Business World |
January 2015
100
"Myself and a partner of mine were realtors,
and we had the largest real estate brokerage
firm in Jamaica at the time," says Managing
Director Michael Campbell. "We bought an
office building uptown in Kingston, and we
had a leaseback agreement with the vendor.
It was a car rental company, so we decided to
use their rental to pay the mortgage on the
building because we had too many carrying
costs."
"A month after we moved in, we discovered
that the entire staff of the car rental compa-
ny were about to lose their jobs because the
owner was leaving Jamaica, which also put us
in a bind because we had the lease agreement
with him," he continues. "I have a mantra that
I live by, which is, 'We're constantly faced
with opportunities brilliantly disguised as
insoluble problems.' Considering we owned
the building, the staff had been there for 20
years, and the business was doing well, all we
needed was a telephone line and a few cars,
and we could continue paying the mortgage."
Ironically, the day after the bank approved
Michael's business proposal, the Jamaican
government banned importation of cars into
