Business plan

My mission is to write a Business Plan. I have read and reread Peter Jones advice on how to write a Business Plan and getting the right mindset to succeed.

This project is a massive endeavor by anyone’s standards. We are setting up an International Charity, Building a state of the art Home for Babies in Uganda, raising around a million pounds (exact figure TBC), setting up a responsible tourism venture, building and producing content for a website and setting up a social work department and a nursery in Uganda.

We am incredibly lucky to have Dan Matthews as our Business Adviser. He was the Publisher for Real Business and now runs his own company LaunchLab.co.uk, a website advising small businesses and start ups. He has published books on business and written for The Guardian and The FT.

It is time to turn my vision into reality…

All new House of Tiny Tearaways expert joins Child’s i team

More amazing news today Dr Elizabeth Kilbey from All New House Of Tiny Tearaways has joined our team of advisers. Elizabeth is a Chartered Clinical Child Psychologist, and has a wealth of experience dealing with a range of complex developmental, emotional and behavioral problems in young children.

I worked on the original House Of Tiny Tearaways as Gallery Producer and loved it. It worked absolute wonders on the children and parents alike, and really turned lives around. I was keen to involve HOTT in this project and emailed the owner of Outline Productions (who produce All New House of Tiny Tearaways) and she very kindly introduced me to Elizabeth.

I wanted to bring on board a child psychology expert because the babies we will be working with will, all too often, arrive after a long period of neglect or even after having been abandoned at birth. The stress of spending their first few hours, days or years without any human contact can have a devastating impact on their psychological development. I have seen first-hand how neglect can have an impact on language development and attachment issues, and I feel we owe it to these children to give them every opportunity to overcome the enormous challenges they face as a result of their early life experiences.

I want to provide specialised nursery care to ensure children reach their developmental milestones and to try and ensure that their early life disadvantages do not limit them in later life.  I am very proud to have Elizabeth on the project to advise us on policies and practices that will, without doubt, make a real difference to the children’s emotional and psychological development.

Hooray for Endemol

I had a meeting today with the Creative Director, Richard Osman and he said Endemol would be happy to support our project.

Endemol is the massive production company behind Big Brother, Deal or No Deal. They are very big on giving to charity and produced formats including Only Fools On Horses, Celebrity Scissorhands, Soccer Aid and Comic Relief Does Fame Academy and raised money for the Teenage Cancer Trust, UNICEF, NSPCC, BBC Children In Need, Cancer Research and Great Ormond Street Hospital amongst recent recipients.

I have worked at Endemol since 2002 working on BBLB, Big Brother, Celeb BB, Fame Academy, The Games, The Salon and Upstaged. In 2006 Sally Braithwaite and I went out to Kenya to film the effects of a 4 year drought for Merlin and Endemol provided the kit and the edit. The video raised tens of thousands for a stabilisation centre and emergency humanitarian aid.

Am I mad?

I’ve just had a very odd exchange with my lovely dad. He walked into his summer house, which unbeknown to him has been hijacked for our charity HQ, and I tried to explain my project and just how much work it involves. Unlike me, my dad is a man of few words but they are always carefully selected. After a rather uncomfortable silence, he piped up with: “You’re mad.”  He then seemed to reconsider, and settled on: “You are… unusual.”
To be fair, I think he has a point. At 30 years old, I should probably be settling down with the man of my dreams, planning babies, own some property and have a pension to secure my future – but I have none of these things. Instead I am spending all my life savings on a dream.

Maybe I am unusual, but I believe if you have a bit of blind faith, passion and a brilliant team, you can pretty much pull off anything.

Trustee Meeting

The first Trustee meeting went brilliantly. The team had all the answers for our Trustees – and they signed on the dotted line. So it makes me very proud to introduce them all:

SALLY BRAITHWAITE– CHILDS-i CHAIRMAN

Sally is Operations and Finance Manager for Channel 4 News

JO RALLING – CHILDS-i TRUSTEE

Jo is Head of Production at Jamie Oliver’s TV Company Fresh One.

HAZEL BUCK – CHILDS-i TRUSTEE

Hazel is my wonderful Mum and head of Community Fundraising. Now she just needs to learn to blog and transfer her village experience to the internet – we’ll watch her progress with interest.

All we have to do is wait for the CRB checks to be processed, then we can send the application off to the Charity Commission.

I can’t believe this is actually happening. Every day I take a step closer toward my dream. I’ve realised the best way to deal with this mission is to break it down into small, manageable tasks. There is an African proverb which says:

“If you are going to eat an elephant..start with his toes”.

I feel like I’m just nibbling away at its toenails.

The kindness of architects

I met with our Architect, Dominic Taylor today. He’s kindly agreed to design the home for us. Earlier this year, Dom arranged for 65 architecture students at the University of Bath to help him design the babies’ Home, nursery, volunteer accommodation, staff accommodation and administration block. To look at the other designs go to Flickr

One of the 65 designs of the home

It wasn’t until Dom spelt it out exactly what is involved that I realised what this really means. Altogether we’re talking 1,117m2 of buildings. In the UK, it costs around £1500 per square metre to build and costs around £1.7m. An architects fee is around 6%.

Basically, Dominic is donating over £100,000- worth of support.

I now get just how ‘kind’ he is.

Mind the gap

I think the stress is getting to me. While on the Tube today, I yawned from the sheer exhaustion of trying to get everything done – only for my jaw to lock. From past experience, I know the best way to rectify the problem is to hit myself in the face until it clicks back into place. It doesn’t hurt, but I can’t imagine what the person opposite me was thinking as they watched me sitting slack-jawed and punching myself in the face. The shame. Eventually it slotted back in and I was able to shut my mouth, but must remember in future not to open mouth quite so wide – and try to get some sleep.