Bar Manager to 7 Businesses

My first job in Pattaya was managing the Sportsman restaurant and bar in Soi 13. That was over 20 years ago, and Pattaya has changed a lot since. So have I. Since then I've started, bought, sold and occasionally given away more businesses than I can easily count.

Some worked and some didn't. Looking back, though, almost every one began the same way: I was here, I was paying attention, and I spotted something other people walked past.

Starting out: spotting the gaps

The first gap found me. As manager at the Sportsman, finding staff was my job, and I quickly realised how hard it was. There was no central place where Thais went to look for work.

So I started one. Pattaya Job Centre began while I was still at the Sportsman, run day to day by my girlfriend at the time while I put up the money. When we went our separate ways, I handed it over to her. It wasn't doing especially well back then, but she built it into a really nice business, and it's still going today. I'm genuinely pleased about that.

The Job Centre also showed me that I wanted more than a manager's job. I told the Sportsman's owner, Dave, a very good friend, exactly that. Pattaya Guide happened to be up for sale, so we bought it together. It was a pocket-sized tourist guide, printed in Bangkok and handed out all over Pattaya, paid for by small adverts. Long before social media, it was how tourists found out what was what, and how businesses reached them.

The golf years: passion and its limits

My next venture came from a different place: my own hobby. I was a keen golfer (here's my guide to golf in Pattaya), and the driving range I used looked run down. The mats and balls weren't being replaced, and you could tell the business was struggling. So I asked whether it was available.

A golfing friend knew the landlady, and it turned out the operators were already leaving, so there was nothing to buy. With a business partner and some money borrowed from my parents, we cleaned it up properly and opened Fairways.

It was an okay business, but I made a beginner's mistake: I went in with my heart, not my calculator. The land was 13 or 14 rai and expensive to rent, and we were selling trays of balls for 35 baht. That's an awful lot of trays just to cover the rent, before staff or anything else.

To raise the average spend, we added a restaurant, sold golf equipment and started a golf society and tournament, the Pattaya Amateur Golf Series. We had a few rooms on site too, and guests kept asking where they could rent a car. That question became Pattaya Rent a Car, which started at the range in 2010.

After three years, the numbers at Fairways simply didn't make sense, and the range closed. But the two things it had spawned outlived it. Pattaya Rent a Car moved to an office in Pratumnak and is still going 16 years later. The golf series turned out to be a good earner that didn't need a driving range at all, so I ran it from the car rental office for ten years.

The series led to one more golf venture. Visiting players would tell us they played off 18 when they were really more like 14, so I started my own handicap system, Birdie Thailand, simply to keep things fair. It grew far beyond that, with members from all over the country. After six or seven years, my business partner and I had gone our separate ways and I'd stopped playing golf, so I handed it over to a charity.

Trial and error

Not everything deserves a full chapter. Over the same years I also owned the Golf Club bar and the Outback bar, ran a pie manufacturing company called London Pie, started a cloud kitchen and had a marketing agency in Bangkok.

Each one taught me something, usually about cash flow. Together they taught me what to look for in a business, and that set me up for the ones I run today.

The businesses I run today

My current businesses came along in this order: Hemingways Jomtien, Hemingways Pattaya, Alan Bolton Property Consultants, Hemingways Lakeside, Cajun Life Cafe and, most recently, East Coast Real Estate. Almost every one came through a relationship rather than an advert. (Here's how I run them all today.)

Hemingways Jomtien was pure timing. I'd told a mutual friend I had money to invest. That same week, Gavin Perfect, whom I already knew, offered that friend an empty restaurant unit in Jomtien. He turned it down and pointed Gavin to me. I knew the previous operator at that location had done well, so I jumped at it, and Hemingways Pattaya followed.

Alan Bolton Property Consultants took years. I'd known Alan for a long time and helped him with his social media and online marketing, acting as his boots on the ground after he moved back to the UK. One day I asked if he'd ever sell. What followed was years of back and forth: when he was ready, I wasn't, and when I was, he wasn't. Eventually he rang and said, "Enough's enough," and this time I was in a position to buy.

After Hemingways Lakeside came Cajun Life Cafe, which was a chance to reward loyalty. I gave a long-standing member of my team the option to buy in with me.

East Coast Real Estate came from paying attention. At a meeting of Pattaya agency owners, David Gray, East Coast's owner, made an off-the-cuff remark about selling. Nobody reacted, but I made a note of it and called him the next day. He said there was nothing in it, but we met anyway, and I made it clear that if he ever wanted to sell, I'd like to hear first. Out of the blue, he later rang to say he was ready to retire, and I had first refusal.

What 20 years has taught me

That East Coast story sums up the biggest lesson of all. If you want to do business in Pattaya, you have to be here, and you have to network. Almost every good business I picked up came through someone I knew, or something I happened to hear in the right room. That doesn't happen from abroad.

I've also come to see other business owners less as competitors and more as people in the same boat. We share ideas, wins and losses, and in the end we're all here to serve the visitors who come to this city. The ones who come together tend to do better than the ones who go it alone.

None of that makes it easy. I have a bit more cash behind me now, but I face many of the same problems I did 15 or 20 years ago: staff, landlords and everything in between. Doing business here is also becoming more formal, with more compliance, much like the West. That's a natural part of a country developing, but it means newcomers need to do things properly from day one.

Would I do it all again? Absolutely. I'd do plenty of it differently, starting with the numbers at Fairways. But given the choice, I'd do it all over again.

If you're thinking of starting or buying a business in Pattaya, read what I tell everyone who asks, and if you want to swap notes, get in touch.

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