“At the time, I was just trying to put together a document,” he says. “It was very amateur, really. It was all about having great fun. I look back and cringe at the naivety of it all.”
The Erotic Review was Griffiths’s first business and gave him the entrepreneurial bug, even though he ended up selling the magazine 18 months later when it was about to go under. He explains: “I know now that our assumptions in the business plan were all wrong. We’d assumed that we’d get customers a lot easier than we did. By the time we realised, the investors didn’t want to put any more cash in and so we sold it to another publishing company.”
Griffiths offers this advice to newbie entrepreneurs tackling their first business plan: “Imagine you’re the buyer who’s putting the money in and ask as many different questions as you can. There’s lots of help you can get now – the British Library has a business centre while there are plenty of websites out there that tell you how to write a business plan.”
Since selling the Erotic Review, Griffiths has written a book called The Accidental Pornographer, started and sold Scarlett Magazine and is now focusing on his writing as well as his latest publishing firm, which specialises in cosmetic surgery magazines. “It’s quite a big market in the UK right now,” he says. “No one else is doing it.”
Related articlesTim Campbell: Now’s the best time to start a businessSeven steps to start-up successStarting a business from home
