Haverin Books - the Experiment

This is the intro to Haverin Books. Haverin Books is the business I want to start and build, rather than the other business I used to own, which sort of started itself and I ran after it. The other blog, Haverin Observations, is more about the content, whereas this blog is about the form.

I want Haverin Books to cause good for me and for other people in my community. I want it to be part of a community, not just an office in which people work 9-5 and hope for the best, who occasionally get together for somebody's birthday.

I want it to be a social enterprise, but I need to support a family and play catch-up with my superannuation, so it's not a 'pure play'. What is a 'pure play' these days anyway?

So this blog is about the journey towards finding the right market to match up broadly with the kinds of things I can make, and the appopriate design of the business itself to make sure it is sustainable and does in fact fulfill its goals of supporting me and bringing good to its community.

I don't even know whether it should scale.

Next post will be about all the things Tom McKaskill taught us at Swinburne in the Master of Entrepreneurship and Innovation program. That bootcamp subject known as Opportunity Evaulation, but which really should have been called Opportunity Strengthening/Maximisation.

There were a whole bunch of rules we learned, that we were taught to think, breathe and live. I didn't agree with all of them, although I could see that they 'worked'. So I'm going to test them out against the ideas that come up in this blog.

For example, we were obessessed with 'scalable'. For a pitch to pass the sniff test, it had to be genuinely scalable. Why? Some of my female classmates, in particular, said that. Why does it have to be scalable to be a great business worth spending time on? And what is scalable anyway? What if the business model is not so much franchise as 'copy'? What if you give away the franchises? What is they're not even really franchises?

I am also going to float some ideas about product, and what's sustainable. And about regional Australia, as I love people and businesses that make stuff - and not just the obvious tosser stuff like marinated olives or handmade cider.

Well, this is the start.

Jenny MacKinnon