by Alex Gunn
Realising that I really did not have much money I found myself going to the same cheap stalls that the poorest Thai labourers and manual workers went to. I looked at the vegetable stalls that specialize in selling only a variety of two or three cheap vegetables that were, what my Mum would have referred to as “on the turn”, in other words, about to go rotten but were still just about edible.
The labourers and manual workers, who were also buying cheap veg must have wondered what on earth I was doing and what must have happened to reduce a rich westerner (for all westerners are by comparison immensely rich) to buying mouldy vegetables in a far flung country market on the outskirts of Chiang Mai. It too was a thought that wasn’t a million miles away from my own thoughts. What on earth was I doing?
I forced myself to concentrate on the job in hand. I had to buy dinner, milk and other stuff for 100 Baht…and had to make it go as far as I could. If I could stretch out that hundred Baht for 2 days or 3 days then I might be able to buy something nice at the weekend. Who knows we might even get to the zoo.
It must have been how fallen aristocrats found themselves in England in the 1800s, living in some huge but largely empty house, with all the trappings of a privileged life style but without a penny, or in this case, a baht to your name.
I bought a big bag of carrots for 15 Baht, some sticky rice (another 20 Baht), a single onion which came to a very reasonable 2 Baht, a small bag of garlic for 5 Baht, a potato for a ludicrously huge 10 Baht, a very small piece of ginger for 5 Baht, a small carton of UHT for 9 Baht, a bottle of water for 10 Baht leaving a grand total of 24 Baht.
I may not be the best adventurer in the world and have the enviable qualities of a previous generation but I could certainly shop for a family of 4 on a shoe string, even half a shoestring or even a stringlet.
I got home and set to work turning the ingredients into carrot soup in the massive cavernous first kitchen. I made a cup of tea in thunderbird mug number 2 using just a little of the UHT milk and saved the rest for the soup. It all bubbled away nicely until it was soft enough to put in a blender (I think they are only used here to make smoothie milkshakes and the like rather than hearty western style soups). I poured the soup out into 4 little Thunderbird bowls and we all dipped big dollops of the lovely warm soft sticky rice into the soup.
The children loved it and had no idea of it’s humble origins, “this is great, can we have it again tomorrow?” “Funny you should say that” I replied. My wife liked it as it reminded her of when we were both young and had no money. We would go down Berwick Street Market in Soho in central London at the end of the week and buy a huge bag of cheap fruit or veg to last us a week. It felt like we were travelling back in time. I didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not, and when you are surviving from day to day you don’t really care.
We had got through another day, another day staving off the admittance of failure, and I was 24 Baht in pocket and hadn’t yet gone mad or been carted off to debtors prison. We felt unexpectedly optimistic and light hearted. I had 24 Baht in my pocket and thought that tomorrow I could buy 2 extra potatoes and still have 4 Baht to put in the tin next to the blind beggar with no teeth who sits at the entrance to the market.
Chapter 16
Business Is Busting
Having spent a middle age life time teaching in schools and colleges and working in clinical settings, plummeting head first into the world of business is a rude awakening. After nearly a year in the cut and thrust world of business where there is no regular payment appearing in your bank account, where every penny, dime and sheckle you earn is by pure dint of your own industry and wit I have a new found respect for anybody who runs their own business and makes it work. Whether a self employed window cleaner or international shipping magnate, if you make money from your own business, in my books, you’re almost super human, because it’s so damn hard.
It feels like as soon as you set up a business, any business anywhere, you swim with the sharks. I know that to people who have never run their own business this might sound a tad dramatic, it would have made me sneer and laugh a year ago, but I promise that it is no exaggeration. You suddenly have competitors, people who don’t like you, who have been doing whatever you are trying to do, better and for longer than you. They would like nothing more for you to crash and burn, not because they are bad people but simply because that’s business, it’s all about survival, sink or swim.
As well as your competitors, who are trying to do what you do, but better and cheaper, you have a queue of people lining up to take your precious money. Some of them are even really nice helpful people that you will need to run a business and simply cannot do without; accountants, book keepers, PR people, banks, marketing experts, web designers, suppliers, search engine optimizers, and a whole host of other business experts and advisors that appear like pimples on a teenager as soon as you start trading. These people, as nice as they might be will happily take money from you until it’s all gone. There’s no avuncular Head of Faculty or Treatment Director to protect you and shield you from the horrors of failure, it’s just you and business, sink or swim.
In the words of Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of The Caribbean “the world is divided into 2, things a man can do and things a man can’t do”. Would I be able to sail the seven seas, fight off Orlando Bloom and woo Kiera Knightley and run a successful company, or would we be returning back to England with stories of injustice, economic downturn, cultural differences and other vague excuses designed to mask the hideous word, “failure”.
Apart from the sharks and the nice people that take your money there’s also vultures, hyenas and jackals. These are the scammers; people who will prey on your innocence and insecurities. They are the modern day wreckers who deliberately misguide unwary companies onto the rocks, or wait for them to drift into shallow water and then plunder the spoils.
