Can you beat buying 20,000 used golf balls on eBay “Buy it Now” and then flying to Phoenix the next day with $8,000 in cash to pay for them? Nobody has so far. But how did it happen? Well, it started on a bench. For a serial entrepreneur being on the bench is after you have finished a venture and before starting a new one. It’s a dangerous time. People following conventional careers start looking at vacancies. Entrepreneurs have to create their own opportunities. This isn’t straightforward. Your diary doesn’t have entries that say:
Tuesday 10am – one hour meeting with self to think up cracking new business idea.
Tuesday 11am – launch new startup based on cracking new business idea. Etc.
If you are like me, it’s more of a waiting game. You wait for word to get around that you are on the bench so that people approach you. Most of the approaches are crap. It might be about a business that is already going wrong. Or something that is still an idea and not a business and it has no money. It could be a franchise pretending to be a startup.
My world is enterprise software. That’s big-ticket IT systems sold to global firms to handle accounting, HR, customer relationships etc. My niche is emerging systems. I join new market entrants who are trying to be disruptors whose objective is to get an innovative new product to the gorillas’ tea party with Oracle, SAP, Workday, Salesforce etc. Usually, we are acquired for a good price when we get big enough to be a nuisance. We want to carry on and go the whole way, but our VC shareholders want to take the money and run. I join these companies when they are established in their home market and looking to branch out in the UK or Europe. I personally fund that expansion for a share in the “liquidity event”. From start to finish none of these gigs has ever taken a whole five years. On one occasion it was less than six months. When the sale is made, I might have to work a year in the new parent company but usually they don’t value the knowledge and expertise that grew the new business as they have people with gigantic egos who already know everything and aren’t about to show you any respect or risk creating a rival who might put a boot in their face as they all try to scramble up the greasy pole.
So, within a maximum of five years I am back on the bench waiting for a passing new enterprise tech startup. This is a dangerous entrepreneur phase. You are bored and you do odd stuff. Other people I know, who play in this game, have done bucket list type things such as: learn to fly, try to become a professional singer, or go on a world surfing tour (like in “Endless Summer”), that sort of stuff. Normally, I fart around on the golf course, buy gadgets I don’t need, annoy people online, nothing constructive. I hesitate to call this a character fault. Without risk and the threat of failure I can’t seem to get going. I am told I just “hang around” and “litter the place up”.
I am covering this topic as a public service. You might be vulnerable yourself. If you are take action to control it. You need to avoid the impulsive temptation to invent an artificial high risk, high reward thing to feed your need for pressure (which is an actual biological state tied up with the endocrinology of adrenalin, fear, excitement, elation etc).
I might have been killed on this one occasion. It started at about 2am one night when I was drifting round the Web and bored and thought “I know what, I have never bought anything really stupid on eBay, let’s take a look”. As a golfer I typed in “golf” and it came up with a list. One of the categories was “golf balls”. They are a fairly high-cost consumable if you are a rubbish golfer. A decent ball costs £3. I can easily lose ten in a single round. Some new golf balls come all the way from China to the UK and don’t survive one hit. Many of them drown. This eBay seller was advertising 20,000 “one hit” second hand golf balls in pristine condition for $8,000. They had a UK market value of between £20k to £30k. His price included the cardboard boxes to send them out to people who you could sell them to in batches of 50 or 100.
I had nothing to do. I had money. Why not? Buy it Now. Kerching.
Of course, I didn’t pay. there and then. I am not that stupid. The seller instantly popped up asking for his money. I explained I was in the UK and needed to see the merchandise before handing over the cash. No trouble he said and gave me his name and address: John Lindauer, Phoenix, Arizona. “See you tomorrow John”, I replied. I bought a return ticket online and went to bed. Over Corn Flakes next morning I mentioned I was off to Phoenix to pay for 20,000 used golf balls I had just bought on Ebay and my wife took it casually. “Shut the door on the way out” or something similar, she said.
When I got to Phoenix (Business Class of course, costs offset against future profits) I rented a Ford Mustang with a V8 and go faster stripes. I had my golf clubs with me as Phoenix has 200 golf courses and I thought. why not sample a few. My hotel looked like a warzone with lots of people limping, bandaged up and being pushed around in wheelchairs. I was comforted to hear that this was because it was next to a hospital where rich people came for operations. They often used the hotel before and after surgery. Sounded plausible I thought.
On the next day I went to a bank and asked for a $8,000 banker’s draft. This is a cheque that can be cashed by anyone who presents it. Much favoured in criminal circles. A suspicious bank teller weighed me up. I weighed the bank teller up. “I must ask you what this is for Sir”. She said. “Ah, I can explain that”. I said. “I am using it to pay for 20,000 used golf balls that I bought on eBay”. On the safe assumption that nobody could make up something so ridiculous the cheque was cut, and they seemed happy to have me out of their bank. I put it in my wallet and made a special note not to lose it.
Then I put John’s address in the Satnav and discovered, though he lived in Phoenix, he was about an hours’ drive away in Indian country. That’s not a colloquialism. He lived in Indian country. On a reservation. In the desert. A doubt flickered. I put it out. I had looked him up on the Internet and he seemed legitimate. Well not completely legitimate in the technical dictionary definition of the word as he had been convicted of election funding irregularities when standing for Governor of Alaska but apart from that he was clean; an Economics professor and a businessman who owned newspapers and radio stations. His daughter “Susan”, on the other hand was doing jail time for treason, having somewhat ill-advisedly taken it upon herself to try and broker peace between G W Bush (President, USA) and Saddam Hussein (President, Iraq) at a time when G W was dead set on teaching Saddam a rather large lesson. As this was a totally private venture, which she had not been invited to do by the State Dept or anyone, the FBI picked her up and she was convicted.
