This period I refer to in my life on all my various business fronts was a joy
for me. Through the medium of the oil painting business I had come to realise
that I was indeed so very fortunate for life to be so, and that in fact for
many around me life just simply was a kind of a drag. From the many comments I
received as a result of driving three different Rolls Royce motor cars, each one
depending on my mood, or in fact the weather. The actuality that I had other
cars for when I would care to go somewhere unrecognised to me the simple fact
that my home was so large that I required a staff of mechanics, gardeners and
cleaners. All of this at the time was quite simply normal to me because I had
grown into this happy style of life because of self-employment, since I was 22
years old, having picked up the secrets of success through personal motivation.
With the newly formed company Reginald Gee Senior Limited I
decided that I would show others how to embrace self employment for themselves.
Either as a part time venture, or a full time operation, with of course the
possibility of a slow start moving up the ladders as it were similar to myself
to answer the kind of thoughts, desires and dreams that all these people
constantly made me aware of with their comments regarding my standard of
living.
Son Richard Edward sits on the car I bought when I was 22 years of age. The best money I ever spent. The number I paid £115 for and the whole family laughed at me. The number on the car in the foreground I simply put my name on before it was issued in Peterborough and was laughed at by even more people still.
My first venture with the new company Reginald Gee Senior Limited
was to write a book entitled “Antiques for Japan”. The
reason for this was that so very many people that I knew commented upon their
envy of the number of times I climbed aboard an aircraft to literally fly half
way round the world. The situation at the time was that Japan had joined the
nouveau-riche and their motor vehicles, cameras, TVs and more were circling the
world. This was the very early 1980s and as the Japanese public became wealthier,
the demand for recovering their own antiques from the rest of the world was quite
staggering. My involvement with the oil painting business, which had taken me to
the Far East on many occasions, had highlighted the Japanese appetite for their
artworks and antique items. On top of which because moving around this area of
the globe was so easy I quite naturally came in touch with others conducting
this business. With all of this in mind I decided to write the publication and
aim it towards British antique dealers, many of which had by now come to join
other of my observers commenting on how well I was doing financially and
business wise. I quite literally wrote the book, filled it with location maps of
four major cities sighting the locations of the Japanese buying trade, made
comments in each entry as to the type of goods, hours of business, telephone
numbers, etc. I mean I quite literally wrote out on a plate as it were the whole
business worth millions of pounds, if enough people were doing it. Then offered
the book by way of various advertisements in major newspapers to the British
antiques trade, many of who had told me how slow trade was for them at the time.
Once more as in the days of the oil painting business with the free seminar, I
was going to get a shock. The British antique dealers who had few customers in
their shops and were not doing very much business quite literally said that they
could not leave their shops for any period. I was left surrounded by imaginary
question marks, once again baffled by how difficult it is to give anyone a
really good opportunity when they are so negatively charged in the first place.
Just the same as the oil painting business, where early agents would not come to
a free seminar, but would pay and then attend an expensive seminar. I was later
to find out that I once again I had a similar problem in the world of business
opportunities.
My various businesses progressed and the slow start for
Reginald Gee Senior Limited was not any form of worry to me. As a
result of many things going forward on other fronts I was happily contacted by a
Mr Donald Moore who at the time produced one of Britain's leading
self employed magazines of the day “The Entrepreneur”. In only
a few weeks this lovely man became a regular visitor to my home staying over as
a houseguest on many occasions. His main provocation for doing so was to
interview me for a wide series of articles ranging through several months issues
of his magazine. As I had never met anyone previously who had worked on the
inside, as it were of the business opportunities market, Donald opened my eyes
to many things that I had not previously considered. He went to great lengths to
educate me upon the aspect contained within this incredible field that is widely
abused and full of dreadful catchpenny schemes making it a veritable minefield
for the unwary.
