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Review of My Little Wrapper
Nigel Botterill, N5 Ltd

This is one of a few examples of Business Opportunity Watch Reviews which are available for the public to view on the public section of the website. The reason for making a small sample of the reviews freely available is to help potential customers decide if they want to subscribe, and also to communicate some matters of general interest arising in the case of some of the reviews. All the other reviews are available only to subscribers. A zero score or a low score means that in our opinion the business model or the investment model has flaws and/or that we have found inadequate evidence to back up claims about earnings, sales, profits etc. It doesn't mean this evidence does not exist and it doesn't mean that the opportunity is a scam and it doesn't mean that the promoters are unprofessional or dishonest. Questions arising are normally contained within the body of the review, and readers who are interested should contact the company with these questions and/or questions of their own.

Page One of Two

1. Review of My Little Wrapper
Review from Business Opportunity Watch Reviews, September 2008 Issue 19

Go forward to Page Two

2. BOW Letter to Nigel Botterill

3. Nigel Botterill's reply

4. Enquiry about a refund

5. Update 9th March 2010 re Nigel Botterill's bio re Card Protection Plan, http://nigelbotterill.com, www.entrepreneurs-circle.co.uk

1. Review
Extract from Business Opportunity Watch Rating Reviews
September 2008 Issue 19

MY LITTLE WRAPPER
Unit 3, Olton Bridge,
Warwick Road
Solihull
B92 7AH
www.mylittlewrapper.co.uk
www.getmylittlewrapper.co.uk
Tel: 0121 765 3400


Who else wants to make people happy, earn good money, do it all from home, with total flexibility? And it involves chocolate!

My Little Wrapper is a brilliant 'business in a box' that you can run, part-time, from your own kitchen table.

Here's how it works: pretty much everyone loves chocolate ... but there's one market that is virtually untapped in the UK. One area that the 'big boys' can't get into - but which you can:

Personalised chocolate bars.

I mean, really personalised. With wrappers that are designed with a real 'WOW factor'.

You print and wrap the chocolate bars, and also get to do a bit of sales and marketing to 'unwrap your customers'.

Your personalised wrappers are unique, personal and affordable - and the market for them is enormous. For starters just think of every family celebration; every birthday party, birth announcements, weddings, anniversary. Then there are occasions such as Easter, Halloween, Christmas, New Year, Prom nights (which are becoming more and more popular in the UK) and that's before you even consider the Corporate market or Charity fundraising which is huge as well.

We give you everything you need to build yourself a successful part-time business that you can run from home, in your spare time, and which is very profitable.

Hi my name is Sue Botterill. I'm a mum of four (thats me with my children opposite) you can read more about me and my business under Background but let me explain exactly how my little wrapper works:

There are three 'ingredients:

1. The Chocolate bars
You can get them from us (they taste delicious) or buy your own. It's up to you.

2. The Wrappers
We've got a range of over 50 designs, all commissioned by us. We've used some of the experts in the field - including designers who have worked for the likes of Cadbury. We provide you with these wrappers, all pre-printed with space for personalisation. You then 'over-print' the personalised message/s using your own colour printer. On most wrappers there is space on both the front and the back for personalisation. It takes seconds to do because of:

3. The My Little Wrapper Software
Here's the science bit! It's dead easy to use but what it does is make sure that the personalisation text is printed in exactly the right place of each wrapper.

By using your own colour printer to over-print the personalisation on the pre-printed wrappers you are able to provide real tip quality looking wrappers.

My Little Wrapper was only launched in March 2008 and its already making a big impact with well over 100 'wrappers' already on board and enjoying great success.

We give you all the training and marketing material you need as part of your Pack. There are no ongoing obligations or license fees - you have full flexibility and complete control, so you can do as much, or as little, as you like.

The Professional Pack normally costs £2,749 plus VAT & P&P.

The Mini-Business Pack costs £1,999 plus VAT & P&P.


Rating Review:

Nigel Botterill, the MD of the company offering the My Little Wrapper business opportunity - N5 Ltd - has lots of ideas for business opportunities and franchises to sell to the public and he's also very good at marketing them.

