12 April - Offers & Entrepreneurs

Gosh what does it mean? Have just accepted a new job – essentially doing the same thing but elsewhere and for more cash, won’t go into boring details - and simultaneously get asked by a friend if I’m interested in becoming UK distributor of some top European ‘only sold in pharmacies’ slimming cream. Yeah right, I so believe they work, NOT, though it took me to nearly 40 to finally stop wasting money on them. Plus I knew how they’d always get me on the ‘but it doesn’t work’ moan: I never ever had the commitment to twice a day rubbing it in for x amount of minutes, thus giving them room to say ‘Ah well, what did you expect then?’ There is also a girlfriend still mildly courting me to join her growing fashion PR agency – could do if I could overcome mild distaste for fashion people in general - and then my sister writes to say I’d be perfect to start own company organising travel and contacts to cheaper labour countries for dental treatment and other medical procedures (she knows I draw the line at plastic surgery). This latter makes a lot of sense, as I personally did have some dental work done a while back during a visit to Krakow and some top of the range ophthalmic work done both in Brazil and Italy. I also know two good friends have saved thousands on expensive mouth reconstruction in India. They were in different cities and used different dentists and both have nothing bad to report. And we all know we can go to France or Germany for speedier, better cardiac surgery and so on.
There is only one problem with these … ideas. I’d have to deal with people and am interested mainly in avoiding doing so. When I was younger, given I speak a few languages, it was suggested I may want to go into tourism etc and even then I baulked at the thought of having to deal with individuals and their requests to that extent. Another obstacle to any entrepreneurial suggestions is that nobody can ever persuade me that the returns are large enough for the effort. Ok so I organise ten of you to go to Warsaw for dental work totalling say £20,000. The most my commission can be is probably ten per cent. Think of all that hassle for 2,000 when I can earn more than that sitting in my comfortable office. Even if it were double that, it probably still wouldn’t excite me so much. As for managing a band! This is another offer I have on the plate… let’s just say I told their producer I was willing to help with contacts/marketing for a fee, and it still took me several calls and emails to get a finished sample CD of their music and some photographs of said artists. Not received either yet. Now, I’m very unlikely to exploit any connections I still have if I first don’t ascertain the product and presentation is worth my reputation, am I? So there you go. Am sure if I sit here for another 20 mins musing on this I can come up with some more examples of things I could have done. In fact only last year L and I got all excited about opening a Bikram yoga studio in Milan where there is none and she could live nearby. I was up for running it but not for teaching and it could only make sense in the first year or so if owners also got down to teaching classes. Now, aside from having to go to LA and stump up thousands to become an approved teacher, we’d then have to find backers to the tune of much much more as Bikram requires steaming up the room and not just finding a wharehous-y space. Needless to say we talked ourselves out of that one. Am sure there are more things I haven’t done and thus been unable to purchase the clifftop villa in Ibiza. Darn…