one of the great things about kuwait is that once you get over the initial hurdles of setting up your business and financing it, the sky really is the limit. the lack of personal and corporate taxes, the relatively easy to get financing, a very strong and stable currency, and a relatively free market all combine to make amassing a “comfortable” level of wealthy quite likely.
for the purposes of this post i’ll ignore the “hurdles” that can at times rival the great wall of china. the thing is even the great wall of china was penetrated with nothing more than a smile.
whether you decide to sell cars, condoms or sandwiches,….. the sky really is the limit.
and that indeed is why many of our parents first came here almost 30 years ago.
thats also why alot of us wound up growing up in a country that 90% of the world has never heard of.
many of our parents came here in their 30’s and 40’s, and inspite of the odds, 30 years later, i think alot of us 3rd culture kids can comfortably say that they did a bloody good job of giving us a better life than they had.
but 30 years later,….
theyre hitting their 60’s and thoughts of retirement loom.
us “kids” on the other hand are in the prime of our lives.
now the rest of this post applies to both expats and locals as this is a “business” type post and not really an “expat” post.
now,…
we may or may not have joined the family firm.
we may or may not even enjoy what it is the family business is.
regardless of what your situation is, you know the day will come when the take over will occur.
so you have a choice to make on that fateful day:
1- do you take over, as your daddy wished, even tho you might not like the job, and give up your life?
or
2- do you sell the firm, take the cash, and move on with a twinge of guilt for ending something that took so long to build?
its a bitch of a situation to be in. and its the one thing that your envious and less fortunate friends will never understand. its something government workers, academics, some doctors and lawyers and bankers simply wont get so its pointless asking your colleagues for advice.
the only person who might be able to help is someone who has gone thru the same situation. in this case, experience over rides any Harvard MBA/PhD/blahblahfancylettersafteryourname.
now i cant tell you what to do cos my situation will differ from yours.
but i can tell you what i did.
like alot of other businesses our business involved customers of some sort.
customers / clients always involve alot of ass kissing if you are to get a job / project / deal.
i kissed alot of ass which is how i know that i dont really like the taste of sphincter.
but i did manage to land a couple of deals for the firm.
perhaps i enjoyed the experience, but i never really enjoyed the actual work cos, ultimately, i preside over the kingdom of lazy asses. i am their king and i lead by example 
at one point it felt like i had given up and settled for option 1 as mentioned above.
then there were shitty days when option 2 sounded better and better. add in “retire on desert island with local topless native girls in grass skirts” and yeah option two does indeed sound good
but being the pain in the ass that i normally am,…. i demanded and hunted for a 3rd option.
now it just so happened that while i was busy kissing ass and running pointless errands, we had decided to invest a little of our extra cashflow into the market instead of paying it out as a dividend to the shareholders.
nothing fancy, just a few shares of the premier bank in this country.
and while i was kissing ass, it turned out that the return on our little investment far out weighed the return on my puckering up.
and thats when a light bulb went off our heads!
but being the first prince regent of lard asses, i really didnt fancy a life of hand signals and SELL SELL BUY BUY!!! it all just seemed much too stressful, and besides we could loose everything!
after doing a little research option 3 came into being.
ever heard of warren buffett? ever heard of berkshire hathaway?
no neither had i at the time.
in a nutshell, buffett bought a failing textile company called berkshire hathaway in what to this day he calls his greatest mistake. infact he chooses not to change the name to remind him of just that.
when he realised his royal blunder, he started to get rid of everything he could in the firm until it was a textile company in license only. and then he started using the proceeds of the sale to invest in companies involved in businesses that he understood.
nothing more nothing less.
today, after more than 40 years in the game, he is number 3 on the forbes rich dudes list. only just behind the mexican telecoms guy and the devil incarnate bill gates. to this day buffett remains the only one on the whole list that got there thru investing.
so thats what i did. read a couple of $20 books about him and got down to business.
and over the period of 3 years i turned a pretty decent contracting company into a pretty decent assett management company, without, i might add, raising funds from the public as many crooks do.
one of the great dividends of this move was that the old man was pretty much born again. its a new trick that any old dog can learn. and its not really “work”.
the greatest fear alot of people have is about not having anything to do when they retire. when you stop working your mind, you start to die. the market has given the old mans brain something to get excited about again, but in a more relaxed way where you work when you want to.
even the mother is getting into it!
but the greatest dividend of all,….
i kicked options 1 and 2 in the ass and found option 3.
with option 3 i can operate from anywhere in the world, without the “hurdles” here holding me back. which is why its time for me to leave kuwait behind.
alot like MTC is now leaving
and it doesnt take much money either incase you were wondering. most companies here have a basic capital of KD25,000-100,000 capital. if your family firm has been a round for a while, chances are you’ll have a atleast 20,000 in spare cash that you can start with.
if you dont have that then you got bigger problems to deal with.
with option 3 one day i will be able to work in my 3 day old boxers and bankers will still have to take my calls while i pick my nose
life is sweet and full of adventure because i refused to be restrained by what seemed to be the only 2 choices i had. just remember, you always have a 3rd option, you just have to work a lil harder to figure out what it is.
it aint easy, and not everyone can do it. but it aint rocket science either!
and if this dumbass author can do it then i’m pretty sure you can too. ( cos if you read this blog then you’ve obviously got brains and taste hehehe )