However, on one previous occasion at least, it escaped Nigel Botterill that business ideas are worth very little unless they are proved to work in practice. This is what happened with his previous venture - the Have A Quickie franchise - which I rated at 2 out of 10 in the December 2007 issue of BOW. The Quickie franchise involved siting coin-operated machines in public places such as hotels and pubs. The machines quickly recharged mobile phones, and the cost was £1 per recharge.

Whereas N5 Ltd informed me in correspondence that they had "run a pilot operation in Leicester since December 2006" they were unable to give me any further details of the figures or of how many machines were involved in the pilot operation (the company were asking franchisees to pay £29,995 for a franchise with 50 machines), and they had not sited machines anywhere other than Leicester.

N5 Ltd then seemed to realise that potential franchisees asked to pay such a large sum for a franchise would require some hard evidence of the viability of the business, and in a subsequent letter the franchise director, Mike Giles, informed me that:

"We are also rolling out our own machines in Solihull during January 2008, and have many venues already signed up. The main aim of the Solihull set-up is so that potential franchisees will be able to visit the locations and see the machines on the same day that they visit us to discuss their application".

I don't know what the results of this "Solihull roll-out" were, but it seems to have been too late for the Quickie franchise so far as Nigel and Sue Botterill and N5 Ltd were concerned. The accounts of Quickie Products Ltd for the period ended 31st March 2008 show a trading loss of £411,157 and the balance sheet shows that liabilities exceeded assets by £411,057. Nigel and Sue Botterill each owned 25% of the shares in the company, and Nigel Botterill was a director and Sue Botterill was the company secretary. After the balance sheet date - on 23rd April 2008 - Nigel Botterill resigned as director and Sue Botterill resigned as secretary and they disposed of their shares.

Quickie Products Ltd is now under the control of two individuals unrelated to the Botterills or N5 Ltd.

It seems to me that Nigel Botterill's launch of the Quickie franchise was a prime example of putting the cart before the horse i.e. of rushing the franchise to market before the company had the evidence to show that the business was a viable one.

Has Nigel Botterill learnt his lesson?

Apparently not, because there is no indication on either of his company's websites for his latest new venture (www.mylittlewrapper.co.uk and www.getmylittlewrapper.co.uk) that it was tested before it was launched.

The marketing material for My Little Wrapper says that what you are buying is a "brilliant business in a box".

If My Little Wrapper has not been adequately tested then this claim is just hot air, because you are not buying a business at all: instead, what you are buying is just a business IDEA (for marketing chocolate bars in personalised wrappers) which - like all business ideas - might work or might not. You also receive the tools and a small opening stock to operate the business idea (e.g. 100 chocolate bars, 500 wrappers, software to personalise the wrappers, marketing material, business stationery etc).

To give Nigel Botterill and N5 Ltd credit, they do give plenty of indications in their marketing material that My Little Wrapper is merely a punt. For example, in response to the question "How Much Money Can I Expect To Make?" the only definitive answer they give is to say that you should make between 60p and £1.10 per bar of chocolate.

The question of how many bars of chocolate you could expect to sell is expressly stated as being "entirely in your hands".

However, N5 Ltd does give an example based on doing wedding orders and children's birthday party orders, coffee mornings, nursery groups etc which result in sales of an average 1,000 bars per month. They say that this should deliver you between £600 and £1,100 profit depending on the price that you sell the bars for (£1 or £1.50 per bar).

A mistake in the calculations

N5 Ltd goes on to say that a profit of £600 to £1,100 per month for around 16-18 hours spent designing, printing and wrapping the bars "equates to a very attractive hourly rate".

The company has made a mistake with their calculation, and it is the sort of mistake which would have been unlikely to have happened if N5 Ltd had properly tested the business themselves.

The mistake is simply that Nigel and Sue Botterill have forgotten to take account of the time spent in marketing to obtain the orders, and the time and costs of delivering the orders, and the time spent running a coffee morning or manning a display table at a nursery group.

Also, you would need to allow a minimum of 5 hours a week to market your business, plus one hour for delivery. So that makes a minimum of an extra 26 hours a month. Added to, say, 17 hours a month for production, that makes a total monthly time commitment of 43 hours. The half-way point of the company's predicted monthly profit is £850, so that makes an effective hourly rate of about £20.

£20 an hour is nevertheless a decent rate of pay.

Could you regularly receive £20 an hour?

