The Proposition

I've been working at a fruit and veg shop for the last month and a half. My boss has offered me a pretty exciting deal.

My boss (Nick)is looking forward to his retirement. He has found an appealing way to supplement his pension. He has come across a deal that will allow him to build a new building to house a fruit shop. Since this is a deal that very rarely comes around, he jumped at it with the idea of selling his current business, starting a new one in the new building and once it is doing good business, sell it, but keep the building to rent to the new owners.

Starting a fruit shop, getting it going and then selling it is something that he has been doing just about every year for the last 30 years. It has slowed in the last little while because of increases to the Australian capital gains tax which means that by keeping a shop going for a few months longer he makes an adddional 60K from the tax savings. In any case he has a pretty good system laid out for starting a new shop and being profitable a few months.

Nick is taking possession of the new building at the end of December or the beginning of Janruary. It will be an empty shell and will take about another 4-6 weeks to be ready for the shop. At the start of February the new shop will be ready to go.

This is where I come in. Nick would like to ease himself and his wife into retirement. He feels that the best way to do this would be to take me on as his apprentice and teach me everything he knows about the business over the next few years. Tracie would take over Marilyn's (Nick's wife) job of doing the books and schedueling the cashiers etc. When the shop is firmly established or near around the first year mark, we would enter into a partnership and then as more time passes and we get to know each other, Tracie and I would take over more and more of the responsabilities of the shop until eventually they could be out all together.

After five years or so, Nick wants to be out of the shop and retired completely. He would sell me the shop at a vast discount or if I couldn't afford it lease it to me, and if I didn't want it sell the shop to someone else with Tracie and I shareing the procedes of the sale.

For the first little while we would be getting $1000/week for enterprenuer's hours. Which isn't a lot of money for the time you are spending. Tracie makes about that much as a nurse without all the stress.

As things are going, we will run out of money in Canada sometime near July and we might not be able to send much back. Student loans are a pain.

We would have to get working visas here, which isn't a problem just a hassle of the paper work.

On the other hand, we would know how to start and run a fruit and veg shop here in Australia. It is a very profitable business. You make most of your investment back within the first three months if you are doing it correctly.

The wholesalers give you a week's credit before they bill you, and so you have sold most of your stock before they even send the bill.

If you start it properly, you can sell the shop at a huge profit of several hundred thousand.

Unfortunatly, when you have your own business, you are so determined to make it work that you don't get vaction and work long hours. Basically Nick closes for statutory holidays and Sundays. But he is never not thinking about the shop.

An enterpreneur has to be a hard worker.


This is the back room of the fruit shop.



This is the bulk section out front. It accounts for about 10% of sales in the shop and would fall under Tracie's control.



This is the tomato room. We keep tomatoes and other tropical type fruits in here.

-Gary Milner