A week in the life of Ros Simmons
Friday, July 31, 2009
| Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories:
Entrepreneur's Diary,
Business
| Tags: Ros Simmons,
entrepreneur,
international,
VIE at home,
women in business,
strategy,
direct sales,
expansion,
franchise,
Germany,
Entrepreneur’s Diary
Ros Simmons, CEO, VIE at home: My week started extremely early on Monday morning with a flight to Düsseldorf. As part of VIE at home’s strategic plans, I’m helping to set up our Germany company and German bank account. So this is the exciting week when our bid for global expansion comes together…
Monday
From Düsseldorf we drive to Bonn to meet with our lawyers who are helping and advising on both the company’s set-up and German employment contracts – which are very different to those in the UK! They include a very interesting section called Contractual Penalties… far too complicated to go into here but, essentially, it gives us the employer protection over data and information.
Then it’s on to the Notary’s office, where we set up the company officially.
So now we have VIE at home GmbH, and a lovely new German bank account with Deutsche Bank! It’s all been a very efficient process in a very sunny Germany – the summer weather is here in Germany, for sure.
I’m travelling with my Chairman and Finance Director, who are also highly organised. All their preparation before we left probably had something to do with them being able to get the bar as quickly as possible and having a few celebratory Bieren (a glass of Riesling for me)!
Tuesday
Today we’ve spent agreeing the rental on our new offices in Düsseldorf-Ratingen, which has excellent travel links – five mins from the airport – and, importantly for the German team, a nice atmosphere and ambience; oh and a great canteen, too.
We have been fortunate in finding great service companies to work with and great corporate people for our field sales team and head office. This certainly has given us a lot of confidence that VIE is going to be successful in this key Direct Sales market, with people who are passionate about our brand and enthusiastic in creating a professional new business.
The German Direct Sales opportunity for us is vast, as Germany is in the top five Direct Sales countries in the world, and potentially could be double the size of our UK business. Direct Sales is just an accepted way of buying and selling products, hence the reason why many US companies often start off their European operations in Germany.
Back in the UK
Since the MBO (management buy-out) from Virgin, we have managed to complete virtually all our key objectives on time
Going international with our own company, rather than setting up a franchise arrangement, was very much on our radar. The reason for this is that in larger markets where the opportunity is greater, we would prefer to manage the operation and achieve greater profits.
Franchising has been a quicker way to expand internationally with some smaller markets, with very low start-up costs for us, so a mix of both company-owned and franchised markets has been our strategy from day one. In fact, we have been able to get this going six months ahead of our plan.
So it’s been a week of achievements. And I have to thank the team, both in the UK and our German Sales Team (pictured above in our new German offices – I’m third from left). They’ve all been very focused in getting the strategic and operating plans up and ready to go.
For news of how our international operation progresses, watch this space!
You can catch up on Ros Simmons’ previous posts or view all posts from our Entrepreneur’s Diary series, in which we follow a male and a female CEO to discover what life is like behind the scenes of their business.
Read what a week in the life of Ten Alps CEO Alex Connock is like…
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