How I became obscenely rich

Regus Saga continues

As you know from my post concerning the first part of the Regus saga I have had some problems with my office at Regus. Well, the saga is still going on and I thought I’d write about it here in case anyone is thinking of getting one, virtual or otherwise.

You may recall I was hassled into signing the contract quickly and I did so because I had seen the office and wanted to get into it quickly anyway. It was just the attitude that was all wrong and the monthly fee. I waited until the Essex sales manager returned to discuss this and to make sure I got the price for the office he first offered.

I was told I could move into the office on the 1st of October and went in on this day. No-one knew who I was and the internet connection was not on. The contract was not officially to start until the 7th so I thought I would wait until then as the office still needed painting and cleaning.

I arrived on the 7th October and the office was ready but the internet for the entire building was not working so still no internet. I moved in my things and set up my internal network ready for when I could start work.

I made an appointment to see the Essex sales manager on the 7th but he did not show up to the meeting or call me, so I arranged another meeting for the end of the week.

On the 8th, Internet was back up and I could start working. I had no voicemail yet but that is ok because the phones were supposed to be redirected to my mobile. I didn’t need to get a separate virtual office reception as that is provided by the receptionist in our building. The person who deals with the phones is away for a week so I will have to wait until then to set up a voicemail.

At the end of the week, I still had not heard anything regarding the transfer of my virtual office to the receptionist here at the Regus building or about my 47p call charge I received.

I thought I would just discuss this at the end of the week with my meeting with the office manager.

In the meantime I found out my client’s calls were being routed to another company so when anyone rang me, they said wrong number and my clients were left wondering what was going on.

The reception staff here at Regus were great in sorting this out and in general have been brilliant.

At the end of the week, the sales manager again missed the meeting with no call. I’m understandably getting a little annoyed now. So I arrange another meeting for the next week.

The week comes round and I find that my internet connection is very basic and to get some basic ports open I need to upgrade to pay £69.99 / month for a single connection to allow ports to open. I think this is very steep but have no option if I want to run my business so I signed up for that.

The next week comes round and we have already had another day of internet connection outage so that is 2 days in 2 weeks o f no internet connection. For an internet company this is a total show stopper.

The sales manager phoned me to tell me he was going to be later and could we postpone my meeting with him for an hour. This was fine, but he did not show up at all! It got to 5pm and I was on my way home when I saw him come out of an office in reception. He looked very sheepish like a schoolboy who has not done his homework.

We went into his office for our meeting. When I asked him about the initial offer and rates he had offered me, he tried to deny it and change the rates! I could not believe it. He told me his system was not flexible enough to give me what he had first offered. I told him what he had first agreed and he said he needed to work out some numbers and he would get back to me by 12 midday the next day with what he could offer me and we would have a further meeting to discuss by the end of the week.

The next day, I heard nothing and the week has gone by and he has not contacted me at all.

On Saturday I received another invoice from Regus. The invoice includes a whole list of set up charges that have never been mentioned before totalling hundreds of pounds as well as a £1400 fee for something undisclosed. There were also further call charges of over £20 on a phone which I have used a few times to locally call my wife for a few minutes. In addition to the charge of £69.99 per telephone they also charge a further £9.99 line rental.

The set up charges include £100 office set up, £69.99 phone set up, £69.99 internet set up. None of which is explained up front and is not included in any documentation given.

There is almost nothing on this £3500 invoice which I agree with and I have written an email to the sales manager asking him to urgently contact me today.

So far I have heard nothing.

I am seriously thinking of vacating this office and finding another one. I am giving him until the end of the day to get back to me.

The chancellor has declared that regardless of what the Icelandic compensation board do, the British Government will guarantee that the depositors of money in the Icelandic bank’s UK branch icesave will get ALL of their money back.

This is a massive relief to me, but I am still not convinced until the money is in my account.

I have contacted the FSA (who seem to be behind the news by about 24 hours) have told me that I don’t have to do anything and that they will be in contact with me to arrange the compensation claim.

I look forward to getting this one sorted.

Icesave and the freezing of my account

Today, the UK part of the Icelandic bank IceSave announced by posting on it’s website that it was freezing all of its customer’s cash. No deposits or withdrawals were being permitted.

This, in retrospect is probably not much of a shock, but for me who wasn’t paying enough attention to the media around Iceland over the last 48hours the news is pretty scary.

