Around the world in 80 trades

Mickk

Anyone else watching this?

Its a very interesting watch but the chap doing it hasn't the first clue about business and he has set himself an impossible task. For a start when he is negotiating all his emotions are plastered all over his face, he never even believes in his own products he is selling. He asks the customer is it nice or is it good quality! Rule number one of selling sh!t is believe or at least pretend to believe in the sh!t. He just always looks like a rabbit caught in headlights, another time he was negotiating with a chinese fella for wine I think. He wanted 110 or something and the chinese fella said "I think the price should be around 88 or 90 yen" so the english bloke says ok how about split the difference and say 89!!!

Another classic dragons den mistake is people mistaking profit for a wage. He treks across continents on horseback or fly's thousands of miles and then doorsteps hundreds of shops and is ecstatic if he makes a couple of hundred pounds "profit". The best one ever was on last nights episode, he rented a fishing boat, got up at 3am, spent something like 12 hours fishing, spent another 6 hours packing and killing the fish and at auction made a "profit" of 75p!!!

The mistake he keeps on making is just doing things that are already being done and "cutting out the middle man". There are two problems with cutting out the middleman, when the middleman is a multinational corporation making millions then great, if you find a market they aren't in or havn't got tied up you stand a chance to make good money. When the middleman are a Chinese fisherman or an Egyptian camel trader who lives in a tent in the middle of a desert who probably don't earn 5 figures a year between them how does he expect to make money? The second problem is that when you cut out a middleman he usually gets pissed, I would guess that him and his 25k would have gone missing in the middle of the desert on the first episode if he didn't have a camera crew with him.

He needs to introduce new products to emerging markets, find things that have been hugely popular in country and that aren't available yet in in another.

On a side note the episode yesterday showed what evil cutthroat people the Asians are, smiling and bowing to us mighty westerners all the way. It sounds very scathing but they really are like that, I deal with them everyday and they learned how to do business from The Art Of War. It is in their culture, the customer is always right. They will nod and smile and tell you what you want to hear even thought they havn't a notion of doing what you are asking and you will find out they havn't done what you asked when you recieve the goods!?

He meets a tea expert who has written 19 books on tea. This expert shows him slides of him drinking tea with the president of Hong Kong ect. This expert then produces about 50g of 20 year old tea which he assures the english bloke he can sell in Japan for between 7 and 17 thousand dollars. He wants 750 pounds for it and insists he would sell it himself but he is a purist and only in it for the love of tea. He is even going to give the him phone numbers of three tea collectors who will buy it. I'd say in another 20 years he will still have that tea.

Axwell

What channels this on Mick?

shoutman

It's on channel four, think next week might be the last episode but not certain. All in all its entertaining enough but you can't help but think the guy is a bit of a tosser, it's a good idea for a show though.