The SelClene Story (page 1)
From a part time home business to a Million Pound franchise
If you are interested in joining us as a SelClene franchisee then you will no doubt want to know more about us. Here is our story to date ...... Martin Gover, (founder of SelClene Ltd)
My main job (and income) was in Insurance, working
for what was later to become a division of Sun Alliance. My speciality was
insuring inventions against being copied.
My future seemed to be in specialised inventions insurance. Insuring
inventions took me all over the country, meeting many interesting and often
eccentric entrepreneurs, assessing their ideas. I would advise on Insurance
cover to protect ideas and products from being copied.
My career seemed destined to remain in insurance. Indeed my parents rather disapproved of the cleaning agency and so, at their suggestion, I invested in the Lloyd's of London insurance market.
Yet at the time I had no idea that my experience with Lloyd's was to provide you, a prospective franchisee looking into the SelClene business right now, with such a guaranteed money-making opportunity. For Lloyd's losses forced me to exploit the high client demand and to earn money from SelClene. I had to perfect the business, to survive.
In the late Eighties Lloyd's of London was regarded as a safe, rather clever and above all very exclusive and posh investment 'club'. You were able to make an asset such as your home work for you twice over by putting it up as a 'guarantee' against insurance losses.
I even asked this question. The agent replied, "It's more probable the moon will turn into Blue Cheese than you lose your investment at Lloyd's".
In 1988, the exact year I joined, the market turned. Too high profits for too many years bred complacency. The Piper Alpha Oil Rig disaster hit Lloyd's badly. Within four years I lost an estimated £350,000.
By 1992 my personal net worth was a devastating net minus of £250,000 - after the house had been mortgaged 100%. It's one thing to start off with nothing, quite another with a big minus.
Many would have given up and walked away. Indeed, I probably would have done too if I'd known how hopeless my position was. Fortunately Lloyd's produced its accounts three years in arrears - so though I and other investors knew things were not good, no one fully appreciated how really bad things were. Also I could 'keep' my house - with a 100% mortgage. I wasn't exactly out on the street.
With every room let to lodgers the mortgage was affordable and life was much the same as before - aside from the worry of a huge debt and the obvious option of formal bankruptcy.
The question I asked myself in 1991 was, "How do I earn it BACK?!" I turned to my job and figured that couldn't generate the money I needed. Even if I worked very hard, I couldn't earn enough to make any impression on a debt equivalent to ten times my annual gross salary. So I looked at SelClene, the part time cleaning agency which I had started and asked myself, "Can it make more than my full time job?"
