Some human males seek their fortune by playing football (soccer), robbing a bank, or marrying into wealth.

Others wish to earn it the hard way. Like a REAL human male should! Although these efforts can be misguided.

Such as with today’s geezer. His wife informs us he’s running a small jam making business to become a trillionaire. May he work hard enough to achieve it!

Jam Packed: How One Husband’s DRIVE, GUMPTION, and INITIATIVE Bankrupted His Family

Dear agony aunt,

My husband, Bobby, decided at 54 to start his first business. “I’m sick of the rat race, wife!” he yelled at me, “So I’ve decided, right, to start a jam making business called Jam Packed. So, give me £10,000. Cheers, big ears!” He’s a charmer like that, so I handed him the £10,000 to launch the business.

He spent the rest of the day researching how to make jam. The next day he went out and bought 300 bags of sugar and 5,431 strawberries. He spent the rest of the money on business paraphernalia. Basically, loads of signs saying Jam Packed. Which he nailed to the front of the family home (yes, he’s conducting business from our kitchen).

Well… the last 2 weeks have been a nightmare!

There’s jam everywhere! Jam jars. Jam. Strawberries. My husband is losing the plot, too, he bought a megaphone. When he gets into a rage he roars into that as his imaginary employees. He seems to think muggins here is an employee, too, and has been ordering me around. We’ve had:

• 13 separate fires and 1 fire that has been blazing for the last 72 hours but is, largely, under control now.
• 1 small explosion.
• Several rat infestations.

Then at the end of each day, as he bats away the rats with a ladle, he goes out the front of our home with all the jam he’s made. Then he starts shouting into his megaphone: “COME AND GET IT!”

So far, we’ve sold 3 jars of jam.

Bobby is undeterred and actually views those figures as an incredible success. He has plans to expand into Europe already and has asked me for another £10,000 so he can open a brand on the outskirts of Paris.

I’ve told him that first he has to put that last fire out. And get rid of the rats. And sell at least 30,000 jars of jam. He got very angry about that and sulked for the next three days, with the quality of the jam taken a considerable dip. It went liquid-like and was more a, kind of, gravy. It was brown, too. I checked what he was doing and, because the rats had eaten all the sugar bags, Bobby was using gravy cubes and granules as a substitute. Needless to say, he hasn’t sold much jam since then and he’s very close to bankrupting the whole family! What should I do!?

Yours at a time of crisis,

Diane

Hi there, Dean! Your husband was right to start a jam business, but from what you’ve described he isn’t disrupting the market enough. By failing to do so, he’s leaving his competitors unchallenged and free to dominate the market.

To pulverise and pulp the opposition he needs to:

• Advertise with those YouTube ads that users can’t skip.
• Blackmail his competitors.
• Hobble his competitors with a huge cast iron sledgehammer.
• Run a cutesy marketing campaign about how jam is great.
• Have a BOGOF strategy (but one get one free).
• Sell the rats as pets in a side hustle.

Those issues combined, in two-three years he should be able to dream about opening a store on the outskirts of Bolton, Greater Manchester.

Dream big, Dean. Don’t let your miserable caterwauling ruin Bobby’s success story. Quit the nagging and get jamming! 🫙🍓