Self motivation, articles and advice

A few days before leaf harvest a massive hailstorm destroyed the entire crop. I lost every cent and returned to South Africa on a motorcycle with R500 in my pocket!

I started a poultry farm on leased land producing eggs. Somehow with this meager capital I talked cage suppliers into supplying laying cages, chicken suppliers chickens and feed suppliers to finance the feed and built this project up to 15 000 birds over a period while living like a pauper. The year that all was paid for a young entrepreneur came back from the USA where he had seen massive poultry plants and established the giant Rainbow Poultry Farms. Within months they had dropped market prices so low that the smaller producers were wiped out! In order to pay for these debts I talked a local commercial fishing boat owner into allowing me to take his boat to sea. He paid me a commission on the fish I caught and I was able to repay the debts over the next few years. I sold the remains of the poultry plant.

In the meantime I had diversified into dairying on the same leased land. Over the next few years I managed to turn this venture, starting with R5000 borrowed capital, into the most successful dairy farm in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The farm won conservation awards, the herd won production awards and we had visitors from all over the world. We pioneered new pasture management systems, brought back innovative ideas from New Zealand, developed my own technology in milking and cow handling systems, established the first bulk milking tanks and started the most effective dairy economics study group and marketing initiative in the country. We regarded this as probably the most successful of all our endeavours. I say, we, as I owe my wife a great deal for her contributions to this venture as well as all those that follow.

We sold the farm enterprise and moved to a coastal resort to begin a venture in property development. During this period I was incredibly fortunate to anticipate the crash in the value of the Rand currency by investing in a highly lucrative contract in a small fleet of Marine containers in US Dollars. Combined with property development our wealth increased over the next years many times over. I built two small shopping centers and speculated in the stockmarket very successfully. Nothing seemed to go wrong. I was fortunate during this time to own a Porsche sports car and a BMW M3. We also traveled extensively in Southern Africa, New Zealand and Australia. I established a personal equity portfolio management service for close friends on their request, as I had been very successful in my own investments.

This germinated an idea to invest in Australia with a partner. I had been very successful in the local stock market and also in a franchised South African theme pub, so I embarked with the local entrepreneur to launch this concept in Chicago, U.S.A., in collaboration with an American partner. I got both projects going as planned. In the meantime financial regulations had made it necessary for me to hand over the successful portfolio business to professional brokers as I was no longer able operate as an unregistered intermediary. Suddenly, after almost seventeen years of unbelievable success on all fronts everything started to unravel. It began with the crash due to a broking fraud of a small start up bank in South Africa that I had invested in. Then the Australian franchisor who we were dealing with failed to live up to the agreements we had undertaken. Shortly after this the I.P.O. stock market collapsed in the U.S.A. taking our American partner with it. This wiped out our US Dollar funding. The Chicago venture had to be aborted due to under funding.

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