The Game of Inches

PART I There is a process

When I was 20 I was really into music and was the drummer in a band. You wouldn't have heard of us, and there's a very good reason for that. Once a week we would pack our gear into a couple of cars and drive to the rehearsal studios across town because there were none in our local area. Being a drummer was a tedious affair in the packing and unpacking department. A while later a mate and I realised there was probably an opportunity to open a rehearsal studio in the local area, because we knew there were other local bands like us who didn't want to drive all the way across town. After asking around we tracked down an empty space in the basement of a real estate agency that agreed to lease it at a low price if we used it only at night and on Sundays (which worked for us). So ‘The Basement Rehearsal Studio' was born. I still have a photo of my friends giving me a branded shirt for my twenty-first birthday. I'm happy to say that my first business enterprise went pretty well, and we managed to sell it to one of our regular customers a year or so later.

Almost three decades on, my wife and I opened a horse-riding school in the heart of the Sydney suburbs. It was an old business that had been closed for a number of years (my wife had previously worked there), but it was right next door to a major business district in a family suburb. Horses are a novelty in the suburbs so we were confident that the rules of supply and demand were on our side. We worked a ...