Continued…
The following passages have been transcribed from :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCar_sFfEf4“I have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention-deficit disorder diagnosed. So, this thing right here is freaking me out. It’s probably why I’m a little bit panicked right now other than all the caffeine that I’ve had and the sugar but like this is like really creepy for an entrepreneur. Attention-deficit disorder, bipolar disorder – do you know that bipolar disorder is the nickname to the CEO disease? Ted Turner’s got it, Steve Jobs has it, all three of the founders of Netscape had it, like it’d go on and on. The kids – you can see these signs in kids and what we’re doing is we’re giving them Ritalin and saying, “Don’t be an entrepreneurial type fit into this other system and try to become a student.”
Sorry, entrepreneurs aren’t students. We fast-track, we figure out the game. I stole essays, I cheated on exams, I hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments. But like as an entrepreneur, you don’t do accounting, you hire your accountant. So, I just figured out that earlier. At least I can admit I cheated in university, most of you won’t. I’m also quoted “weird me” and told the person who wrote the textbook, I’m now quoted in that exact same university textbook in every Canadian University in college studies. In managerial accounting, I’m in chapter 8. I opened up chapter 8 talking about budgeting and I told the author after they did my interview that I cheated in that same course and she thought it was too funny to not include it anyway. But kids, you can see these signs in them.
The definition of an entrepreneur is a person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risks of a business venture. That doesn’t meant you have to go to an MBA program. It doesn’t mean you have to get through school. It just means that those few things have to feel right in your gut, and we’ve heard those things about “is it nurture or is it nature?” “Is it thing 1 or thing 2?” What is it? Well, I don’t think it’s either. I think it can be both. I was groomed as an entrepreneur. When I was growing up as a young kid, I had no choice because I was taught at a very early young age, when my dad realized I wasn’t going to fit in to everything else that was being taught to me in school, that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age. He groomed us, the three of us, to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies, so we can employ other people.
My first little business venture, I was 7 years old, I was in Winnipeg, and I was lying in my bedroom with one of those long extension cords that if you’re 30 years old, you don’t remember phones with extension cords but I do, I’m 44 and I was calling all the dry-cleaners in Winnipeg, to find out how much would the dry-cleaners pay me for coat hangers. And my mom came into the room and she said, “Where are you going to get the coat hangers to sell to the dry-cleaners?” And I said, “Let’s go and look in the basement.” And we went under the basement and I opened up this cover and there has been a thousand coat hangers that I had collected because when I told her I was going out to play with the kids, I was going door-to-door in the neighborhood to get coat hangers to put in the basement to sell because I saw her a few weeks before that taking – you could get paid. They used to pay you 2 cents per coat hanger. So, I was just like, well there’s all kinds of coat hangers, and so I’ll just go get them. And I knew she wouldn’t want me to go get them, so I just did it anyway. And I learned that you could actually negotiate with people. This one person offered me 3 cents and I got him up to 3.5 cents. I even knew at a 7-year-old age that I could actually get a fractional percent of a cent and people would pay that because they multiply it up. At 7 years old, I figure out, I got 3.5 cents for a thousand coat hangers.
I sold license plate protectors door-to-door. My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me these things at wholesale, and at 9 years old, I walked around in the city of Sudbury selling license plate protectors door-to-door to houses. And I remember this one customer who’s so vividly – because I could never – I also did some other stuff with this client, I sold newspapers, and he wouldn’t buy a newspaper from me ever, but I was convinced I was going to get him to buy a license plate protector. And he’s like, “Well, we don’t need one.” And I said, “But you’ve got two cars, “ and I’m 9 years old. I’m like, “But you have two cars and they don’t have license plate protectors.” And he said, “I know.” And I said, “And this car here has got one license plate that’s all crumpled up.” And he said, “Yes, that’s my wife’s car.” And I said, “Why don’t we just test one on the front of your wife’s car and see if it lasts longer.” So, I knew there were two cars with two license plates on each. So, if I couldn’t sell all four, I could at least get one. I learned that at a young age.