Did you know for example, that there are people who stalk the internet, buying up web site addresses that expire, for a tiny renewal fee and then phone you up and happily announce that you can have your web site address back for an extortionate amount of money. This isn’t as rare as it sounds as the renewal reminder goes to the person who created the web address, not the person whose web site it is. On hearing this cheery news I immediately made a note in my diary next to my Mums birthday so that I wouldn’t fall prey of a website hijack.
There are also companies that scare money out of you. We were contacted by a nice sounding lady from a Singapore based business agency who informed us that our company name was not secure and anybody, at anytime, could set up a company with the same name as us and start trading. She went onto to say that for a modest sum to cover costs she would organize legal documents to be drawn up to protect us. It all sounded very plausible and for the peace of mind we would have happily parted with some money.
We mentioned it to Khun Krit our company lawyer who informed us that we should do no such thing and immediately fired off an email telling her to bugger off in legal language.
So, apart from the sharks, the nice people who will take your money till its all gone, the hyenas, the vultures and the jackals you still have Jerry from Hong Kong; people drawn to you by the smell of cash, or in Jerry’s case just the idea of the smell of cash. Hang in there Jerry.
But, even if you survive all this lot, you still have to have a product or service that people actually want, that you are able to price correctly and is visible to the right people.
It was this last bit that was going wrong for us. Our modern day version of the shop window, our web site, was in the wrong part of town. I actually later found out that it wasn’t in town at all but out on some remote ring road beyond the gas works where nobody except mad dogs and glue sniffers hang out.
Without a steady flow of people finding us on the internet we were saddled with having to import four top notch journalists every few months. Although I don’t know a great deal abo
ut business models even I knew that this is what they probably referred to at business school as “a shit business model”. We had to find a new web site person who could put things right, and quick. It was now the middle of March (“beware the ides of March”, Julius Caesar, Act 1,Scene 2) and financially we were hanging on by our fingertips.
Oh my giddy aunt, what an unbelievable palaver followed. It felt like every weirdo who washed up in Chiang Mai made a living fixing poorly performing web sites.
We met a Canadian bloke who, we realized, half way through our meeting, was drunk. Not just a little bit tipsy and jolly but actually completely blasted. Until that point he sounded like he knew what he was doing and we were ready to give him the job. When he couldn’t hold things together any longer, he slid off his chair and asked me outright whether I would buy him a beer. It didn’t sound like a great offer, although I have to admit that I still can’t think of a way to so totally sabotage what amounts to a job interview. We decided against hiring him and we parted company.
We met a bookish looking young Norwegian man who spun a story of such pitiful unrequited love that he made himself cry and told us that he was in no fit state to work. We agreed with him.
Eventually we plumped for an extremely nice laid back American guy who set about dismantling our web site and charging us vast amounts of money. Things kind of felt like they were staggering forward, our web site did look a bit better but still we had no enquiries and things just didn’t feel right. Nothing he did made any sense to me, including, rather bizarrely, optimizing the web site for the phrase “mid life anxiety” which he guaranteed would bring customers flocking to Chiang Mai. After several weeks of nothing except watching our small sum of money that we had made at the beginning of the year run out, and haunting cheap vegetable stalls at the market, I suggested that we meet in order to review what exactly was going on. It quickly transpired that he was not just the other side of town but the other side of the world, in America where he was working as a psychiatric nurse!
We just couldn’t believe it. Our company was heading down the pan, our money was almost gone, we were living on carrot soup, we owed an unbelievable amount to the bank and our American web site wonder boy, our sole saviour, was busy dispensing Chlorpromazine the other side of the world. I just couldn’t bloody believe it. It was like being trapped in a surrealist nightmare.
Chiang Mai is a bit like that, a kind of international base for the weird and incurably restless. One day you’re having a quiet beer in a bar with a normal sounding bloke. The next week you hear he married an Indonesian belly dancer, moved to Tel Aviv and opened an American pancake house before being arrested and deported to Brazil where he was wanted for diamond smuggling. After a while you kind of get used to it and just assume you are talking to a retired Mossad agent, or under cover CIA spy or Ukrainian gun runner. You get used to the fact that people come and go without warning or explanation and nothing seems to make a great deal of sense. It’s a bit like living in a play written by both Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
Still reeling from the shock of employing a psychiatric nurse to save our web site I phoned Paul, who you might remember is the manager of The Rachamankha Hotel and asked if he knew anyone, anyone, half way normal who could fix web sites. Enter, Ozzi and Glen.
Glen is a tall mild mannered West Country man from the UK with a profusion of blonde hair and an economy with words. Amazingly before he came out to Thailand, he was making ends meet working as a builder in the next village to us in Devon. He seemed totally un-amazed at this startling coincidence and when I said excitedly “that’s amazing, we would have to drive right past you to get to school in the morning” he simply replied “what did you think of the rendering”. Anyway, ignoring my further excitement that he actually knew Derek Wilkinson the butcher, he did whatever Search Engine Optimizers do to move our web site away from the ring road and into the town centre. He was around long enough to make sure that it was all running smoothly before promptly, and unexpectedly, moving to Colombia where he is now engaged to marry a national beauty queen (see what I mean). It’s probably just a matter of time before he opens a pancake house.
