The very first business plan that I ever wrote was on the back of an envelope. It was at the time when Cynthia “Madame Cyn” Paine had been sentenced for running a brothel in 1986 – I was 13 years old. For some reason, I instinctively knew that she got away with it because the majority of her clients were high-end, upper-class gentlemen folk. So I hatched a plan.

The idea was to go to the bank and ask for a mortgage on a small country house that had at least 6 bedrooms, all en-suite. Downstairs, there’d be a large enough serving room for any gentleman waiting for the lady of their choice. The dining room would serve food on two women that lay on the tables. This room would double up for those folks who liked to participate with “multiple guests” if there were large parties that wanted to do ‘the group thing’. Each bedroom would be themed to suit the appetites of our guests. The house would also need a cellar to stock wine and to act as a dungeon for those guests… who, for want of a better phrase, “liked the dark.” Away from the heteronormativity of it all, equity was the name of the game for me.

I was going to be your Equal Opportunities pimp! All of the “guests” would be of high social standing. There’d be a booking system where the guests could suggest which suite they wanted to book. The local chief of police would be invited to ensure silence and after the fixed mortgage, the bills and kitchen staff were paid, each woman would be paid a percentage into an offshore bank account to make sure that they had a pension plan once they’d left. Due to age, they’d have a shelf life but they’d get a reference from me to make sure that they could move on because by day, the house would double up as a tourist attraction… and the ladies of the night would be tour guides, receptionists and gardeners by day. There would be non-disclosure agreements as well as a no drugs policy. Women would have up to 3 men a night and regular STI checks. This brothel was a surefire winner! However, there was a problem, my mum and dad.

Just as I instinctively knew once I saw my plan on the back of the envelope, that it was a winner, I also knew my mum would have an absolute molten lava of a fit, if she knew what I was planning. I knew that neither her nor my dad would go house-hunting to find the perfect country house for me to become a pimp. Which meant they wouldn’t sit in a bank manager’s office and vouch that their 13 year-old daughter was about to set the pimping world on fire! So I tucked the plan away…

Fast forward to 2020…

So a little thing happened in 2020 where the world kind of shut down. I was in a job that paid the bills but there was a whole raft of people highlighting this new phenomenon – the 6-figure person. This was a time to step away from the day job and start running that bakery you never knew you’d dreamed of running! My spidey senses started tingling when at some point in the madness, American Kartrashian-adjacent “socialite” Blac Chyna started her Only Fans account.

Now let me make it really clear what I thought Only Fans was. I thought it was like a supped up version of Instagram, where you post pictures but add a subscription fee because the pictures were racier. So again, I made plans but the plans were based on a TV programme I’d watched a couple of years ago. The programme was called Fetish. It documented the likes that turned people on. One fetish was the sound balloons made, another was a car turning over in it’s ignition, another one was giants. It was at that instance that I realised that literally anything could turn someone on. The plan I hatched was literally holding up some strategically placed flans and hiding my chesticles then crushing the flans in slow motion, capturing the crushing noise for the ASMR crew and that’s all it would be. My biggest dilemma would be do I make the flans or buy them! I sat on my clever wordplay internet sensation until a man you had monkey pox literally stopped my dreams of 30 million followers and £35 billion in revenue.

A man who had caught monkey pox decided to share the effects of the virus on social media. I found him on Twitter. On one of his update posts, someone said, “Damn, with all that you’re into, you’re lucky you only got monkey pox.” So, I scrolled and through the scrollation, I realised why Only Fans was a porn subscription service. Gone were my dreams of 30 million followers and a load of revenue because there was no way in hell I could compete. Only Flans would’ve been like the Women’s Institute of the porn world!

I think my take is that I’ll always have a business plan brewing up in my mind but I’m far more discerning about which business plans I’m prepared to execute!

Tricia xx