Jimmy’s Iced coffee just became debt-free. That’s correct. We don’t owe anyone anything, not even a penny. It’s still sinking in, to be honest, and when you’re super busy, you find little time to reflect on achievements big or small.

I personally regard this one as my greatest ‘out of home’ achievement ever. To mark the occasion, we popped up a post about it on Facebook last week and - without a pound spent on ‘post boosting’ - we received a whopping 854 likes, a load of shares and some truly wonderful comments. I’d be the first to say don’t judge yourself or your business by the amount of ‘likes’ you get, but this was, for us, a seriously unprecedented amount of feedback.

It’s a truly great thing to see when people really do support you by liking, commenting or otherwise on your business progress, and it’s also great to share that type of information with our drinkers.

The post described how we had been trading for 1,287 days and it was on this day that the cash shackles had come off. It’s kind of made me realise that we all need to live more in the ‘now.’ I know there’s the old ‘carpe diem’ saying, but it really does hold a great deal of meaning.

We have had countless business meetings where the only question people are desperate to ask is ‘What’s the exit strategy?’ Well, in all honesty, we don’t have one. Why? We started Jimmy’s because we wanted to change the way iced coffee was drunk. We wanted to do something for ourselves. And, more than that, we wanted to prove that we could do something for ourselves. We didn’t think about selling 37% equity for £16m in seven years, (which is not relative to our business at all). We didn’t even know what equity meant back then. We didn’t think about what the end might be as we hadn’t even started.

In my eyes, we have only really just begun, and we’re continuing to find our feet on this slippery iceberg that is fmcg. If one day we’re truly exhausted and someone approaches us to help us out, we’ll speak to them; but for now, we’re still cruising albeit by the seat of our well-worn pants. Exit = Happiness? I don’t think so. Now = Happiness.

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