A Message from Ian Chinashop CBE
Hello, I’m Ian Chinashop, and I own and run the Ian Chinashop China Shop Co.™ And I’m here to tell you how I made it in business, and how you can make it too.
The secret of success is hard work and determination. Without these things I could never have turned the million pounds my dad gave me on my 21st birthday into a global business empire. Some hang around waiting for handouts. That doesn’t work. You just end up embittered, entitled and useless. Some people expect life to serve them what they want on a silver platter. I can’t stand people like that. I had to work hard to succeed, and there’s no reason why you can’t do that too. Some people say I had advantages, but who doesn’t? Even if you grow up in the poorest housing estate in the country, you can turn your desire to escape into an advantage. If life hands you lemons, make lemonade – as my friend Ian Lemonademanufacturer OBE of the Ian Lemonademanufacturer Lemonade Manufacturing Company™ always says. He should know. When he inherited his company from his father – Sir Simon Lemonademanufacturer – it just made lemonade. I mean, how 20th Century is that? Simon diversified into limeade and cherryade and cola, lemonade ice lollies, a lemonade chocolate bar, lemonade flavoured condoms… the company’s mascots – the Lemonade Family – got their own TV series and now sell millions of pounds of merchandise every year. He puts a lot of his profits into a nice lemony hedge fund. You see what I’m saying? Take a disadvantage (i.e. ‘my father’s company just sells lemonade’) and turn it into an advantage. Okay, so he had lots of help… like when he was able to pay for meetings with government ministers to lobby for relaxation of rules on what he was allowed to put into the lemonade… and able to get away without paying corporation taxes for more than a decade because he could pay accountants to put it all off-shore for him… and able to pay his staff less, and give them fewer holidays, and less compensation for work-related injuries and poisonings, and stop them joining unions, and pay less for more part-time workers on precarious contracts, all thanks to liberalisation of labour laws… but hey, that’s just winners helping other winners. You can’t complain if the winners do that, it’s part of how winners get to be winners. If you want to be part of the winners club, where the winners help the other winners, then use your individual enterprise and initiative to turn things around for yourself.
There are certain facts of life that everyone has to come to terms with. You never get anywhere without a hard-headed appreciation of how the world works. This is especially true in business. If you’re going to succeed in a business, you need to make yourself master of the facts of that business.
I’m going to explain to you how the china shop business works. …
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The Pex Lives boys are back with The Crusade. And also with “then-current events,” which I don’t actually know when refers to. Dallas? Brexit? The Crusades themselves? 
from the American South, and is an attempt to dicuss these issues with a presumed-majority-white audience, and as such is in no way intended to displace black voices on these issues. If you’re looking for black authors on these topics, may I recommend Ijeoma Oluo’s “
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