It all seems a bit quiet when I turn up after my BRE Meeting with about three people on each stand for every potential punter wandering around.
Just as I am about to go off and introduce myself to the other exhibitors, I am introduced to an IFA. His firm is doing very well and has a very catchy name. A few minutes talking about his business in more detail, reveal an obvious area that he has overlooked. He leaves quite happy after 20 minutes.

Next I meet a mortgage broker who has found a niche for self-cert commercial mortgages lending up to 85 per cent of the value and up to £2 million. It appears that about 25 per cent of people’s mortgage costs are paying for compliance and regulation. The net profit for prime lenders is 0.2 per cent p.a. There could be scope for our working together as he would like an IFA to refer investment business to, which he no longer does.

Next I meet a doctor who is a health service manager and is looking for about £50,000 to set up a new business. He got the idea after doing his MBA and PMP – Project Manager Professional qualifications.
I point out that due diligence has to be done for any new investor whether the amounts are £50,000, £500,000 or £5 million. This can make smaller projects uneconomic. Further discussion reveals that he has a partner who might be able to raise the money and fund the business for a year. This would make raising future capital much easier as it would be a real business with a track record rather than a good idea. Even people with brilliant ideas do not have an easy time of it http://www.georgeemsden.co.uk/?p=59. He also needs a website and other written material so I introduce him to Caroline Hampstead whom I wrote about two weeks ago and is in my BRE Bond Street group.
Two of the Dragons’ Den production team from the BBC in Manchester are at Olympia. They are still open for applications and the link is www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden.

No point in wandering off now as my next customer sits down as soon as the other guy has left. He has the chance of buying an internet café for £20,0o0 but the owner will not show him any books. My friend has wisely stopped the process since there is no point in buying a business where the debts are unknown and the bailiffs are after the existing owner.
The alternative here is to set up from scratch and we make a list of the costs involved. It also occurs to me that he might be able to buy the business from a receiver soon. I introduce him to an insolvency practitioner who might be able to do a credit search and see what debts the business has.

A guy in the security business with strong overseas interest is my next candidate. His bank has promised £250,000 provided he can get another £500,000. I suggest www.3Cscomminity.com for starters and know 3 other people who might put up the money.

A lady is next. She has two buy-to-let properties but really wants to run a Starbucks or Coffee Republic shop of her own and tells me she has two choices. An existing one is for sale at £100,000 and a new could be set up from scratch for £50,000. Her properties were bought sometime ago and seem undervalued with reasonable equity in each. A few minutes with the calculator shows that she can actually do both. She leaves very happy.

Next is a retired Army major working in the security business. He has some very valuable experience but is not able to use that in his current position. He mentions a close protection course costing £3.500 and lasting 21 days and which would certainly enable him to earn more. I point out that this seems to be a “no brainer” as the yanks call it. One of my own networking contacts might be able to help and we exchange contact details.

Another guy in the packaging business has got £200,000 turnover from a standing start in 10 months and is making a profit. The missing link here is someone to telephone his target companies or take a course in cold calling himself. I introduce him to Mike Segall of www.newbusinessgeneration.co.uk who got me to the exhibition in the first place and who does exactly this sort of thing.

Next is a university student who has a business doing DVDs of events - shooting and selling them the same night - an extra source of income for the event organisers. I invite him as a guest to the next BRE Bond Street meeting. It turns out he is a salsa teacher too.

Finally, I talk to a very successful management consultant who works with FT-SE 250 companies who is looking for a new challenge. There appear to be two ways for him to go. Move up a level and delegate the day to day work or move to a new area entirely. I suggest fleshing out a business plan for the latter. Since he seems to at cross roads, I suggest a talk with a coach and recommend George Metcalfe, an executive coach also in my BRE group www.brebondstreet.co.uk

The day was very enjoyable and none of the people I met knew me or vice versa. My advice was based solely on what they told me but all seem to have found it useful. One of them was kind enough to hint that I ought to be charging for my advice………..

Ironically, the one person I am not able to help is in the financial services sector. He seems to have bought a franchise from citisolutions. Examination of his business card shows that this outfit is a tied agency and he can only do second mortgages which are unregulated but not standard first mortgages. He can do investment business but not pension business and does not seem to be aware of the standard qualifications to be a financial adviser namely FPC (Financial Planning Certificate) 1, 2 & 3.

