Alesha's Finance Advice

A few years back me and the wife decided to change our lives and buy a business. We’d been caught up in the rat race for too long, and it was time for a change. I’d managed to save up a hefty packet over the years and an inheritance meant that finally we had enough money to be able to achieve our dreams before we retired. We decided to relocate to a lovely countryside area and run a camping site.

One of the big attractions for me was my love of fishing. The site we bought had a couple of great lakes that were perfect for fishing. The site had built a reputation over the years for anglers and that just added to the revenue coming in from the site.

Everything went swimmingly for the first two years. We had good numbers of visitors and a fantastic ratio of repeat bookings the next year. However, when we finished the books after our third year there, I discovered that we were significantly down. I decided to take somewhat unusual measures and contact several visitors to ask them about their stay, and it turned out that a lot of people who had come back the second year, but not the third year, had stayed away because they hadn’t caught a thing in the lakes during the second year!

I looked into the health of the lake and found that it had silted up very badly, and needed dredging. I immediately found a company that offered dredging services and got them in. Once the lake was dredged, I introduced a new population of fish and sat back and waited to see what would happen. Three years later and bookings are back up and the anglers, and more importantly, the owners, are happy! I’m still not sure whether my lake needed dredging, but I know that once I had the work carried out, the punters came flooding back in!