OBVA (Overseas Business Ventures Australia)
I had sold my shops; I was a workaholic what was I to do?
My beautiful second wife had a small business which kept her occupied but I needed something to do. So my suggestion was to market her business so that she could get more clients. She thought that would be helpful as she was having difficulty getting her 30 odd clients a year.
So I exchanged my bright coloured shirts & jeans and traded them in for the shirt, tie and suit. What a change; but I was now representing Australia and therefore could not be seen as the cowboy any longer. My strategy was that we were not going to be like our competitors, we were going to do this properly. So I set down the rules of Engagement, which was:
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I would travel to the various countries regularly meeting as many people as possible.
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I would personally inspect all the businesses, which meant getting on buses and travelling all over places like Taiwan in my suits and with my bags.
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I would assess each business for its viability and more importantly to determine it being successful and could add value in Australia.
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We would only take on clients we believed 100% that we could get them accepted by the Australian Government.
Well within the first 12 months of our marketing campaign "Australia the Land of the 21st Century", to my wife's horror we were doing 300 applications, 10 fold increase. My wife was not impressed as this meant she had to write all these proposals.
The company expanded and within the next 12 months, we had sold half the business to the 9th largest accounting firm in Australia.