Mr Shreicks Shakes took £280k off Crowdcube investors in 2015. It is now in the hands of Il Liquidatore.
In a slightly odd twist, this Crowdcube failure had sent an email to its shareholders at the end of 2017, telling them that the end was nigh but that he, Andrew Sherick, hoped to resurrect the business once it had closed. The reasons for closure were numerous but none of them were down to him.
In this email he wrote -
However,
what I would ask is that it is important at this difficult time that I also ask
that you keep this information entirely confidential. Your support in this would be appreciated. I put at
risk our plan to carry our shareholders forward if I am not offering similar to
our creditors this I cannot do. (His underlining and colour selection)
Had he achieved the above and knowingly left his creditors short, he would have being breaking the law. Luckily for him, he didnt.
The company goes down taking with it unpaid debts of over £600k, accrued in just 2 years. One key supplier, Tomlinson Dairies, were well thanked for their efforts by being left with a debt of over £200k. There appears to be no money in the company. Which is odd as the founder had claimed the IP and brand was a roaring success. In the SoA he puts its value at zero.
We really do need to either start educating people in some basic business sense or stop idiots like this from being able to set up companies. You dont allow people to drive a car without a license, so why do we allow anyone over the age of 16 to be a company director and start companies at the drop of a hat.
As usual Crowdcube have been conspicuous by their absence in all of this.
We wrote about this before but took the post down when the founder contacted us to give him a chance to sort things out.
Although i greatly sympathise with Tomlinson Dairies they should also have not let him run up a £200K bill.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think this post is fair on the founder and it descends Into a personal attack which is nasty and defamatory. He is a very good person who has acted in his company’s/shareholders’/customers’/family’s best interests. How does that make him an idiot?
ReplyDeleteI get that you are trying to stick up for the little guy in your blogs and I have been a follower for many months before this post (maybe even a fan), but your information is way off on this occasion as you are just looking at Companies House docs, citing an email that doesn’t say anything much and taking their silence to mean something sinister - you don’t know what actually happened away from those filings.
For your infornation - after entering the supply partnership with Mr Sherick’s in late 2016 Tomlinson’s Dairies won a much bigger contract to supply Sainsbury’s from the same factory from which they were leasing space to Mr Sherick, so their tiny deal with Shericks became an annoyance rather than the lifeline it had been months earlier. This is when their service levels to Sherick’s dropped off a cliff as Tomlinsons struggled to meet their obligations with Sainsbury’s.
Sherick’s big name customers like M&S/Waitrose/Aldi were expecting increased supply to match the growing demand and rollout schedules. They became unsatisfied by extensive supply issues coming from the Tomlinson’s factory. Sherick’s also had new major supply contracts ready to launch but no stock to fulfill them with so kept them on hold for many months. Unable to rescue the service levels the two parties fell into dispute, ending up in Mr Sherick’s entering voluntary liquidation.
So you can continue playing your tiny violin for Tomlinson’s if you like but personally I think Sherick’s were sadly the victims here and saying the founder is an idiot is rubbing salt in his wounds. You should apologise.
There is an even more interesting twist to this story which former shareholders can be very excited by, but I don’t think you deserve to have the information on your blog as it is not negative or scandalous enough to feature, it’s actually very positive.
So you say but why believe an anon. If he knew what he was doing he would have anticipated the dairy's move and had it covered - that is called running a business. Idiot seems appropriate here. His lack of a plan B was idiotic. It is fairly typical of the half witted excuses for real businesses that use Crowdcube. None of the story above is anything other than the day to day happenings of an SME - happenings real entrepreneurs handle without exhorting to crashing and phoenixing. I do hope he includes his old SHs in his new(ish) venture and with the lessons learnt here will make a success of SherricksV2. BTW leaving a debt of that size to Tomlinsons (or anyone) is not excused by their commercial activity - that is unless you read the Old Testament before bedtime.
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