As I recall, we exchanged pleasantries and, using my years of training and through force of habit, I garnered a little information about him, his background and personality and promptly salted them away for future reference. As I say, Neil insists he can’t remember this meeting and therein, I think, highlights one of the many but subtle differences between the pair of us: while I generally speaking don’t miss a trick, Neil can sometimes be said to be not entirely on-the-ball, and this is why he is prone to the odd slip or sometimes displays an inability to make the most of a given opportunity.
About eight or nine months after this introduction, I did indeed find myself on the brink of my first truly solo business venture. I decided to invest in buying a franchise in the well-known English Plus Language Corporation. This is a corporation that is involved in the foreign language sector, and includes (amongst other things) a chain of language schools across the world. Each branch is in itself a franchise and ‘owners’ are beholden to the corporation as an entity, and I invested in one of the first ones opening in Jakarta, Indonesia.
As it ultimately turned out, this didn’t turn out to be a fantastically lucrative first dip of the toe into the private sector, and although the schools still operate today and I haven’t actually ended up losing money, nor have I exactly made a mint out of it. More of that to come later, but at this point I was more interested in ensuring I had a good team of teachers for our opening. Being a bit of a greenhorn when it came to the education business, I initially tried to recruit by word of mouth and this is when I remembered Neil and so approached him in order to see if he would be interested in coming on board.
It wasn’t difficult to dig up his personal details, and so one day my wife and I made an appointment to go up and see Neil together with his wife, Yossy, at their house in Sidoarjo.
I guess Neil must have been about 27 or so at the time and Yossy a couple of years younger. As we settled down to chat in his living room, I took the opportunity to take in my surroundings. His home, although not exactly salubrious, was certainly respectable in size and décor, and he seemed to be doing reasonably well for himself. His house was a single-story dwelling but had three bedrooms, a large living room, and, no doubt, a kitchen and bathroom in the back. He and Yossy had tastefully furnished the house with a nice line in contemporary furniture and had adorned the walls with what appeared to be a couple of original pieces of artwork. They looked to me to be a young couple with a plan and a future ahead of them.
I outlined my plans regarding EPLC and he seemed interested although non-committal. I said I saw him coming on board and working with me for a few years and then being in a position to either branch out on his own, or else move up through the Indonesian education system and get into the really lucrative teaching world of bona-fide International Schools. I said that in time I would assist him to gain the additional educational qualifications which he would ultimately require should he have serious designs on staying in the teaching industry, and in turn he could assist me in providing some knowhow and experience in what was sure to be a trying time as I attempted to get the business off the ground. I advised him that as much as he might enjoy doing what he was currently doing; namely, lots of teaching in various locations all over the city, he wouldn’t be a young man with lots of energy forever and what I was offering him was a chance to build a career.
Although he was friendly enough and seemed to be listening to me, I got the impression I wasn’t really getting through to Neil. I felt he was perhaps reluctant to move to Jakarta at that point in his life, or maybe he felt he could do better financially working on his own than the package I was offering him, and thus the vibes I was getting from him didn’t look promising. I noticed that every time I asked him a question or made a general statement about something, his attention would momentarily flick across to his wife, Yossy, before offering up any sort of response. He also spoke very carefully and in measured tones as if he was weighing up how much information to impart, which I found slightly unusual in someone still relatively young.
Ultimately, I decided to take the bull by the horns, so as to speak.
‘Yossy, may I speak to you outside a moment?’ I ventured.
They both looked surprised, but finally Yossy answered. ‘Me?’
‘Yes, if you don’t mind.’
She didn’t look it, but she replied, ‘Sure.’
We spoke briefly and quietly in Indonesian outside on the small patio there while my wife and Neil stayed inside.
‘I can see you are the ‘boss’ in this marriage. The decision maker,’ I started.
She tried to protest. A token protest, I thought. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Oh, you are. I can see that. Look, Neil has potential,’ I pushed on. ‘I like