However, the question is: could you receive it regularly? This depends on whether you get repeat orders. Without repeat orders, its very difficult for most businesses to survive.

With My Little Wrapper, if you don't get repeat orders then you'll continually have to be spending time marketing to potential new customers, and you'll need to be travelling further afield in search of them.

Repeat orders would be particularly important with My Little Wrapper because your unit profit is small.

At the moment, there isn't any evidence of the level of repeat orders for My Little Wrapper. Nigel and Sue Botterill would have needed to run the business themselves for at least six months to test this, but there is no indication on the website that they ran the business at all. The testimonials shown from purchasers of the business refer only to specific sales having been made.

Could you get your money back if you weren't happy?

Let us turn now to the question of whether you could get your money back if the business did not turn out in accordance with your expectations. At first sight, it seems that you could, because the home page on the website says, "Both Packs come with our full 100% Money Back Guarantee" and there is a link to this guarantee. However, this seems to be rather misleading, for several reasons:

1. The Terms and Conditions page says categorically, "no refunds will be available".

2. The Guarantee itself starts off by saying, "My Little Wrapper is tried, tested and proven" but - as already stated - there are no details on the website of any testing at all having been carried out.

3. Under the heading "Our 100% Money Back Guarantee" it appears that you would have to wait a full 12 months to get your money back, and during that time you would need to have "followed the Programme fully". I have seen many similarly-worded misleading "100% Money Back Guarantees" on business opportunities over the years. In practice, nobody has much chance of ever getting a refund because of the requirement to operate the business for 12 months. After all, if the business is not working for you then you wouldn't want to be spending a whole year flogging a dead horse and incurring costs if you were not getting the sales, would you?

4. The conditions for getting your money back are made even more onerous by the requirement to produce "certified accounts" and the company will then "pay you back the difference between what you did generate in sales and the cost of the Programme". This appears to be a mistake, because surely what the company should be repaying you is the difference between your net profit - if any (i.e. your sales less your costs in generating those sales) and the cost of the Programme. The requirement for certified accounts means that you would have to cough up several hundred pounds to get your accounts audited.

Anyway, Nigel Botterill has got a good point in implying that he won't believe your figures unless you have them audited. That is a very business-like approach, and it is precisely the approach you should take with him.

So you need to ask Nigel Botterill to produce certified accounts for the My Little Wrapper business. If he can't, then forget it - because it will mean that My Little Wrapper is just another one of his untested business ideas and - as seen with the Quickie franchise - they don't always work.

Will My Little Wrapper work as claimed?

In the meantime, though, let's try to get a bit of an idea for ourselves about whether My Little Wrapper will work , and if so how: let's consider the first two sources of business given under the heading "Income" on the page headed "How Much Money Can I Expect To Make".

The first one is a wedding order, and N5 Ltd says that "a typical wedding order can be for 100 bars".

Do you think you'd get many wedding orders?

It seems unlikely. Most people tend to do the traditional thing at weddings, and the traditional thing is sugared almonds. There are good reasons for this - sugared almonds look pretty and dainty and ... they don't melt or make people's fingers sticky. By contrast, even the most beautifully-wrapped chocolate bars would probably look clunky and out-of-place ... and what sort of a state do you think they would be in after spending several hours on a wedding table in a room which would be likely to have become rather warm?

Orders for children's parties are much more likely, and indeed the company says,"Children's birthday parties tend to be the mainstay of the business". However, the company says that the average order is around 20 bars. That means a sale price of between £20 and £30, with a gross profit of between £12 and £22, depending on whether you charged £1 or £1.50 per bar. That's not very much when you consider that you would have spent time getting the order, printing and applying the wrappers and delivering the order.

Having said that, I think that a personalised chocolate business could work if it were run as an add-on to an existing children's party business. That way, you would have your own ready market for repeat sales.

Whilst it's true that on the Internet you can buy software to print chocolate wrappers for a small price (e.g. www.wrapcandy.com), the results are not likely to be good as with My Little Wrapper, where you simply overprint the personalised details onto pre-printed wrappers.

Colour laser printer needed

It's important to note, though, that in either case you need to have a laser printer; otherwise, as soon as the wrappers come into contact with wet or sticky fingers (e.g. children's party, wedding party) the ink could run or smear. Furthermore, it's presumably not just a question of appearance but also a question of Health and Safety regulations, since the ink could then come into contact with food or go directly into children's mouths via their fingers.

