The rates and the phone bills and the lights and everything

[muskanislam25]

Entrepreneur Andrew Reynolds takes a sceptical film crew back to the place he grew up — and to the school he attended as a child — to discuss how his Father’s business plans were flawed from the start — and how students of the Cash On Demand system can avoid the pitfalls of business and cash in on Andrew’s money-making technique.

Transcription:

Andrew Reynolds outside his old primary school

Reporter: Well, Andrew Reynolds here at Winnall Primary School in Winchester. Must be a great feeling of déjà-vu for you, surely?

Andrew Reynolds: Yeah. It’s weird actually. I haven’t been back here for about 30 years. I remember my brother and I used to come to school here. And my dad would drop us off at the front here in his paraffin van.

Reporter: A paraffin van?

Andrew Reynolds: Paraffin in the old days before central heating phone number data how you used to heat your houses. You used to have like paraffin heaters and the paraffin man would come round with these big five-gallon drums of liquid paraffin. And you’d put it in your heater and that’s how you heated your house. So he used to do door-to-door deliveries. That was his first business. He was still a slave to that business, of course because it’s any sort of job, really. But it’s just the fact that he could call himself his own boss. He had his name on the side of the van.

He moved on a notch from there because he managed to get enough money together to open a little hardware shop down the town, which was much better. In fact, I remember in the Hampshire Chronicle, you know the local paper; there was a big sort of headline of, “We’ve arrived.” And my dad really thought he’d arrived. Big picture of the shop; ‘Reynolds of Winchester’ over the top of the door. And he felt he’d arrived.

Sad thing is the sort of business model of retail, as we’ll see over the next few days, the business model of retail is fundamentally flawed because there’s just no money in it. By the time you’ve paid the rent and else there’s no money actually left to feed the Reynolds household.

So coming to this school we were among the poorest people here because poor old mum and dad just never had any money coming in. And we used to walk back to the shop and literally wait till they shut the shop up. They’d be sat in there all day waiting for people to come in. That was a nightmare. Just the model of actually running a shop, you know.

You open at 9 o’clock in the morning. About half ten, some guy comes in and says, “I want some screws, Mr. Reynolds.” “Okay, well what size screws do you want?” “Well, I want some inch and a half ones or something.” And then it’s, “Well, do you want counter sunk ones or do you want round headed ones? You want brass ones? Do you want a box of screws?” And you go through all this sort of selection process to come out with maybe a tenner in your hand.

And the profit margins in retail are so small. I mean the stuff I sell; I buy for a quid and sell for several hundred pounds. Poor old dad used to buy a box of screws for whatever it was and he’d mark it up by maybe 30% and that was his profit. At which he had to take all his money. So there was just no money in the retail. And they spent 20 years of their lives stuck behind that counter, waiting for all those people to come in to spend a few quid. It’s just a wasted life, it really is. It’s so sad.