Financial difficulties

 

Closing a business is much harder than opening one. I have several service contracts that I signed for third party companies to supply me services for the company.

 

Now the business has run out of money, I have tried to negotiate a closure for these contracts. Some people have been reasonable and wished me luck and others have been very difficult and unreasonable.

 

The worst company is an SEO company who supplies news stories in the form of an XML feed to your website. This company is called Direct News, which is part of Adfero. I signed a contract with them last year with a 3 months notice period for termination in it. I wanted to delay the start of this contract by 6 months and so that contract was annulled and a new contract with a new start date was provided.

 

What I didn’t realise was they had changed the termination clause from 3 months to one year.

I admit this was my mistake not spotting this change, but I signed the new contract and now the business is going down I tried to cancel the contract they have refused to terminate in less than one year.

 

I even offered them 3 months payment for no service, but they have been really unreasonable and have demanded full payment.

 

I am seeking advice on how whether I can win a case against them for them misrepresenting the new contract by not highlighting the change. They say they pointed this out in the meeting but they did not, unfortunately there is no record of this either way, so it is their word against mine.

 

The total outstanding amount for all three remaining months is about £7500. What is really annoying is that the news has never really done anything for the company either!

 

A good lesson has been learnt here on my journey to being a successful businessman and that is ‘Trust no one’, ‘Read the contract’ and ‘cover the downside’.

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Added Jun 2012:

I thought I’d just add what the outcome of this was. We paid Adfero nothing. Not a penny. As Richard Branson says in his autobiography, never be afraid of legal action. Also I have since persuaded three other companies not to use Adfero. It’s a small world and it does not pay to annoy people unnecessarily!

 

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A cunning plan

 

 

I have had a couple of weeks to have a think about the next step to becoming obscenely rich.

 

Weighing up my love and fascination for trading and the freedom that this would allow, and coupled with my 12 years experience in coding software and my ability to learn new things very quickly, I have decided to find a job that will teach me how to build trading systems properly.

 

I have been talking to some of the recruitment agents in this area and have found that the way to get into the serious banking / trading environment is to have experience in that environment. This is of course a chicken and egg situation. So, how to crack it.

 

It is possible or easier to get a position with a banking subsidiary company that would offer this experience, or take a full time job in a bank earning less and go in as a more junior position that I would be used to.

There is also a course I have been recommended that teaches about Quantative Finance. This course is expensive (Around £10K) and takes six months to complete in the evenings, but comes highly recommended and teaches the complexities of this type of trading and the certificate might open doors into a bank’s trading floor.

 

You can find out more about this course here.

 

So, I have dusted off the old CV, and sent it to some of the agents and see will see what happens.

 

In the mean time, I have decided to find any I.T. contract that pays well to get me out of my financial difficulties.

 

There seems to be a fair amount of maths involved in building the trading systems, and luckily I have some experience of this as I did a physics degree. I have forgotten most of it, but I am going to start re-learning some of the calculus etc ready for the next step of building my own system.

 

I ignored this before and used the methods in ShareScript to generate the numbers I wanted. Once I understand more about what is going on underneath, this should help me achieve a greater understanding of patterns and randomness in trading.

 

I am also reading and learning more about FOREX trading in general and am reading the book ‘FOREX, Patterns and Probabilities’ by Ed Ponsi. It seems like a good book and I’ll write a review of it once I’ve finished.

 

 

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What’s next?

What’s next? 

For anyone who has watched ‘The West Wing’, you know what I am talking about.

What’s next?

 

The business is 99% over. I have a few things to clear up in terms of contracts etc and also there are still some prospects out there that may come off at some point, but nothing immediate.

 

This leaves me with the greatest asset of all. Time.

I now have all the time in the world, the rest of my life ahead and I can do whatever I want.

So what to do now.

 

Well, I have learnt a hell of a lot since starting this journey a year ago, perhaps a good place to start would be to see what I have learnt and use this to form a new business plan.

 

1. I have learnt a lot about the markets, trading (both share dealing and spread betting)

 

This is mostly to do with technical analysis, the mechanism for trading, the importance of having a trading system and risk management.

