When we started the journey of purchasing 2a Grange Road no one had even heard of COVID19, we never in a million years expected to go into a country 'lockdown' the day we finally received the keys but here we are, all navigating our way forward through this new strange world of social distancing and frequent hand washing.
The government have been great in providing a package of support to businesses for most but unfortunately we don't qualify for any of it. On top of the large mortgage (commercial properties in West Kirby don't come cheap) we found ourselves worrying what the future would hold for Cub & Calf. We have worked so hard to get to this stage and be so close to opening, we didn't want to walk away now.
Quite a few of you started to suggest doing a donations page but I didn't want to just take donations from you all when I know everyone is stretched financially at the moment with everything that is going on. Then a sponsored link came on my Facebook feed advertised a fee free crowdfunding campaign with Crowdfunder UK.
Egged on by a couple of you I looked into it and realised that maybe I didn't have anything to lose and it would give us a real shot of still completing all the wonderful things we have planned for Cub and Calf without eating into any of the amount of savings we had already borrowed and saved to start up the business.
The beauty of Crowdfunding is you can pre sell your products in exchange for the pledges and this felt a lot better for me, Cub and Calf have products we could easily advertise and sell and we would earn the money now whilst its needed.
At the same time we received our designs through for the play scheme from Tigerplay and paid the £18,000 deposit to secure the build and installation which is now booked for the end of August.
It made sense to show you what we had invested in and to use the Crowdfunder to back the rest of the build.
I set about making the Crowdfunder page which is actually pretty easy to do, it took quite a few late nights to populate it with all the information and then I had to do the dreaded video. Im naturally a shy person and I hate my own voice played back on recording, I think quite a few of us do though don't we?
We launched the project to a mailing list of subscribers first as advised by Crowdfunder and then made it 'live' the following day. Pressing the 'go live' button is definitely one of those hold your breath moments in life!
I've since found out that Natwest will match fund the campaign up to a maximum of £5,000 meaning if we successfully raise £5,000 they will give us the same amount as a donation!
At the end of day 2 we are sat at £1,500 which is an incredible achievement and I'm so thankful to every single one of my lovely Cub & Calf team who have backed us so far.
What can you do to help now?
Well we need the money to keep coming in, we have 25 days left to do it in and we need at least 100 people to back the campaign.
Please keep sharing the Crowdfunder link, keep sharing the social media posts, and generally keep raving about how brilliant our place is going to be when we open hopefully in September.