Think out of the box. New beginnings.

I had been in Colombia for a number of years and enjoyed some of the best times of my life. Cultural enrichment through music, food, language and relationships.

I thought I would probably live in Colombia for the rest of my life. I had a weekend house in the Andes where I kept horses and spent a couple of days a week enjoying the fresh mountain air, I had a small heliconia plantation of tropical flowers which were for export and I also had a small house in Juanchaco near Buenaventura on the Pacific ocean. My business was going well and I was generally very content.

I started to get strange phone calls in the middle of the night. Later these became menacing calls until an attempt was made to kidnap me. At that time I was also Vice president of the Colombian American chamber of commerce. I made it perfectly clear that I was worth nothing, hoping to deter the would be kidnappers.

On the third try, a roadblock was put up on the road to my heliconia farm and I had no option to ruin my car and drive through it. This was the last straw.

The following week. I left Colombia with a very heavy heart and decided to go to Zimbabwe where I was born.

Lesson 1. The decision to cut ties with everything I held dear for many years was a very emotional one, but I also undestood that material things are expendable. We can always rebuild if we have the right attitude and desire.

Lesson 2. Not having any fixed agenda gave me the liberty of absolute freedom of choice about what next.

I was not sure what I would do. One day, I went to the airport cargo section and saw jumbo jets being filled with boxes of flowers. Each plane could hold about 220,000 lbs of cargo. I asked where all these flowers were going and was told, to the auction in Alsmeer Holland.

Everyday thousands of boxes of flowers were being shipped to Holland to an auction.... So who was buying all these flowers?

I got on a plane and went to see for myself. I was in awe at the size of the auction floors and how the "clock system" worked. Buyers would bid on lots going round on a moving belt. They had special seats in an arena setting and inserted their credit cards into their relative slots. In a few hours each day over 20,000,000 flowers are sold.

I thought about this and decided that there was a really good opportunity for business for me.

I approached several of the international buyers, some from Sweden, Italy, France, Denmark and Switzerland and asked them if they would be willing to buy at a fixed price from me. I would ship the flowers directly from Harare to Nice, Malmo, Copenhagen, Zurich etc. This meant that the flowers would arrive 2 days earlier, and no middle man handling.

I found good receptivity for this.

I then went back to Zimbabwe to look for some farmers who would be willing to sell to me directly at a fixed price. This was attractive to them since the auction prices depended on the supply from all over the world.

Within 6 months I was exporting around 1,000,000 roses and greens per week.

Thanks to the volatility of the Zimabwean currency I was also making a lot of money on the exchange rate every week.

The results were great, but the learning curve was stressful. Flowers in transit left on the airport tarmac in freezing weather or on the hot sun, meant that I had to learn many things including handling pershables and the cold chain etc. It was a totally new career.

These were good times again.

Lesson 3. There are no limitations to our creative thinking and the actions possible, are due to our positive attitude of, why can't I, do this?