Sitting in my new office the last three days; wooden floor, wooden desk, big window looking over treetops towards Galway Bay and Salthill, hot coffee pot; lovely!
As I am currently covering all Galway bookings and quite a lot of Kerry bookings, I am trying hard to establish a simple weekly routine. Having our
great instructor team in Kerry is helping, but I am still down there each week, and will be for the foreseeable future. It's impressive driving at 50mph how much more fuel you can save as opposed to 60/70mph, especially pulling a trailer; and you generally get there within the same'ish amount of time.
We are nearly over-busy right now, which is an absolutely brilliant complaint, however I am struggling a little to stick to the planned schedule/business plan for our expansion. For example our new flyers are to be ready for Easter and they should have been designed and ordered last week, but it will not be until this coming week that they get done.
We haven't signed off yet on our permissions to use Galway City/Harbour for our guided sea kayak tours and we have some provisional bookings for these sea kayak tours of Galway Harbour next month!
This is a good complaint though - it just makes me a little nervous as I see how quickly Easter and then the busy summer months are rocketing towards us. I can also see how easily something may potentially get overlooked, such as not having hiking boots for participants of our Carrauntoohil Guided Climbs; which happened for one client last week.
I am learning a lot right now and this quieter period of having two operation bases is good to iron out any teething problems and get our entire team up to speed on the changes. Writing these blog updates also helps me to reflect and re-focus on progress.
I needed the past three days to complete the unpacking of all our equipment, catch up on emails and diary jobs and send out an email newsletter, which was about a week overdue.
After a
Mountain Skills 1 in Galway this weekend, on the Burren/Galway/Clare border, I have the entire week to focus on finishing off both our Kerry and Galway operations, from new flyers, to pricing trailers/sheds, to PR work, to ordering new sea kayaks, to dealing with the harbour master and county council and following up on some possible funding.
Generally I have avoided any funding/grants over the previous years of running Outdoors Ireland, although have participated in many of Failte Ireland's training courses, provided freely by them. This time around however it really kills me to see how the really hard-earned taxes I pay are wasted by our completely useless government and by the fact that the self-employed are nearly penalised. I wont even begin to start on the VAT/Revenue crooks - so to sum it all up; if I can secure some funding for the large enough capital outlays we are about to have, then this time around I certainly won't feel guilty about it.
On a cheerful note; we have just launched a really nice product, which I am looking forward to working on -
Iyengar Yoga & Kayak Workshops In Galway. We have a
'Two For One' Special Offer until April on our
Galway Mountain Skills Courses,
Kinvara Bay Sea Kayak Trips and
Galway City/Harbour Kayak Trips.
Carrauntoohil Guided Climbs and Killarney Lakes Kayak Trips are ticking over in Killarney right now; while there is healthy interest in our Galway Sea Kayaking; and this is actually quite early in the season/year for so much interest - which is very promising.
More next week and hopefully by then I will have a huge list of things achieved and ticked off!
Nathan
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