Oddly, whereas the two adverts I found for My Little Wrapper on Google (www.franchiseexpo.co.uk and www.theukfranchisedirectory.net) both say that you need to have a colour laser printer, the website of My Little Wrapper only refers to having a colour printer.

Here's what the two adverts say:

"By using your own colour laser printer to over-print the personalisation on the preprinted wrappers you are able to provide real tip quality looking wrappers."

And here's what the website at www.getmylittlewrapper.co.uk says:

"By using your own colour printer to over-print the personalisation on the preprinted wrappers you are able to provide real tip quality looking wrappers."

There appears to be an unfortunate error throughout, because presumably the word "tip" should read "top".

BOW wrote to Nigel Botterill to tell him about this and also to ask him about what kind of printer franchisees need to have, together with a number of other questions. BOW's letter is reproduced below - link.

It's important that anyone considering buying this business opportunity (or any of the other business opportunities and franchises offered by Nigel Botterill) does not allow their decision to be influenced by the incredible number of prestigious awards which Nigel Botterill himself, and his company N5 Limited, have received.

The latest one is "Innovative Company of the Year 2008" which Nigel Botterill received at a ceremony chaired by Peter Jones of BBCs Dragons Den in March 2008. This award is part of The Fast Growth Business Awards from Crimson Business, publishers of Growing Business Magazine and the popular website at www.startups.co.uk.

Previous awards to NIgel Botterill and N5 Ltd include:

• Sunday Times Tech Track 100 - September 2007
• Best e-company of the year 2007 from Sharp Edge Awards, presented by Duncan Bannatyne from BBCs Dragons Den
• BTs Essence of the Entrepreneur Award 2007

How come, you may ask, the great and the good on the Judges Panels - including not only Dragons Den gurus Peter Jones and Duncan Bannatyne, but also Sir David Arculus (responsible for the phenomenal success of Emap) and Rene Carayol MBE - rate Nigel Botterill and his company so highly when BOW does not?

The answer is that these judges are judging on the basis of different criteria. They are looking at questions such as whether Nigel Botterill's business is innovative and whether it is financially successful.

BOW, on the other hand, is not primarily concerned with whether Nigel Botterill makes a lot of money and comes up with new ideas; BOW is first and foremost concerned with looking for evidence that what he is offering will enable his customers (e.g. you if you bought a business opportunity or a franchise from him) to make money, regardless of whether the idea is new or old-hat revisited.

Ignore any awards received by any business opportunity or franchise

Therefore, the best advice to anyone thinking of buying a business opportunity from a company which has received any awards or accolades is to totally ignore these in doing their research and arriving at their decision on whether to purchase the business.

Furthermore, with any award given by a publishing company, you might wonder whether the decisions were totally impartial or whether major advertisers were in with a running start. (Please note that BOW is making this comment purely as a general, common-sense observation, without any specific reference at all to either Nigel Botterill and his company or to any of the awarding companies.)

Another thing is that you would be unlikely ever to be able to find out what evidence the judges based their decision on.

For example, in the case of Nigel Botterill and his company N5 Ltd it does not seem to be based on the company's financial results as filed at Companies House, because for the year ended 30 April 2006 the company had a deficit of £126,726 on its profit and loss account. For the year ended 30 April 2007 the deficit was nearly £70,000 and the company's creditors exceeded its current assets by nearly £30,000. Also, at one time during the year Nigel and Sue Botterill owed the company the incredible figure of nearly £2 million (the amount they owed at the end of the year had fallen to £325,885).

Regardless of the latest award from Fast Growth Business, according to Alexa (www.alexa.com) the fall in the number of visits to the website of N5 Ltd's main franchise - thebestof - continues unchecked, as detailed in the following letter BOW sent to Nigel Botterill.

Go forward to Page Two

2. Review Continued - BOW Letter to Nigel Botterill

3. Nigel Botterill's reply

4. Enquiry about a refund

5. Update 9th March 2010 re Nigel Botterill's bio re Card Protection Plan, http://nigelbotterill.com, www.entrepreneurs-circle.co.uk

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