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| Getting it done |
Recently I’ve taken to posting one of the random photos that Google decides to throw up at me each day. Above is yours truly, when we went to Park City, Utah, to talk to a Mormon guy — in the capital, Salt Lake City — about buying the franchise rights to his fast-food Wraps business for Hong Kong.
We decided not to go ahead with that, and instead, shortly after, bought the Master Franchise rights for Wall Street Institute from the HQ of that company in Barcelona. We opened the first WSI centre in Asia in 2000, here in Hong Kong, expanded here and Japan, helped establish the business in China, Thailand amd Taiwan. We sold our HK business in 2007. It’s still going here in Hong Kong — amazingly, I think, given the 2019 riots and Covid 2020+. It was a fabulous business. But we sold at the right time, just before the 2008 global financial crisis. We’ve never had sellers’ remorse.
ADDED: We’d wrapped the Mormon wraps business, so we went off skiing in Park City, which is right nearby Salt Lake City. Park City is one of the loveliest resorts in America. Which makes it one of the loveliest in the world. Because skiing in America is first-rate. American ski resorts are great for the facilities, the lifts, the gondolas, the cable cars, the on-and-off-piste restaurants, the huge variety of resorts and runs, the vocally happy skiers, whooping it up while whooshing down. Lots of super-good skiers. Friendly, friendly people.
The guy trying to sell us the franchise was lovely, very friendly, as are most people in Salt Lake City. As are most Mormons. He stopped at a strip mall during our drive around town to hop out and buy me a copy of The Book of Mormon. He was shocked I hadn’t read it. He feared for my eternal soul. I asked him, as we drove by freshly snow-clad fields, if he could tell me a bit about Mormonism. Could he, what! At the end of his extended exegesis, I wondered that gown men, apparently otherwise perfectly sane and sensible, could believe such arrant nonsense.
I read a bit of The Book of Mormon that night. I found it a wonderful soporific.
