All-Together Housing
This is the charity that owns and operates the transitional house that I live in. Before going to Mexico I lived where I am now and also lived at their 51 Victoria Street address, where their office is as well. The President, Bob Cottrell, has helped me so much over the years and I will always be indebted to him. I built this site for free as a labour of love and a little payback to him.
Welcome To Ecuador
This was my first venture into building a network of city guides. In most countries like Ecuador there is no Yellow Pages so if something goes wrong, like your toilet leaks, you need to know somebody who knows somebody whose brother is a plumber. Even well established businesses rarely have an actual street address to find them. My city guides would change all that because I had an extensive Business Directory that included maps that used an actual GPS location.
My first site was WelcomeToCotacachi where I lived. Once that site was up and running I would use it as a model for other cities and just change the local content. When I was looking to start the site for Ibarra I met a lady who had just quit the new company that had the Yellow Pages franchise and she was very excited to work with me. That all fell apart when her former boss, who had sexually assaulted her, threatened to kill her and her family if she started working with me. Such is life in a third world country.
The Toronto International Real Estate Expo
When I worked for a time at a call centre in London, Ontario the company partnered with a company called Diversified to develop an event to sell property in places like the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica and, of course, Panama. Not only did I develop the call program and email marketing but I also built the website for the event. We managed to attract a number of exhibitors from several countries and generated a lot if interest but the follow-up management was a disaster and we never collected a dime. The guy basically running the event turned out to be a well known crook who absconded with some of the money and made very shady deals to get some of the exhibitors into the show. It could and should have been a very successful project. There was a futile attempt made to resurrect the show in Calgary but that also failed.
RainTech Smart Water Systems
One issue in Boquete and for that matter all of Panama was how little rainfall collection they did. In the rainy season we got a ton of rain, none of it collected and then in the dry season there were drought conditions where people in some of the newer housing developments had no water for months. Another issue was that most of the older houses in Boquete had no hot water. I designed a system to both harvest the rainfall and retrofit houses to add hot and cold water lines. I had an investor back in London, Ontario who was coming down to see me to invest in the company Rainwater Harvesting Smart Water Systems, and I had lined up a number of local renovation companies who wanted to partner to install the systems. I even had the local owners of one of the bars ready to add the system to their home because they suffered with no water for months at a time. Just when I was getting all excited the investor called to tell me that his wife had been diagnosed with cancer and he wasn't coming. The whole project fell apart.
Condor Investmentsd
When I first went to Panama back in 2007 it was a time when Panama had started to be more favoured than Costa Rica and there were numerous investment opportunities. My colleague and dear friend, Sieg Pedde, was doing a major housing development north of David, building large three and four bedroom homes in what was called Mira Del Lago. It was primarily being marketed to rich Americans and Canadians who were ready to retire to a warmer climate. With this influx of Expats I thought there was a lot of opportunities to start businesses and to develop housing and resorts in the miles and miles of pristine beaches.
One issue in Boquete and for that matter all of Panama was how little rainfall collection they did. In the rainy season we got a ton of rain, none of it collected and then in the dry season there were drought conditions where people in some of the newer housing developments had no water for months. Another issue was that most of the older houses in Boquete had no hot water. I designed a system to both harvest the rainfall and retrofit houses to add hot and cold water lines. I had an investor back in London, Ontario who was coming down to see me to invest in the company Rainwater Harvesting Smart Water Systems, and I had lined up a number of local renovation companies who wanted to partner to install the systems. I even had the local owners of one of the bars ready to add the system to their home because they suffered with no water for months at a time. Just when I was getting all excited the investor called to tell me that his wife had been diagnosed with cancer and he wasn't coming. The whole project fell apart.
AjijicToday.com.mx
When I was doing extensive research on going to Mexico in my elusive search for somewhere with a lower cost of living I knew that if I stayed I would lose my GIS pension because i was out of the country for more than six months. That was abut a third of my income so I knew that I had to find a replacement to survive.
I searched and searched for websites ab9ut Ajijic but all I could find were sites promoting Real Estate. There was no site that was a city guide for both tourists and locals, so created AjijicToday several months before going. I had talked to my new friend, Francis Dryden, who assured me that it would be easy to generate the very limited income I needed to replace my lost pension.
Nothing could have been more wrong. I spent countless hours building one of the best sites I’ve ever done. It had everything. When it came time to start marketing the site I knew that my Spanish was far too limited to be able to meet with clients so I started looking for an outside sales consultant. I designed a really attractive package for them where they got the first month’s revenue as commission, plus they got it every year the client stayed with us. My plan was to have the same city guide in every community around Lake Chapala and there would be a rep in every town and village and the first rep would get an override on every dime they earned. They could have easily made ten times the average income in Mexico.
Over the first few months I interviewed seven different women, all of whom were very interested and I was certain that one of them would jump at the chance, but I could not have been more wrong. Not one of them took on the best career they could have ever had and I never earned a dime from the site. Huge disappointment and eventually forced me to return to Canada.
The Salmon Armenians
This was my first attempt at building a band site. They were a great band at the time and I loved Sara Weeks on vocals. Whenever I saw them and asked for You Can Leave Your Hat On I always thought she was singing it just to me.
Although the site is long gone and Sara left the band many years ago this is a video from back them.
JustADollar
This was a site I designed when I was first in Mexico. My friend at the time, Jack Irish, was involved in a very complicated money exchange project that he believed was going to mean millions of dollars for him. We talked for hours about all the great things that we could do in Mexico to help the locals. As it became clear that this whole scheme was a pipedream I decided to try to develop a fund raising project where I asked just a single dollar from anyone. Naively I believed that anyone would be willing to invest less than the cost of a cup of coffee in such worthwhile projects, but I was wrong. The site hasn’t raised one single dollar so far. Sad.
The Shadowz
My favorite band by far. I met these guys back when I was in Belleville several years ago before going to Mexico. I went to pretty well every gig they had, like the Belleville and Trenton Legions, and the Army Navy Club. Although back then I had talked to them about doing a website for them nothing every came of it.
When I came back to Belleville and went to their first gig I did talk to them again and they were open to it. The drummer’s nephew had built them a site but it was pretty basic and didn’t include things like a calendar of their upcoming dates.
Although I didn’t want to offend family or push it I did build a new site for them for free. I invested a whole lot of hours in it, just hoping that they would like it and agree to use it. They did.
