Accidental entrepreneur keeps on trucking.

Short-distance furniture removals was the last thing on the Dutchman’s mind when he arrived in Sydney in 1972 with $20 in his pocket, one suitcase and no return ticket.

When you start a business you don’t get all the bells and whistles You don’t have systems, budget and marketing plans in place. They come later.

Desperate for money, Kuipers worked as a barman in an infamous Kings Cross nightclub. “My midnight courier run was spent ferrying little brown bags from one person to another,” says Kuipers, who grew up in an idyllic village not far from Rotterdam. “I had no idea what was in them and I never asked. I was so naïve.”

“I was darting up and down every street in the Cross with a brown bag for this person or that, knocking on the doors of the houses of ill repute and illegal gaming joints. The door would open and a prostitute or a drunk threw their arm out to grab my bag and swap it for another. I would dart back down another alley or street to a different dark and depressing den.”

During the day, Kuipers worked at a bridge club and heard that a shipping cruise line was after a bridge director. Kuipers spent the next six months cruising the South Pacific, had a shipboard romance with his now-wife Cheryl Kuipers, and was soon married.

The genesis for Two Men and a Truck came when Cheryl Kuipers needed her husband to pick up a pine bookcase in his van. He did extra deliveries for the shop, at $20 a time.

Read the complete story in the attached article.

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