I did comic book arbitrage. When I was about 10 years old, I sold comic books at our cottage on Georgian Bay and I would go biking up to the end of this – the beach and buy all the comics from the poor kids and then I would go back to the other end of the beach and sell them to the rich kids. And I just learned – but it was obvious to me – buy low, sell high. You got this demand over here that has money. Don’t try to sell it to the poor kids, they don’t have cash, the rich people do, go get some.
So, that’s obvious. It’s like a recession. So, there’s a recession. There’s still $13 trillion circulating in the US economy. Go get some of that. And I learned that at a young age. I also learned “don’t reveal your source” because I got beat up after about four weeks of doing this because one of the rich kids found out where I was buying my comics from and he didn’t like the fact he was paying a lot more.
I was forced to get a paper route at 10 years old. I didn’t really want a paper route but at 10, my dad said, “That’s going to be your next business.” So, not only would he get me one, but I had to get two and then he wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers, which I did. And then I realized that collecting tips was where you made all the money. So, I would collect the tips and get payment. So, I would go and collect for all the papers, he could just deliver them because then I realized I could make money. By this point, I was definitely not going to be an employee.
My dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop and he had all these old automotive parts lying around and he had this old brass and copper. And so, I asked him what he did with it and he said he just throws it out. And I said, “But wouldn’t somebody pay you for that?” And he goes, “Maybe.” I remember at 10 years old, so 34 years ago, I saw opportunity in this stuff, I saw there was money in garbage, and I was actually collecting it from all the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle and my dad would drive me on Saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where I got paid, and I thought that was kind of cool. Strangely enough, like 30 years later, we’re building 1-800-GOT-JUNK and making money off that too.
I built these little pincushions. We were in cabs and I was 11 years old, in cabs, and we made these pincushions for our mom for mother’s day and you made these pincushions out of wooden clothespins – we use to hang clothes on clotheslines outside. And so, that’s’ what the clothespins look like and you’d make these chairs, then I had these little pillows that I would sew up and you could stuff pins in them and because people used to sew and they needed a pincushion. But what I realized was that you had that option. So, I actually spray-painted a whole bunch of them brown and then when I went to the door, it wasn’t “do you want to buy one,” it was like, “which color would you like?” Like I’m 10 years old, you’re not going to say no to me. And especially if you have two options, you have the brown or the clear one. So, I learned that lesson at a young age.
I learned that manual labor really sucks – like cutting lawns is brutal but because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that, I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing, but if I’m cutting – if I land this client once and every week I get paid by that person, that’s way better than trying to sell one clothespin thing to one person because you can’t sell them more. So, I love that recurring revenue model I started to learn at a young age.
I remember I was being groomed to do this. These are all – I was not allowed to have jobs. I would caddy, I’d go to the golf course and caddy for people, but I realized there was this one hill on our golf course, the 13th hole with his huge hill and people can never get their bags up at, so I would sit there with a lawn chair and just carry up all the people who didn’t have caddies. I would carry their golf bags up to the top and they’d pay me a dollar. Meanwhile, my friends were working for five hours to hold some guy’s bag around and get paid $10. I’m like, that’s stupid because you have to work for five hours, that doesn’t make any sense, you just figure out a way to make more money faster.
I did – I sold Pops at a bridge night at our – every week, I would go to the corner store and buy all these Pops and I would go up and deliver them to this 70-year-old woman playing bridge, and they’d give me their orders for the following week and then I just deliver Pop and I just charge twice and I had this captured market. You didn’t need contracts, you just needed to have a supply and demand and this audience who bought into you, this woman who weren’t going to go to anybody else because they liked me and I kind of figured it out.
I went and got golf balls from golf courses, but everybody else was like looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls. I’m like screw that, they’re all in the pond and nobody is going into the pond. So, I would go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes, you just pick them up with both feet and you can’t do it on stage, and you get the golf balls and then you just throw them your bathing suit, trunks, when you’re done, you got a couple of hundred of them, but the problem is that people didn’t all want all the golf balls, so I just packaged them. I’m like 12. I packaged them up three ways. I had the Pinnacles and DDHS and they’re really cool ones back then. Those sold for $2 each and then I had all the good ones that didn’t look crappy, they were 50 cents each and then I’d sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones and they could use those for practice balls and I did that as a young age.”
more to come….
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