You can find business anywhere if you keep an Open Mind.

I thought you would enjoy this story. I have counseled and represented many traders who got their start this way.


It all started with her being seized by the simple whim to pack her suitcases and head off to whatever European city entered her mind, for a few weeks. It was, after all, mid-summer and she needed to get away for a while. A major monkey-wrench was thrown into her very simple plan, when she was told by every travel agent in the city that she should have booked during the spring, when seats were still available.

She was left with no choice but to change her travel plans in the end. Instead of going to the destination of her choice, she ended up heading to the only one with seats that were available. Being the plucky individual that she was, it did not deter her in the slightest that it happened to be the capital city of a minuscule country that neither she, nor her travel agent, had ever head of before. She threw a pile of warm clothes and skirts, plus a few unmentionables, into her suitcase and headed off into the wild blue yonder.

To put it in a nutshell, she wound up in the middle of a country where nobody, not one soul, could speak her language. This resulted in something of a heart-stopping moment when the customs agent examining her bags suddenly gave her the strangest of looks. He gestured towards her and began jabbering excitedly in his own language. At first she thought that she must have violated a local regulation by wearing them, but through some rudimentary sign language and crudely drawn pictures depicting stick-figures carrying guns being chased by other stick figures in police uniforms, the agent was able to communicate that he was only warning her about local thieves.

As she got out of the airport, it occurred to her that she may have made a dreadful mistake. It was not warm and sunny in the least. In fact, in no time at all a frigid blast that could have blown in directly from the North Pole, had caught her skirts and blown them up over her head, much to the delight of the waiting cab-drivers. Gathering them in one hand to prevent further rude actions by the wind, she dragged her luggage to the nearest cab.

Luck was with her at last. The cab’s driver had been the only one to discretely look away during the wind’s antics. And, though he could not understand a single thing she said, he immediately recognized the name of her hotel when she pulled out her booking confirmation and waved around it in front of his face. After a twenty-plus minute ride that seemed more like a practice run for a Formula One event, she arrived safely, if somewhat shaken, at the hotel.

Undaunted, she arose the next morning and set out for the city-center. What awaited her there was one of those rare, life-changing moments, for everywhere she turned, in every shop window, were the most ornately designed, absolutely exquisite men wedding bands. When she whipped out her pocket calculator and did the math, she discovered that she could easily resell them at a five hundred percent profit margin back home. A new business was born that day, on that street in the middle of nowhere. The local population still does not speak any language other than their own. But, that is not a problem for our heroine, who keeps the source of her supply a closely guarded secret.

She has learned theirs.

The moral of this little story is that when you’re traveling either for business or pleasure abroad, always look for deals on things that could be bought or sold, then imported or exported. Many an import / export business has been started this way.

This may be an obvious tip, but because of the economic situation worldwide, some things are not always available some countries, and there is a growing market for all kinds of things.

Just keep your eyes open, and you could be well on your way to starting a new enterprise idea