Only in the office 4 days this week as I will be at the Growing your Business exhibition at Olympia on Friday 23rd March

* A cry for help from a friend who is being threatened with bankruptcy by HMRC over some back tax. The only potentially realisable asset he has is a tiny pension where the fund value is under the so-called “triviality” limt of £15,000 so this can be taken wholly in cash. This will involve a transfer and then encashment so I have to charge a fee. My friend is quite happy to do this but I feel the whole exercise is pointless as he will be throwing way his only financial asset to settle part of the tax owing. The money would be much better used in starting another business venture for example, where the chances of earning a living and paying tax are quite good. My written advice to him explains this but I insist that he talks to an insolvency practitioner first.
He finally meets the guy who confirms my thoughts that encashing the pension to pay part of the tax owing is pointless. He offers to help my friend complete the bankruptcy questionnairre when it comes in the post. I am glad my gut instinct was right here.

* It is the last day of term for teaching swimming and as my usual first pupil is away, I am given another boy aged about 6. Peter the owner of Dolphin Swimming Club, suggests some stroke work as he has done 25 metres. The first three minutes are fine but near the halfway steps in the pool where the water is deeper, he bursts into tears and tells me he does not want to go down the deep end. How did he get he gets his 25 metre badge? I ask – three half lengths at the shallow end!
There is only one cure for this. We go down to the deep end with him doing a front crawl kick and me holding the float to the annoyance of other teachers at the deep end – I can be very selfish about my pupils when they are at a critical point. We come back and spend the rest of the lesson with him swimming across the pool in water well out his depth and most the time he is in tears. In spite of this, he swims to me when asked and away from me too – a very good sign.
Though he does not know it, he has done very well and I am pleased to tell him so at the end of the lesson. I do hope his parents follow my advice and practice the same stuff in the holidays to reinforce what he has learned, otherwise the poor lad will have the same torture at the start of next term.
Another dad gives me a lovely handmade thank you card from his son and a bottle of Glenfiddich for my efforts. Perhaps I am not such an ogre after all….

*My salsa is getting rusty so I bring in my dancing shoes and leave to go to www.streetbeat.co.uk who meet at Turnmills near Farringdon. For some reason, the shutter is down and getting late so time for Plan B and I get the Metropolitan line to Great Portland for some ceroc www.ceroc.com in the International Students Hall, the venue for many salsa club nights. It turns out to be a great evening with a beginners’ and intermediate class with people from their early twenties to their sixties. Perhaps my private tango lessons have paid off indirectly as I manage to learn the four basic moves in the lesson. Then it is onto the dance floor for the freestyle bit. I have a memorable dance with with a lady who is there with her son who is in his thirties – she tells me she does jive and tap dancing which makes me feel very unfit.
As ceroc is a new dance – a cross between salsa and jive, it is very liberated. Guys still lead but ladies do not wait to be asked if they want a dance with you. Sadly it all finishes at 10.30 pm.

* The Budget is consistent with previous policy in that the effects are the opposite of the fine words. I also get the feeling that the Chancellor does not like poor people or to put it more politely, people on lower incomes, very much. Thus a reduction in Basic Rate Income Tax leaves poorer people paying more when National insurance contributions are taken into account. Changes in Corporation Tax penalise small companies and benefit big ones.
With pensions, Basic Rate tax payers with taxable earnings of less than £34,000 will now get less tax relief on their pension contributions. Currently £100 into a pension becomes £128 with tax relief. After 6 April 2007, £100 into a pension becomes £125 with tax relief. Nice one Gordon.

N.B. I will not be in the office on 5th April 2007

I am still voiceless but need to get writing again.

* It is the tax season so I am talking to other professionals about tax year end ideas – many of which have been available since 6th April 2006! Most popular are VCTs and SIPPS. A trickle of ISA forms comes in too.

* I am told that on average one person a day ends up on the tracks of the London Underground network. At Kentish Town on Wednesday, I am on a train where this happens. We are all told to vacate the station and get onto buses. A lady who is quite shaken tells me she saw the guy’s legs sticking out.
This makes me late for my appointment with an accountant at Bevis Marks synagogue where we discuss tax year end business. Afterwards, I am given a yarmulke and conducted around the lovely Grade I listed building. They have regular services where people of other faiths can attend – very encouraging to hear in these interesting times and good PR too.

Two mortgage cases illustrate the rather tortuous path to getting an offer.

* With a Right to Buy case where the client is buying a flat in a tower block, Nationwide manage to lose the accountant’s details twice. Then they say that the client cannot use her solicitors as they are not on their panel. The solicitors respond pointing out that they do a lot of business with the Nationwide and quote their reference number. Two weeks after passing all this, Nationwide ask for details of the new solicitor! Still waiting for the mortgage offer.

