Mayfield Chocolates.

Well the starting point was we wanted to feature flavours of Australia because the premise was that Australia makes lots of good foods, so why don’t we use some of them in the chocolates rather than just doing chocolates with syrups and flavouring and stuff.  So from the start we’ve done things like natives wattle, lemon myrtle, kakadu plum, native aniseed and we also do other things that are made in Australia –  like Queensland Rum, South Australian Brandy, Tasmanian Leatherwood Honey, fresh cream. And we use these ingredients in a creative way to get a really good taste result.

The main obstacle starting from scratch. Everything’s totally experimental and some things work really well right from the start so for instance people love their chocolates so we’ve got the recipes right and some of the equipment we got was perfectly fine – other equipment not quite so appropriate. I’ve learnt from that, that if you’re starting a business and you’re making projections when you’re doing your budgeting have your projected income and double your expected expenditure investment required so you have to overcome that so allow time to build up steam

I think communication is very important. That you understand each other, also you give people the opportunity to do their job and you don’t micromanage them. And you trust them to do things if you’ve got the right people that shouldn’t be a problem. Also having the legal side of it sorted out so that if something does go wrong it can be handled properly. Keep a focus don’t be all over the place and if you’re employing people, get professional advice about all rules because it’s pretty complicated, especially if you haven’t done it before.