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Talking About Starting A Business From Scratch...
By Remar Sutton - Attitude Advisor
Little Apple Bay, Tortola, British Virgin Islands — If you've ever been in business for yourself, you know the attempt takes courage, hard work, and luck. Doubly so if you're on a tiny island.
That's why for many years I've admired the efforts of a native Vermonter, Nan Thomas, and a local villager, Benito Potter, to survive and by inches begin to prosper and in the process build a personal as well as business relationship.
Nan's father was one of the founders of the ski resort Sugar Bush Valley, but Nan preferred warmer climes and moved to Tortola in 1987 to open a charter sailboat business. With that business hit hard by the year's economic downturn, she very soon found herself without money or a decent place to live.
"I asked one of the girls in the village if they knew a place to rent," Nan remembers. "And they said, ‘Go to Sebastian's,’ an aqua-blue beachside hotel in Apple Bay. ‘Go there,’ Nan recounted, ‘and ask for Ben's number.' I met Ben, and here we are," Nan says with a smile which speaks volumes about true grit and pride.
Ben lived a couple of hundred feet from Sebastian's. As she spoke, Nan was sitting at their sturdy, bright blue and yellow roadside art stand, not twenty feet from Sebastian's and about four hundred feet from their first art stand, a rickety chair and a discarded table placed under a sea grape tree.
There, the two of them began crafting art and trinkets from coconuts gathered from nearby lofty coconut trees and from apple-green, gourd-like calabash. Ben and Nan collected the calabash from Jost Van Dyke, stopping occasionally to watch sea turtles frolic off Sandy Spit.
Back then, Ben scraped the inside of the calabash clean with a perfectly edged shard of a broken Heineken bottle (it took two hours per gourd) and Nan used discarded house paint to create her works. A good month saw two customers for their efforts.
To make ends meet...
