It's been a month now. Roughly. Anyway who is sill counting days now? Half of the world is locked at home and in France the clocks have gone to sleep since mid March.

I remember that last Saturday before the announcement quite vividly. Saturday March 14th was my last day at Bloomdrops before the lockdown, announced on Monday 16th. It had been a quiet day. It had been a quiet week really. But how would I know what a quiet week is since I had opened just 2 weeks before? So here I am, 7.45 pm, letting out the lady who was to be my last customer in a while... I had not anticipated then that the door would stay closed for so long. I hurried back home, looking forward to my 2 days off. But Monday the news is dropped. After closing schools we are now closing everything. I feel a huge lump in my throat. This can't be real! I haven't even really started, I still know nothing about my customers, my suppliers, my cruise speed... I've worked so hard for this to happen and now I have to close? Really? Crush... (noise of broken glass)

How long will this last? What will I do? A million questions bubbling up in my head at the speed of light. Tuesday morning me and my lump go back to the locale and gather all the plants arranged in front of the window display to put them by the counter window, so they can get some light even when the curtain is down. I wash up the last couple of cups I had left there, put all perishables in a bag to bring them back home. I think of the coffee roaster girl who was telling me a few days earlier she had just found a locale and just hired someone. I think of my neighbours: the restaurant across the street, the little wine merchant, the cheese shop who just opened too, the vintage shop owner in the street nearby who was telling me how quiet February had been. This is going to be hard.

The first week at home was very strange. A bit like in a parallel world. I spent most of the time... sleeping. I was exhausted, by weeks of hard work, by the lockdown situation and also knocked out by another rough news on the personal side that had came in just a few days before. So I thought: "okay, just take this as a break dude. You've been running a marathon for several months now. Take this time to rest. You need to recover from the marathon and from that other thing that is really squeezing your heart and which you cannot push aside by throwing yourself into work. Take this as a message the world is sending. Take it on the positive side. After all, the kids are well, you are safe and you have a home, the rest will follow, later." It turned out I really needed a rest so looking back at the first 2 weeks they were actually beneficial and helped me take a step aside and digest a lot of things.

I will not insist on the financial side, although this is of course a very stressful part but not the one I want to focus on here. The whole world is obsessed about financials. About gains and losses. About cash flow. About growth. Of course as an entrepreneur I am too, since money is what keeps the machine going. But I think anyone who decides to build something will agree that entrepreneurship is more than making money. It's about a vision of life, about what you want to express. When you decide to leave a job to set up a business it's not about earning or learning more, its like a piece of you that you throw out there with the conviction that you can do something meaningful. At least this is how I see it. And this is where my week 3 blues kicks in... 

That week I see that a lot of companies have adapted, switched to home office when the business allowed it. For some it's almost like business as usual. For others this COVID-19 is a great marketing tool… It gives a strange feeling of "everything-will-be-back-to-normal-soon". Will it really? Do we want things to be back to the "before-normal"? Is this really the world we want to find when we can finally go back on the streets, the one we want to pursue with and hand over to our children? Wouldn't it feel a bit like: "Here you go sweeties, you're all grown up now so it's your turn to take over. Oh, and there 's a bit of a mess we've left out there - you know, like after any good party, so you'd better get started with a serious spring cleaning before anything else!". Not sure I'm super comfy with that. 

Once I was able to pull my head out from all the admin stuff I had to catch up with while trying to maintain some kind of presence on social networks, I was faced with that question I had been gently pushing aside since the beginning of the shutdown. I should set up my website in parallel shouldn't I? To stay present, and to keep the business afloat. Hmmmm. So I will just move online too? This seems pretty straight forward at first thought, but I am not totally ok with this. It's not about what platform to choose, about those 300+ product references I have to create & maintain, starting with the 600+ pictures I have to snap, nor about the multi-channel stock management and the deliveries, the returns etc. It's not even totally about the challenge of being heard/seen out there on the world wide web and being competitive in a big pool of web giants. It's something else. 

Do I want this? Do I really want to set up an e-shop? Just writing that word makes my stomach swirl. So I'd be setting up yet another merchant site... My guts know that's not what I want. This is not what my project is about. This sounds out of key. That's not what the little voice was whispering and definitely not what made me want to throw off the bowlines and sail away from safe harbour! Don't get me wrong, I am not keeping anything against dear Mr Twain who helped me chose to catch new trade winds in my sails, no. It's just that an e-shop feels pretty far away from what Bloomdrops is rooted to. 

I haven't had enough time out there to build authentic customer relationships and anchor what Bloomdrops is about. 2 weeks existence is a meagre basis to nurture through digital channels so the idea of a web extension doesn't really work. Besides, it would work only for physical objects as you cannot offer a cup of tea and cake with a conversation online. Nor can you run a DIY workshop online. Well, you can but then it's a YouTube Tutorial - lol, not something you share with other real people who will spill over, laugh, suggest a different approach. So I know where my discomfort comes from. I want Bloomdrops rooted in the real world, with real people. So, okay to use the digital as a tool, but it cannot be the core of my business. Not now.

But of course here comes the left brain again with cash flow, ha! You know, that left the brain talk (actually screaming): "Yes but you gotta keep the business running baby! You don't know how long this crisis nor the after-crisis is going to last and you can't just hold your breath forever! Come on, move and get this website up and running!" Urhhhhhh. Thanks pal, I hear you. You know, like when someone tells you something you don't understand, and repeats it with exactly the same words, only louder and with this patronising tone? In Monday’s last announcement it was said that shops would be able to reopen in a month. So here's what I have decided. I've set up a quick and dirty website, far from the nice, sleek web I was imagining, just to allow people to order things online and pick them up at some given time slots.

I want proximity and real life to remain at the core of Bloomdrops so I have decided to be patient/resilient even if it is risky. I know cashflow is the other side of the coin, a business cannot live only by its values so I also need that left brain (even if I often feel like shutting him up) to keep kicking. I don't know what is next and how things will turn out, but I don't believe in good or bad decisions, just in making choices that feel right at the time they are made. To me, besides the rational part which is of course a must have, setting up and running a business is a bit like being a conductor for a disorderly orchestra with always one or the other instrument randomly playing out of key and forcing to constantly re-adapt the piece. The piece is writing itself along the way, and there's no master violin who gives the tone. It is also a bit like a singer who has to improvise with what he has, trying to stay in tune while keeping that authentic touch in his voice whatever the background music sounds like. It's crazy, it's painful and also wonderful. I think I love it!

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