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flushgordon1
01 Jun 12 11:08
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Date Joined: 25 Jun 11
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well there ye go.

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Replies: 116
By:
sibaroni
When: 01 Jun 12 11:11
fair play to him, wouldn't you say.
By:
flushgordon1
When: 01 Jun 12 11:12
look after the pennys and the mills will look after themself.
By:
sibaroni
When: 01 Jun 12 11:21
yu tough on the very essence of the problem with socialism.  It has nothing to do with macro-economic effect, helping the poor etc.

You are just envious of people who succeed.  Seems a waste of emotion to me.
By:
flushgordon1
When: 01 Jun 12 11:23
are you reading something into what i have posted sib ?
i make no critcisms
you are pretty poor at reading people ,
thank feck  you became a lawyerSad
By:
blackburn1
When: 01 Jun 12 11:40
are you reading something into what i have posted sib

So, why did you post it?
By:
flushgordon1
When: 01 Jun 12 11:43
because it pleased me toHappy
By:
Eeternaloptimist
When: 01 Jun 12 12:06
The boy done good. Fair play.
By:
cheese
When: 01 Jun 12 14:12
Lewis deserves his cash as being the only man in Britain who took on the banks
on behalf of their customers and won to the tune of hundreds of millions of
pounds.
By:
Dr Crippen
When: 01 Jun 12 21:03
Cheese,
Didn't you say that doing well in business was all down to luck?
By:
flushgordon1
When: 01 Jun 12 22:11
i would think marty will be feeling lucky today.
By:
cheese
When: 02 Jun 12 15:24
Didn't you say that doing well in business was all down to luck?

I didn't say anything about his business skills. I said he deserved the
money because he ****ed the banks over.
By:
Dr Crippen
When: 02 Jun 12 19:27
He deserved his £87 Million because he ****ed the banks over?

Fair enough.

I'm glad you think that's a fair rate of pay for his little campaign.
It certainly didn't do his business any harm at the time either.
But of course that would have been the last thing on his mind – lol.
By:
flushgordon1
When: 02 Jun 12 20:55
i await my cut which i am sure martin will send along with next weeks newsletterLove,
By:
Dr Crippen
When: 02 Jun 12 21:37
I've got no complaints, I regularly use the site.

One of his early tips was pointing out that Barclays were offering £100 to open a current account online, with just the condition that you deposited a thousand pounds for two consecutive months. Of course you could take the money out soon after you put it in, and close the account after you had got your £100

Barclays took the offer down within hours of him pointing in his weekly email out what good a bargain it was, I've still got mine though.
By:
cheese
When: 02 Jun 12 23:25
It certainly didn't do his business any harm at the time either.

I doubt he made any money out of it directly (how?). The knock-on publicity
might have given his site a boost but he must have been a multi-millionaire
several times over before that. MSE has been in the top few thousand websites
since 2005.
By:
Dr Crippen
When: 04 Jun 12 10:55
Oh I see they all take it easy when they’ve made a few bob.
Like Branson, Sugar and that lot on Dragon’s Den, they can’t wait to start taking it easy.
By:
flushgordon1
When: 04 Jun 12 11:05
sugarLaughLaugh
By:
tonkability
When: 04 Jun 12 23:31
He is the darling of the greedy and the needy people who won't spend Xmas,personally can't stand the little sister.
By:
tonkability
When: 04 Jun 12 23:32
Shiyster
By:
cheese
When: 04 Jun 12 23:49
Sugar's pretty representative of most self-made businessman. Maybe 10% of his
ideas made money. Most lose money. Branson's hit rate is similar (Virgin coke
any one?).

If you or I started a business we might expect to have that same 10% chance
of real success. It might be 15% if we work really hard at it and have a fantastic
idea but it is always a punt. There are so many random variables that can
screw things up.

The difference between Sugar, Branson and the rest is that they get lucky early
on and then have the cash to bankroll further businesses till they get another
success.

If you can show me someone who has a disproportionate success to failure ratio
as a businessman I'll hold up my hand and acknowledge their genius. But those
people are pretty rare. I can only think of one offhand (Warren Buffet).
By:
sibaroni
When: 05 Jun 12 00:10
I think that is unlikley to be true.  I don't have a personal drum to beat - I haven't got a string of successful businesses behind me.

But their is an inate commercial ability that some have in spades.  There is hard work; and I mean really hard work.  I do not include myself in either category.

They are, from what I can observe, entirely different skills from plain academic intelligence.

You might make a case cheese for saying that being born with those skills shouldn't be rewarded by many millions, of course.

But on either of our analysis'; Martin Lewis has done very little harm and a great deal of good.  He finds himself now to be very rich.  Some on here are plainly envious - which I find to be a hallmark of socialism.

I am delighted for the guy, he seems nice and has done more good than harm.  If I am right in my reading of that, only socialism could find fault; only envy.
By:
cheese
When: 05 Jun 12 01:10
But their is an inate commercial ability that some have in spades.  There is hard work; and I mean really hard work.

This is the standard Tory line (why does this not surprise me coming from a LD?).

If you "work hard" at a business you might, if you are really industrious, save yourself the salary of half a good employee.
That's not going to make the difference between success and failure. "Hard work" is very easy to quantify mathematically
as a business asset, and very easy to dismiss as a negligible factor.

What will actually make or break your business:

If you run a haulage firm a spike or drop in the price of oil.

If you run a consumer-orientated business a small change in the broader economy.

If you run a business based on intellectual propery, random and arbitary decisions on patent law.

If you run a tech firm, whether a big player decides to buy you up or squash you.


None of these things are remotely predictable with any significant degree of accuracy. And there
are a billion other variables like these.

The businessmen with the highest success to failure ratios are invariably those who practice
effective risk management. The high-profile success stories you hear about are usually clueless
gamblers who got lucky.

