Friendly for business - raganwald's posterous

Despite all the talk about the trillions of dollars being made in the technology business, Real Estate is the single greatest engine for creating millionaires and billionaires ever discovered. One of the great things about being in Real Estate is that you don?t have to be in?business, you simply collect a rent from people in business.

Let?s close our eyes and imagine we decide to build a shopping mall. Great! All these stores move into our mall, and we provide them with empty space. They improve the space, the stock it with wares, they employ people to provide services and sell goods, and they pay us a fixed rent, expenses for electricity and other services, and perhaps we even charge them a certain cut of their sales on top of all that. Sweet.

We need a location. Land costs money, so we look around at various jurisdictions, towns where we could buy up some vacant land and build our mall. We?re building a ?Destination Mall,? a place that attracts its own traffic, so we don?t have to buy pricey property downtown in a metropolis. We?ll build our own off-ramp from the superhighway, we?ll erect our own billboards sending drivers to our mall, we just need a nice town, clean and safe, where the local authorities are eager to attract businesspeople.

We find a nice place. The inhabitants are a touch puritanical, their schools seem to have a real issue with teaching evolution or sex education, but that is not our problem, we are building a business, and they seem to love business, it?s in their blood. Fine. We do a deal, and put up a mall. Naturally this brings revenue into the town, we hire people to build and run our mall, we?re attracting jobs. We like to think of ourselves as good corporate citizens.

The tenants move in, the mall thrives, pretty soon there are 400,000 customers a month going through our welcoming doors and business is doing very nicely, thank you.?One day, there?s an urgent phone call from one of our tenants. He?s shouting incoherently about a problem at the mall. As you?re trying to get him to calm down and explain, you see there are calls waiting from other tenants. Your email inbox starts to gyrate like a drunkard with Delirium Tremens. Your assistant sticks her head in the door of your office. The press are outside, they want to interview you about the problem at the mall.

WTF!?

You head straight over. There are news vans filling the parking lot and angry mobs of customers milling about. All the lights are off and the doors seem to be padlocked closed. You push through the throngs to the doors. There are swaths of police tape over the doors, ?crime scene investigation.? It seems the police have shut down the entire mall. You look around for the police, but they are nowhere to be found.

You rush to the nearest police station to find out what is going on. You were not called, you did not receive any paperwork, the mall was just closed. On your way, you notice that your billboards have been papered over with massive signs, ?Mall closed because of criminal activity.? Your business is being ruined, and you don?t even know why. The policeman at the station is very nice, but he explains that it has nothing to do with him, they got a request from the Fraud Squad, and they complied. Was there, you wonder, any court order? The policeman shrugged. ?I get a call from Fraud,? he says, ?I do what they ask.?

You call the number he provides. It takes you a few hours of leaving messages, calling back, getting redirected, and finally you reach a woman who says she?s in charge of this case. ?I have to review the files,? she says, ?I?ll get back to you in a few days when we?ve decided what to do.? A few days! What on earth could have provoked this kind of draconian action of closing an entire mall?

?Well,? she says, ?I can?t disclose any particulars, but we received a tip that one of the businesses in your mall is stealing from customers. Skimming bank card details perhaps. Maybe getting them to divulge personal information in the guise of applying for a loan. Like I said, I have to review the file. Either way, your mall is a de facto centre of criminal activity, so we closed it. Once we?ve had a look, we?ll figure out if we can reopen the mall.?

The Program

?Say,??she continues,??we have a program for businesses like yours. What you need is a Liaison Officer. They can help you out.??You aren't a criminal, you didn't know you needed your own personal police officer to protect you from the police. But you play along and ask how that works.

?Well, it's simple, really. Once a crime has been committed, we have to close everything down to keep the criminals from hiding or detroying the evidence. And, of course, they've alredy stolen the money. So what we do is, we work with you to assist our surveillance teams. You provide us with all the names, personal details of your tenants and shoppers, real-time access to your surveillance camera feeds, bank records, emails, everything, and we won't need to close you down.?

Aren't they asking you to help them spy on your tenants and their customers?

?It's not spying, no, spying on our citizens is prohibited by law. We're investigating crimes. We''re the good guys, remember? You're just being a good coporate citizen, not one of those companies acting as a safe harbour for our enemies, right? All the Big Boys are onside with this. Let us know if you'd like to do your bit, a lot of this unpleasnt stuff will just go away. Your choice, nobody's forcing you to do anything.?

You are fuming. You lay out your own money to build a mall, you bring jobs, prosperity to this little town, and your reward is to have your business shut down at what amounts to a whim. You grew up in a small town. Everyone knew everyone. If the detectives had called and asked to shut one of the town?s leading employers down, the police chief would have had a long chat with the detective about what?s good for the town and what?s bad for the town, and whether they could find a way to work with the business to bust the actual perpetrator of the crime.

Closing an entire mall for a case of fraud is the kind of thing that creates a ghost town. As the anger recedes, you know that in a few days you will get your mall reopened. You start placing calls to PR firms to get stories about the mall in the papers and on the news, you need to pressure them into reopening the mall and fix the damage to your reputation, fast.?You also call a meeting with the firm you hire to scout for new locations. You won?t be doing business there any more.

This town is no longer friendly for business.

Source: http://raganwald.posterous.com/friendly-for-business

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