I have the majority of my and my partner’s cash in a high interest IceSave account. Between the Icelandic government and the FSA there is an obligation to pay back up to £50k per person. The amount of money I have in the account is (luckily) less than this.

The first £16K approx per person of the claimable amount falls to the Icelandic government with the FSA making up the rest. My predicament is that we have about £30K in a joint account which means the Icelandic government should cover all of our money. However, there are stories that the government is unofficially bankrupt and the amount of debt the banks owe is many times greater than Iceland’s GDP.

Russia has supposedly lent Iceland $4Billion although this has not been confirmed, but will they use is to bail out the banks?

The situation at present is that I can’t get my money and I have no idea when, if at all, I will get it back. Pretty scary.

In Rich Dad, Poor Dad, one of the first books I read which started me on this journey, he talks about how when financial crisis hits, it is always the people who are not investors that get hit the hardest: the people with savings, with jobs and commercially bought investment deals. I am beginning to know what he was talking about.

From now on, I am going to pay more attention to the world news and not trust the banks at all. I’ll let you know what happens.

Just a short post to let you know, I moved into my office today. Everything went well apart from there was no internet connection and it won’t be on until tomorrow evening which effectively kills a day’s work.

The office has a great view from the corner of the building over trees and plenty of space for me. It has been repainted as promised and new furniture has been put in.

 It feels weird not working from home, like I have moved out, however, it is excellent and a necessary step in the right direction.

I already feel more empowered and that the asset of the business is being constructed as planned.

Also when I got home, I really felt I could leave the office behind and spend some quality family time.

Ban on shorting

I thought I would write a little on my opinion on the ban on shorting. As you may know, the governments around the world have placed a ban on shorting various stocks. Some countries have gone for a total ban and some just selected stocks. The UK have banned shorting on Banking and Insurance stocks until January 19th 2009.

My personal take on this, is that this will, in the short term increase volatility in the markets and in the long term cause massive drops in share prices when the bans are removed.

My reason for this opinion is that in the short term, if people cannot short it means they can not hedge against going long in other stocks or investing money / lending money to large institutions. This in turn means there is less trading in the markets which in turn means that the trades that are placed cause much high volatility, which in turn keeps people out of the markets and the cycle increases.
With regards to long term massive drops in price, it has been shown that stocks become overvalued if there is no way to short them. This is borne out by China allowing for the first time, shorting of stocks to try to offset market bubbles which have recently burst. When the overvalued stocks have the ban removed, the stock will be shorted and drop like a stone.

Shorting stock acts like a  stabiliser to the market and I believe is one of the key ingredients which make the markets bounce back and become self regulating. In my previous post way back when I started this blog about Alan Greenspan’s book, ‘The age of Turbulence’ , I talked about the difference between a free market and a socialist controlled market and how a free market is better for all of us as long as you don’t mind a bit of stress every now and again. I also talked about the socialist and populist forms of control and how the ultimately lead to their own demise.

I see this ban on shorting a populist move based upon fear and misunderstanding of the true nature of the markets.

I guess when you have archbishops standing up and saying ‘down with the shorters, they are like bank robbers’, you know you are in the hands of a mob.

Sales and marketing

It’ s been awhile since I wrote a post and this one is a bit of a repeat of the previous post in this category, however, it does add more detail and give an update of how things are going. Being a dad doesn’t leave much time in the evenings and in the day I have been busy building the business asset.

As you know, I completed the website a week or so ago and now I have been going through the marketing database I created by parsing trade magazine’s websites and researching the net. I have created a sales brochure and written a personal letter to each of the companies new business directors.

I am sending this tomorrow to 33 selected companies. These are the companies I feel I am most likely to be able to work with. I have nearly 250 other good-match potential clients with over 750 other potentials that need investigating. I am going to slowly go through each of these companies and contact them all. I sending the letters in small batches so I can personally ring the companies a few days after I have sent the letter. 

I have also taken out an advert in the leading trade magazine for my industry for one year. We have got the only round advert in a sea of square ones.

I have also been working on my connections using LinkedIn as business social networking site. I have reviewed every job I have ever done and looked up people I used to work with. Some of them are now directors of their own companies and may offer some potential for business. I will contact all of these connections in the next week.

I have also set up a Google Adwords campaign to show adverts for the company when certain keywords are searched upon in Google.

I will also contact previous clients in the hope they have either more work or that they will refer my company to those that they work with.

Using this multi pronged sales and marketing tack my target is to win just one big client before Christmas.