Lewis isn't really either. He is a very good journalist who deserves a big salary for his excellent
consumer advice.

Whether his business success is down to his great judgement I tend to doubt however. MSE is
actually a very poorly designed website with an incomprehensible affiliate model. The web is
littered with the corpses of such ventures, many (like MSE) with great content. I tend to
think it became successful because it was in the right place at the right time.
By:
flatliner
When: 05 Jun 12 03:56
Does the BBC get a cut?
By:
MRGRUMPY1
When: 05 Jun 12 07:58
cheese     04 Jun 12 23:49 

The difference between Sugar, Branson and the rest is that they get lucky early
on and then have the cash to bankroll further businesses till they get another
success.



......Or as actually happens, it becomes much easier to find some other mug to bankroll future ventures.
By:
flushgordon1
When: 05 Jun 12 10:08
had sugar not got the contract for building sky boxes when he did he was not going anywhere fast,
there is a lot of luck,being in the right place at the right time,nepotism and as they say 99% perspiration 1% inspiration.
By:
cheese
When: 05 Jun 12 10:28
Or as actually happens, it becomes much easier to find some other mug to bankroll future ventures.

That's very true also. Notice the runner-up in this years apprentice seemed very confident of being able
to raise $25 million solely on the basis of Sugar's name.

To his credit, Sugar didn't want to use other people's money. Most businessmen are less scrupulous.
By:
Dr Crippen
When: 05 Jun 12 10:30
Cheese's last paragraph, is very telling. There he goes on about Lewis's sh!te website. It is poor but it's good enough.
If success in business was down to website design we'd all be millionaires.

Instead of peeing about with his website all day which is the easy bit, Lewis was getting himself on the radio and television telling the world about it, which is the hard bit.
There's a lesson there.
By:
Nocash
When: 05 Jun 12 10:37
Dr Crippen     05 Jun 12 10:30 
Lewis was getting himself on the radio and television telling the world about it, which is the hard bit.
There's a lesson there.


Too true.....Get yourself a good agent.
By:
cheese
When: 05 Jun 12 10:46
Instead of peeing about with his website all day which is the easy bit, Lewis was getting himself on the radio and television telling the world about it, which is the hard bit.

No, celebrity by itself did not make that site popular. There are hundreds of celebrities more famous than Lewis, who was pretty much C-list at best when he set up the site. If they could all make 87 million, which is a lot of money even for a celebrity, they would all be doing it, in the same way that any successful pop star nowadays sells a perfume.

It was Lewis's website which actually made money at the end of day. I suspect most people using that site, like me, focus on their area of interest in specific forums, and pay comparatively little attention to anything Lewis writes.
By:
Bentley Boy
When: 05 Jun 12 10:48
Achieving some kind of Celebrity status, via any means whatsoever now seems the way to earn lot's of money quickly, with talent and hard work of little account in the celeb driven media. Sleep with a soap star, premiership footballer or appear on a reality TV show and there seems to be a short lived (or long term in a few cases)lucrative career available.

Good luck to Lewis who seems a decent bloke.
By:
flushgordon1
When: 05 Jun 12 10:51
he never made me a million but his commonsense advice certainly saved me a few quid.
in his wildest dreams i dont think he imagined his site would ever have paid off the way it has,and thay have probably paid way over the odds for his internat venture(as are most of these types of things)
so he has won a watch.
By:
Dr Crippen
When: 05 Jun 12 11:11
Sugar’s programme ‘The Apprentice’ looks for what Sibaroni described in his last post as ‘’But their is an inate commercial ability that some have in spades.
, entirely different skills from plain academic intelligence’’

On Sugar’s show they go to him with immaculate academic qualifications, and he turns around and says to them‘’ you can wipe your arse with those, I want to see what you can do’’

Boy do they get thrown in at the deep end.
By:
Nocash
When: 05 Jun 12 11:16
Dr Crippen     05 Jun 12 11:11 
Boy do they get thrown in at the deep end.

How so? In my opinion everything is handed to them on a plate.
By:
Java
When: 05 Jun 12 11:17
Cheese is SEETHING that somebody had success.  Laugh
By:
flushgordon1
When: 05 Jun 12 11:18
the apprentice is a load of staged bollux.
they pick the most obnoxious bunch of people to artificially create friction and grief.
if you had a normal business with the assembelled talent on the apprentice it would last about a fortnight.
most of them end up doin pr and other consultant pish which allows them to use their ten minutes of fame on some easily impressed dafties  to remove sums of money for a period of time until they fade back into obscurity,
the apprentice ffs
By:
Dr Crippen
When: 05 Jun 12 11:27
Whether the Apprentice is staged managed or not, what they are looking for is the closest I can give to an illustration of what Sibaroni was talking about at its basic level.
By:
Dr Crippen
When: 05 Jun 12 11:30
You see this ability in the self employed uneducated plumber who has just charged his educated customer £300 for changing a washer on his tap.
He doesn't know whether he's ripped him 'off' or ripped him 'of' but he knows who’s got the £300 now
By:
Nocash
When: 05 Jun 12 11:35
Dr Crippen     05 Jun 12 11:30 
You see this ability in the self employed uneducated plumber who has just charged his educated customer £300 for changing a washer on his tap.


Nothing to do with the ability of the plumber, all to do with the stupidity of the customer.
By:
sibaroni
When: 05 Jun 12 11:46
I have a friend.  He left school and became a carpenter.  He was in bottom sets at school and sh*te at sport.

He used to put 33% of the money he earned aside, because his accountant told him to make provision for tax.  Other than a mortgage, he never took debt.

He is worth many millions today, and a completely down to earth bloke as well; you wouldn't pick him in a crowd.

I guess Cheese regards him as lucky.
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