CONFIDENTIAL
Dear 'harpu':
I know you are always interested in looking for opportunities for investment.
I don't know if you would be interested in this, but I thought I would mention it to you because it could be a real "sleeper" in making a lot of money with very little investment.
A group of us is considering investing in a large cat ranch near Hermosillo, Mexico. It is our intention to start rather small with about one million cats. Each cat averages about twelve kittens each year; skins can be sold for about twenty cents for the white ones and up to forty cents for the black. This will give us twelve million cat skins per year to sell at an average price of around thirty-two cents, making revenue about $3 million a year. This averages out to about $10 thousand a day excluding Sundays and holidays.
A good Mexican cat man can skin about fifty cats per day at a wage of $3.15 a day. It will take only 633 men to operate the ranch, so the net profit would be over $8,200 per day.
Now, the cats would be fed on rats exclusively. Rats multiply four times faster than cats. We would start a rat ranch adjacent to our cat ranch. If we started with a million rats, we will have four rats per cat per day. The rats will be fed on the carcasses of the cats we skin. This will give each rat a quarter of cat per day. You can see by this that the business is a clean operation, self-supporting, and really automatic throughout. The cats will eat the rats, and the rats will eat the cats, and we will get the skins.
Eventually, it is my hope to cross the cats with snakes because snakes skin themselves twice a year. This will save the labor costs of skinning the cats as well as giving us two skins per cat.
Let me know if you are interested. As you can imagine, I'm rather particular whom I want in this deal. And I want the fewest investors possible.
May I hear from you at your earliest convenience.
Very truly yours,
'your bud'