Plan E by Owen Perry

Author:Owen Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Published: 2023-02-03T21:16:57+00:00

Chapter 4

4. Building a Unique Partnership in Puerto Vallarta

I was twenty-five years old, and I was ready to be in business for myself. I was going to be my boss!

I decided to stay in Puerto Vallarta, and I partnered up with two of the people I had worked with at Vacation Internationale: Fernando Gonzales, who had worked in administration/sales management at the Mazatlan resort before coming to Puerto Vallarta, and Luz Maria, a woman I’d worked with in Puerto Vallarta, where she was a manager in administration/marketing, and who I’d been dating for the past year. (Almost forty years later, it’s still the three of us!)

I had met one of the owners of La Fabrica de Francia—a furniture store from France that was popular throughout Mexico and had become the biggest department store in Mexico City—and convinced them to sell their eight-bedroom mansion in the high-end area of Puerto Vallarta as a vacation ownership. Luz Maria and I were dating and working together at the time, and Fernando just so happened to be in town from Mazatlan and asked what we were doing. When we told him, he immediately said, “Let’s do something together.”

I had only been in Puerto Vallarta for a little over a year, so I hadn’t had to set up a business in Mexico before and didn’t know the process for administration, accounting, etc., but I knew how to sell to American clientele. Fernando had experience in administration. He knew the basics of the business, and he spoke English very well, so our skills complemented each other.

The three of us were still talking about that deal, trying to figure out what the next move was, when we began exploring other opportunities to work for ourselves.

One day, we were driving down the main road of Puerto Vallarta, just outside of town, when we saw a crane at a building site in the hotel zone. We went to look closer and saw that it was a small project, a condo hotel. One building was already built and the second building was going up. It was a six-story property, not on the ocean but with a sidewalk path to the beach, and with a restaurant on site.

We discovered they were trying to sell condos at full price, and we asked to speak with the owner. That’s when we met Graziano Sovernigo.

We approached him, told him about the vacation ownership we’d been doing, and said, “We’d like to buy twenty condos from you.”

We hadn’t looked for the financing yet and didn’t have any financial plans, but Graziano’s interest was piqued. He asked to see what we’d been doing so he could understand it better. A couple days later, we picked him up and brought him to the resort, where he could see that we had some success and that there was a lot of activity and sales happening.

A couple of weeks later, we met with Graziano again, and he told us, “This is the deal: you’re going to sell this fractional ownership, and you’re going to get your sales commission.

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