If We Can, You Can

Author:

Phil Cronin

Business:

Tombola

Published:

10/11/2008 11:14:00

We were actually successful in the first year after the dot com failure and believed that we had got it right and others were in the wrong. We were sucked in and got carried away with what we were doing. Therefore, we didn’t see enough, we didn’t forecast what was the value of a page on the internet which had actually dropped to less than 5% of what it was.

Looking back over the files, all our financial plans were actually quite laughable, all based on a model which had completely disintegrated. I’d spent nine years building up a cash file from my other business and managed to blow it all in the space of two years which wasn’t too clever.

I definitely learned from that catastrophe though that a) financial forecasting isn’t as straightforward as I had previously thought and b) you really do have to work out the downsides and create a contingency plan if it doesn’t work out. You also need to know when to stop, to know when you’re out of your depth and start working on ways to fix things rather than digging a deeper hole. It didn’t change our fundamental belief in the value that I thought we could add; we just needed to find a new way of framing it.

What kept me going despite the failure in the first online venture was (aside from arrogance, pigheadedness and, well, bigheadedness) the fact that I still felt the internet provided me with a really fantastic opportunity. We were able to leverage our expertise better than we’d ever done before so it was worth another risk especially since we’d learned from our previous mistakes. Besides that I really wanted to give it one more go. I didn’t like the idea of shutting it down and giving up completely which was the only other alternative. It was one last throw at the dice, albeit with an improved concept and a shrewder business mind.