On your hobby horse

Ali Chamberlain with one of her handmade cakes. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

Ali Chamberlain was recovering from a head injury when she decided to turn her love of cooking into a career. The former coach and mentor believes the biggest challenge of turning a hobby into a profitable business is giving it appropriate value.

"There is a difference in saying, 'I'm coach and mentor' to saying 'I make cakes'. That is a quite difficult transition to think through."

Now the former consultant owns and manages Ali's Celebration Cakes.

As part of her rehabilitation she met Career Dynamics director Lee Brodie to discuss her options and planned a series of possibilities. Initially Chamberlain considered catering, then decided to concentrate on a product. She discussed the idea with friends, talked to Home Business in New Zealand, then put an advertisement in the Yellow Pages. She now spends three to four days a week creating cakes.

One challenge is pricing, says Chamberlain. "I'm currently measuring the time it takes [to produce a product] quite carefully to ensure I cover costs and make a living hourly rate without charging exorbitantly."

When Wendy Cuiffe was made redundant she decided to leave the corporate world and do something close to her heart; a dog-walking business. It was the perfect match of interest and employment. The concept grew from realising other people shared her frustration over leaving dogs alone during the day. Her dog-walking and cat-feeding business, Walkies, is two years old and has 75 to 100 customers.

Cuiffe spent two months researching, before writing a business plan. When contacting six dog-walking businesses advertised in the Yellow Pages she found three had shutdown, one was answered by a child and the other was a voicemail service.

"I quickly realised professional customer service would be my point of difference."

Cuiffe works Monday to Sunday fulltime, employs one walker three days a week and is in the process of employing another.

On the cusp of expansion, her long-term plan is to franchise. "But first I need to get the reputation and brand better-known."

To turn an interest into employment requires a belief you are capable of doing it, says Cuiffe. "You need to find space to stop and think. I was doing a lot of personal growth, which helped me realise I could step outside the square."

Her challenge is to put better boundaries around the service. "I need to be firmer and sometimes say no to customers. For example I worked all Easter but didn't charge extra and should have."

And yes, she still loves dogs. "I'll never lose that. My heart just melts when see a dog."

In 2000 Alison Bowman, mother of three, discovered the American hobby of scrapbooking and fell in love with the combination of diary writing, photographs and memorabilia. She quickly became frustrated at a lack of materials in New Zealand and within four months had started a scrapbook online business, the Paper Peacock, with a friend.

Now, online buyers order from Australia, South Africa, England and Japan. In late 2002 Bowman opened a store in Christchurch with workspace and hire equipment, such as cropping tables, guillotines, templates and dye-cut machines. Workshops are an integral part of the business and like many small businesses income is better some months than others.

She wouldn't recommend anyone start a business as they did. "We simply found a company with funky materials and bought to my Visa card limit. We then put together a business plan, saw a bank manager, got a loan and talked to Bizinfo. In retrospect, we should have done it the other way around."

One difficulty has been drawing the line between business and pleasure with others. "You're doing something that gives everyone warm fuzzies but you're still running a business."

According to Heather Douglas, of Home Business New Zealand, about 67 per cent - around 230,000 - of small businesses are home-based. Many are interest or hobby-based, she says, although she has no statistical breakdown of this.

"However, often the area of interest is governed by what the person has done previously in the course of their employment," says Douglas.

Brodie feels it can be limiting to just look to hobbies. "It is about finding something that provides a high level of synergy between what is important to you personally, your skills and what you enjoy in your current job."