Business as usual

It's one of my great regrets that I have always found it far easier to get a job in a corporation in the top three in its sector, than I have been able to get a job in a charity. All of the odds should be in my favour; market leading companies on my CV, experience worth probably hundreds of thousands of pounds, but no success. The loop I've faced is: see, apply, don't get acknowledged/don't get invited to interview.

This is a shame for me because, as must be obvious by now, I'm not greatly motivated by money - I don't want to be a fund manager or a venture capitalist. I'm much more interested in the effects of my work on people.

So in the past week I've put £5 into Trading 212, to deal stocks and shares to see if that's viable as a business, although admittedly the idea leaves me quite cold and so I haven't chosen which shares to buy.

What I'm particularly interested in is business as a lever to improve things; all around us recently we have only seen the exact opposite either by, or for, business. Either things have been run down so that private companies can enjoy a fire sale of assets to turn a profit on (the NHS, for example), or private companies have failed so miserably that what should be something worthy and worthwhile is pretty much ruined (i.e. the railway franchises where the taxpayer will eventually pick up the pieces).

What if we could start a venture that 'made money' out of doing good? The comedian Stewart Lee mused that there are hugely rich comedians, and also comedians such as himself, who have never achieved great financial security, though he also pointed out that if you can get a hardcore of 5,000 fans willing to pay £10 each to see you, that's a nice living. (Which gives me the opportunity to share unquestionably the greatest lead into a gag ever: https://youtu.be/IkI9h7EGYvI)

So what if the company doing good made enough for a person, but not huge profit - essentially a lifestyle business?

What if we didn’t sell anything? What if we gave it away and asked people to donate according to what value they thought the venture brought? Trading in coins not being a valid business under my self-imposed rules, I’m going to have a go at the above idea.

Progress this week: I’ve begun getting a transcript together of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. Before this coming week’s update, I’m going to pick stock and invest.

Comments

Beginner’s luck

Three Fivers is predicated upon being able to start a ‘business’ that makes money from just five pounds of investment. Today I could close it down as successful. In my first ever venture into share dealing, I bought £5 worth of Harland and Wolff shares at 4:05pm. At 4:38pm, I offloaded them for a 13p (2.6%) profit. Not enough to pay the mortgage, nor even to qualify as a side hustle, but profit nonetheless. 13p doesn’t buy much these days - not even a Freddo - but, 2.6% profit compounded does add up; my love of a spreadsheet shows how profit becomes more interesting over five days below. Over 12 months (365 days, although you cannot trade for at least 104 of these days) that would turn my humble £5 into around £5300. Not bad. I’m not especially enamoured of share trading, but it can be quite interesting I think if I add in additional rules; devote a maximum of 5 minutes a day to it and invest the whole of the capital at once - no portfolio. Whether this will survive even the next ...

Failure is not the same as a business failing

Already, I have failed. It's not terminal to the project, maybe not even to the strand of the project, but it's failure nonetheless. Despite literally *minutes* of trying, I've been unable to link Google's AdSense to this blog to (hopefully) monetise the blog. (If anyone can explain to me how I get round a circular set of "Press this to verify > You need to do this in blogger.com > Go to Google AdSense > Press this to verify", I'm all ears.) Now, I'm pretty unmoved by this - I've lost nothing and I'd be writing these anyway. Everyday I hear of more and more businesses that are laying people off, closing UK operations or just plain going under. That's heartbreaking, because they're not just venturing a fiver and writing stuff in lunchbreaks. Fortunately, I still have a nominal five quid left - having used no resource other than my time - to invest into another venture. Comments are open and I'm open to ideas, before I start ...

Why the delay?

It's not going well. My vow to blog weekly has fallen by the wayside, and a blog a month must have tripped over it. However, to try to take any positives from it, I'm learning. Content planning is key. Plan it and you'll have it, or at least have the time allocated to make it. But, the whole blogging situation has made me realise one thing; I am the inverse of someone on the breadline/on Universal Credit. So ungenerous is our Social Security - it's not 'benefits', they are a right, not a gift - that people in receipt of it spend much of their lives, and probably all of their energy surviving. They've no time to enrich themselves, to 'invest in themselves'. I am the complete opposite - in trying to see whether it is possible to take virtually nothing - £5 these days barely covering a loaf of bread and some spreadable butter - and spin it into a business, I'm consumed by well-paid work which keeps me from experiencing the desperation to make mone...

Three Fivers

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