Not Dead Enough

70

They say the recipe for success in life is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. The bit they don’t tell you when you start a new business is the cash you need to find. You need the lawyer and the accountants to set up the company, the Patent Agent to file for your copyright on your software, the design company to create your logo and your corporate image, and the packaging for your product, which you need to have if you intend to be a global player, and of course your website. You need an office, furniture, phones, fax and a secretary. None of this stuff comes cheap. Twelve months on from my Big Idea, I was over one hundred thousand pounds out of pocket and not yet ready to rock and roll. But close.

I had taken out a second mortgage on my flat, sold everything I could sell, and, on top of that, a bank manager who believed in me had given me a bigger loan than he really should have. I had, as the Americans say, bet the ranch.

I was reading all the financial pages of the newspapers and subscribed to the trade magazines of every business I intended to target. So imagine my dismay one day when I opened a supplement of the Financial Times to see an article written by a journalist called Gautam Malkani on my business.

It was a complete carbon copy of everything I had thought of doing. And it was already up and running.

And my photograph was staring out at me from the pink page.

Except the name of the company was different from the name I had chosen.

And the name beneath my photograph was the name of someone else, a man I had never heard of.