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 What
can go wrong? When a business fails or an investment goes wrong
this can invariably be traced to
a lack of sound advice in the
beginning from a
trustworthy source.
To the casual observer the Costa del
Sol looks like a place where most businesses should succeed. There
are more and more foreigners arriving, buying property, and
settling there. These people are filling the cafes, supermarkets,
newsagents, boutiques, antique shops, using garages, buying
flowers in the florists, the list is endless. Business appears to
be booming! Well perhaps not.
Not according to David
Hampshire who in his book Living and
working in Spain says:
“starting a business in Spain is one of the
quickest routes to bankruptcy known to mankind”
Mr. Hampshire knew what he
was talking about when he wrote that. Literally hundreds of
people have come to the Costa del Sol with the dream of running
their own business and eventually retiring in their sunny
paradise. Many succeed but some do not, their business does not
work, they lose their investment and they return home
disillusioned and penniless.
This should not happen
because there are many, many, successful foreign owned businesses on the Costa
del Sol. After all Spain is the
country of the Small Business. The
1.5M small family businesses in Spain actually employ some 85% of
the workforce!
So how come many get it
so wrong? There are many reasons including: Lack of research, lack of
business experience, (many of the failures have never run a
business before), lack of finance, lack of effort, but, and as we
stated earlier the most
important reason is lack of sound advice in the
beginning from a
trustworthy source.
Just to illustrate this point:
The following letter
appeared in the "SUR IN ENGLISH"
dated 18th April 2003:
BAR FOR SALE
I know you have probably heard
these types of stories a million times but even if this letter
stops one person losing their life savings it’ll have been worth
it.
I moved out here with my family
like many others do to buy a Bar. We were led to believe we had
bought a life time lease that the owner said was renewable every
five years. Then five years down the line when we came to renew it
the owner said it was not renewable. Where does that leave us we
thought also what about all that money we gave him? The money we
had saved up in the UK working half our lives for.
We went to our solicitor, he
pored over the paperwork and told us it was not the lease that we
were led to believe it was, it was only a five year rental
contract, therefore we hadn’t a leg to stand on.
We lost all our money and nothing
to show for five years of very hard work we did there – to put it
plainly, we lost everything.
The thing that makes me sick is
that the same Bar is back up for sale. So anybody buying a bar out
here please, please be very careful, get yourself a very good
solicitor, or else you too could be another victim of the oldest
trick in the book written by unscrupulous landlords.
L. Barrett
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