Hartmut
Part 2
What to do now?… was the big question. Back into an employment relationship, the thought was unbearable. I still had my old vision from “Wendezeiten”… the freedom… financial independence… Westernhagen… and for that I had given up my great childhood love…
Now I suddenly had a lot of time to think, I had no more orders, all the staff had been laid off, the company was in ruins, the wife and children had moved out, gone…
More and more I realized, no matter how bleak everything is right now, I have to get through the time until it starts again… and I needed an idea… a vision that I can sell… that will save me over time. And I still remember today… on a long car ride through France, it then popped into my head:
… Over the years we have worked as booth builders all over the world, in Dubai, Mexico, Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland… all over Europe, we have used an unbelievable amount of material that simply ends up in the dustbin after the event. Zero recycling, way too expensive… Disaster.
And on the other side I saw, with me in the environment, old industrial wastelands which molded before itself, which nobody wanted to touch for years, which went thereby ever more broken and which one could buy for small money. And that’s when an idea came to me. Maybe you can combine them? How? Well, maybe you can cart the no longer needed material at zero cost after the fairs, which otherwise ends up on the garbage, at their own expense from the fairgrounds to Chemnitz in the industrial wastelands and then use this material to redevelop these industrial wastelands … develop them into industrial parks and rent them out commercially…
…with this thought in mind, I took the next highway exit, sat in the lobby of a hotel just outside Paris from morning until night, and hammered my vision for a business concept into the laptop, completely euphoric.
However, there was now a big catch, I was financially as good as broke, highly indebted, no orders, no collateral, completely on my own, did not know how I should get over the next few months until the end of the financial crisis … but I needed half a million to save the company over time, because only in this way I would still have access to the exhibition material in the future for my plan and I needed another million to implement my idea… to start a new company… To buy up industrial wastelands, to acquire littered railroad sites, for acquisition and planning costs, financial resources for clearing and gutting…. simply for everything until the first tenants can move in at some point…. actually completely hopeless. And yet I went from bank to bank, presenting my visions with fervor and conviction, but each time I received only uncomprehending shakes of the head and rejections… except for this one time.