“What is he on about, now” I can hear them saying and, in truth, I’m not sure myself because Mo and I have been turned upside down and inside out during the last few weeks since we declared our intention to sell the Big Pitch Guide. We sent out a couple of dozen letters to prospective advertisers inviting them to participate in the Guide and the response has been quite dramatic, especially from a couple of the ‘big’ dealers in RV’s. In fact, the response from several sources rocked us back on our heels due to the fact that they shot our business plan for 2006 to pieces – for instance, we had planned to produce just a hundred or so books for use at the Travelworld RV Show at Telford in January with the idea that any left over would probably satisfy our need for the rest of the year but as I sit writing this article in mid-December of 2005 we already have orders for several hundred books and a very real possibility of more orders to come.
Mark and John, the owners of Dolbeare Holiday Park, had returned from their extended holiday in Spain so Mo and I had packed up Bumpy, our 36ft quad-slide Monaco Cayman, with the intention of touring Wales, the North of England and Scotland searching out more sites to add the Big Pitch Guide. We started the tour by taking some time out with George and June Evans at Brue Yachts ARV Park in Highbridge, Somerset and whilst there we finally managed to produce the first ‘finished’ Guide. In a previous life, both Mo and I were involved with map-making in the Army so we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted the final ‘Guide’ to look like and, luckily, it has turned out more or less the way we wanted it to – specially being as we had to ‘cut the cloth to suit our purse’, as the saying goes. However, one thing we did not have to do in the Army was to actually sell our maps to make a living – we left that to the Ordnance Survey – so we turned for advice to several people who we hoped would point us in the right direction. George and June Evans ran a very successful yacht and motorhome building business until their retirement a couple of years ago. We showed the Guide to Bob Edwards at Travelworld, and asked if we could launch it at his Show at the Telford Exhibition Centre in January 2006 and he gave us some most useful advice on the advertising side of the business. Next, we had a telephone call from Eric Randle, at Itchy Feet in Cornwall, to say that he was interested in advertising in the Guide – and we left there with an exceedingly interesting proposition to mull over. Finally, we spoke to Edward Martin, a friend (and business advisor) that we have watched building his computer business from a one-man band to a very successful outfit that has already outgrown its premises several times in the last ten years or so.
Armed with this plethora of information, Mo and I decided that we had to commit ourselves even more fully to the project than we had hitherto planned. We needed to rapidly sort out our production facilities, to build the proposed Internet web site, to compile a new business plan and to audit our finances. The holiday obviously would have to be curtailed and so we promptly set about returning to Dolbeare Park in Cornwall where we had planned to establish ourselves semi-permanently. Unfortunately when we arrived back on site we found that our ‘broadband’ connection telephone line had inadvertently been cut in two places whilst we were away so we were without a BT phone for a week awaiting repairs – most frustrating. Our mobile phones were literally ringing their heads off and we were being invited to take the proof Guide to several different prospective advertisers throughout the Country, there was even talk at one time of a National High Street Publisher taking an interest in the project, with a view to putting the Guide on sale in their special interest section - so much for our proposed hundred or so copies in the first year - and then we hit our first major problem.
It very soon became apparent that we could no longer fulfil our employment contract at Dolbeare at the same time as producing the Guide – We didn’t have the time required to complete both jobs, we didn’t have the office space required, we were not really close enough to any of the major print suppliers but over and above all that it was also becoming more and more obvious that we needed to be settled more ‘upcountry’ than we had envisaged. We both love Cornwall but we had to admit that it simply was not suitable for our business location - so after consultation with Mark and John, we packed Bumpy once again and within the week we were on the road back to Somerset. That’s the true story but, as always, there is also an underlying tale to be told! I love ‘lardy cakes’ and always have done ever since I was knee high to the family dog – not your average bland tasteless supermarket product but the real belly-busting teeth-sticking toffee-laden lardy cake that you rarely find in this healthy food-fad status of today. The kind of cake that sticks so hard to the greaseproof paper in which it is wrapped that you inevitably have to eat the paper as well. The kind of cake that requires a steaming hot cup of tea or coffee to be supped between bites, in order to stop your lower teeth from being stuck to your upper teeth - and I have found a supplier of such lardy cakes in Highbridge in Somerset! The cook will only produce so many cakes per day and if you don’t get to the shop by 10am you simply don’t get one, no matter how much you plead with the staff or offer to pay over the odds. The location of this purveyor of delicacies fit for a king shall remain my secret but I have no doubt I shall never leave Highbridge again – (or until Mo tells to).
Other people have mentioned it but I have never really taken too much notice of it until recently – the amount of single items of footwear that you see lying abandoned on the road. Driving down the motorway from Somerset to Cornwall we passed a dozen or so, just lying on the hard shoulder but always one single shoe or welly-boot – never a pair. What happens to the other matching item? Is there a dealer somewhere who stocks only one item of every type of footwear known to man, like the specialist china shops that promise to match an item of broken crockery. And what about the person who owns the missing footwear – what happens when they get out of the car at the end of their journey and suddenly realize that they have only one shoe on. I mention this because I have developed the same problem with pyjamas and socks, no I don’t scatter them all over the motorway but somehow or other, it seems that every time we up sticks and move, I lose another single item out of a ‘pair’ of clothes. Socks can be explained by the washing machine – it is a proven fact that single socks hold the washing machine together much more effectively than nuts and bolts, I know this because every time the washing machine grinds to a halt, the engineer exposes the faulty part which is invariably held in place by a single sock! But how on earth can I lose my pyjama bottoms when I am in a completely sealed box of a bedroom with only one exit door – answers care of Bumpy - on a postcard, please.
I digress! In order to make sense of the Big Pitch Guide we obviously needed a source of up-to-date maps from a supplier who would not charge us a fortune for use of their copyright material – we found that supplier and were given their tacit agreement that we could use their maps without problem, providing that we acknowledged their product in the Guide. Unfortunately, when we went back for final approval, we found that their consent had been withdrawn – we could print their maps and give them away to any number of family or friends - but in no way whatsoever could we sell them! Actually, unbeknown to them, that Company did us a real favour in refusing to allow us to sell the Guide in its current form. It made Mo and I sit down one night recently, to re-evaluate our situation and find a way in which we could give the Guide away free of charge - without the possibility of bankrupting ourselves in the process. We always knew we would be hard-pressed to find more and more sites throughout the UK and the Continent without the help of our family and friends and it was that fact which guided us to form a group to be known as ‘The Friends of the Big Pitch Guide’. We have already had several people telephone us to ask our advice on sites in certain areas of the Country and to tell us of sites known to them which are RV friendly so why couldn’t we expand that situation and invite every RV’er in the Country to join us and we could thus expand the Guide to include their information. We could charge a membership fee to cover all the administrative tasks of the group, keep the members informed by a regular newsletter and, just like all the premier caravan and camping clubs, offer the Friends a completely free handbook – in this case - a copy of the Big Pitch Guide.
And so once again we think that fate has stepped into our lives and radically altered the course we had begun to steer. Membership to the Friends of the Big Pitch Guide is already open and accepting applications from everybody and anybody who wants to know more about RV friendly locations. Anybody who has an interest in RV’ing, or indeed camping with any large outfit, is invited to join - just so long as they are willing to give us their name, a contract address and phone number for the membership records, as well the £30 fee for the two year minimum period of membership.
The web site www.the-big-pitch-guide.com is up and running and has already had a number of members express their interest. We are still on course to launch the Guide at the Telford Show but now we are going to give it away completely free of charge to our Friends of the Big Pitch Guide.
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