Miss Red and I we due to go to a festival last weekend but unfortunately it was cancelled at the last minute by the organisers. This is my synopsis of the creditors meeting I attended today.

I would like to share more than I can but until the minutes are produced by Purnells, I am not legally able to, please do not ask me to PM you the details or scans of documentation as I cannot.

What I believe I can share is a summary of the meeting and key points I gathered

Key points

·         Purnells have been appointed as liquidators (They have no ties to the business and are completely impartial)

·         1st meeting with the liquidators was on the 1st August, they were contacted before this.

·         There are little or no assets in the business (some t shirts and caps)

·         There are no secured creditors or employee claims (everyone is being treat as an unsecured creditor.

·         The bands may still be due money under contracts therefore increasing the debt

·         People are going to be lucky to get anything from Altfest Ltd as all the majority of the money has been spent on getting the festival to the stage it was (deposits  for bands / etc.)

My views from the meeting

·         The directors had a good idea but did not have the ability to fulfil it. (They admitted this in the meeting).

·         After realising they did not have the ability they took advice about costs from a third party and did not get any comparative advice / quotes. Later in the day when the size of the festival had grown, they then consulted someone else and they got a higher price. There was not any contingency in their budgets for this price increase, yet they were able to spend this amount on a headliner.

·         At the meeting when quizzed about this initial advice and whether it was backed contractually / insured they could not give any confirmation, which is worrying.

·         Their accounting appears to be lacking

·         They vastly overestimated the pull of one artist versus his fees

·         They did not take action to rectify fundamental funding problems early enough.

·         ClubTickets are not to blame, they were just the unfortunate company that got in bed with AltFest with regard to ticketing. They are likely to go into administration because of this.

In my opinion

They let the size of the festival spiral out of control, adding more and more unnecessarily. They did not have the management skills to run a festival of this size and did not engage the appropriate help in doing so.

It would appear they did not follow any management principals when constructing budgets or managing them.

I'm not normally one for posting about dead celebrities but my respect goes out to Robin Williams making it his life's work to make the world smile whilst battling with depression himself.  

His apparent suicide is a loss to many & the probable cause close to home so I won't say more, I'll just leave this here:

Do you keep to-do lists?  I do.  Trouble is I tend to keep adding to my list all day more than crossing things off so by the end of the day I have a longer list!  Well, today my list got shorter...and I did some awesome plotting that wasn't on the list too :D

In good news my website & Ebay listings are all now up to date & the majority of what I have to sell is now also on Pinterest.  I have a draft ready to go for the next newsletter (I'm just deciding what I can do to thank my lovely subscribers for adding themselves to my mailing list), if you've not already added yourself you can do that here.  I've made up a bunch of cross stitch kits so they're ready to post & have all orders parcelled up & ready to go - organised eh?

Today I've also been talking to another awesome artist who I'm really excited about working with but it's hush hush until things are all finalised.  I might even tell my newsletter subscribers first ;)

There are also plans afoot to get more Miss Red goodies out there in real shops.  Did you know that as well as using the internet you can go outside to shops that are actual buildings?  I know, weird eh? :p

Unfortunately for this blog post my productive day doesn't have a whole lot of pictures I can show for it.

Here's stuff I finished earlier this week:

Great British Bake Off ain't got nothin' on me! ;)

Right, I'm off to eat some of that...now I've seen it my tummy wants some!  Byeeeee

P.S: I'm only 7 likes off of 400 on Facebook, I'd love a little share to push me over the milestone if you don't mind ;)