death of a salesman?
Thoughts on doing business in bali
If I had a dollar – or 10,000 rupiah – for every time someone asked me if I was in Bali for business, I’d be rich.
I’m always quick to deny it but more often than not they still give me their card in case I’m looking for a business partner sometime down the track. I’ve never had a head for figures. When I hear the word business I see columns of outgoings and incomings that don’t add up. Nevertheless, for a while there, the more I was asked, the more I actually started to consider it. Not doing business in Bali began to feel almost unnatural, like being a teetotaller on a brewery tour.
But where would I start? Import/export seemed the obvious thing. There are opportunities everywhere so I’m told and it’s true that almost everywhere you look there are goods in bulk eager for a market, a crate and a shipping agent. But how many mosaic mirrors or “African” masks could you really shift? There’s a veritable mountain of wooden giraffes next to the Delta Dewata that never gets any smaller – a tangled mess of necks and legs out in the weather. Maybe they’re maturing or waiting to be processed, but as far as I can tell, the answer to the question “who buys these things?” is right there in that never-decreasing pile. At my gloomiest all I see when I ride by is deforestation and a waste of poorly paid skills.
As if I needed any further dissuasion, I lived for a time in a house that had recently been vacated by an English couple who had been “doing business”. I got the impression they’d left in a hurry and I could only imagine that bad business was to blame. The clues were many and you didn’t need to be a detective or an archaeologist to piece together their lives from the evidence they’d left behind. There were shelves filled with airport novels, regional English cookbooks, biographies of Bruce Lee and Georgie Best, hundreds of DVDs, and puzzle magazines filled with half-completed crosswords and sudoku. But the real treasure trove was an enormous dark-wood cupboard filled with business cards, invoices and, most revealing, photographs of inventory: life-sized wooden Indians dominated, but it also included bamboo didgeridoos, masks, scaled-down wooden motorbikes, some chairs – most of which were still in the house – and the cupboard itself, solid and immoveable – I know because I tried. The owner of the house had no idea where they had gone or whether they were coming back. I suspect there was some rent owing.
I wanted to believe that any export business I embarked on would do better than that; that I would invest wisely, carefully choose my products and clearly identify the market for them; that at no stage would I exploit natural, human or cultural resources for the sake of my own gain. But ultimately, living with the ghosts of bad business decisions made me realise that the best way to achieve all that was to not do business at all. In Bali that looks like quite a unique selling proposition... though not one that pays the bills.
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