The highs and lows of starting a new business after a pandemic
15th September 2021
Image: David Phillips of Moors and More Tours
Starting a new business at any time is daunting, but after a worldwide pandemic, when everyone has been locked away for the best part of two years, it’s a real challenge, especially when the service you are offering is yourself, your skills and your knowledge! Not only have you got to promote yourself, and the package you are part of, to get your name out there, but you also have to reassure potential customers that it's safe to come out and use you!
I have got previous when it comes to setting up an enterprise after a period of quarantine. Back in 2001 a foot and mouth outbreak kept people off Dartmoor for many months. During that period, I was introduced to the manager of the CHICKS (Country Holidays for Inner City Kids) charity by a friend of mine who was working for them. He was looking for a use for his minibus that was only really being used at the beginning and end of the children’s stay, so we came up with the idea of Moors Tours, trips across Dartmoor in the minibus with me acting as the guide pointing out the sights and telling all the spooky myths and legends as we came across the places they related to. We did this for a couple of years and it proved popular with both home-grown holidaymakers and foreign tourists alike, tourists we are sadly lacking at the moment thanks to the restrictions still in place!
Fast forward twenty years and here I am again trying to tempt people on to Dartmoor, this time with my own business venture, wanting to share my knowledge and passion for the landscape and legends. Having been furloughed from my job during lockdown, it gave me plenty of time to contemplate my future, wondering if there was someway I could make money out of my two main interests, Dartmoor and the paranormal. When I first set up my investigation group TIP (Torbay Investigators of the Paranormal) in 1995, it was always intended to be a free service with no charge to join us at our meetings nor our investigations, which I regarded as mutual journeys of discovery. Back in those days properties welcomed our visits, for the owners were just as keen as us to find out what spirits they had. Then along came Most Haunted who made ghost hunting popular and paid allegedly haunted sites for the privilege of filming there. No longer were these places free to us, as they now saw them as money spinners, charging between £300 to £400 a night just to stay until the early hours of the morning. On top of that, if the place didn’t have rooms for the night, you would either have to book lodgings elsewhere or make the journey home having had no sleep! This arrangement didn’t appeal to me at all. How could I justify paying that sort of money and then sharing the cost amongst my group for sitting in the dark all-night waiting for something to happen? I couldn’t, but there were plenty of other groups sprouting up online who were happy to make money out of it!
Image: Guests of Moors & More Tours
I’ve often had people asking me how much it is to join my group and to take part in investigations or to use our services, and they are pleasantly surprised when I tell them it’s free! That’s a problem I’ve always had, trying to work out how much my services are worth and how to price them, plus I’ve never really wanted to...until now.
Working out what to charge for a tour wasn’t easy, for once we had settled on the idea of hiring vehicles rather than using our own, that had to be factored into the equation, along with petrol and what to pay myself and my driver for a day’s work. So I settled on £300 for our basic tour, which some potential customers have balked at, whilst another was happy to pay that just for a few hours drive...the secret is to have faith in what you are charging and don’t be tempted to sell yourself short just to get a sale.
Then there’s the most important task of all, getting your name out there and promoting the business. Having spent three years at drama school followed by thirty odd years working in theatres, I’ve learnt a thing or two about promoting a product and I’ve gotten particularly good at self promotion, which is just what I need to launch my new venture! For my group, TIP, I’ve got fleeces with our logo on the back, and over the years I’ve been stopped many times by people reading it and striking up conversations about paranormal experiences and suchlike. Now I can introduce Moors Tours into the mix, which, along with handing them a leaflet, has certainly given them something to think about and may lead to some business in the future. My choice of uniform, for my role as guide and storyteller, is Steampunk with hat and goggles, frilly shirt and waistcoat, which, although it doesn’t spell out Moors Tours, is intended to catch the eye and draw a crowd, in the way that the outfits worn by jesters and minstrels did in days of old, allowing me to explain myself and once again give out leaflets. These leaflets used to be an important tool for marketing, but, thanks to Covid, hotels and other businesses are reluctant to take them so you need to suss out your targets before leaving a supply so you know they won’t just get binned. To date, my customers have all come from the Bovey Castle Hotel, and they were more than happy to take some. Visiting there to pick up guests was like entering a different world, with the reception desk fielding requests about the next pheasant shoot and a guy wandering around with a falcon on his arm...standing there in my Steampunk gear I didn’t feel out of place at all!
