About Me

The name is Shabbir Hossain.  I am a tireless seeker of knowledge, an occasional purveyor of wisdom, and, accidentally, a small business owner.

PHILOSOPHY

My philosophy is simple: I want to make money. If you are reading this, I hope you share the same philosophy. The idea is to stand out in the crowd and do things differently than the rest.

EDUCATION

I graduated from the University of South Alabama with a BS degree in Marketing.  After graduating, I started looking for a job. Still, it was the early 90s, and other than fast food chains, no one seemed interested in hiring a fresh college graduate with a marketing degree, so I decided to go for my MBA. I started my MBA program at Lynn University in Boca Raton, FL, but after 2^nd semester, I ran out of money and had to quit; I was only halfway through the program.

HOW I GOT STARTED

Gas station wasn’t my first business, but it was my third venture. Obviously, as you can guess, I did terribly in the first two businesses. My very first business was a computer retail store (pre-internet days). It was with a very good buddy of mine; we both had a passion for computers and knew how to put one together. So we decided to open a retail store and sell custom-built PCs.

My second try was buying and selling used cars. The reason I got into it? I love cars, period. I love to play with them, so I thought, why not make money doing something I genuinely enjoy? But after only four months and three cars later, I realized it was not as glorious as I thought it would be. Anything I said to the buyers about the vehicles made them think I was not being truthful, thanks to a few dishonest used car salesmen! I had to give that up!

I then realized that I should get into something more conventional as I needed to do something very soon. I started talking to a friend who owned a Gas Station business in Palm Beach, FL. He always told me how it made good money and that it was not that hard to operate. I then started to look for a store, and the only place I knew to look was in the newspaper.

I found an ad in a Tampa newspaper for a gas station that was offered for sale. It looked really lucrative and reasonably priced. I didn’t know much about the business and thought my business degree should be good enough to handle business as simple and ancient as gas stations.  My confidence landed me with a group of not-to-honest sellers who told me this was the most fantastic money-making store and was for very little money! So I jumped (like a fool), cashed in everything I owned, took a cash advance from my credit cards, bought the store, and moved to Tampa.

It was one great learning experience, to say the least; looking back, I think I needed that failure to teach me a valuable lesson about gas stations and how tricky it can be to fool someone so easily.

I will discuss my failure in more detail in my blog, so keep an eye out for it.

WHAT I DO NOW

I still operate the same business I started in Tampa 18 years ago. I own and operate several gas stations and a couple of Quiznos franchise restaurants.