When a geologist told me I was sitting on 2,000-year-old water, I almost started a bottled water business
About 40 years ago, I had what I still think was a genuinely good idea.
I was sitting in a geologist’s office in Naracoorte, South Australia, looking at maps of underground water flows. She pointed to the map and told me my house sat directly above one of those ancient underground streams. The water moving through that rock had been filtering through it for over 2,000 years by the time it reached my property.
I already had a bore and a pump. I was drinking that water every day. I was showering in it. It was already mine.
All I needed was a way to bottle it, label it, and get it in front of people who cared about where their drinking water came from.
Imagine the marketing angle: “The purest water you can buy. Rock filtered for over 2,000 years.” That is not a tagline you manufacture. That is a true story with a geological certificate behind it.
So what happened? The idea never got off the ground.
Not because the idea was bad. My wife at the time thought I was mad. “You can’t sell water to people,” she said. I wonder what she makes of the bottled water market now, where a 600ml bottle at a petrol station costs more than the petrol itself.
The idea was not the problem. The bottleneck was finance. I needed a bank loan to set up the bottling operation, and without that agreement, nothing moved. I hit the wall and I stopped. I never sat down and seriously asked myself: is there another way around this?
That is the part I regret most. Not the business that did not start. The fact that I never looked hard enough for a path around the obstacle.
The bottled water business is now a massive industry. The global market runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Premium spring water, mineral water, and artesian water all command prices that would have seemed absurd in the early 1980s. The consumer appetite for pure, traceable, naturally filtered water is exactly what I was planning to sell.
But this is not really a story about the bottled water business. It is a story about blockages.
Every idea that does not become a business has a blockage sitting in front of it. Sometimes the blockage is money, like mine was. Sometimes it is knowledge, or time, or confidence, or the wrong people around you at the wrong moment. The blockage is rarely the idea itself. Good ideas get stopped by logistics, not by lack of potential.
The question worth asking is not whether your idea is good. It is: what is stopping it, and have you actually tried to find a way around that thing?
I did not. I let the finance wall stop me completely and I moved on. Forty years later, I drive past a service station and pay three dollars for a bottle of water and think about Naracoorte.
If you have got an idea that is sitting still, or an online business that is not yet producing what you hoped, it is worth getting clear on exactly where the blockage is. Not in a vague sense. Specifically. Is it traffic? Is it the offer? Is it that you have never actually told anyone what you are selling? Is it that you are waiting until everything feels ready?
Once you can name it, you can start looking for a way around it.
This is what I built to help with exactly that:
Find and clear the blockages preventing your sales: