Yes, but the business has to pay for itself, if we don't make a profit then there is no point in running it.
As for the £100k fttp, I see your point, we would enjoy it as well and it might increase the value of our property. However, there is a slim chance that we might get FTTP in 2021 and then we have thrown away a fortune for no reason when we could have paid the small mortgage off instead. I am not working, being confined to bed, and so I do not have limitless income. And we are too small. Janet can't handle the work as she is not well and we can't expand into more rooms as we do not have the land and would in any case not want to ruin the experience of solitude for the guest by turning it into a caravan park basically. We only have two rooms., and so people are not on top of one another.
But coming back to FTTP, I could not sell that to Janet. I can do what I need now although it is a pain, and I can in fact cover the guests’ needs too because of the excellent 4G, but how to make that manageable?
Basically one needs to think like a customer, which is easy because I used to be one and Janet is superb at that. She gets people coming back three times for instance and has incredible ratings on trip advisor and no complaints ever apart from the occasional outright loony or nasty piece of work. Like a vile family from Israel where the husband picked this place and then the wife freaked out about his choice and was wanting us to basically build a cottage for her at the last minute. I suggested to Janet that they should just go to a four star or five star hotel and then they would be happy. When they turned up the wife was just screaming at the husband about picking a wooden box in the middle of a field surrounded by mountains, which people choose just precisely for the features which she detested. Simply insane and did not read the label on the tin. Being extremely foreign was no excuse because english was excellent.
But despite thinking like a customer, that has to be a sane one. If the customer wants everything including the moon on a stick they still have to pay for it, and if financially challenged then they are someone else’s customer. I personally find it really annoying when some things are not (apparently) free, and so others will think like that too, so those have to just be factored in and hidden away in the base price so that you do not disappoint. We are so overloaded with demand that I constantly suggest raising prices, but Janet knows best. We do explain to people why some things need to be paid for, however they are charged, and explain what things do cost us. And I think people appreciate that. We are not trying to take in more customers because we are booked solid all the time.