John Howard Lindauer – Wikipedia
I found this back story fascinating and was looking forward to discussing golf balls with such an interesting family.
On my way to the meeting point, as the miles flashed by (V8 speed), I found my doubts returning.
”Anyone can say they are John Lindaeur” a voice said.
Another voice replied, “Why say you are John Lindaeur”.
The first voice spoke again.
“This sounds like one of those internet scams where someone in Nigeria wants to transfer £100m to your bank and share the loot with you but you have to go out first with £20k in cash and open a bank account and when you get there they whack you on the back of the head, nick your money and the Nigerian police don’t give a stuff as you were only there to steal Nigerian money”.
That was harder to brush aside. I got on the phone to home where it was about 6pm. “Look I am on my way to pay for these golf balls”. I said. “If I don’t ring you back in exactly one hour you need to know this is where I was and call the police. Have you got that?”.
I can’t be certain Mrs Charman wrote down the details. She claims she did, and she did say “Be careful”, though I got the feeling she was thinking more about the bother of filling in paperwork if I was murdered, abducted or some such, than she was concerned about my safety. She probably wasn’t thinking that but I wouldn’t have blamed her if she was. I have a track record of getting into scrapes. But I usually seem to get out of them.
For some totally irrational reason taking this precaution calmed my nerves, and I enjoyed the local scenery: sand, cactus, road signs with bullet holes, tumble weed etc. High Chapparal must have been filmed around here I thought. Then with the Satnav warning me that we were ten minutes away a miracle happened. The desert bloomed and signs appeared to announce a luxury golf development with millionaires’ mansions lining the course. Ah I thought. John’s a golfer. It all makes sense now. It was a gated community owned by the Apaches. The housing was certainly impressive. Big.
I pulled up at John’s. It was obviously his as it had a five-bay garage with teams of Mexicans sorting, cleaning and bagging golf balls. In that way that only an American Professor who has been Chancellor of a state university can pull off, he wished me a hearty welcome and invited me to inspect my balls, (so to speak). There was no doubt this was a legitimate operation. I looked at my balls (boom boom) and waved my hand. “Everything looks in order John” I said and handed over the dough. John laid on a BBQ steak lunch overlooking the green and fairway next to his house. How civilised I thought. He told me about his life and how he had been a visiting Professor for a while at Sussex University. He explained his business model for buying up newspapers and radio stations in small towns to leverage the price to advertisers. Very smart. But something was troubling me. I had to ask. “John. You are clearly a rich and successful man, so why do you employ people to wash and package golf balls in your garage and sell them on eBay?” He looked at me as though I was a first-year undergrad economist with no brain. “Because I can make money out of it”. Greenkeepers from all over Arizona pick up lost golf balls and sell them to John for cash. He sells them on at a premium. It’s a high margin, low effort business. I nodded understandingly and reflected silently that I couldn’t think of one UK academic who would do it, but on the other hand they wouldn’t own newspapers and radio stations or stand as a Mayor (the nearest we get to State Governor). Much as I wanted to probe him on election funding misdemeanours and the story behind his daughter’s well-intentioned but misguided peace efforts, I chose not to.
With the deal done I drove on to Sedona and played golf for a couple of days in scenery that was possibly the best surrounding any golf courses. I lost quite a lot of ammo, but it was comforting to know there were 20,000 in the post.
(As is clearly visible, I was going through a bored and over-eating porky phase while “on the bench”)
The end of this story is where the lesson resides. The golf balls were duly shipped and for about two weeks I made a good margin selling them on eBay, but I got fed up standing in the queue at the Post Office to post them on. The gig was over. Seventeen years later I still have about 10,000. They made the trip to Devon when we moved, and I use them for practice in my back field. Some find their way into next door’s cow pasture and Jason the farmer is kind enough to chuck a few back when he cuts silage. I tell him not worry as I am unlikely to run out.
The lesson here is that to an entrepreneur with the risk and enterprise gene and nothing to do, this project was interesting and exciting right up to the point where it worked. Then it became totally boring, and I went back to my normal routine of sitting on the bench and waiting for a passing enterprise tech project. All told I am probs about $10k down (if I include the cost of the trip to Phoenix and write down 10,000 balls I still have in stock). Was it a waste of time and money? That’s debatable. I win a few quid here and there when I trick people into playing a game of “Let’s see whose bought the most stupid thing on eBay?” And I have a great story that makes people look at me in a way that suggests they think I should be locked up or not trusted with sharp objects or responsibility. On this last point they are wrong. I accept my behaviour was not “normal” for normal people. But it was normal for the presence of those key qualities of impulsiveness, confidence, adventure, creativity, adaptability, innovation that, you need for someone to take on and make a success of a startup, most of which are much higher risk than buying 20,000 golf balls. Of course, the big worry in retirement is that I am not on the bench. A bench is temporary. Retirement is permanent. I have already funded the build of an aeroplane by students as an adrenalin detox project at our local college. What next?
