THE SMOOTH WAY

Today's first picture is the Australian rip and curl on Dee Why Beach. When our daughter Julie first went Down Under in 2006, Sophie, my husband and I went to visit her in Sydney, and we stayed one week at Dee Why and one week in Manly. These small towns are both situated on what is known as the Peninsula, and the quickest way to get into Sydney city centre is to take the ferry from Manly.

Dee Why Beach

On a ferry (again!)

Julie was in Oz on a "Work and Travel"-visa, which is a visa you can get only once in your lifetime. It gives you an opportunity to get to know Australia, in fact it is exactly that - you work and you travel. Some Australian employers know how to take advantage of these young adventurers and offer them pretty awful and low-paid jobs, but Julie was lucky and landed a job at a smoothie and juice bar, which she ended up managing. (She'd tried her skills at potato-picking up country but was so bad at it that she got fired. I suspect she got herself fired on purpose....)

Our terrace in Manly, overlooking the beach

Actually I was not going to write about Australia today - I was going pick up the thread from yesterday and talk about the company we started after we'd sold our fruit basket business. Instead of just taking the money and running, we HAD to be entrepreneurs again. We never learn! So visiting Oz, hearing about Julie's work, lying on Manly Beach every day with a - yes, you've guessed it - SMOOTHIE-bar across the road, we thought: "Hmmm..... this could be something for Norwegians..." Less than two years later we opened The Smoothie Factory in an Oslo suburb.

And we're still running it. These have been five incredibly hard years - introducing smoothies and freshly made juices to the Norwegian public has been tough going, but FINALLY! About two years ago things started to change for the better and gradually we increased our sales. By then we'd poured amazing sums of money into it and very nearly given up many times. We felt terrible about having persuaded our shareholders and co-owners to join our project - basically they'd lost all their investments by then too.

Our daughters have all been managers at The Smoothie Factory - one after the other - now it's our youngest daughter Sophie who runs the business. But we're very much hands on all the time, not getting paid yet of course. But we hope and believe that one day we'll be able to expand, to be able to see increasing profits, and eventually to return our shareholders' investments to them.

Twice we've been elected "Best in Test," once by a TV-channel, once by a newspaper. We receive a lot of feed-back from our customers that our smoothies are superior to others, and yes - they are made with first-class ingredients. Frozen yogurt, frozen or fresh fruit or berries, juice or milk.

This venture has been far from smooth. But when I see the bar crowded with smoothie-hungry faces - as well as one or two celebrities - my entrepreneurial heart proudly races. Though I definitely think this is the last time I launch one of my ideas into expensive reality!

Mira's many smoothie-faces: