Don’t Cut Corners. Don’t Be A Wheelbarrow!

I went to Windermere in the Lake District the other week and heard how a local boat builder was making £100,000 a month with an incredibly enterprising scheme…….but there was a twist to the story!The man in question was a dab hand at boat design. In fact he could sketch out what he wanted and send his diagrams to Poland where he had his boats made at a fraction of the UK cost. On one occasion his dream boat had been beautifully joinered, lacquered and finished to precision but, as he was due to leave for Poland with his £8,000 cheque (the boat would be sold for £58,000 in the UK), our intrepid entrepreneur caught flu. No problem, he thought, he would send his cousin to Eastern Europe……after all he couldn’t afford to miss out on a cool £50k profit and, at two boats a month (that’s where the £100k profit comes in)…..the schedule had to be maintained. His cousin (we’ll call him Fred), duly got to Poland, handed over the cheque and set off overland with the boat in tow. Normally our man from Windermere sailed the boat back but Fred was not a qualified ‘pilot’ so this wasn’t possible. Everything was going swimmingly until he got to France and local drivers began waving at him as they overtook the spectacular craft. He eventually looked in his mirror and noticed that the wheels on the boat tow trailer were on fire! When the French equivalent of the Automobile Association eventually attended, they advised him that the trailer wheels were off a wheelbarrow, and that’s why they’d caught fire! Imagine, fantastic, low cost  boatbuilders but with ‘cheap’ service. What does this story say about the Polish suppliers? Never cut corners, you will get found out!