* Another first time buyer case goes to the Alliance and Leicester. The applicant is a doctor who previously worked in the USA. I ask A&L and am told they do not want this address info. Application keyed in on-line but a day later, they get in touch asking for missing address history and inform me that the case has to be reapplied as a result. I ask the client to provide this address info and he brings his papers to the office. The mortgage underwriters then tell me that they do not need this info but approve the case subject to valuation. Next day a letter arrives asking for payslips!!
I politely point out that this is rather confusing for the client and makes us look silly. The reason is that the mortgage underwriters are in Leicester and the mortgage processing team are in Belfast.

* New people join in2 and their photos and copy will be going onto the firm’s website. My own copy on the website is out of date, and needs rewriting. While I could write this myself, I decide to outsource this to Caroline Hampstead, www.carolinehampstead.com a copywriter in my BRE Bond Street group which meets at the RAF Club 128 Piccadilly.
Her previous work includes the posters for Lastminute.com’s “easy decison/hard decision” campaign which were noticeable in the Underground last year – Brazilian or Hollywood? showing an appropriately shaped patch of grass.
The invoice for 3 and half hours is money well spent.

* As my voice shows no sign of improvement which is a real handicap for networking, a friend suggests a visit to samedaydoctor in Wimpole Street who helped him enormously. I get an appointment that day and some strong antibiotics but no real improvement. Going back to my own GP, she refers me to the Royal ENT hospital in Gray’s Inn Road. They see me in the morning and phone later to ask me about my medical history. The question that really throws me is “Have I had any implants?” to which I able to answer a very definite No!

Have a good weekend.

A very pleasant Christmas and New Year in Thailand leave me very inclined to spend future Christmases there.

Knowing that the weather would be warmer, I naively thought that the heat might reduce my appetite and that I might lose some weight. But instead, I ended up putting on a stone in weight in 3 weeks as the friends I stayed with knew all the best restaurants.

On my previous visit to Thailand, I had eaten some exotic things like chickens feet, pork sausages fermented in leaves and very small chillis, fried rice birds and fried frog. Chickens feet are very much a delicacy there but are basically tasteless. One eats the scaly skin off the claws and the only flavour is from the soup they are cooked in. Rice birds like small sparrows were eaten whole – good for soaking up beer while the fried frogs were more difficult to eat with their bigger bones. Sadly the rice birds are no longer available. I did not bother with the fermented meat sausages as even my asbsetos palate could not cope – in Thailand, it is the smallest chillis which are the hottest.

The one restaurant we visited twice was a Japanese “all you can eat” buffet where the cost in the evening was Baht 499 – about £7. Here ducks rather than chicken feet were on the menu and even in two visits, I never managed to sample everything. Among the cold dishes was a pigs ear (sic) salad and several kinds of tofu. The ducks feet were no more tasty than the chickens feet but I thought I might as well try them while I had the chance. The fare varied from the ultra simple clear soup to tempura, dim sum, all the different types of sushi you have ever seen to other dishes cooked in very rich sauces. As an antidote to the rich food, there was ice cream including Japanese green tea flavour – actually rather nice.

Some of the dishes could be picked and given to a chef and brought to your table a few minutes later with a special section for Korean style cooking if that is how you preferred it. I am not a great fan of Korean food myself as they eat a lot of pickles (including pickled garlic) which often gives Westerners indigestion.

Another interesting restaurant was a Chinese one famous for its distinctive Hainan-style food – Hainan being an island off the coast of China. The style of eating here was very informal with a steady stream of fairly small dishes from which you can be as picky as you like, rather than the more traditional first, second, third course style of dining which we are more used to in the West.

Somewhere we ate cooked jellyfish – rather like noodles – ducks tongues and carp a couple of times. Fortunately, my host reminded me to drink yoghurt cultures every day and I found one of these before each meal kept previous digestive problems away.

The most exclusive restaurant we visited was one near the King’s palace where the food is slightly sweeter than most other Thai food but just as spicy. Again there was a procession of lots of dishes rather than separate courses.

Near the end of my stay, we visited one of Thailand’s 42,000 temples near Ayudhya the old capital, and on the drive back to Bangkok I noticed some roadside stalls selling some barbequed dark things. My host pointed out that these were cooked rat being caught in the paddy fields near the road. Eating these would make an interesting dare for a celebrity TV show, but my report on eating these little furry creatures will have to wait for my next visit to Thailand. Might even get round to trying cooked crocodile as well.

Bon appetit!