to make a £100,000 profit in four and a half years. We went for it and resolved to buy our own place.
We love Cornwall, but we found it to be a long way away from our friends in London, who we could hardly ever see. As an alternative, we looked at Somerset, Wiltshire, East and West Sussex, Hampshire, Suffolk and Dorset, but we decided on Norfolk. You can get more for your money in Norfolk, and it was only an hour and a half on a train to London.
We came across an ideal site: a business and three-bedroom home wrapped together in Castle Acre, which is a stunning historical village that has two English Heritage sites, a Norman castle and a priory. It had a café, which we later called Wittles Castle Acre but at that point was called Barnfields, and we immediately fell in love with it. It had been run by a couple who were very much ready to retire and were running the business down. We bought the property for £625,000.
Remarkably, we moved in a week before the second Covid lockdown, which with hindsight was absolutely crazy. How, we thought, could we start a business at a time when nobody could go inside during the middle of winter?
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So we baked cakes, made a pot of soup and a vat of curry and started trading out the front door. And it turns out it was an amazing way to meet our neighbours. Everyone from the village came out, and everyone loved it.
Social distancing was still in place, but the fact they could come and be sociable somewhere near to their home, get a damn good cup of coffee and an interesting cake and maybe see their neighbours was fantastic. It became a weekly event. It was the best way to introduce ourselves to the village, and those customers have helped to sustain us throughout the years, along with the village's many visitors. It became a booming success.
Five years later though, and after agonising over the decision long and hard, we've decided to sell. We love it, but it's a physical job. We're nearly 60 and we're tired at the end of the day. We want to go and live in Italy, in either southern Tuscany or Umbria, and live a quiet life together.
A couple of friends have died during the past year, which was very sudden, and it got us thinking that life can be short. We enjoy what we do. We're working hard and we're successful and we make good money. But we don't want to work ourselves into a grave.
