Big Milestone reached Today. 50 Year Anniversary

50 Years in Business.

I have known this day is coming. I have known it's been coming for 65 years. Yet today, my 65th birthday has still come as a bit of a shock.
Until about five years ago, 60 years was the retirement age for women in Spain and 65 for men. Now I am planning my next and last five years in business.

50 years ago
Fifty years ago, I celebrated my 15th birthday. The day started a happy, carefree day. A typical cold day at the end of March. However, I was about to get an even more frigid blast of a severe reality check, chucked all over me. My father took me to one side and asked me what business I wanted to start. I have to say I was incredulous, and I did mention to him that I was only 15 and not old enough to have my open my own bank account.

Undeterred, he whipped out a bank book, yes in those days, bank records were kept in passbooks. I looked inside, and it had a balance of £10.00. At that time, that was a lot of money to a 15-year-old, in today's world, I'm guessing it would be about $150. Silly me thought it was a birthday present. It wasn't; it was the start of my cash flow.

I shouldn't have been surprised, both my parents were self-employed I had grown up in a world of business. At the age of four, it was my job to take small dustbins downstairs for my mother's rental business. Every Saturday, I had to go up two flights of stairs and take down the trash. I couldn't empty it because I couldn't reach the big dustbin! It was symbolic. It was the first of my lessons working towards a work ethic. My parents had to work hard all day Saturday to clean a five bedroom apartment, but they made it fun for us kids trailing behind them.

By the time I was seven, I had to spend two hours a weekend reading a news article in the Financial Times and then explaining to my dad what that really meant. I rarely got it right, but I did listen when he told me what it was about. By the age of 11, I could read a balance sheet. By the age of 15, I could create a basic balance sheet and had mastered bookkeeping.

So I was flung into the world of having to build a business. My father had sent me out to work at weekends from the age of 13. I also had a paper round every evening. In today's world, that is probably appalling, but back in the day, it was perfectly legal. Many of my friends had jobs. We left next to the seaside, and I worked in the kitchen of a bed-and-breakfast establishment. After breakfast, I then helped clean 13 bedrooms and then came down to wash up before during, and after lunch was served. After lunch, I went home for two hours and then came back to help prepare and serve dinner in the evening and washup.

Sunday mornings were busy. I started a paper round 6.30 and then ran to the hotel to repeat the same as the day before.
I didn't mind my job, but I had no idea how to start a business. My dad told me I had been working in hotels and bed and breakfast's for two years. What did I think was the gap in the market.

I thought about it and then mentioned the staff often didn't turn in and it was a problem. The main problem was people like me were not allowed not to turn up and therefore bore the brunt of the work. Bedrooms still had to be cleaned whether or not stuff turned up.

The long and short of it was, I began an agency. It started in one hotel, and I negotiated a deal to provide them with all the necessary, casual labor that they needed. They had chefs and cooks, but it was the jobs at the bottom end of the food chain that needed doing. I took the best, which was the most hard-working of my friends and promised them a pay rise if they came to work with me. The hotel paid me plus my fee, which was 10% of the earnings, and I paid the girls. The reason it was interests of the hotel I guaranteed I would find someone to do the job.

So that was how I started in business 50 years ago today. I finally had 12 hotels on my books. I also had 56 girls working for me. The great thing was I no longer had to work in the hotel myself. By the time I was 17, my parents had their own hotel, restaurant, and pub, and the whole family worked it together. By the age of 21, I had bought my own business with my husband. Well actually, he wasn't my husband at this point we didn't get married until five years later.

We went into business because by that time, we had met on a bus going to Tibet, and we wanted to continue traveling. To keep traveling, it meant we had to create our own lifestyle. So we decided to be self-employed. For the first ten years, all our businesses were retail shops of various types. True to form, I also had a market stall over the weekends. I sold costume jewelry. It was a brilliant choice; there was a high-profit margin, and the goods were easily transportable. I didn't drive in those days, and I could get to work with a suitcase.

