"Let's sell fruit juices!"

While collecting all documents related to the Visa, we realized that we would not be of any interest to Australian authorities should we want to pursue our Ole Country business. I used to be a Lloyd’s of London correspondent . I asked Gus:” what would you like to do? Anything we try now, we will be starting from scratch.” Since Ole Country is known for its huge exotic fruits variety, he came up with the concept to sell fruit juices. As I had no idea about the business, but still knew that a business is a business(as any other), I agreed with him, more due to the fact I was quite uninspired.

We saw some franchises available at the time: the” Blue Chip “ones were quite expensive, and we found out that any screw shop had become a master franchiser. I could have got into any of these, but would probably have burnt the whole savings on absolutely nothing. And fruit juices seemed an interesting industry.

We offered a business plan to our Australian Visa officer and were supposed to have an answer by eight weeks. When eight weeks were off, we asked what was happening and noticed that actually our case had not been reviewed yet. We were already through late September and when our Visa agent decided to raise some complaints to the Visa Officer on its tardiness, he announced that he would be sending the entire file to another embassy(moving the files from New Zealand to Ole Country). With the help of God, our Visa agent had been a public officer before and he probably said some nasty things to the Visa officer. So we were granted a 04 years Business Visa.

My immediate reaction was to fly back to Ole Country and look for suppliers. We found one at the very heart of the forest, who was being run by a cooperative. Very nice. Very “Forest Alliance” thing. The cooperative itself was managed by a local University NGO. Very nice. The director was a German fellow we did not get to know, who was completely absorbed on selling coconut fiber to stuff Mercedes Benz car seats. Very nice. We decided on 08 different varieties and sealed the deal. Flew back to Australia very happy.

When we arrived(after a month) we realized the deal had not taken place: the manager who took us to visit the factory just would not answer our phone calls(that we had to do late at night, due to hours’ differences) and when we finally called the director himself, he answered: “ooooh, you’re in Australia!!! Very far away country!!!” and that was that.

Tell you later.