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Buying a Business in Tenerife

Gary Blade (left) is originally from Liverpool and has been in Tenerife for five years. He owns Cheers Family Bar; O’Callaghans Cabaret Bar and Star of India Restaurant, all located in Los Cristianos

Many people dream of opening a bar or restaurant in Tenerife but Gary made his dream come true. How did he do it?

Back home I worked for a long time in sales and invested money in a bar and a hotel in Liverpool. Later I found that I wanted to live where people’s first instinct was to enjoy themselves and not to be worrying about everyday matters.

Now, I own several businesses in Los Cristianos. I opened Cheers Family Bar, in San Marino, five years ago. Three years later I opened O'Callaghans Cabaret Bar in the Apolo centre and in June 2004 I set up Star of India Restaurant, also in the Apolo Centre.

I get to my office in Cheers Bar in the morning (I also look after 24 apartments) and stay there until 4pm: I go home for dinner and a shower then I’m at O'Callaghans for 9pm, where I compere the evenings entertainment until 2am - then it’s home to bed!

My advice to anyone thinking of starting their own business in Tenerife is to spend a lot of time investigating all aspects of it, such as the clientele, turnover, proposed improvements in the area and possible debts on the premises.

It’s a lot more complicated opening a business here than in the UK; so many payments for different things have to be made. We were at the final hurdle for the opening license when the council inspector decided to leave his job; because they don’t have a replacement everything is now held in abeyance, which is very frustrating. I think that success is only measured by the effort you put in, so if I fail it’s nobody’s fault but my own. I believe that if you give people quality they will stay with you; we’ve been very lucky to have a year round trade. My clients are a mixture of expats and British tourists.

It takes a lot of hard work and effort trying to keep everybody relatively happy and there are some days when you wonder if it’s all worth it. But then you get some little kid telling you they have had the best holiday ever and it kind of makes everything worthwhile.

This feature is republished through the kind permission of Living Tenerife. Visit the Living Tenerife website for more interesting articles on the expat lifestlye in Tenerife.

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