Sunday, September 2, 2012

The Moon also sets

I'm reading where the Rev. Sun Myung Moon has gone to his reward.

Maybe he wasn't the messiah after all.

I've always thought it would be cool to start a cult. Used to work with a guy named Wolfgang Dobrowski at the Sandvik plant in Guelph. He'd had a previous career as the owner of a gym.

Fixed up this leased space in a plaza in Cambridge, and went on a tear selling lifetime memberships to his brand-new gym.

Those lifetime memberships just rolled in like crazy. It didn't take long before he had a couple thousand memberships at $500 a pop. Then he hit a wee snag.

A couple thousand is pretty much the max for a gym. They were all lifetime members. Once he had the initial money there wasn't any more cash flow.

Wolfgang had a whale of a time spending the initial cash flow, and it took a while for it to sink in that there wouldn't be any more. A year and a half after opening his gym he went bankrupt.

That left a couple thousand folks really pissed that their "lifetime" memberships had been boiled down to 18 months. When I got to know him he still had a turbo-charged Trans Am, and dreams to return to financial glory.

With his own cult.

Don't know how that worked out for Wolfgang, but it worked out pretty good for the Reverend Moon.

He leaves a few hundred thousand followers and an empire valued in the multiple billions.

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