Business

Hi,

this week, I wrote about building a legacy for the family, as my purpose is to start building the generational wealth. You can read the post in here.

In the past 20 years, I had some good business, and some bad ones. Some I was forced to close, and some I sold.

Most ventures that I owned were in manufacturing. Starting to build up factories from zero, with machines that could produce fast, directly after fine-tuning and some features, that most of the competitors did not have or did not want to have. I'm going mostly for the tough technical solutions, where a high mark-up can be charged. A lot of friends, asked me why I don't try to do easier things, but with a higher turnover. Here, I dislike to produce or cheap. I love quality, not the cheap stuff. Also, Europe is not suitable for cheap production. Europe is known for high precision, high quality manufacturing. For example, my biggest customer, beside the newly opened car plant near Berlin, in the past 5 years, was a Swiss aeronautical component manufacturer. If you fly with a European made jet plane, you will definitely have a component that left our manufacturing. Due to NDAs and customer protection, will not go into details. Actually, this customer offered to buy our manufacturing location, which we gladly sold, as it needed a full technologization upgrade cycle. The plan was to grow that business, but given the need to invest at least 6 figures, I've sold it. My customers always loved the cleanliness of my businesses. I've been to many places in the world, and can say, that only Japan has toped the cleanliness, but mostly due to the technologies used.

There are business that I've had before, and will never do again, like beauty parlours, massage studios, sun tanning studios and everything beauty related, which is small scale with maximum of 3 locations. A lot o head aches with employees and customers, and it is not worth it, if it is not scalable.

But let's switch to business that I still have and where I want to move.

For now, I have participations in a hostel, a bar, a car repair shop, a food manufacturing plant and an industrial automatisation service. In none of them I own the majority, and in mostly I've entered as a business angel or partner. I don't plan to sell them, only if I see that the business my vanish, or if I get a very good offer.

What I've started building in the past year, is my real estate business. Here also did some good buy and sell, but now, will probably focus on holding long term. What I like to buy, are old buildings with monument protection. Yes, these are a pain to deal with, especially in Germany, but if one manages to get past the hurdles, they can be lucrative, and also will retain/increase value for generations to come. Another real estate class that I've been buying, is agricultural land. I buy and rent it. It is one of the asset classes that it is limited, as the land is finite on earth, and also good land will be scarce due to different reasons.

We will incorporate everything, as the socialist mad man are active these days, and socialist are always loving other people money.

I will not go into crypto, as this is known in here.

My circle of trust, has similar goals, building generational wealth. Even if we have different strategies. I'm always broke, and every month there are more days than money left. I'm not sorry, as like today, I've got only 150€ till the 1st of May in my wallet. Everything is invested at the start of the month, also paid what needs to be paid. I focus on leverage and every cent needs to be leveraged, even if this means to live a lot below our means.

How about you? Do you operate any business?