Ozzi on the other hand is very different. Originally from Finland, Ozzi, like us, has adopted Chiang Mai as his home. He is handsome, young, talented, creative, talks four languages, has a master’s degree in business and sets up a new company every other week. I have no doubt that he will be a millionaire by the time he is forty (Jerry from Hong Kong please take note). Above all this though, Ozzi is our friend and lives just up the road.
He set about re-building our web site so that you can actually understand it. When he talks you can tell that he knows what he is doing, and is calm and reassuring. As someone who has had to overcome adversity and change many times himself he really understood what we were trying to do. In many ways he saved us from going bust, and for that we will be forever grateful. Thank you Ozzi.
Slowly but surely the enquiries started to come in again. The nightmare flash backs of writing 5000 words about engagement rings in the middle of the night, with the rest of the family sleeping, started to subside. I stopped buying Value Toilet Roll and haunting the cheap vegetable stalls and discount shelves in Tesco Lotus and feeling like I was supporting a family on a student grant. We took a few bookings and once again had some money in our Thai bank account. The amount of vegetable soup diminished in direct relationship to the number of customers that paid their deposit (I don’t suppose that is a phrase they learn in business school). The roller coaster ride was going back up again.
In case you have a brain storm and decide to give up your nice comfortable life and set up a business in Thailand, for what its worth here is a small list of business things I have picked up over the last year in the Chiang Mai Business School of Hard Knocks.
Whatever you think it’s going to cost or even told it’s going to cost, double it.
Whatever money you think you’re going to make, halve it, and then halve it again.
Never tell a potential customer that you haven’t got it or can’t supply it.
Talk to Ozzi, or someone like Ozzi before you start.
Be prepared to have instant enemies, lie awake at night worried sick and work harder than you ever have done in your life.
Make sure you are listed as your web site address owner.
Be prepared to use all your savings, your overdraft facility as well as your good name at the bank.
Don’t trust a web designer who has qualifications in psychiatric nursing.
During the time that the Work Permit Inspectors visit your business, get dressed before you meet them.
Always do the right thing (there does seem to be a kind of business karma in Chiang Mai) if the right thing is unclear it’s probably the option that looks the hardest.
When you go for your medical for a work permit be sure to demonstrate a keen love of local food.
Before you start trading make sure you have a blender in your kitchen (for the carrot soup).
Be kind to Jerry.
Chapter 17
Our First Family Holiday
By the end of April I had received medical treatment in nine different Thai hospitals, which for a man who previously had been treated in hospital once in 43 years isn’t bad going. The majority of these visits were made not as a result of a sudden attack of Munchausen’s Syndrome but because I was bitten by a rabid dog in a remote part of Thailand whilst on our first family holiday.
As the school Easter Holidays rolled around, or Spring Break as they’re now called, we thought we should go and see some more of Thailand and give our children a much deserved holiday and break from their parents’ whittering on about bankruptcy. So like true adventurers we set off, on trains, buses and at one point all four of us plus luggage on three taxi motorbikes in the pouring rain, to see the beaches in the south of Thailand.
We
had to watch our money very carefully for although business had picked up a little it felt like the roller coaster could take another downward plunge any moment. The taste of carrot soup was still fresh in our mouths. With this in mind, my wife had worked out a careful itinerary of interesting far flung places and cheap but cheerful hotels in the south of Thailand. It all looked great on the kitchen table over a glass of wine (or Red Cock) but experience over the last year has taught me that everything always does, until you have to start doing it.
To be honest, the two days of travelling, on a tight budget, with two youngish children had been pretty rough to say the least. The journey from Bangkok to Hua Hin alone was a minor nightmare. It’s a trip that hundreds of holiday makers take every day without incident, as long as you’ve got the money to spend on a hired van and driver. If you decide to take the cheapest train with no air con, as we did it, feels like you’re travelling across India on public transport, or how I imagine you feel when you are travelling across India by public transport.
It all felt great getting on the train and waiting for the departure time. There was no shortage of people getting on the train and selling refreshments, and the numerous old fashioned fans above our heads whirred away, shooting a pleasing breeze across our hot brows. Three hours later I would have happily committed murder in exchange for a safe arrival at Hua Hin station.
The train very slowly shunted out of the station and stopped almost immediately. Now out of the station we were in searing heat and you could actually feel the temperature inside the carriage rising. What was a cooling breeze on our brows just moments ago was now just very hot air being blasted in our faces. The train crept forwards for about ten minutes and stopped again, and this went on for three hours, getting hotter and feeling that we were going nowhere fast. Our youngest was lying with his head on my wife’s lap trying to sleep to get away from the heat. My wife, with increasing irritability, was trying to get him to lie still and have a sleep. Our oldest son had given up trying to read because he said that sweat kept making his eyes sting, and he was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and head bowed as though he was going to be sick. I could still just see the tower blocks of Bangkok city centre, we had hardly travelled any distance at all. Just to rub it in we had stopped next to a fantastic looking elevated super highway with sleek air conditioned cars zooming past at thrilling high speed, like dolphins down a water shoot. It felt like we were in hell.