BusinessGrenada.com Issue: 5 2010 - 2011 | Page 98

Feature decking and other touches add to the maritime effect. Additional five-bedroom Lawnhouses are a bit further back, and separated from the ocean by lawns and Grenada’s only Olympic-size swimming pool. Behind and above those stand luxury apartments. Lee reached the point of carrying out such a project by a circuitous route. He started his professional life working for Ford Motor Company’s British subsidiary and then set up an advertising agency, which, among other work, handled Ford’s nascent mobile phone operation. “I had a mobile phone when they were the size of a suitcase,” he remembers. Eventually, Ford turned the business over to him, at a most opportune moment. “The mobile phone industry was just about taking off,” he explains. “The year we took over, Ford had collected 26,400 customers. Within 18 months, 26,400 was our average month. We became the second largest service provider in Great Britain. Timing is everything in business.” Eventually, telecommunications giant Vodafone bought the business from Lee and his partner, enabling Ric and his wife to retire … for a day, says Lee. “We decided we had to find something else to just one of those places you just want to keep coming back to do.” That “something” was real estate development. Lee’s Grenada connection began in 2000, when he wanted to go away for Christmas, and asked his wife to choose a suitable vacation spot, that was “somewhere hot.” She suggested Grenada and quickly ran into a misunderstanding. Ric thought she meant the city, Granada in Spain. “I said it will be a bit chilly this time of year,” he laughs, “but she said, ‘no, no, look, this is in the Caribbean.” Repeated visits eventually led to a house purchase and a chance conversation with Peter “Champie” Evans, a Grenada realtor who, the Times of London says “seems to have sold, owned or stayed in pretty much every property on the island,” and who is now a partner in Prickly Bay Waterside. In 2003, Evans mentioned that a bayside parcel on the exclusive Lance aux Épines peninsula had been sold to a French developer. Lee, who is a visionary by nature, then began speculating with the help of an architect friend, Richard Hywel-Evans, over what the two of them would do if they owned the land. On the back of some napkins over lunch, they sketched out a plan that looks remarkably like what eventually was finalized as the Prickly Bay pr