I noticed that a local book shop was closing down and I asked if I could buy his old stock. The old man took one look at this enthusiastic 11 year old and said that I could take as much old stock as I wanted for free! Several wheel barrows later and my dad’s garage was full of about 1000 old books.

My plan was cunningly simple. Our double garage backed onto a popular tourist car park and since it was August I knew there would be a steady stream of people walking past. I convinced my best mate, Tim, to help out (he was on 50% commission). A couple of hand painted signs later and we opened for business.

After quickly learning that people will just walk past unless you manhandle them into the garage, we started to get some customers. This is where we started to realise there was a small problem in the overall master plan. The quality of our merchandise was sorely lacking. For example, we had 15 tourist guides to Tunisia that were 8 years out of date. Another tough seller was a biography of some old and distant politician. Our enthusiastic faces carried the day. After all if you can buy a book for 20p then its worth buying it just to stop us hassling you! “Think of the oil fields!”, we cried.

Eventually, we raised £40 for my brother’s trip, but I learnt a much more valuable lesson about opportunity. If you keep your eyes open and stay prepared, then you will be able to make the most of opportunities that fall your way. The only sad thing about this story is the endless grief I received from my dad for about the next 5 years: “when are you going to get rid of those @£%*$! books cluttering up my garage…?”…. Guide to Tunisia anyone?

I managed to borrow army netting, mannequins and tons of cloths. The night was great fun but in our enthusiasm in organising the night, we forgot about marketing. Our efforts to talk people in from the street proved only partially successful. The venue could hold 1000 and we only managed to get about 200 through the door. In total, we lost about £100 each.

To top it all off, someone decided to rugby tackle a mannequin, resulting in the mannequin’s head coming off and being used as a football. Since I had paid a £50 deposit to the store who loaned me the mannequin, I spent the next day talking my way into the Uni art department and persuading the tutor to help me fix the head back on for ‘an art project’.

An important lesson learnt here was that it doesn’t matter how great a product is if no one knows about it. Marketing is as important as the product.

In an effort to live up to my Dad’s standards I decided to enrol in a Physics degree at Manchester UMIST. I quickly found out that although I loved the big picture elements of problem solving, I hated the mammoth amount of detail (and work) that was needed. My lecture attendance plummeted as I focused on the more fun elements of Uni life like socialising and sport. At the end of my first year, I realised that I had racked up quite a lot of student debt (even with a £100 support allowance from my Dad) and had nothing to show for it (well, other than a few good times!).

I decided that I needed to get away from it all and clear my head. I found out about a program where you could sell books door to door in America and decided that this would be a good way to get back on the straight and narrow whilst at the same time earning some money. The only problem was affording the tickets to get out there. I bounced the idea off my Dad who enthusiastically said that it would be a great experience for me and that he would pay for the tickets (I later found out that he did this to get his own back at me for wasting his money whilst at Uni!).

The trip was not great. I lost my passport prior to departure and had to do a very quick emergency passport in Cardiff. This resulted in my missing the connection when I got to New York. Since I had very limited funds I was forced to board a coach to Nashville. I ended up sitting between the toilet and some gun nut for 18 hours (never sit next to the toilet!).

In Nashville we were trained for a week before being sent out to our turf. This was great fun and very American (lots of standing up and shouting, high fives, and telling each other how great we were). Full of enthusiasm, I confidently agreed that I would be starting at 6am with a cold shower EVERY day and finishing around 8pm. The working day consisted of said cold shower (which I managed to do for the first 5 days) and then meeting other sellers in a local coffee shop. We would gee each other up and then do a victory dance outside the coffee shop (another Americanism sales motivation technique which we managed to keep up for a surprising 2 weeks). Then we were off on a full day of wondering around suburbs on foot with a massive 8kg bag of dictionaries and encyclopaedias.

Selling books to Americans is not easy. Sales seems to be part of American life and all I had that was new was my quaint English accent. There are quite a few stories from this summer that I won’t go into here, but there were quite a few instances of me being chased off the premises by a yank with a gun. When a 70 year old man is waiving a shot gun at you and yelling “giit the heeeell orf maa property!”, you soon start to question your situation in life!

I managed to make $5k profit by the end of the summer. I learnt that face-to-face cold sales is hard work. You try knocking on a cold door, talking your way in, convincing someone that they really need an encyclopaedia and then getting them to write a cheque for you as you cheerfully tell them the books will be delivered at the end of the summer! I also learnt that people are more likely to buy something if they can see an emotional value rather than a cold logic.

I found that working for clients could be an unrewarding experience though and decided to start my own internet companies instead. I ran Net121 in the background whilst founding Accommodation for Students in 2001, then Conferences UK in 2003 and then Thomas Charles in 2005. The next site I am planning to launch will be a dating site, which is currently in soft launch.