 

2. I have learnt a lot about running a proper business, getting sales and productising ideas to sell to potential customers.

 

This is mostly about keeping costs down, being creative, taking that idea and making it commercially viable and then selling that idea to someone who then pays for you to build it.

This is great in a growing market, and extremely difficult in a shrinking market (as I have found).

 

3. Property would be great to buy now, but I don’t have any cash. Have not explored this avenue yet.

 

4. I love the flexibility of running my own business and the fact that this allows me to spend time with my family when I want to.

 

5. I like being the boss.

 

6. Not many of my friends understand this way of life and in fact some don’t even like to talk about it. (I had one friend who took one look at the very first paragraph of this blog and switched it off quickly as if the thought of discussing making money through assets was somehow unclean!)

 

7. I don’t mind using the telephone to call people up

 

8. I like working on my own as well as with others

 

9. Spending money is a good way of losing money not making money.

 

10. The most important aspect of anything is to have fun!

 

Into the pot, I could also throw that I need some cash in the reasonably short term to carry on paying my expenses.

 

There are some options in order of what I am thinking I might do next:

 

1. Get some contract work which I can do quite easily which is high paid and short term to build cash reserves. The downside of this, is it is back to working on someone else’s asset, the advantage is low responsibility, short term and high cash.

 

2. Go back to working on freelance work form home. The advantage of this is that I can manage my time as I like so I can keep open for opportunities, work from home to see my family more, but the disadvantage is I am not building assets and the cash is a lot less than contracting work.

 

3. Carry on with the business as a background task to keep up with the prospects we have made, pursue any low cost / low time prospects as they might arise.

 

4. Come up with a whole new business idea

 

5. Learn more about trading in its various forms and make a living through that

 

6. Carry on learning and come up with another method of making some money

 

I am going to think about this over the next few days. I have been testing the water with contract work and there still seems to some of it about although not as much as a few years ago.

 

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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The end of an era?

 

I have been banging on doors now for nearly six months trying to get some sales for the business and have finally given up the ghost of this incarnation of the business. My cash is all but depleted and I have closed the office and I am back working from home.

I have closed my Barclays share dealing account and haven’t opened my spread betting account in months.

I have no real assets to talk of and it is nearly a year since I started this blog.

 

So, am I depressed?, am I carrying on?, am I still waking up each morning flinging the curtains wide and rejoicing at another day.

 

You bet! Life can seem hard at times, especially for a new business in the heart of a depression, with a government that increases tax on dividends by 1% every year.

However, the spring is here, the trees around my house are starting to bud and I am already thinking about the next plan to build assets and generate an income.

 

No one said it would be easy and many entrepreneurs have said they have had many failing businesses before they made it big. So I guess this is just another step along the journey.

 

I looked back over the posts i made here last year and I still believe in the same philosophy of  being free, building assets, focusing on the things that matter in life and working towards financial freedom through asset based revenue.

 

This is the end of one era and very much the beginning of the next one.

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The big trading challenge

 

I signed up for the SG Turbos Trading Challenge today. I haven’t actually placed a trade yet, but I am going to have a look at it tonight.

 

You get £10K of pseudo money and you have to trade using their system. There are prizes for the best traders (i.e. the ones with the most cash in their accounts) at the end of each month and at the end of the three month game.

 

The game started today and the winner so far has a 6% gain in one day.

 

So it is early days yet. You can also create leagues to play against each other that don’t count towards the prizes, but I cant see me doing that.

 

In return for running this game, they of course want to market their stuff to you and hope you like their trading system so much you use that instead of your existing one. As long as you know this, I think it is worth a go.

 

I’ll start placing some trades tonight and I’ll let you know how I get on.

 

For those of you who want to play (it is free) you can sign up at: http://www.sgturbos.co.uk/index.php

 

SG Turbos is run by Societe Generale.

 — Just as an addition to this post, the game is actually trading something called a Turbo. Seems like a CFD with a few differences. There is a free seminar explaining what these are on the 8th April. I think i would prefer spread betting than this but Im willing to give it a go. I might go to the seminar, I havent decided yet.

 

 

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