The most important part of promoting and marketing a business is getting your name online and in print as much as possible. Once again, I had experience of this from my early days of running TIP, it seemed that back then stories of spooky stuff and paranormal experiences filled newspapers and, once you had that exposure, requests to do radio and TV interviews followed, so much so that I managed to get mine and the group’s name around the world from the States to even South Korea! Those were fun days! So, when it came to launching Moors Tours, I sent out publicity to some of the contacts that I made back then and waited to see who was still able to help. Having got a website set up by friends of my partner, Sarah, whose only request for their fee was for their own tour, which is still to happen, and loading it up with some beautiful videos courtesy of my clever niece, Beth, who received high praise from a BBC Spotlight reporter the other week when he saw them, we waited for customers to get in touch. There is also a Facebook page for more instant communication and sharing of pictures and videos, which, along with my TIP page, is also connected to the website. Buying advertising space with Visit Dartmoor, Visit Devon and the Dartmoor Magazine itself were essential expenditures, but it was the reaction of my other contacts that I was concerned about...
I needn’t have worried, for I was soon contacted by Devon Live who wanted to do a nice piece about my new business and my stories, which was followed by a national piece in Chat It’s Fate magazine, originally intended to just be about Berry Pomeroy Castle, thanks to the lack of interest from English Heritage, it became about Moors Tours and me instead! Devon Live came back for a second bite of the cherry when we arranged to do a live Facebook broadcast from Squire Cabal’s Tomb, in the churchyard at Buckfastleigh, on the anniversary of his death, when his hounds are said to bay at his tomb and his horse and carriage drives up to the doors of his old home at nearby Brook Manor to take him on one final journey...neither of these things happened on cue sadly, but the other weekend I was joined on one of my monthly group walks, that I lead, by a woman and her husband who just so happen to own the farm next door to the Manor! They confirmed how spooky a place it is, both inside and out, and I expressed an interest in possibly doing an investigation there at some point if they could put in a word for me...watch this space!
At the same time as we were filming with Devon Live, we were joined by my good friend David Hammond, who has his own show on Riviera FM, a local radio station based in Torbay, on a Thursday morning. He then came on a tour with us and recorded me telling my stories with a view to broadcasting them on his show, something he has been doing every week since. We have also done visits to Churston Court and Berry Pomeroy Castle, making recordings as we go, with other trips planned in the future to keep the local folklore segment of his show going for as long as possible.
The most exciting piece of publicity came from Jim Parker, the editor of a relatively new publication, the Torbay Weekly, who used to edit the Herald Express, which had published articles about me in the past so he was well aware of who I was. Initially there was no response from him, then out of the blue an email arrived apologising for this lack of response, informing me there was to be a write up about my new business in the next issue and, most importantly of all, a request, as I was the expert, to write articles for the paper on a regular basis! For seven years I wrote a monthly column for the Torbay Times, when it was in circulation, so doing them weekly would be a new challenge, but with plenty of time on my hands, since taking the plunge and leaving my job at the theatre, and making myself available whilst I await my customers, I was happy to rise to it. So for several weeks now, on a Thursday, not only can you hear me telling stories on the radio, but also pick up a copy of the Torbay Weekly and read my latest article! Sadly there is no money to be had but it is all good free advertising, and from what I can gather my efforts are being well received, and my name and the business is out there being talked about, and that is the important thing. Once you’ve set the ball rolling and you’ve begun your journey, you have to hope that others will jump on board and help you with your vision, and, along the way, over time, paying passengers will come along for the ride and keep your dream afloat too...here’s hoping!