Many years later, my husband and I were to move continents three times. We lived and worked and traveled. This traveling was done in various stages. When we had a retail shop, we worked for three years, seven days a week, every hour possible. We then traveled around the world for three or four years and didn't do any work at all.

Later we owned restaurants in Spain. We both work 17 hour days, seven days a week, for eight months of the year. We stopped work on 7 January every year. 6 January was the festival of three Kings, and major festival in Spain and very profitable. So we start work on the seventh and when traveling mid-April.

We didn't always travel sensibly. One year we went from Sri Lanka to Kenya and then back to the Maldives, which was an hour's flight from Sri Lanka. I'm not particularly proud of that footprint, but in those days, no one thought anything about that.

My husband promised me when I was 30 I would be in Sri Lanka. I took that to mean my 30th birthday. As it happened, we were in the business we didn't own at the time we only rented it. There was a rent increase in July of that year 1985. The landlord refused to tell us what it would be until near the date, which meant we couldn't sell the business without knowing what the rent would be.

Undeterred, I booked two flights to Sri Lanka for the day, it was to be our only day off in four years, but it was tax-deductible. That was some long day we set off at 6 a.m. in the UK and flew out at 11 a.m. UK time. We arrived in Sri Lanka at 6.30 in the morning. We must've covered 250 miles in a taxi that day visiting friends. When we got back to the airport, I realized something was wrong. I sat in the airport for half an hour wondering what it was and then it hit me.

We were the only white faces in the airport, and yet that morning, when we flew out, three-quarters of the plane's passengers were white. I dashed to the desk, gave my ticket over, and asked where my aircraft was. He looked at me and said quite seriously, "somewhere over Pakistan, Maam". I told him I had to get back and he said there isn't a flight until Tuesday. It was Friday!

He told me that they would put me up into the Hilton hotel as it was their fault. That day the airline schedule had changed to summer bookings. I ended up hitchhiking to get home. It was easier to hitch on planes in those days, and we didn't have to pay at all. Ironically we had got to Frankfurt before I realized in our haste I had left our tickets behind.

We managed to get a seat on 16 different airplanes. First of all, we went to Japan. I am well aware it was in the wrong direction, but it was a plane going somewhere. We came back via the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Moscow, Dubai, Rome, TelAviv, and a lot of airports I can't even remember. We were in the air for 42 hours.

We got back home at 2 a.m. on the 30th. We started work in our newsagents at 5 a.m. the next day, and I have to say it was an honesty box that day. I told a thousand customers that they could give me what they thought they owed me. We were both too tired to add up the orders.

Now I have to decide what to do with the rest of my life. I am now widowed and have to decide what I want to do. I must be the only person on the planet that has put the house up for sale during the coronavirus. I plan to sell my house in England and Spain and go back to Sri Lanka. It will be a starting place.

I then want to see one Argentina, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Cuba, and I will choose one of those countries to settle. Or not, it's not beyond the realm of possibilities that I will travel around the world for the rest of my life with the rucksack on my back and blog about it.

There are not many women of my age traveling alone, but there are probably many who wish to, yet they don't know how to. You didn't think I'd actually travel without making it pay, did you?

So today, I'm going for a walk along the beach because we are in a voluntarily locked down. It was not how I planned to have my birthday. I planned to return to Sri Lanka, though, not necessarily for the day. However, I am genuinely grateful I am alive and well and healthy.

Soon I plan to build up a business with someone from wealthy affiliates. This is a wonderful place to network and partner with people. In our case, we have decades of experience, but in two completely different areas. I'm super excited about the project. Even though today has been a day of reflection, I am super excited about going forward. My past is behind me, but the future is in my hands.

I planned out and created my future at 21. With the help of Wealthy Affiliate and the training here, you can do the same. You have the opportunity to create your own life and live it on your terms.